January 2011
14 posts
12 tags
Music Dump - Chillwave's Bright Eyes Bruno Mars... →
The (un)glamorous heroin casualties of 1990s alternative rock; The Bruno Mars review that’s a virtuoso performance of snark; why it’s embarrassing to be a 30-year-old who really loves Bright Eyes; music pushes the same buttons in your brain as cocaine or sex; a tribute to the sadly departed Trish Keenan of Broadcast; Simon Reynolds reckons that chillwave gets an unfair bad rap; why...
10 tags
Reliable Forger's Spoon Predicts Jumbo Teeth
Jumbo Shrimps: Why Mega-Mammals Still Looked Puny Next To The Biggest Dinosaurs by Brian Switek (Laelaps): The biggest land mammal ever, Paraceratherium, was more or less a giant rhinoceros, and was 18 feet high and weighed 17 tons. Still, compared to the likes of dinosaurs like Diplodocus, it’s a baby. So what was it about the big brachiosaurs that made them get so big? Switek argues two...
5 tags
Breathe Bolivia's Stupid Emailed Menage A Trois...
Science Proves You’re Stupid by Joe Quirk (H+ Magazine): I think you’ll probably know all this if you’ve read all the links to articles about cognitive biases I’ve posted - our memories are pretty inaccurate, and the feeling of knowing something is different to actually knowing something. Then again, your memories of reading those articles are inaccurate, and you probably...
5 tags
Music Dump - Girl Talk's Loud Glitter Vomit Jazzes... →
Girl Talk’s live sets feature more hits and more great musicians than every Big Day Out ever, combined; why that band you saw last night was so bloody loud; the state of pop music in 2010; Liz Phair on why the music industry is not a stable middle-class pursuit; the toffs who are taking over British music; the death of smooth jazz!…hallelujah?; how hip-hop invented the modern economics...
9 tags
Evolution Delusions Parse America Smoke Deafness
Up In Smoke by Deborah Blum (Speakeasy Science): One of the things about smoking is that you can see it in people’s faces, if you look closely enough - the nicotine causes your skin to age prematurely. And so, when Blum’s mother-in-law denied smoking to the doctor when she was diagnosed with cancer, the doctor would have known it was a lie. Smoking-related cancers are not only early...
4 tags
Number Ones: Wynter Gordon's "Dirty Talk" →
Here I discuss the current Australian #1 single, a song that wasn’t much of a hit in the US when it was released in March last year (!) (and which I gather has probably found success from being featured in an ad for cable channel Arena). What other examples of American singles being much more successful in Australia are there?
The song sits in an odd middle ground between provocative and...
7 tags
Tunisia Internet Drug Improves Dating Future
The First Decade Of The Future Is Behind Us by Kyle Munkittrick (Science Not Fiction): Our world today totally sounds like science fiction if you remember what it was like to live in 1995: “It’s just after Christmas. The average family’s wish-list includes smart phones like the president’s “Blackberry” as well as other items like touch-screen tablet computers, robotic vacuums, and 3-D...
Destiny Flatworms Talk Music Madness Mathematics
Firstly, the state I live in has flooding over an area twice the size of the British Isles. There is flooding to the north, to the south, and to the west of where I am. (three blocks east is the Pacific ocean, which is also slightly wet.) And it’s flooding. A dozen dead and many many more missing. See incredible YouTube footage. (I’m lucky enough to live in an area which has somehow...
11 tags
Tough Guy Fighting Comic Vaccine Scandal
How The Case Against The MMR Vaccine Was Fixed by Brian Deer (British Medical Journal): The original study that claimed to show a link between autism and the MMR vaccine was published in the medical journal The Lancet in 1997. If Deer’s article here is any indication (and it is), that study was not just mistaken but an outright fraud - Deer has gone and re-interviewed the parents involved in...
10 tags
Placebo Telly Babies Source Gaga Monsters
Hatching Monsters by Charles Baxter (Lapham’s Quarterly): P. T. Barnum, the nineteenth century huckster extraordinaire, released an autobiography-cum-self-help-manual in 1855. It’s a fascinating sociopathic memoir, mostly for what Baxter takes from it in terms of what it says about America - practical people who don’t really have anything to believe in are always going to be...
8 tags
Vanishing Suspects Seeing Awkward Nollywood Buster
Vanishing Act by Paul Collins (Lapham’s Quarterly): Barbara Follett was a child prodigy, a 12 year old who wrote a critically acclaimed children’s book, and an travelogue of startling quality as a 14 year old. But, in the end, she simply, literally, went missing after ending up as a secretary with a husband who didn’t appreciate her. What went wrong? This is an exceptional...
9 tags
Soundbite Waves Change Suitably Mental Soulmate
Inside The Battle To Define Mental Illness by Gary Greenberg (Wired): The DSM-5 - the American manual of psychiatric diagnoses, by which we know words like ‘bipolar disorder’ and ‘major depressive disorder’ (now coming out in 2013, apparently, has been the subject of a lot of controversy. This isn’t uncommon in psychiatry( Scientologists are very much not their only...
1 tag
Number Ones: Guy Sebastian feat. Eve - "Who's That... →
Wherein I talk about there being too many songs called ‘Who’s That Girl?’, Sebastian’s reality show origins, the alleged influence of David Guetta and the Black Eyed Peas on the song, and the mythology of the Club, and how Sebastian is too polite and family friendly to really make it work. (Because of holidays and so forth, it took a few days for this to get posted, and...