Last heard in 2005

Today as I was typing my long paper, my mood was to hear something slightly different, so I started looking for stuff that I had not heard in a  while in my itunes library. Turns out that there are some songs that have not seen airplay on my desktop since 2005 (I might have heard them since, but not from this platform). I was surprised by that. It seems to indicate that I’m listening more to the playlists I made than to the random song selection available in the program, especially since the genius feature was introduced. Just for statistics sake my current library seems to have about 3500 songs, but this was smaller then (probably by a factor of 1.5 to 2).

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Remembering

I saw Avishai Cohen performing this piece above live recently. He is a great jazz improviser on the double base. Enjoy!

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Grading’s done!!!

Time to celebrate. I just finished the grading for my course on General Relatvity for the quarter. That is one of the great accomplishments for  my weekend.  That and getting over a cold. For some reason, and I’m  not the only one, I find grading to be one of the most onerous and unpleasant tasks I have to do. I just don’t like it. Makes wanna sing “I don’t want to grade, I want to bang on my drum all day”. Well, if you modify lyrics of a certain song that I have linked below, you get the idea.

The thing is, I planned an easy final, and it turns out that I stumped my students. Arghh! That meant I had to read a lot more stuff carefully. Turns out that many missed a rather natural simplifying assumption that makes the problem that stumped them relatively easy to solve. Oh well, such is life.

On a related note, next week I’ll be going on a very well earned vacation. Before that, there are a lot of tasks that need getting done. For example, preparing my course for next quarter. Also, as part of the usual seasonal work overload, we have to deal with postdoc selections and making shortlists. I guess I better start singing again.

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A rare gem

Rather than complain about my lack of time for doing anything, I thought I would share something that I stumbled upon and I just had to stop for a few minutes to listen.

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Broken headphones

Today my headphones in the office are broken (the left ear headphone is not sounding music). So I need a new (inexpensive) pair of headphones for my computer to pass away the days while I work. I don’t like the ear bud versions, so don’t even suggest those. They feel like an insect crawling in my ears and I find them really uncomfortable.

Any recommendations?

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Right now on my earphones

Well, I’m wondering, is this cool? or does this just date me?

Hmm?

In case you’re wondering about dates, I found this one the other day.

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Bebop for you.

Nothing much to say. I’ve been listening to The Seatbelts and Yoko Kanno today while I work. Pandora is just great.

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Random stuff of the week.

If research papers had a comment section it might look like this. This is how a lot of blog comments look like anyhow.

In the air waves there is a lot of discussion of the recent paper by Hartle and Srednicki about doing science in a very large universe. This has been discussed here and here. I’ve been waiting for my chance to write a rant on issues about typicality, but I will do as a typical blogger and just reshuffle other news around.

Oswaldo Zapata has a new essay on the music of the superspheres. Erm that should be music of the superstrings. I haven’t read it yet (I’m way way too busy right now), but I’m sure something interesting can be picked from it.

Jacques has started posting again and suggested some interesting music to listen to. I have recently stumbled on some great performances by Clapton.

Here is one.

Actually, I’ve considered going through all of the live versions of Layla available to compare them. There are some other great versions with Mark Knopfler and Phil Collins. You should go find them.

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For restful moments.

When I have a change of pace and need some calm in my life, I sometimes listen to Keiko Matsui. She is a very talented jazz pianist. The song below is called Water Lily. I also recommend Flight of the Angels (I couldn’t find a good video) and Steps of Maya.

 

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Climbing down

Following David’s advice I’ll climb down from my theoretical ledge and rant a little bit, since I have no time to do anything more substantive. Every semester reaches some point where your time fractionalizes to smaller and smaller bits, where the number of small but urgent tasks exponentiates, and the ability to hold a single thought for more than 5 minutes (not to mention 5 seconds), becomes a sweet and fading memory.

In such times good energetic music is the way to go, I can use all the adrenaline I can get. Yes, this is turning out to be another one of those posts where I bore all the readers with some obscure classical music (“classical music” refers of course to the overwhelming majority of music ever made, a vast landscape of styles and personalities).

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