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"A linkworthy piece of musical-cultural criticism," writes John Marks. I agree. Now if John Derbyshire had merely said Saturday Night Fever was the greatest movie ever, I'd have agreed to disagree. His passionate and specific arguments, however, have convinced me to see it again with an open mind.
Bagheera prefers lurking in the shadows, but every once in a while, she imitates a puddle of black on a light background.
From the Washington Post:
"It is my aim, my destination in life to make the cello as beloved an instrument as the violin and piano," Rostropovich liked to say, adding that in the making of music, emotion was more important than technique. "You must play for the love of music. Perfect technique is not as important as making music from the heart."
For his own technical expertise, he offered only this explanation: "I don't even know why my hands do certain things sometimes. They just grab for notes."
Scientific American tells you how to construct a quantum eraser at home—a devise that proves that actions in the present can change our basic interpretation of what happened in past events.
But, gosh darn it, traditional "light is a wave" physics could also explain the results with no quantum mechanics involved. But that would make the universe a much less weird place, so I won't worry about it.
The Times has published a lost Daphne du Maurier epistolatory short story unpublished for 70 years.
That's what Tommy and Stuart Mitchell think. They claim the 15th century chapel's ornately carved patterns and cubes contain a musical sequence, concealed "because knowledge of harmonics may have been seen as dangerous, even heretical, by 15th Century church authorities."
This strikes me as unlikely, given that Pythagoras was widely known in the 15th century, but I like a good puzzle as much as the next guy. There's even the possibility that the music will be pretty good. After all, one of my favorite recordings of the last decade posits that there's a hidden obituary for his dead wife…
Things are coming together and we're moving right along. We're gearing up for the Home Entertainment Show and preparing for all the spring and summer fun.
I'm happy to say that the new Stereophile t-shirts have arrived, in both men's and women's styles (we are, indeed, hopeful), and the baseball caps are on the way. Even more exciting, for me at least, are the soon-to-be completed Attention Screen CDs. I've already seen the very attractive digipacks and booklets, and everything looks as it should — all of the pages are in the right order and no pictures are upside down!…
Sitting in Hong Kong harbor one afternoon, I watched container ship after container ship set sail across the Pacific, piled unbelievably high with cargo modules. I asked my host, "How can that be stable?"
"It isn't," he replied, "but manufacturers calculate that shrinkage from being washed off the deck is cheaper than using less densely packed ships."
That can't be right, I thought. Apparently it is. Worldwide, about 10,000 cargo containers fall overboard each year. Oceanographers are using that flotsam to chart surface currants and swirls.