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Air Guitar Nation

This summer my family is holding their once-every-five-year reunion out near Mountain View, just on the eastern cusp of the Rocky Mountains. One of the things we’ll be doing is rocking out with a music jam. Not everyone in my family plays an instrument, so I suggested that those not playing should bring their air guitars. I figured just about everyone can play the air guitar, but it wasn’t until I saw the documentary, “Air Guitar Nation” did I truly know the depth and potential of the invisible instrument.

AIR GUITAR NATION is the feature documentary about the year that air guitar swept America – from New York to Los Angeles and then all the way to northern Finland. AIR GUITAR NATION chronicles the birth of the US Air Guitar Championships and the personal journeys of those talented contestants who are vying to become the first World Air Guitar Champion from the United States. Every August, the Air Guitar World Championships bring thousands of fans all the way to Oulu, Finland to see the world’s best air guitarists battle it out for 60 seconds of mock stardom. For years, the USA was missing in action. Enter the first official US Air Guitar Championships. What starts as a friendly contest above a New York strip club becomes a battle of naked ambition played out on the national and, ultimately, the world stage.

Here is a short clip from the movie, please enjoy as C. Diddy gives the most amazing air guitar performance you’ve ever seen:


[C. Diddy Air Guitar Nation – YouTube]

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The Whitburn Project: 120 Years of Music

Using data from the Whitburn project, Andy Baio of Waxy.org just wrote an extensive entry about one-hit wonders and pop longevity.

For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they’ve created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. It’s 25 megs of OCD, and it’s awesome.

Did pop songs stay on the top 40 charts longer in decades past? Were there more one-hit-wonders in the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s? He’s done some great parsing of some really big data sets, and the results are very interesting.

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MoMA Kills Art

One of the senior curators at the MoMA had to end the life of a tiny coat built out of living mouse stem cells after it grew so fast that the cells began to clog the incubator.

From the New York Times article:

One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.

Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.

This is just a taste of the interesting kinds of developments we’re going to see from biological science in the near future.

(via)

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Family News – The Good and the Bad

Vaughn HutchinsonOn the morning of Monday, May 12th, my sister and her husband Glen added a third baby to the family — another boy. I am very excited for them as are the rest of my family. Jackie and Glen named him Vaughn Patrick Hutchinson. He was a little over 10lbs and his low blood sugar levels meant he needed to be on I.V. for a day or so until things stabilized. They are both healthy and happy to be back at home.

Meanwhile, in some less happy news, on Monday my Mom’s brother Rodger, went into the hospital as well and was put on I.V. because he was unable to eat. It was only a few months ago he was diagnosed with cancer, and though we all realized his time was short, it is still very hard. He died this morning at around 7am in his home.

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Jonathan Lebed the 15 year old stock trader

I came across this great article about Jonathan Lebed, and how he become one of the youngest stock traders to bring in a million. It also relates how the S.E.C. took $285,000 of it away—and that was after they tried to get more.

“Can you explain to me what he did?”

He looked at me long and hard. I could see that this must be his meaningful stare. His eyes were light blue bottomless pits. “He’d go into these chat rooms and use 20 fictitious names and post messages. . . . ”

“By fictitious names, do you mean e-mail addresses?”

“I don’t know the details.”

Don’t know the details? He’d been all over the airwaves decrying the behavior of Jonathan Lebed.

“Put it this way,” he said. “He’d buy, lie and sell high.” The chairman’s voice had deepened unnaturally. He hadn’t spoken the line; he had acted it. It was exactly the same line he had spoken on “60 Minutes” when his interviewer, Steve Kroft, asked him to explain Jonathan Lebed’s crime. He must have caught me gaping in wonder because, once again, he looked at me long and hard. I glanced away.

It’s a few years old now, but it’s still compelling reading: Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities.

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IATT Bulletin 1147

What would you do first with the ability to travel through time? Desmond Warzel shares some clever writing, with Wikihistory, a message board by time travellers.

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?

At 18:33:10, SilverFox316 wrote:
Easy for you to say, BigChill, since to my recollection you’ve never volunteered to go back and fix it. You think I’ve got nothing better to do?