The Mandelbear's Musings

It hasn't been a very productive week for me, but not totally unproductive either. You can see the improved font selections -- Atkinson HyperLegible Next and Merriweather -- on HyperSpace Express. There's not really all that much to see, it still needs some improvements, and it took me too long to get around to. But it's something.

In my partial defense, CSS is a very deep rabbit-hole, and I am easily distracted. Especially if I can frame it as something I can use.

Music. I didn't publish an s4s post yesterday, but I meant to, because I ran across The music of dying stars -- head over to the Zwicky Transient Facility's Sonify the Cosmos page for more information, a combined sonification and visualization, and an interview. You can make your own.

I this is not the first time I've used a sonification as my s4s. Maybe not even the second, depending on whether you count The Songs of Pando.

In other news, Pope Leo XIII cared for the poor, fought for labor union rights. He was against Socialism and Laissez Faire Capitalism. What influence Leo XIV will have on the way the US is going remains to be seen, but the fact that his first homily as pope has apparently upset some MAGAts gives reason for hope.

I could use some hope right now.

( Notes & links, as usual )

So the idea of "spirituality" has been in my mind, and to some extent in my journal, where I wrote "Is looking up at the night sky a spiritual practice?" I was remembering, in particular, the night N, Colleen and I came back to the house on Whidbey Island one night not too long after we'd bought the place -- the sky was spectacularly clear, and for a long while we all just looked up and got lost in the depths of it.

Songs came up in my discussion with EG yesterday, in a somewhat different context, and afterward I thought about what songs inspire the kind of awe and grandeur that those stars did.

The first song I thought of was Don Simpson's Ship of Stone. The second was Dave Carter's When I Go. The third was also by Dave Carter -- Lord of the Buffalo. Which I haven't done as a s4s, so I'll just link to Tracy Grammer's cover of it.

(You can also find considerably rougher versions by Kaleidofolk at Or-E-Con 2, 2022 and Lookingglass Folk at Conflikt 2012. Not necessarily recommended unless you're a completist.)

Radiation therapy can lead one down some pretty weird rabbit-holes. I was rummaging around trying to find out why treatment dosage is measured in cGray. Why 1/100 of a Gray? (I note in passing that a Gray is 0ne joule per kilogram.) Well, it turns out that the outdated CGS unit of radiation dosage was the Rad, equal to 100 ergs per gram, and it's equal to 0.01Gy. So the field of radiation therapy goes back a long way, and everyone was used to using rads, so they just kept the numbers and renamed the unit. Besides, it means nobody has to worry about where to put the decimal point -- my prescription, which is fairly typical, is 7000cGy spread over 28 individual 250cGy zaps.

One thing leads to another, so I followed things like radiation poisoning, radioactive waste, and a Timeline of the far future, which somehow wound up at Ray cats. To quote the article,

A ray cat[a] is a proposed kind of cat that would be genetically engineered to change appearance in the presence of nuclear radiation. Philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri originated the idea of a "living radiation detector"[1] in 1984 as a proposed long-time nuclear waste warning message that could be understood 10,000 years in the future...

But how do you ensure that people ten millennia in the future will know why their cats suddenly changed color, and what to do about it? Well, you could make a nursery rhyme about it, and give it a really catchy tune,... The result is titled "10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)". I'm not sure it's catchy enough to do the job, but it is pretty catchy.

See also, Raycats and earworms: How scientists are using colour-changing cats and nursery rhymes to warn future generations of nuclear danger - CityAM, The Cat Went Over Radioactive Mountain | Method, and the podcast Ten Thousand Years - Episode 114 of 99% Invisible (which has the song in it).

...

To change the subject almost completely, but still sort of related, the folks giving radiation treatments at the UW medical center provide background music via Spotify (to keep you from being bored during the prep and treatment, which takes some 20 minutes on a good day.) Naturally I told them to search Spotify for "filk".

The treatment only runs for the last few minutes; the rest is the techs adjusting your position and orientation so that the markers in your prostate line up within a millimeter or so of where they were the last time. So they were still in the room when Paper Pings came on and I was able to say, as calmly as I could, "I wrote that."

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Well, music-adjacent, anyway. Hatnote Listen to Wikipedia is an audio-visual rendering of the Wikipedia edit stream. Scroll down for more information. (This page has more detail.)

Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site, punctuated by a string swell.

Note: when you follow the link to the page, you won't hear anything -- it's muted. To unmute it, click on the volume-control slider in the upper right of the header (to the left of the "about" link -- it has rather low-contrast). Click close to it's left-hand (quite) end and adjust the volume from there.

If you've been reading this blog for a while you may have noticed that Songs for Saturday, in addition to having a highly irregular schedule (only 102 entries since I started the tag in 2011), occasionally strays away from the usual run of music-with-vocals that most people consider "songs". But I don't think I've ever strayed quite this far, though that's only because I haven't tagged whale songs or the chirp and ringdown of colliding black holes. Let me fix that.

So with a tip of the hat to ysabetwordsmith, here is The Sweet Song Of The Pando, The Largest Tree On Earth. (Ysabet actually pointed to this NPR article: Eavesdropping on Pando, one of the largest trees in the world. Pando is an aspen clone, spreading over more than 100 acres (43 hectares), with 47,000 tree-like stems growing from a single root system.

I'll get to black holes and whales eventually.

So, earlier in the week I linked to a song, Children Of Darkness by Richard Fariña (as sung with his wife Mimi) -- you'll find the lyrics under the cut, as well as at the link.

Here's another version, sung by Mimi's sister, Joan Baez. Not sure how I feel about the orchestration, but...

I like both versions, but with a preference for the Fariñas'. It's a weird little song, but it fits my mood and the times. Unfortunately. I'd much rather sing cheerful songs in happy times, but that isn't what's happening right now. Another song that's been in my mind lately is Bob Dylan's Desolation Row. Same kind of thing. When things are bad I want a song that resonates with the mood rather than fighting it. (That's related to the standard advice for talking to someone who's depressed or grieving. And the joke that goes: They told me, cheer up -- things could be worse. So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse.)

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Since I got confused and ran this week's "Done Since..." post yesterday, I think I'll overcompensate and post an "s4s" post as "Songs for Sunday". (It wouldn't be the first time for either of those, although it may well be the first time I've done both in the same week.) And besides, this isn't really about songs.

Anyway, this week's rabbit hole started with an article on Aeon.co called either "The pharaoh’s trumpet", or "What King Tut's treasures reveal about daily life in ancient Egypt", depending on whether you look at the page's H1 tag or its title. In any case, last Sunday was the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. Among the lesser treasures there were a pair of trumpets, one made of gilded bronze, and one of silver. The article embeds a video, Tutankhamun's Trumpets played after 3000+ Years. I'll wait while you go and listen.

Which led me to Wikipedia, to find out why they were called "trumpets rather than bugles. There, I learned that "bugle" typically refers to the military signaling device, which is limited to the five notes of the "bugle scale", corresponding to the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth harmonics of the horn's fundamental. In the key of C these would be C, G, C, E, and G. You'll note that the 2nd and 4th harmonics are an octave apart, as are the 3rd and 6th.

That led me to the Natural trumpet, on which by going up to the 16th harmonic a skilled player can play an entire chromatic scale by bending, or "lipping", the 7th, 11th, 13th, and 14th harmonics to bring them into tune. Modern trumpets and other brass instruments use valves, of course, which side-tracked me for a while into looking up the difference between piston and rotary valves.

From there I started getting into the difference between "just intonation", which uses pure whole-number ratios, Pythagorean tuning, and the modern equal temperament system, which divides the octave into 12 equal semitones with a ratio of 2^-12 (the 12^th root of 2) between them. Just temperament is used primarily by a capella groups and string quartets.

After that I started getting into modes, diatonic (and other) scales, and some of the more arcane places music theory has gone in the last hundred years or so. I think things beyond that point are mostly of interest to academic music theorists -- mathematicians and physicists got off this bus around the harmonic series.

Kaleidofolk had a good rehearsal this afternoon -- I finally got most of the tech to cooperate. But it turned out that the recording I got off of Zoom was 32kHz mono. I can see why they'd want to do that, but grump anyway. I will try several other things tomorrow morning. The concert's at 2:30.

Anyway, the real s4s post this week will be "Songs for Sunday", tomorrow.

