Saturday, July 9, 2016

Endurance is the crowning quality...

Unsurprisingly, Fort Worth is ranked as one of the friendliest cities while our eastern neighbor is ranked as one of the rudest.

110 Nobel Laureates sign a petition urging everyone to stop hating on GMOs. "There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption. Their environmental impacts have been shown repeatedly to be less damaging to the environment, and a boon to global biodiversity." (Note: I'm not necessarily a fan of the euphemism "precision agriculture.") The entire GMO debate is one that exemplifies the fact that your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant.

Jon Anderson (Yes) and Roine Stolt (Flower Kings) have joined forces for the album Invention of Knowledge, due out on 24 June. Hear a teaser on YouTube, read more at Inside Out Music.

And Daniel Lanois' new album Goodbye to Language is out later this year, but the teaser track Heavy Sun is available now.

Unheard Bird is a double album of 58 recently discovered and previously unreleased tracks by Charlie Parker.

Perle Fine, Early Morning Garden, 1957. source
I've made no secret of the fact that I consider Donald Trump to be a repugnant, oafish buffoon. But smarter people than me have made a more rational case about why he's uniquely unsuited for the presidency: "we believe that his entire way of behaving represents a rejection of the essential character traits (the “qualities”) that our democracy requires of its leaders."

Cool video of eye-tracking of an F-1 race driver.

Shocking news: Americans and Europeans are different. Another example of the difference is air conditioning, our love of which was called an epidemic. On the other hand, it's not clear to me that Europeans know that air can actually move and circulate.

Everyone knows about six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Here's Six Degrees of Musical Separation where any two musicians can be related in no more than six steps. (Note: someone doing a cover of someone else's work counts as a step.) For example, I gave it Anthony Phillips (a very very early member of Genesis) and Pink. Seemed like a challenge but they were connected in two steps.

The 99 best business books. 7 out of 99 isn't bad, right?

The NFL 2016 rule book is online as a PDF. Maybe it clarifies what a catch is.

Peter Diamandis asks an interesting question: what won't change in the next 10-20 years? I read where someone replied that restaurant tables will still wobble and you'll still need to jam a folded up napkin beneath one of the legs. But what else? It's a harder question to answer than it appears.

The planned 5th installment of the Alien movie franchise (to be directed by Neill Blomkamp) is going to be set after Aliens (i.e. Alien 2) as though Alien 3 and Alien 4 never happened.

Does anyone care how happy Twitter is? Check out the Hedonometer.

Because you stink.

...and patience all the passion of great hearts. ~James Russell Lowell

4 comments:

RJG said...

Nice to see I'm not the only local blogger who throws in random prog references :-)

http://regularjoesguide.blogspot.com/2016/07/cane-rosso-fort-worth-texas.html

John said...

Prog is an essential part of my existence and, therefore, part of this bloggy brain dump.

RJG has been bookmarked. I've been known to enjoy food.

May I ask how it is that you found the Bits?

RJG said...

Food and Fort Worth, Texas. I was going through Francis' list of favorite sites.

I maintain a couple of prog music blogs as well. I took a break for awhile, but they're back up and running.

http://unencumberedmusicreviews.blogspot.com/
http://undertheradarcds.blogspot.com/

I'll add your blog to the undertheradar list, as that's a good fit.

John said...

I wish Francis would start blogging again.

I'll check out your music blogs.Thanks for listing mine.