Pelanne.Com

I freaking love misheard lyrics. Until the rise of the internet, it was the only way I could sing along with most songs. Now that the internet is as pervasive as it is, we have no excuse to not know the lyrics.

Unless, of course, the wrong lyrics are the only reason the song is worth listening to…

I present, therefore, some song by some band, the vast majority of whose catalog I probably don’t like:

This is what I consider to be a great use of the power of the net: large-scale, anonymous, stream-of-consciousness word association.

Go to the site, add your own associations, then go splash around in the giant pool of connected meanings and take a gander at how other people think:

http://www.humanbraincloud.com

It doesn’t matter what he’s doing - Christopher Walken makes everything a little bit cooler.

This is pretty incredible - Jennifer Lin, age 14 at the time, and having just finished discussing what she calls “flow” - a mindset she gets into in which she can spontaneously create beautiful music - proceeds to take five randomly chosen notes selected by the audience and create some serious beauty.

After playing two brief pieces and discussing the nature of creative flow, Lin embarked on what some observers called the highlight of the entire conference. Having prepared a deck of index cards by writing a single musical note on each, she asked for a volunteer from the audience to select five at random. Her volunteer – none other than screen actress Goldie Hawn – complied, and Lin sat down to improvise a theme based on the notes.

What happened is perhaps best described by someone who was there. Red Herring weblogger James Daley detailed his reaction in a February 29 entry: “Biologists may write books about the complex neurological, chemical and electrical functions that occur in order for certain stimuli to produce complex human emotions,” he wrote. “All I know is that as Jennifer continued to play the hairs on my arm stood on end. A buzz crackled through the audience as the beauty of her composition unfolded. Several people nearby had eyes that were moist with tears.”

Her full performance and improv discussion can be seen here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/46

This is a great image of an F-15 observing a Space Shuttle launch to keep an eye out for mechanical issues or fuel leaks (not a bad idea, I suppose).

Click the image to view a high-res version:

Had a good time watching the markets decline last week with my largest holding, the energy sector, leading the way. Not.

Perspective mollifies the whole thing, however - the 2.5% drop experienced on Thursday was the 698th largest drop ever. In other words, we’ve seen worse - a lot.

In reading about it, I did find a funny cartoon - maybe now’s a good time to increase those market hedges…

This is worth a minute and a quarter of your time:

If you like interesting historical sites, this one is for you…it’s a really cool site I ran across this morning which posts detailed scans of photos, many of which are a century old or older.
Add it to your RSS readers: http://www.shorpy.com/shorpy

From the site:

Shorpy.com is the 100-year-old photography blog that brings our ancestors back, at least to the desktop. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a boy who worked in an Alabama coal mine near the turn of the century.

Dan Perjovschi is an artist from Sibiu, Romania. He lives in Bucharest.

Artist, writer, cartoonist, sometime curator - his works, especially large scale works with thousands of miniscule portraits drawn directly on the walls of museums, have been exhibited internationally.

It’s like a whiteboard with attitude:

More images by Dan Perjovschi
Artist Website

“He’s probably the loneliest man alive. The sole survivor of his people, it’s thought that his friends and family were massacred by cattle ranchers some years back.

He lives in a small patch of Brazilian rainforest and is known as the ‘Man of the Hole’ because of the huge holes he builds, either to trap animals or to hide in.”

Full Article at New Scientist

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