So this will be a rather quick s4s, because I've been rather lazy today, and also we had a KF practice session. The lazyness mainly manifested itself as watching a lot of YouTube videos. Fortunately for this series, most of those videos -- all the ones that weren't math-related, in fact -- were from Talis Kimberley's - YouTube channel which consists mostly of sessions recorded in Talis's kitchen over the last two years or so.

They are wonderful, Talis is a fantastic (in several senses) songwriter and singer, and you should go watch them (and of course listen to them).

Strange week. No disasters, and some success -- mainly my short concert at FK-NO 3 (the third virtual FilKONtario) -- but also some computer weirdness, fighting with WordPress (I may need a bigger hammer), a completely flipped schedule, and an unexpectedly large amount of ?emotional? something-or-other.

I didn't practice nearly as much as I should have for my concert set, but it was (barely) enough. The set was 15 minutes, which I figured (correctly) would be about all I'd be capable of. I'm pretty sure most of the emotional weirdness came from the setlist:

1. Wheelin'
2. The River
3. Eyes Like the Morning

I mentioned in my introduction that "Eyes Like the Morning" probably doesn't need a trigger warning for anyone but me. (I could have been wrong about that. Feel free to correct me in the comments.) On top of that, I've had For Amy (CW: major character death) as my top earworm for the week, which doesn't help.

Oh, yeah -- some of the week's weirdness was due to the fact that in the process for setting up my lair for N's new fosterling, m's friend k, to quarantine in for the week, I somehow managed to leave my main laptop, Sable, behind on my desk. Oops! Fortunately I have spares, because I seem to be the household's default destination for unloved laptops. I hauled out Raven, which normally lives in the bedroom. After which I discovered that the passwords file hadn't been synced in at least a couple of months. (No, I have no idea how that came about. Distraction?) Fortunately one can set WordPress passwords from the command line, and I'd already set up SSH to the server.

Also around computers, one of my older Thinkpads, Sherman, has been acting strangely -- quite possibly either a corrupted hard drive. Bad memory is also a possibility, though it passed the test I ran on it. Meanwhile smartd on Raven has also been complaining, which implies that its rotating rust drive is dying, so I'm in the process of setting up a new SSD for it. Terabyte SSDs are cheap!

I've been making modest progress toward modernizing the markup in GoingSideways.blog so that I can take advantage of the recent editing improvements in WordPress editing. Because the WPBakery page builder is a miserable editing environment for me, and the way it does layout (with "shortcodes", and if you don't know what that implies be thankful) makes it difficult to switch to some more modern editing environment. I think I have everything updated except the home page at this point. I may need a bigger hammer for that.

And oh, right -- there was also the dentist appointment Thursday, getting a crown replaced. (I think it was a replacement, anyway.) The technology for that process has improved amazingly since the last century, but making the new crown on the spot means an extra 45 minutes or so sitting around reading my phone. (Beats driving an hour and a half each way to the follow-up appointment for getting the lab-made crown installed, so I'm not complaining at all.)

( Notes & links, as usual )

It feels like it's been a strange week, albeit in ways I can't really express. Surreal? Partly I guess because of Ukraine, and maybe also because of Texas; there must be something else, though. My sleep has been all over the place - all the way from 5:20 on Sunday to 10:27 on Thursday. And most days I really would have preferred to stay in bed.

As I wrote last Sunday, You know things are bad when you read plague news as an escape from the _really_ bad stuff.

We had some snow on Monday; there was still some on the ground yesterday.

This week's music links: Carl Orff: Carmina Burana and Best Of Scott Joplin.

Look under the cut for links in support of transgender kids in Texas: on 0223We and 0225Fr.

( Notes & links, as usual )

So I actually made some music on Saturday, for once, with a 25-minute concert in the Festival of the Living Rooms (you can find FotLR via FB or any filk-related discord server -- send me an email if you can't find it and want to).

N wanted to be part of it, so she came up to Whidbey with me for the weekend. We continued a family and band tradition by working out the set list this morning during our first rehearsal. We did a second run-through for timing -- 24.5 minutes. As usual, I think I did a lot better in the rehearsal -- I was way too nervous during the actual concert. And I think I left out a chorus in Lock Keeper. Glarg. Anyway, somebody -- R, I think, recorded it for us.

