Bobby McFerrin illustrates the simple beauty of the pentatonic scale

This is fun--actually delightful. Bobby McFerrin plays the audience, and they produce a pentatonic baseline for McFerrin's improvising. World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo. For more of McFerrin's magic, watch the video below:

World Science Festival 2009: Notes & Neurons, Part 1 of 5 from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

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Where are the photos of good things supposedly happening in Iraq and Afghanistan?

I’ve totally run out of patience. I need to see photos of all the good things happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there aren’t any. Why aren’t we seeing lots and lots of photos documenting all the supposedly good things the United States is supposedly doing in these countries with its bloated military-industrial complex? We spend a billion dollars every three days on these two “wars.” We’ve already spent a trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of this money unaccounted for. http://www.costofwar.com/ For Iraq alone, we will have spent at least $6,500 per U.S. citizen before we are done with it all (if that ever happens). Hey, somebody, please show us lots and lots of photos proving that a billion dollars of new things are happening every three days in Iraq and Afghanistan. Show us one trillion dollars of progress over the past 10 years. Certainly the public could be shown photos of stabilized neighborhoods, sprouting businesses, and kids learning in quality schools, if these things were happening. I challenge any of you to scour the current editions of your favorite news sites to find photographs or videos that would give you any optimism that the U.S. will ever leave either of these countries. Just find any photo of anything happening in either war zone over the past week. You won’t find it in American mainstream news sites. And no, this story that Afghanistan has a total of one rock band isn’t good news. You probably won’t even find any current news that any war is going on at all.

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The Apollo 11 launch close up and slow

Check out this a wonderful video and commentary regarding the launch of Apollo 11, the first lunar landing. All of this action is captured with a still video camera perched almost unimaginably close to the rocket exhaust. 500 frames per second turned 30 seconds into 8 minutes. This video reminds me about the many ordinary things that had to happen according to plan in order to allow the success of what has to be the one of the most spectacular journeys in the history of humankind. Keep in mind that the Saturn V Rocket was 363 feet tall, only one foot shorter than St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Each one of the F-1 engines (which are still the most powerful rocket engines ever built) were 12 feet in diameter at the nozzle, and there were five of these monsters powering the launch.

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

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