This past weekend, Marvin Minksy, one of the founding fathers of computer science, passed away at the age of 88. Educated at Harvard and Princeton, The MIT Technology Reviewrecalls, “Minsky believed that the human mind was fundamentally no different than a computer, and he chose to focus on engineering intelligent machines, first at Lincoln Lab, and then later as a professor at MIT, where he cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1959 with another pioneer of the field, John McCarthy.” During the 1980s, Minsky published The Society of Mind, a seminal work which posited that there’s no essential difference between humans and machines, because humans are “actually machines of a kind whose brains are made up of many semiautonomous but unintelligent ‘agents’.” (Quote comes from this NYTimes obit, not Minsky directly).
Above, you can watch The Society of Mind taught as a free online course. Presented at MIT in 2011, Minsky takes you through his theories about how the human mind works, emphasizing “aspects of thinking that are so poorly understood that they are still considered to be more philosophical than scientific.” The goal, however, is to “replace ill-defined folk theories of ‘consciousness’, ‘self’ and ’emotion’ with more concrete computational concepts.” Lectures in the course include ones intriguingly called “Falling in Love,”“From Panic to Suffering,” and “Common Sense.” In addition to The Society of Mind, the course also centers around another book by Minsky, The Emotion Machine, which you can purchase online here.
In 1968, Mick Jagger and Michael Lindsay-Hogg—director of the Let It Be film and several promo music videos for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—sat down to brainstorm ideas for a full-length television production that would be unlike typical concert films. Lindsay-Hogg drew a circle on a piece of paper, and an idea was born for a rock and roll circus: two shows featuring the Stones, the Who, Marianne Faithfull, Taj Mahal, Jethro Tull, and John Lennon’s supergroup Dirty Mac, with Yoko, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix’s drummer Mitch Mitchell, and Keith Richards on bass. That December, the bands played on a circus set in a London TV studio to a live audience.
Unhappy with the resulting footage, Jagger shelved the project, feeling like the Stones’ performance wasn’t up to snuff. (They went on early in the morning, and some say Jagger felt upstaged by the Who.) Some film of the concert made it into the 1979 documentary The Kids Are Alright, but much of it was lost until 1989, when it turned up in the Who’s private archive. The full concert film eventually premiered in 1996 at the New York Film Festival (and it’s now out on BluRay-see trailer below), where it appeared, wrote Janet Maslin, “straight out of its time capsule,” bringing back “the sleek young Stones in all their insolent glory, recalling a time when they ruled the roost.” Despite Jagger’s misgivings, they really did dominate that circus stage, but the event is notable for a number of other reasons.
Of course, there’s the Lennon supergroup, whose performance of his “Yer Blues,” sans Yoko (top) is “indispensable,” writes Allmusic. That’s no overstatement. Clapton’s sinuous leads and Mitch Mitchell’s busy fills sit beautifully with Lennon’s confident delivery. Rock and RollCircus also features the only filmed performance of soon-to-be Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi in his tenure with Jethro Tull (“arguably,” Maslin says, “the most unbearable band of their day.”)
As amazing as so many of these performances are (Taj Mahal’s “Ain’t That a Lot of Love” seriously rocks), as Maslin pointed out, the Stones “ruled the roost,” and they knew it, even if they had to go on at five in the morning to accommodate difficult setups between acts.
It just so happens that Rock and Roll Circus represents Brian Jones very last gig with the band. (It was not, as Ultimate Classic Rock reports, an earlier show at Empire Pool that May.) He looks particularly unenthused above playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and the rest of the band looks exhausted as well—all except Jagger whose “fabulous performance,” Maslin writes, “nearly turns this into a one-man show.” Just above, see them do “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” introduced by Lennon in sign language (“one of two live renditions it ever got with Brian Jones in the lineup,” writes Allmusic). You can also see the barroom blues tune “Parachute Woman” here and below, a jumpy, funky “Sympathy for the Devil” (with Spanish subtitles).