As you might expect, the whole thing was about Colleen, and with N singing on "Lock Keeper", "The Rambling Silver Rose", and "Where the Heart Is", half of it was really a Lookingglass Folk concert.

Setlist:

• Eyes Like the Morning
• Wheelin'
• Lock-Keeper
• The Rambling Silver Rose
• Where the Heart Is
• The River

Next time we give a concert it's not going to be anywhere near as ose. But we had to do this one first.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who's been following this blog for a while that I have a weakness for rabbit holes. These often involve either a series of YouTube videos or a Wikipedia dive, and the deepest usually include both. So when the the 1998 movie version of "Cats" was streamed last Sunday to mark the musical's 40th anniversary, well...

It's provided me with an entire week's worth of rabbit holes and earworms.

If my memory serves me (it often doesn't, so...) "Cats" was the first, and perhaps only, Broadway show that Colleen and I actually saw live on Broadway. The details surrounding it don't appear to have been memorable, but the show certainly was, and when the DVD finally came out in 1998, I bought it.

I have mixed feelings about the movie version. On the one hand, it wasn't recorded at a live performance -- there were scenes and parts of scenes missing (Growltiger's Last Stand was the one I noticed), and there were close-up shots where you couldn't see what was happening on the rest of the stage. There were special effects, notably the appearance of Firefrorfiddle and the magical tricks in "Mr. Mistoffelees". On the other hand, the close-ups showed details that I couldn't possibly have seen from the nosebleed seats on the balcony, and the special effects were on the whole a nice addition. And of course being a DVD I can watch it any time I want, for free.

I still want a video of a live performance. There ought to be one. It's not likely that I'll see a live performance any time soon. Or maybe ever.

Anyway, rabbit hole. Mostly chasing links from the Wikipedia articles on the musical and the movie. That also led me to the 'Cats' Musical Wiki on fandom.com, and Cats the Musical Behind the Scenes on YouTube. The characters' detailed descriptions and back-stories are endlessly fascinating.

It also led me to T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, of course, and to the... unfortunate... 2019 film version, which is on the list of the worst films ever made for a variety of reasons. That's one DVD I don't intend to waste money on.

I won't waste too many words on it either; I'll just point you at Cats (musical) 1998 vs. 2019 Comparison and Why the Music in Cats (2019) is Worse than you Thought both on YouTube. And the Wikipedia article on the uncanny valley, which its CGI-over-motion-capture characters place it squarely in the middle of.

And now if you'll excuse me I'm going to watch the (1998) DVD again, because I'm all out of brain bleach.

The obvious Songs for today are taking place on the Zoom version of Consonance - The SF Bay Area Filk Convention, otherwise known as Nonsonance. (That link points to the program page.) You can find the Zoom links on either the Book of Faces in the consonance group, or on the #filkhaven discord server.

I should have posted this last night.

I don't multitask, so writing and listening to filk are sort of incompatible. I'll get back to listening now.

Today's S4S, by way of the Filkhaven #media-room channel, is Evolution of Star Trek Series Music Theme (1966-2020), performed by VioDance on YouTube. VioDance is a violinist/DJ duo, based in Spain -- they play at weddings, parties, and various other events. Their YouTube channel shows off their use of projected backgrounds, LEDs, and lasers -- there's a lot more variety there than just the static backgrounds of the Star Trek medley. Fun!

But for me, Becky's performance in "Evolution of Star Trek Series Music Theme" was upstaged to some extent by her instrument, a Wood Violins Viper. In addition to being V-shaped, it has frets, and is self-supporting.

It's a good thing for my bank account that I'm a guitar player.

Colleen and I were married forty five years ago today. So there's really only one song that will do: Here's Stan Rogers singing "Forty-Five Years".

Here's a live performance. from Home in Halifax, and the lyrics.

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Happy anniversary, Love.

This is going to be a fairly short post, which is all out of proportion to the amount of time I've spent in this particular rabbit-hole.

Sometime last March I signed up for a year's worth of online access to The New York Times -- it was deeply discounted, and prevented a lot of annoying dead-ends when following links from their COVID-19 coverage, which is free. As I said, rabbit hole.

