September 13, 2009

Moving cathedrals.

Courtesy of the Music Animation Machine. Best watched in full screen. A few observations:

1. I can’t even begin to decipher musical notation.

This animation told me a lot more about the structure of the first movement of the Fifth in real time than I think I would have learned in hours poring over the sheet music, or even through listening again and again to the symphony itself.

Not everything – I don’t know how you could graphically represent time signature, for example. But enough.

2. If this animation was converted into an augmented reality iPhone app, for use by concertgoers during performances – if you could understand what was going on in the latest avant-garde work in the moment, or you could overlay the interpretations that had been made of one symphony by different orchestras – well, that would be really cool.

3. It looks a bit like the Arecibo message, and even a bit reminiscent of the Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is pleasing.

September 12, 2009

Vile.

Page 27 of the Daily Mail, 12 September 2009.

That’s all I have to say about the Daily Mail editor’s decision to publish 9/11 Trutherism the day after the anniversary of the attacks.

I can only presume that it was Paul Dacre’s decision. After all, he has been described thus:

Paul Dacre is the last — or anyway, presently the only — British newspaper editor who stamps himself on his newspaper every morning. Other editors put their mark on papers, and shape them — Dacre beats the words out every night, producing a paper which is his voice, reflects his tastes and views, has his acuities and blind spots, in a way true of no other paper.

The “new book” is by David Ray Griffin. It is entirely natural that Mr Griffin would claim Osama Bin Laden played no part in the murder of over 2,700 people – despite Mr Bin Laden’s frequent boasts to the contrary. Mr Griffin claims that individuals in the United States government played that part instead.

Does Paul Dacre believe these theories? If not, why would he allow their author a sympathetic double-page spread in the widely-read Saturday edition of his newspaper?

September 9, 2009

Happy 2000th anniversary of the Battle of Teutoberger Wald.

The Roman Empire did, after all, grind to a halt for the first time in its history two thousand years ago today.

Yes, the Rhine probably was a more defensible and prosperous border for the empire than the Elbe. And yes, even though Germanic tribes did destroy three full legions and 15,000 soldiers somewhere north of modern Osnabrück from September 9 to 11 in AD 9, their descendants didn’t sack Rome itself until 410.

And yeah, no one really gets references to classical history today for that matter either, I guess.

Still. Who knows how much would be different if Quintilius Varus had kept his legions?

September 7, 2009

No torture necessary.

Jury convicts three men of attempting mass murder at 30,000 feet. Perhaps this due process thing is a good idea after all.

September 6, 2009

The problem wasn’t just al-Megrahi, cont’d.

Sorry to bang on about Anglo-Libyan relations again.

Still, further to what I said about the haphazard nature of the UK’s Libya policy – it’s striking it should also have led to the Government not to support compensation for victims of terrorism, in case it leads to a “secure energy future” for the UK.

Not just any energy future – a future that will increasingly depend on a man who asked the United Nations to abolish Switzerland last month.

This will not end well.

September 3, 2009

The problem wasn’t just al-Megrahi.

I read through the official documents on the al-Megrahi affair on Tuesday, just after they were released. (I was rejected for work experience by Newsnight once again, so I thought I may as well do something vaguely journalistic to make up for it. Yeah, I’m a sad individual.)

The UK Ministry of Justice, the UK Foreign Office, and the Scottish Government all released papers “relevant” to the Megrahi case because of media reports of a conspiracy. This Times analysis is a good summary of the document drop’s Megrahi-related revelations.

But the documents are far more interesting than just for what they say about the decision to release Megrahi. They are a devastating snapshot of UK policy towards a key state in the War on Terror since 2007.

And I’m going to argue that they provide more than a hint that those relations have evolved very haphazardly, very incompetently, and into a very dubious state indeed.

Full details below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

September 2, 2009

The Devil has all the best tunes.

And very often also the best graphic design.

Foreign Policy magazine has a stunner of a slideshow up of images from David King’s Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union.

This particular propaganda poster exhorts workers in the Azeri Soviet Socialist Republic to build airships for the Soviet state.

The slideshow includes: war photography from the Russian Civil War; an infographic of the first Five Year Plan; a colour photo of Stalin lying in state – and a haunting prison mugshot of Zinoviev before his show trial during the Great Purge.

Because, after all, only the best graphic design will do if you are aiming to hide the ugliest truth.

PS

Given that the poster was made in 1931, I’m surprised at the iconographic prominence of Lenin over Stalin: Lenin had died in 1924, and by 1931 Stalin had long since outmanoeuvred his main opponents for the Soviet leadership.

Was Stalin’s position still too vulnerable to roll out the infamous personality cult of his later years in power? Were Soviet national minorities like the Azeris still too wary of Stalin’s takeover? Or maybe Azeri graphic designers just hadn’t got the memo from Moscow yet.

September 1, 2009

It’s apple season.

(via Jason Kottke).