With song writer and vocalist extraordinaire Quincy Coleman, think Elvis Presley's power, Edith Piaf's emotion and the spirit of Django Reinhardt breaking Challah on a Hawaiian island while shooting a scene for a David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Fellini collaboration.

Quincy describes the style of her latest album as "Israeli, surf punk, gypsy swing."

How could you not like that?

Quincy Coleman: Come Closer

The purpose of this survey paper is to demonstrate that important aspects of popular songs are best understood in terms of modern complexity theory.

Featuring the only reference to KC and the Sunshine Band in the history of Communications of the ACM. (Try working them into your next press release!)

See also, A finite state machine for Western Swing (*).

If this is all too much for you right now, consider starting out with Danica McKellar's Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail. (This book targets the same market as my monthly magazine that is a cross between Vogue and Foreign Affairs.)

The Complexity of Songs | Don Knuth

If you think those who have long challenged the mainstream scientific findings about global warming recognize that the game is over, think again.

Then, ponder this: I defy the data!

Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Click through for the second and third heresies. I'll just say there's a wealth here, and leave you with this tidbit about Francis Crick:

The six best years of his life, squandered on naval intelligence, lost and gone forever.

After this, revisit Advice for a Young Investigator.

Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society | Freeman Dyson

These are not merely colorful concoctions springing forth from fertile imaginations of mad scientists and pedagogues of calamity. This is a heinous attempt to create, from among the ranks of this emerging generation, a class of desensitized drones who will conform to the absurdity of a society in which nothing is held to be true, and everything is permitted. Reminiscent of the dark ages in science, where knowledge was suppressed, today it is not a question of annihilating science, but of controlling it. These are, and always have been the preconditions to control a society. From the pits of the aforementioned nexus, have sprung the seeds that were necessary predecessors to the modern-day Darwinian globalized market and cyberculture that have spawned a population on the verge of willingly surrendering that which renders them superior to apes, bacteria, and computers—their humanity.

I don't endorse this article, and the publication may be questionable, but the author articulates a distinct perspective.

I notice that the August 3 issue of EIR includes a story on the Cramer tip, Big Bank Failure Could Turn Credit Crunch Into Global Crash:

Big international banks will be left holding the bag, with hundreds of billions of dollars of unsellable junk-bond debt, because the collapse of the world credit markets promises to abruptly end the era of "leveraged takeover" scams.

'Spacewar': Welcome to the 'Post-Human' Era

This article is being called an instant classic.

What it was addressing was not our promising future but our dark and anxious past. It was simplistically suggesting that the inflationary 1920s had so overheated our economy and our expectations that we had stupidly “bought” the inevitable retribution of the Depression. In other words, the parade, like film noir, was directing our attention backward, not forward. After the war, we were not so much disillusioned by our prospects as giddily illusioned by them, and the message of film noir was curiously at odds with the national mood.

Rerunning Film Noir

You may have seen this. It's not exactly Pearls Before Breakfast, but it's worth a listen.

Hip Hop Violin

Baby Einstein makes you stupid! Science says so.

Buyer beware: Videos aimed at improving infant and toddler language skills are not as beneficial for language learning as they claim to be, according to a new study.

Rather than helping youngsters, such products may actually hurt their vocabularies.

Watch out for sharp edges on DVDs!

Update: Full text of the paper, Associations between Media Viewing and Language Development in Children Under Age 2 Years, is freely available.

Einstein Drains Baby Brains

For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.

Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers (*) for both questions.

...

The basis of Dr. Clark’s work is his recovery of data from which he can reconstruct many features of the English economy from 1200 to 1800. From this data, he shows, far more clearly than has been possible before, that the economy was locked in a Malthusian trap — each time new technology increased the efficiency of production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the surplus, and average income fell back to its former level.

'Germs' Debunked? Not Yet, But Another Wrinkle Emerges

Like some kind of techno-utopian Johnny Appleseed, a start-up called Meraki wants to cover the earth with ad hoc Wi-Fi networks

This article is probably kind of salesy, but the idea reminded me of Alan from Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

Meraki's Guerilla Wi-Fi to Put a Billion More People Online