The Times has an ongoing series of articles with titles starting with "Five MinuteS That Will Make You Love X" where X is some sub-genre of classical music, the idea being that they ask various people to suggest their favorite short selection. All but the first two were published this year. The most recent one, which dropped me straight into the rabbit-hole this time, was 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Beethoven:

In the past, we’ve asked some of our favorite artists to choose the five minutes or so they would play to make their friends fall in love with In the past, we’ve asked some of our favorite artists to choose the five minutes or so they would play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, the piano, opera, the cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, the violin, Baroque music, and sopranos.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the stormy, tender music of Beethoven, who was born 250 years ago this month.

As I said, it's all classical. But it might be fun to think of what you'd pick for X=Filk. (You can probably guess my pick.)

( The full list to date (from the most recent): )

Somehow Dump Trump AND!!!, made by Julie Matthaei (another former resident of the activist co-op Columbae House), didn't make it into a Songs for Saturday post, but it was posted here, the day before the election, under the river tag.

Anyway, last week Julie produced a sequel: Dumped Trump AND!!!. She also wrote an article about the creation process: Dump Trump AND!!! Singing Across the Generation Gap for a 21st-Century Revolution (which also explains how "AND" got into the title).

NaBloPoMo stats:
   8575 words in 22 posts this month (average 389/post)
     92 words in 1 post today
      1 day with no posts

Just a quick note, since it's almost Sunday and I haven't come up with a Song for Saturday this week, to say that I'm signed up for a zoom concert at OR-eCon on Saturday the 14th at 3pm. It's not entirely clear to me why I was that foolish, considering how little I've been practicing lately. Maybe that's why.

I have a few ideas, but haven't come up with a set list yet (though it's likely to include QV, The River, and Bells of Norwich). If there's anything in (see my repertoire) or out of the LookingGlass Folk songbook, that you particularly want to hear, feel free to suggest it in the comments. (That also goes for anything you particularly don't want to hear.) I won't necessarily take all suggestions, but I'll consider them.

One of my favorite professors in the CS department was Don Knuth, world-renowned as the author of The Art of Computer Programming (he is currently working on Volume 4, I believe), and the inventor of the TeX computer typesetting system (which I use for my song lyrics, using a set of custom macros on top of LaTeX.)

He is also the only person I know who has a pipe organ in his living room, which brings me to today's "song" for Saturday: his remarkable multimedia organ composition Fantasia Apocalyptica. You can watch the North American premier performance here, on YouTube. The video uses a split screen to show the organist, the text in both Greek and English, the score, and a series of illustrations by Duane Bibby, available in book form as Fantasia Apocalyptica Illustrated).

I recommend starting with the page on Knuth's web site, which is written as a series of (frequently asked?) questions and answers and goes into considerable detail. I found it best to take the piece itself in small segments following its natural division into chapters, but if you have an hour and a half to spare, go for it.

It seems particularly appropriate for these times.

A few days shy of thirty years ago our second child, Amethyst Rose, was stillborn. It wasn't until a dozen years later that I wrote a song "For Amy" ([ogg] [mp3]); you'll find the lyrics and audio at the link, and in the set of memorial songs I posted last November on Día de Muertos, which fell on Saturday that year.

I think part of the reason it took me so long to write "For Amy" was that I'd already written something that worked for me -- a setting of Yeats's poem "The Stolen Child" -- sometime in Augusong st of 1990. I'd heard at least one other version; I've heard several more since. I latched onto the poem at once -- it was really too obvious for me not to have noticed. But the tunes I'd heard had a problem: they were too delicate and cheerful. I suppose the faeries would think so.

So I wrote my own, mostly in D minor. (Am capo 5, to be precise -- that was the only set of chord shapes that had the right combination of minor and suspended chords within easy reach.) The first three lines of the chorus, though, are in D major. What child wouldn't want to walk away "with a faery hand in hand"?

The only recording I could find of my version of "The Stolen Child" is one of a set of scratch tracks for what was meant to be my second CD, Amethyst Rose, and which I apparently abandoned some time in 2010. I suppose I ought to get back to that sometime. Sometime soon, preferably. But I'm not making any promises -- I know better.

The other reason it took me so long to write "For Amy" may be that I was already well into my series of prose poems posted on Usenet, and later LJ and DW. In particular, the one from 1991, which already includes the central images I would later use for the song.

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Look for another post on Tuesday, August 4th.