To see the full concert—including the Who’s quick appearance, more Dirty Mac (with Yoko), and a bunch of sideshow extras—pick up a copy of the Rock and Roll Circus on BluRay.
The long-looming 2016 United States presidential election has already got many of us, even (or maybe especially) non-Americans, instinctively flinching at anything that smacks of political campaigning. Given that the noise has nothing to do but intensify, how do we stay sane for the duration of the year, not to mention able to tell the credible claims from the incredible?
I recommend getting some perspective with a visit to the Internet Archive’s newly opened Political TV Ad Archive. Its creators have, “after sifting through more than 100,000 hours of broadcast television coverage and counting,” organized “more than 30,000 ad airings” into a site meant to, in the words of Internet Archive’s Television Archive Managing Editor Nancy Watzman, “bring journalists, researchers, and the public resources to help hold politicians accountable for the messages they deliver in TV ads.” A formidable task, given that the current storm of political ads in which we find ourselves comes as only the latest visit of the larger blizzard of political ads that has swirled around us since Eisenhower answered America 55 years ago.
At this point, even the most well-informed and media-literate among us face a difficult search for clarity amid all the slantedly aggressive “messaging,” and so the Political TV Ad Archive has accompanied its data with links to “fact-checking and follow-the-money journalism by the project’s partners,” which include the American Press Institute, the Center for Public Integrity, FactCheck.org, and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. “Before the primaries are over, the public in key primary states will be buried in campaign ads generating more heat than light,” Watzman quotes Television Archive director Roger Macdonald as saying, highlighting the ease with which it lets us “have a better chance at separating lies from truths and learn who is paying for the ads.”
What has the project found so far? To take examples just from its scrutiny of the candidates drawing the most media attention, partner Politifact “rated a claim in this Donald Trump campaign ad as ‘Pants on Fire’ because it proclaimed that Trump would ‘stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for,’ while showing footage not of Mexican immigrants, but rather of refugees streaming into Morocco that had been pulled from an Italian news network.”
On the other side of the great divide, partner FactCheck.org “reported that a Hillary Clinton TV ad that claimed that drug prices had doubled in the last seven years was inaccurate,” claiming that “brand-name drug prices on average have more than doubled” when “more than 80 percent of filled prescriptions are generic drugs, and those prices have declined by nearly 63 percent, that same report says.”
The lesson to take away so far: ads are ads, and political ads are even more so. We have no defense against them but what facts we learn and what degree of hair-trigger skepticism we bring to the table, both of which tools like the Political TV Ad Archive can only increase. Evaluate these flurries of claims from all sides as best you can without getting too obsessive about it, and you’ll surely survive 2016 with your reason intact, and even a thing or two learned about the dark arts of political advertisement. Stay smart out there, ladies and gentlemen — especially if you live in a swing state.
In high school, I had a history teacher who was, in his spare time, a millionaire owner of several marinas. He taught, he told us, because he loved it. Was he a good teacher? Not by the lights of most pedagogical standards, but he did intend, amidst all his lassitude and total lack of organization, to leave us all with something more important than history: the secret of his success. What was it, you ask? Naps. Each day he touted the power of power naps with a proselytizer’s relentless enthusiasm: 15 minutes a few times a day, the key to wealth and happiness.
We all thought he was benignly nuts, but maybe he was on to something after all. It seems that many very wise, productive people—such as Albert Einstein, Aristotle, and Salvador Dali—have used power naps as sources of refreshment and inspiration. Except that while my history teacher recommended no less than ten minutes, at least one of these famous gents preferred less than one. Dali used a method of timing his naps that ensured his sleep would not last long. He outlined it thus, according to Lifehacker:
1. Sleep sitting upright (Dali recommends a Spanish-style bony armchair)
2. Hold a key in your hand, between your fingers (for the bohemian, use a skeleton key)
3. Relax and fall asleep (but not for too long…)
4. As you fall asleep, you’ll drop the key. Clang bang clang!
5. Wake up inspired!
Dali called it, fittingly, “Slumber with a key,” and to “accomplish this micro nap,” writes The Art of Manliness, he “placed an upside-down plate on the floor directly below the key.” As soon as he fell asleep, “the key would slip through his fingers, clang the plate, and awaken him from his nascent slumber.” He claimed to have learned this trick from Capuchin monks and recommended it to anyone who worked with ideas, claiming that the micro nap “revivified” the “physical and psychic being.”
