confused of calcutta

I blame David Weinberger. It was him. He made me do it. He made me follow his tweet and watch this video.  Joe Cocker, with subtitles for people who find his accent and delivery style hard to comprehend. Be careful. Be very careful. I hurt.

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Nearly 40 years ago, we were asked this question at school:
Imagine a string tied around the middle of an orange, in effect forming a circumference. Now imagine another string, this time tied around the middle of the earth, at the equator.Okay? Now increase the length of each of these strings by a foot. Imagine each [...]

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A little while ago I saw this somewhat unusual list of words:

It appeared on the xkcd blag, and Randall shared very little about it: It was in his handwriting, it looked faintly familiar, and he had no idea what it was about. You can see the whole story here.
I whiled away some time just thinking [...]

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I was very taken by the launch of SoundIndex from the BBC, which came to my attention today. Why? Take a look at this partial screenshot:

The chart by itself is not particularly remarkable. Not until you take a look at the rubric for the colours under each track, shown as the Power Bar Key.

A good [...]

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John Martyn’s May You Never is one of my all-time favourite songs. It has everything: melody, lyrics, the warmth and delivery of a brilliant singer-songwriter, and, in my case, fond memories associated with people who aren’t around any more, in places that aren’t the same.

Some years ago, a friend told me he’d [...]

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I’ve been lazing all evening. My older two children are at a concert in Brixton, the youngest is in bed, my wife has her church group over, and I’ve been left to myself. Which is a good thing sometimes, especially when it’s the end of the week and i’ve spent most of it travelling. [...]

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I’m fascinated by humourists, comics and comedians.  There’s something about them; I sense that a talented comic has a privileged view of the human condition, a perspective unlike any other.  So I feel I learn from watching them.  [More on this later.]
A good comic can make you laugh by a single word or gesture. For [...]

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I’ve been playing around with FoxyTunes, installing it in Firefox, getting the TwittyTunes extension. And it’s not just because I like music. I think what’s happening here is very powerful.
Let’s start with Twitter, it looks harmless and gormless, what possible use could it have? After all, what can you do in 140 characters? Let’s [...]

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I had some fun trying to pick my 50 best albums for 1971, and it looks like some of you enjoyed it as well. As my dad used to say, “repeat medicine until patient dies” (and no, he wasn’t a doctor, it was a phrase he used when executing squeeze plays in contract bridge; I [...]

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I guess I’m slightly fanatical about music made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There was so much wonderful music made during those days. So I thought I’d try constraining things differently in a pretend Desert Island DIscs selection.
I decided to choose exactly 50 albums from my collection.
Too difficult.
Still too many.
So I decided [...]

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