Fun with Scale

Posted by Danny on Friday, February 5, 2010 at 12:13 am

Yay, more astronomy, sort of.  I think It’s safe to assume that most people who’d read this blorg have heard of (and probably by extension, seen) the Powers of Ten video produced by IBM in the bygone era of the ancient 1970s, but if not, here’s your chance.

The powers of ten from Curtis James on Vimeo.

I love the tour through the sciences, moving from cosmology at the outer extent of the journey, through astronomy, then sociology (what the hell, right?—urban sprawl and stuff), biology, chemistry, and then physics.  Also, the narrator has the sort of voice that’s only broadcast without irony in productions that are at least two decades old, or The Sciences.  Bob MacDonald of Quirks and Quarks or Jay Ingram of Daily Planet are local exemplars.

Recently(ish) on Astronomy Picture of the Day, they featured a video that struck me as a contemporary successor to Powers of Ten, and which I present below.  If you have the bandwidth, I strongly suggest viewing this at 720.  (Also, if you’d like to read the APOD commentary, it’s here.)

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YouTube Excisions

Posted by Danny on Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 5:54 pm

I’m writing this post with two groups of people in mind: educators who have found a really great video on YouTube but can’t rely on an Internet connection in their classrooms on the one hand, and on the other, obsessive archivists like me who don’t trust resources to stay put on the Internet forever and want to be able to physically touch the storage device containing a digital copy of that resource, safeguard it for posterity like a deranged but sweetly philanthropic magpie, and then gradually forget about it during the intervening years while the content and media formats grow naturally obsolete anyway.  If you don’t fall into either category, this may still be interesting to you.  You’re just not as special.

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Love Songs for Science

Posted by Danny on Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 1:55 am

I’ve gotten linked to John Boswell’s Symphony of Science videos a couple of times now, so this probably won’t be news for anyone.  I’d kind of like to document it though for archival purposes so that, if nothing else, I can know when I discovered Neil deGrasse Tyson, a science popularizer cut from the same cloth as Carl Sagan but with perhaps a more straight-forward rhetorical style and less in the way of overt poetics and classical invocation.  More on him very soon, but first, of course, the videos.

At the time of this writing there are two videos on the Symphony of Science website, though there are apparently plans to make more.

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Free eBooks and Ways to Find Them

Posted by Danny on Monday, July 20, 2009 at 11:06 am

If anyone’s still out there, you’ve probably had enough Blueberry music. I’m going to be posting a longer article shortly, but I wanted to bring your attention to some handy resources for ebooks, as I’ve just found them. First, there’s MobileRead, which I haven’t just found, but which contains this directory of free ebook lists and author websites. It’s geared mainly to non-academic reading in multiple formats (PDF, Mobipocket, EPub).

They seem to have a small selection of individually-published open ebooks, though I’ve added links to Lawrence Lessig’s author page and Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma, so it’s possible that there are other open books to be had which have yet to be catalogued here. It’s a wiki—if you know of something tasty, you should add it to the directory.

In other news, I’m gearing up for thesis research and adding resources to my daunting pile of “oughtta-read-this-before-you-go-talking-to-other-people-dammit” books. It turns out that MIT Press includes a lot of CC books and article series, among them the following that are of interest to me and maybe you:

Iiyoshi, T & M. S. Vijay Kumar (Ed.). (2008). Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I’ve been using articles from this collection since my first project in 2008; it’s full of tasty goodness.

Willinsky, J (2006). The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I haven’t read this yet but it looks pretty good, if you’re into the OA thang. Leslie Chan gets a mention.

Also, The MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning is available as well from the MIT Press.  I’m particularly excited to look at Davidson and Goldberg’s The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, not surprisingly.

Free Music from Some Lovely Indie Games

Posted by Danny on Monday, June 22, 2009 at 10:55 pm

A quickie: for folks who don’t necessarily enjoy video games but do enjoy very pleasant music, I’ve tracked down the soundtracks for World of Goo, Braid, and Blueberry Garden. For those who do enjoy video games but haven’t explored these titles, they’re all really, really great, original, independently-produced games with appropriately singular musical scores.

Kyle Gabler’s soundtrack for World of Goo is freely available here. If you don’t already know the music and are turned off by the name of the game, please give it a chance and listen to one of the most celebrated tracks, “The Best of Times,” on YouTube. Don’t forget to toggle High Quality. (Also, for hard-core fans and/or pianists, a fan arrangement of the entire soundtrack and sheet music are available here courtesy of Sebastian Wolff.)

Jonathan Blow selected the tracks for Braid from the work of a handful of established artists on Magnatune.com, a really neat model for flexible music publishing and licensing that escapes the DRM and general obsolescence of traditional publishers and gets around the distributor-biased conditions of iTunes. Unfortunately, the Braid soundtrack isn’t available for download without a Magnatune subscription but can be streamed at high resolution for free. See?


Music from Braid by Sieber, Kammen, Fulton and Schatz

Finally, the lonely piano score for Erik Svedäng’s heavily applauded Blueberry Garden has been made available by its composer, Daduk. The details are all here and you can pick up the files from the link provided on Svedäng’s blog without doing anything strenuous like signing up at Jamendo.com (whereat the album is hosted). It’s CC-by-nc-sa — how groovy is that?

Enjoy, I hope.