Dali included “Slumber with a key” in his book for aspiring painters, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, along with such nostrums as “the secret of the reason why a great draughtsman should draw while completely naked” and “the secret of the periods of carnal abstinence and indulgence to be observed by the painter.” We might be inclined to dismiss his nap technique as a surrealist practical joke. Yet The Art of Manliness goes on to explain the creative potential in the kind of nap I used to take in history class—dozing off, then jerking awake just before my head hit the desk:
The experience of this transitional state between wakefulness and sleep is called hypnagogia. You’re floating at the very threshold of consciousness; your mind is sliding into slumber, but still has threads of awareness dangling in the world…. While you’re in this state, you may see visions and hallucinations (often of shapes, patterns, and symbolic imagery), hear noises (including your own name or imagined speech), and feel almost physical sensations…. The experience can essentially be described as “dreaming while awake.”
The benefits for a surrealist painter—or any creative person in need of a jolt out of the ordinary—seem obvious. Many visionaries such as William Blake, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge have made use of waking dream states as wellsprings of inspiration. Both Beethoven and Wagner composed while half asleep.
Scientists have found waking dream states useful as well. We’ve already mentioned Einstein. Brilliant mathematician, engineer, philosopher, and theoretical physicist Henri Poincare also found inspiration in micro naps. He pointed out that the important thing is to make ready use of any insights you glean during your few seconds of sleep by writing them down immediately (have pen and paper ready). Then, the conscious mind must take over: “It is necessary,” wrote Poincare, “to put in shape the results of this inspiration, to deduce from them the immediate consequences, to arrange them,” and so forth. He also suggests that “verification” of one’s hypnagogic insights is needed above all, but this step, while critical for the mathematician, seems superfluous for the artist.
So the micro nap comes to us with a very respectable pedigree, but does it really work or is it a psychological placebo? The author of the Almost Bohemian blog writes that he has practiced the technique for several weeks and found it “relatively successful” in restoring energy, though he has yet to harness it for inspiration. If you asked empirical sleep researchers, they might tend to agree with my history teacher: “Sleep laboratory studies show,” writes Lynne Lamberg in her book Bodyrhythms, “that a nap must last at least ten minutes to affect mood and performance.” This says nothing at all, however, about how long it takes to open a doorway to the unconscious and steal a bit of a dream to put to use in one’s waking work.
Aside from the very specific use of the micro nap, the longer power nap—anywhere from 10–40 minutes—can work wonders in improving “mood, alertness and performance,” writes the National Sleep Foundation. Short naps seem to work best as they leave one feeling refreshed but not groggy, and do not interfere with your regular sleep cycle. The Sleep Foundation cites a NASA study “on sleepy military pilots and astronauts” which found that “a 40-minute nap improved performance by 34% and alertness by 100%.” Lifehacker points to studies showing that “power naps, short 10 to 15 minute naps, improve mental efficiency and productivity,” which is why companies like Google and Apple allow their employees to doze off for a bit when drowsy.
One stress management site observes that the 10–15 minute power nap does not even require a pillow or blanket; “you don’t even need to go to sleep! You just need a comfortable place to lie on your back, put your feet up, and breathe comfortably.” Such a practice will not likely turn you into a world famous artist, poet, or scientist (or millionaire marina-owning, altruistic high school teacher). It will likely rejuvenate your mind and body so that you can make much better use of the time you spend not sleeping.
