Goodbye Green-eyed Lady

Green-eyed lady, lovely lady.

Green-eyed Lady by Sugarloaf
(words and music by J.C. Phillips and David Riordan)

We lost Gypsy last night. Her back legs weren't working and she was in pain, so we took her to the vet. It was likely a clot blocking the flow of blood to her back legs, but that didn't really matter. She was sixteen and in a lot of pain. They administer a strong sedative first, so nothing after will be felt. Almost immediately she stopped howling and slowly drifted off. That's when we knew we'd made the right choice.

We'll miss you lady-cat.

Space

Space, the final fronier.
Kirk

Let's put some space between here and election news.







That's better.

"Belched into the right-wing echo-chamber"

In law, this would create a mistrial.
Greta Van Susteren
No, it would get the lawyer fired.
Keith Olbermann

The right-wing noise machine is in full bluster mode because they "just learned" that Vice Presidential moderator Gwen Ifill is writing a book titled titled Breakthough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama News of the book appeared in print as early as July 23, weeks before the debate moderators were even chosen and agreed upon by both campaigns.

But I digress. Here is Keith Olbermann telling us what he really thinks about Ifill's so-call conflict of interest, among other things....

"If the McCain campaign, which could have found out about it at any time over the last two months and nine days by simply googling her name, if that campaign really didn't know anything about this book until Greta Van Susteren emailed them last night...

They're morons!"

Rick Wright 1943-2008

And no one called us to the land
And no one crosses there alive.
Pink Floyd
Echoes
(Waters, Wright, Mason, Gilmour)

Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright died today. Damn. At least they had this one last gig together:

And way back when...

The Soup covers Kathy Hilton's response to McCain

Now I'm not a political analyst, but when your candidate for president is wrong and Kathy Hilton is right....
Joel McHale

I wish I'd found this when the McCain's Britney/Paris add was still running, but this clip still cracks me up...

Cellist Zoë Keating

I like to think of it as a DJ scratch approach to the cello.
Zoë Keating

Another Radio Lab podcast highlight: Quantum Cello. Last season's War of the Worlds episode was live and cellist Zoë Keating provided the music. In this podcast, Jad Abumrad visits Keating to learn more about her music and listen to her perform a few pieces. Her music is really cool. There are certainly better adjectives than those, but that's all I can muster right now. Trust me, though, it's really cool.

As she plays, she digitally captures segments of her music which she loops back. As the loops are playing back, she plays additional layers over them. The result is sounds more like an orchestrated work than a solo one. What I though was especially neat is that she does this live. The loop capture is controled with foot pedals. In the podcast she performs three pieces live that sound more like studio recordings.

It's great stuff. Check it out if you get a chance.

Update: Here's a video of her performing live, so you can really get the idea:

You know what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like this?

When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that:
"Have ya paid your dues, Jack?"
"Yessir, the check is in the mail."
Jack Burton
Big Trouble in Little China

Last night Sharon and I stayed up and watched a movie. We could have watched There Will be Blood, which we have from the library and haven't seen yet. We didn't. We watched John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China.

I love this movie. It is not a good movie. It's a bad movie, but it is so deliciously bad. It is corny and cheesey and makes no attempt to be otherwise. If it did, it would not be half as much fun. At no point does this movie take itself seriously, and that is what makes it so much fun.

You canna change the laws of physics

All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics.
Brian Greene

Assume the universe is infinite, but the number of possible configurations of particles in the universe, while tremendously huge, is finite. That means that at some point somewhere in the universe, a particular configuration of particles must repeat. Somewhere, an almost incomprehensible distance from here, there is another version of me writing this exact same blog post in an identical office when he should be coding. In fact, there's not just copy, there are countless copies.

That is just one of the concepts explored in this episode of the Radio Lab podcast. Brian Greene, physics and mathematics professor and director of the Institute of Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University, sits down with Robert Krulwich to talk about the nature of the universe.

Two other tidbits from the conversation:

• The universe is actually a lot like a block of Swiss cheese.
• If you think about it, it is actually more likely we exist in a huge computer simluation than in the actual universe.

Krulwich keeps the science content accessible and the conversation tone fun and interesting. Take a listen if you have a chance.