A Milestone for Dark Side of the Moon

A mix of Pink Floyd, Aardman Animation, and Tom Stoppard is something I am powerless to miss.  The creation is a play written by Stoppard to go with Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, an album that spent over 800 weeks on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart, and which 40th birthday is being celebrated this year.  It will be broadcast by the BBC on Monday.

To go with it, Aardman (the Wallace and Gromit guys) put together a mildly mind-blowing (more of a muffled, contained explosion?  Look, I want to be the one person who isn't wildly raising your expectations on a regular basis.) teaser video that is much in keeping with the surreal images that have represented the band over the years.

Browser Tab Roundup

Odds and ends I've that don't deserve posts of their own:

Behind-the-scenes photos (1,138 of 'em) from the original Star Wars films

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is back for season 2, including Letterman and Chris Rock.

More evidence that morality is inborn, and isn't limited to humans.  A monkey reacts to unfair treatment:

Zoos make Abstruse Goose sad.

One man's top 10 Magnetic Fields songs

America's 50 worst charities

Security questions run amok

Star Trek as the A Team:

Piazza, New York Catcher

My night with Belle and Sebastian, and Yo la Tengo, was lovely, and not just because DC was under the high 80s for the first time in a while.  Jessica and I saw them a couple years ago at D.A.R., and both shows were excellent.  My friend Brandon had been wanting to, and didn't go away disappointed.

I've never really listened to Tengo, but I'll be fixing that soon.  They were all over the map stylistically in their one-hour set, but everything worked for me.  I can see why people are into them.

Captured from my second-row, center sentry post:

My First Bit on International TV

This afternoon, I was on RT's Prime Interest to talk for a couple segments to talk about the paper I did with my colleagues at the BPC, and the cool Nominations Tracker that goes along with it.  The subject is admittedly dry, but if you're into this sort of thing, it's interesting in a geeky sorta' way.  So, first time on an international broadcast...

My bit starts at 6:50:

Cookiewaits does it again (lyrics NSFW):




If you missed the first one, it's here.  I'm partial to the new one.

Never Gonna Smell Like Teen Spirit

This is fabulous.  Uploaded July of 2009?  Did it only achieve meme status now, or did I just miss it back then?

H/t to Jessica.

Best of the Week

Some good stuff I've read in the past week or so...

Grantland on the state of late night:

Letterman's retirement feels increasingly imminent; his contract is up in two years, he'll be 67, he likes to play at home with his son (one imagines Dave-as-Godfather-Marlon Brandon stuffing orange rinds into his gap-toothed mouth to amuse the lad in their backyard), and his decision will doubtless be a combo of personal choice and Les Moonves strong-arming.  When Letterman does retire, the entire history and mythology of the nighttime talk show will finally come to an end.  No one other than Dave does it with the same combination of intent to further precedent, awareness of lineage, and motivation to unite a mass audience that began with Steve Allen't Tonight.

Matt Yglesias makes the excellent point that promoting efficiency and innovation aren't the same thing:

A visit to San Francisco over the past few days really crystallized in my head the important distinction between increased efficiency in the allocation of resources and fundamental innovation...  San Francisco is a hotbed of inefficiency and what any economically literate person would recognize as bad public policy...  That said, while San Francisco is a hotbed of inefficiency it's also a hotbed of real innovation. The corridor that starts in San Francisco and runs down to San Jose is the premiere cluster of technological innovation in the world and has been for some time...  Human existence is complicated and it's no surprise that there's a lot we don't really understand about it.  But you frequently see an effort to simply subsume the question of innovation into the question of efficiency.  Like if you want a high-innovation economy you just need a lot of sound market-oriented efficiency-promoting public policies, such that true prosperity stems from Oklahoma and the Dakotas with their libertarian-approved policy frameworks.

And, a cool app that shows the entire scale of the universe.  Drag the bar to move from 10^-35 m to 10²⁶ m.