I recently watched this documentary about the anonymous vocalists who sing backup for the featured musical stars, providing harmonies and visual excitement by dancing and swaying along with the music. In the 1950s and earlier, most of the backup singers were white women who sang more sedately and tended to follow the written music score. [Read more…]
Ahmed Shihab-Eldin is an American journalist of Palestinian origin who has worked at a range of news organizations in the US and abroad and often has to go on overseas assignments. He says that he dreads coming back because of the appalling way he is treated every time by US immigration officials. He recounts his experiences, including the latest one when he was returning from covering the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. [Read more…]
The Republican members of the House of Representatives had a retreat last week and minority leader Eric Cantor had to tell them some surprising news and that is that not all Americans are business owners. [Read more…]
A friend pointed me to what she said was the best commercial shown during the Super Bowl. I agree that it is a really good one. [Read more…]
You may have heard about ‘moon illusion’, the way the full moon looks much larger when it is just over the horizon than when it is high in the sky. Many people will swear that it actually does appear larger and concoct theories as to why it is so, when the reality is that the larger size is a trick our brain plays on us, though there is no consensus on how it does it. In an earlier post I examined some of the explanations. [Read more…]
My earlier post on the origins of complexity sparked an interesting and informative discussion in the comments so I thought I would pass on another article about it by Amy Maxmen that I came across later, that looked at the same question in light of what we know about the seemingly lowly amoeba. She starts by posing the problem. [Read more…]
You may recall the case of Lavabit that I have written about before where Ladar Levinson, the owner of that encrypted mail service, shut down his business to avoid giving the government the master encryption key they demanded so that they could read all his 410,000 clients’ emails. This happened last June, likely when the US government first learned of the NSA leaks and discovered that Edward Snowden used Lavabit to communicate. [Read more…]
I watched the third and final episode of Sherlock last night. Like the others, it was entertaining and kept me engaged. It also ended with a two teasers (one major and one minor) that suggest that a fourth season is in the works. The way the major teaser was presented, like the previous episode, seemed to be drawn from the film V for Vendetta. It has been two years since the previous season so one does not know how long it will be until the next one is released, especially since the two lead actors are now in high demand for other work. [Read more…]
There are two science-religion debates coming up. One is tomorrow (February 4) between ‘Science Guy’ Bill Nye and Answers in Genesis young-Earth creationist Ken Ham. The other is on February 21 between cosmologist Sean Carroll and theologian William Lane Craig. Serious concerns have been expressed by both sides about the usefulness or even the desirability of these debates. [Read more…]