I sat down this morning to start a s4s post, and given my mood Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" was the first thing that came to mind. Sorry about that. As I wrote in this post (originally on LJ), "Desolation Row" is not only my favorite Bob Dylan song, but one of the very best songs I've ever heard. Or sang.

I transcribed it from this track [UPDATED: previous link was wrong] on his (vinyl) album Highway 61 Revisited sometime in the mid-to-late 1960s. Transcribing a track from vinyl us a tedious process and involves a lot of repetition, which is why I can perform it off-book.

Sometime in the early 70s I found that the melody was wonderfully well-suited to my modified Travis picking pattern, as is Dylan's "Lilly, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts", which I learned sometime later from Joan Baez's album From Every Stage. It wasn't until 2008, when I wrote "Quiet Victories" (usually referred to as QV), that I wrote a song that exceeded either of those in length and pickability.

When I sing "Desolation Row" to a filk audience, I usually introduce it by saying that it reminds me somehow of Dhalgren. (No, not just because of its length...)

I also wrote a little parody: Desolation -- Oh, No!. After I wrote QV I wrote a revised version of the second verse, changing "I just can't stop singing Bob Dylan" to "I'm afraid I'm as bad as Bob Dylan". (It can be sung immediately after QV to lighten the mood.)

( links )

... as Lady and I look out tonight / From Desolation Row.

Today's music (it isn't all songs) is very much a mixed bag stylistically, but it's all pandemic-related, because of course it is.

Let's start out on the creepy end. From @siderea, we get The COVID-19 Fugue. (You may want to start with her post about it, which is more descriptive than this brief mention.) Basically it's a fugue built around "C° V-I D 1-9", which is composer Nicholas Papadimitriou's musical respelling of "COVID-19". The results are impressively dissonant (which you might predict from the C-diminished at the start), and absolutely riveting.

From there by way of this comment by @adelenedawner, we go to "Hide Away" by Alice Dillon, a nursery rhyme along the lines of "Ring around the Rosie" (except that the latter's association with the Great Plague appears to date to some time after the Second World War, but it still makes a good story). There's an expanded version here. Lyrics for both versions are in their comments.

From the back alleys and schoolyards we go to Broadway, with The "Zoom Block Tango".

That's a good segue to our final number, "Bolero Juilliard" -- a nice piece of choreography and video editing. You might conceivably want to compare the ending with this version.

Not too bad a week, I guess. Anxiety and depression, mostly about US politics. The plague doesn't worry me nearly as much -- I can do something about it.

I'm sitting here on Whidbey Island, but I'm virtually at FK-No and the Filk Hall of Fame inductions. The new inductees are Juliana McCorrison, Rob Wynne, and Blind Lemming Chiffon. It was followed by an unexpected chance for the earlier inductees to sing one song. I sang "Ship of Stone". (It was between that and "The River"; I realized later that "Stuff that Dreams are Made Of" would also have been very appropriate.) So this is kind of a s4s post too.

Zoom has its problems, but it's a hell of a lot better than not going to a filk con. I'll take it.

One disadvantage of zoom is that it seems extraordinarily difficult for me to compose a post while listening to filk. This may be due in part to the fact that there aren't any breaks. I'll take it anyway.

Somewhere on the borderland between computer science and music, there was an article in Quanta about Donald Knuth. Including a link to his Fantasia Apocalyptica, which is a massive organ piece based on the Book of Revelations; much of it derived from the numerology therein. That went along with MIP*=RE, a proof that somehow cascades through physics and math, by proving that the set of things computable using a quantum computer that takes advantage of entanglement is identical to the set of things that can be computed. The fact that some things are not computable (e.g. the Halting Problem) turns out rather surprisingly to disprove some conjectures in both physics and math.

Lots of links and a few quotes down in the notes.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I was kind of at a loss for which song to write about today, but then somebody posted a link to Apollo 13 in Real Time. Fifty years ago today. So there's really only one song that fits: The Ballad of Apollo XIII.

The link goes to a music video somebody pieced together over Julia Ecklar's track from Minus Ten and Counting: Songs of the Space Age (the linked page includes YouTube videos of all the tracks). You'll find the lyrics, posted by the songwriter, in this comment.

I don't have anything more to add.