The Penultimate Word

Hogwarts Professor

The Leaky Cauldron

and of course

More Tom Lehrer. This is a clever animation of New Math.

Brian May, guitarist for Queen, is completing his PhD in astrophysics at the Imperial College in London.

I have never been a huge fan of Queen (if I hear We Will Rock You or We are the Champions one more time I will be ill), but this is way cool.

(From Marginal Revolution)

(Thanks to Plenipotentiary)

The Weekly World News is going out of business!!!

I give a bunch of stuff away, so read no further if you haven’t read the book.
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Eszter Hargittai has a post up at Crooked Timber on the Worst Job Ever:

Unclear why exactly:), Michael Froomkin asks the question:

What would be the most unattractive job in the regular economy? I’m not talking about the objectively least-well paid or statistically most dangerous, or most unpopular (car salesman?). I mean, what job would you least like to have. No fair saying subsistence farmer in Darfur either — I mean in the US (or other developed economy).

His response: toll booth attendant.

There are many different responses in the comments, including:

• chicken processer
• masonry laborer
• bike messenger
• Whale-Feces Researcher
• Assistant Crack Whore
• Press Secretary for the Bush Administration

The worst job I ever had was working at the glass plant at Ford’s Rouge complex as a washer-feeder. We took extremely hot windshields which just came out of an autoclave (hot oil bath), trimmed the excess vinyl from the edges of windshield with sharp razor knives, and then loaded them onto a carousel which take them through a final wash and inspection. The work was mindlessly boring, repetitive, somewhat dangerous due to the sharp edges of the glass and the sharp razors, and my coworkers weren’t exactly the brightest bulbs in the lamp. The pay was really good, though.

The New York Times has a fascinating article about a one-off Steinway concert grand piano with two keyboards. The second, shorter (76 keys) keyboard sits above and plays the same set of the strings as the main keyboard, but an octave higher. This gives the pianist the ability to play very large intervals, such as two octaves, with one hand - a feat not possible on a standard piano.

The piano’s mechanism was invented by an Hungarian composer named Emanuel Moor. The Steinway factory in Hamburg, Germany, built one. The Austrian builder Bösendorfer made around 60. The last remaining Bösendorfer instrument is at a piano studio called Hurstwood Farms in Kent, England.

A video accompanying the NYT article shows pianist Cristopher Taylor playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the Steinway.

And the hits just keep on comin’…

James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic Online, discuses Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and the New Jesus Problem:

One memoir of life at the New Yorker under its founding editor, Harold Ross — maybe it was James Thurber’s The Years with Ross, maybe Brendan Gill’s Here at the New Yorker — described the concept of the “New Jesus.” Everyone who has ever worked in an office will recognize the idea. The New Jesus is the guy the boss has just brought in to solve the problems that the slackers and idiots already on the staff cannot handle. Of course sooner or later the New Jesus himself turns into a slacker or idiot, and the search for the next Jesus begins.

Fallows goes on to argue that Petraeus, a serious and very competent man, is getting the full New Jesus treatment. But, as things continue to go to hell in Iraq and not even Petraeus can stop it, he will become the next fall guy. This is an article worth reading.

6abc.com: Charles Shaw Chardonnay, better known as “Two Buck Chuck,” beat hundreds of other wines and was named the top prize in a prestigious tasting competition in California.

“The characteristics that we look for in our gold medal winner & a nice creamy butter, fruity & it was a delight to taste,” said 2007 California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition judge Michael Williams.

The affordable wine beat out 350 other California chardonnays to win the double gold. Second place went to an $18 bottle, and the most expensive wines at the event, at the price of $55, didn’t even medal.

To find this prize winner, you need not go to a fancy wine shop or elite retailer. Charles Shaw Chardonnay is mass produced in California and only sold through the quirky Trader Joe’s grocery stores.

“We choose to sell good quality wines at $2 a bottle because we think it’s a fair price,” winemaker Fred Franzia told ABC News’ Ryan Owens. “We think the other people are charging too much.”

When I was in school, the cheap wines of choice were Annie Greensprings, Ripple, and Boone’s Farm. None of these, um, products would have won a medal. But then, that was not their mission.

(from Brad DeLong)

BAGHDAD - Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki shrugged off U.S. doubts of his government’s military and political progress on Saturday, saying Iraqi forces are capable and American troops can leave “any time they want.”

Sounds like a plan to me.

My photos of trucks that didn’t quite make it under the Washington Street railroad are up at Flickr.

I recently finished the book Temperament - How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization, by Stuart Isaacoff, pianist, author, and founding editor of Piano Today.

The way instruments are tuned sounds like an incredibly dry subject, but it in fact is a subject which has been furiously controversial for centuries. The theory of how vibrating strings produce sound was first developed by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, and the relationship between notes on a scale were thought to be ordained by God. While the Pythagorean system produced “pure” intervals, it produced horrible results as music and harmony became more complex. Fixing the system involved scientists including Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Descartes, musicians including John Dunstable, Frescobaldi, and Bach, and religious figures including myriad Popes and John Calvin. Many methods proposed by all these people challenged fundamental beliefs people held of the relationship between God, man, and the universe.

Isaacoff mixes cultural history, musical theory, and mathematics into a very readable account of how the modern system of what is called equal-temperament tuning came into being. If you are a musician, I highly recommend this book.

So I joined Facebook yesterday. ‘Course, everyone else in the known universe joined last month.

Great snark:

(From xkcd via Scalzi).