Category: General Page 21 of 25

[:en]For news and blog related stuff, and everything else that doesn’t fit.[:de]Ein Sammelordner für alles, was irgendwo anders nicht untergebracht werden konnte.

Words from the Page

By Fips

On 11th April 2008

In General, Memes

Courtesy of Caro, here’s my contributory few lines from The Lives of the Great Composers by Harold C. Schonberg, page 123, three sentences from the fifth one on:

And, indeed, the coda of the first movement, with its slippery, chromatic bass and the awesome moans above it, remains a paralyzing experience. That is the way the world ends. It is absolute music, but it clearly represents struggle, and it is hard to hear so monumentally anguished a cry without reading something into it. The trouble is that face with such music, all of us tend to become sentimentalists, reading into it the wrong message.

So he sums up the Ninth Symphony of that “Revolutionary from Bonn” as the chapter title has it. A pretty decent book on the whole. And yes I realise that was four sentences.

Now the bigger question of who to pass this on to. Let’s see if and how Steffi, Heliologue and Rob respond.

Daily Links

By Fips

On 9th April 2008

In Daily Links, Music, Science

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 “Eroica” – A wonderful website devoted to one of the most important pieces in Beethoven’s career, and the history of the symphony. Courtesy of Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the website also features works by Copland, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky.

Flash Earth – View the Earth using Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Maps and more, and switch between them. The site claims to be experimental and works without official consent, so will not necessarily be around for long.

Tenth Dimension – Confused by string theory? Watch this simple and fascinating video explaining the ten dimensions—but be prepared to have forgotten it all inside of two minutes!

Zamzar – Convert between a good variety of audio, video, image, document and storage file types online for free. This includes videos available on a number of popular websites (e.g. YouTube, Metacafe and the like). The paid for version offers a number of improved features, but even the basic free version allows files of up to 100Mb to be converted, plenty adequate for most file types, though the result is emailed to an address of your choice, which could prove problematic for certain inboxes.

Daily Links

By Fips

On 9th February 2008

In Daily Links

Book Glutton – Another social internet site, this time designed around the premise that it’s good to read together. The site offers members a chance to form and join reading groups, enabling them to discuss and annotate the book while they read.

ControlC – This website provides a way to save a copy of everything its users ‘copy’ on their own machines, as a way of safeguarding against losing links and information they accidentally overwrite. Not sure how this works with files rather than text being copied, but it claims to be compatible with most major operating systems.

Visible Body – A fascinating look at human anatomy. Free 3D model illustrating the various systems of the body. Sadly currently only works with Internet Explorer.

What Should I Read Next? – Rather limited in scope, it simply does what it says on the tin, suggesting further reading to entered titles. It offers little more than you might get being an Amazon customer, and since this website relies on a small selection of registered users to provide its suggestions, it’s hard to imagine its current database of around 50,000 titles growing too considerably.

Late Resolutions

By Fips

On 4th February 2008

In General

Although it may be customary for resolutions to start after New Year’s, most things surrounding this blog and its author work in a slightly different time zone to everything else. Nevertheless, it was my intention to make an effort to post more on this blog, partly since it might otherwise fall into disuse, partly in order to stretch these fingers more and let a little blood into parts of my brain that are getting a little dusty. The content will be much the same—i.e. as random as ever—but the aim is to post something once a week, albeit supplemented occasionally by interesting links and silly YouTube videos. That might also include some crazy literary wonderings. We’ll see.

But to kick start February, vaguely akin to the peacekeepers, here’s the THX lemur:

Universally Challenged

By Fips

On 27th November 2007

In General

A confused Paxman

Another blunder on the prestigious UK quiz show University Challenge yesterday, as Birmingham took on Magdalen College, Oxford in a very close contest. The question went something like this:

Jeremy Paxman: “Which hydrated ferrous salt used to be known as green vitriol?”

Answer: “Iron sulphate.”

Jeremy Paxman: “No, just sulphate.”

That’s akin to asking who composed Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and rejecting the answer “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” because the card read “Just Mozart.” Of course, everyone makes mistakes, and it should be no surprise that the question master makes a few given the breadth of subjects on display, but Paxman’s general manner makes it difficult to forgive him on this account. Paxman quite happily berates students for not knowing things in his particular field, or indeed for having any knowledge of popular culture, God forbid. In addition, as most people know, the show is filmed and edited in one continuous performance, and might last an hour rather than the televised half an hour. Plenty of time for someone to prevent such rediculous answers from being aired. As someone has already commented, this isn’t the first time such a poor mistake has been made, and no doubt neither will it be the last, until someone finally stands up for themselves or Paxman is brought down a peg.