The label “American original” gets slapped onto a lot of different people, but it seems to me that, especially in the realm of letters, we could find no two luminaries who merit it more in the 19th century than psychological horror pioneer Edgar Allan Poe, and in the 20th century William S. Burroughs, sui generis even within the Beat Generation. So how could we resist featuring the recording just below, free to hear on Spotify (whose software, if you don’t have it yet, you can download here), of Burroughs reading Poe’s tale — because, as you know if you read him, he wrote not stories but tales — “The Masque of the Read Death”?
The 1842 tale itself, still haunting today more than 170 years after its publication, tells of a prince and his coterie of a thousand aristocrats who, in order to protect themselves from a Black Plague-like disease—the titular Red Death—sweeping through common society, take refuge in an abbey and weld the doors shut. In need of amusements (this all takes place about century and a half before Netflix, remember), the prince throws a masquerade ball. What, then, should interrupt this good time but the inexplicable arrival of an uninvited guest in a costume reminiscent of the corpse of a Red Death victim — possibly an embodiment of the Red Death itself?
Poe could tell a seriously resonant tale, and so could Burroughs. Though completely different in form, aesthetic, setting, and psychology, both writers’ works strike just the right ominous tone and leave just enough unexplained to seep into our subconscious in vivid and sometimes even unwanted ways. And so it makes perfect sense for Burroughs and his voice of a jaded but still amused ancient to join the formidable lineup of Poe’s interpreters, which includes Christopher Walken, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, James Earl Jones, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and Stan Lee. But among them all, who better than Burroughs to articulate “The Masque of the Red Death’s” final line: “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
You can hear more of Burroughs reading Poe, in performances recorded for the computer game The Dark Eye, in Ted Mills’ previous post here.
Last summer, Paul Marshall, a DJ at the classic rock station 100.7 KSLX in Phoenix Arizona, went the distance in trying to answer a question: how many AC/DC songs end in pretty much the same way? The result of his study is the supercut below. On his Facebook page, Marshall writes:
It took a LONG time to go through. I promise you, *no song was repeated.* These are all the final notes, of almost every AC/DC song ever recorded (very few songs in their history, fade out. They were omitted). They know how to end a song. That’s for sure. Feel free to share, steal, and give to your morning show without crediting me (you know who you are!). Annnd.…power chord!
All of this puts the quote attributed to Angus Young (AC/DC co-founder/guitarist) in a funny light: “I’m sick to death of people saying we’ve made 11 albums that sounds exactly the same, Infact, [sic] we’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.”
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What’s it like inside the mind of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking? Is it an electro-cosmic dance party narrated by Carl Sagan? I would like to think so. So would director Will Studd of Aardman Studios who created the hip promo video above, which also includes audio clips from Hawking himself and fellow physicists Brian Cox and Andrew Strominger, with music by Max Halstead. Pretty cool, but what’s it for?
Ask Hawking—or rather, read his paper (or one of the layfolk summaries), “Soft Hair on Black Holes,” which he posted a couple of weeks ago on Cornell University’s arXiv, an open access database of physics, mathematics, and other scientific research. Of Hawking and other physicists’ theory, Tia Ghose at Live Science writes, “black holes may sport a luxurious head of ‘hair’ made up of ghostly, zero-energy particles.” These “hairs” may store quantum information that would otherwise be lost forever. In the second part of his lecture, Hawking will expand on his theory of black hole radiation. Get a brief summary of that theory in the video clip above, and watch this space for Hawking’s sure-to-be-enlightening black hole lectures.
Those familiar with David Bowie lore may know one or two things about the recording of his seminal 1978 track “Heroes.” One is that the recording studio did, in fact, look out over the Berlin Wall and the lovers that Bowie saw made it into the lyrics (“I can remember standing by the wall/And the guns shot above our heads/And we kissed as though nothing could fall”). The other is the microphone set up in Hansa’s expansive recording studio: one next to Bowie’s mouth, another 15 — 20 feet away, and another at the far end of the room to catch the reverb. (Hands up how many of us learned about that when Steve Albini copied it for Nirvana’s “All Apologies”? Anybody?) But as this video above with producer Tony Visconti shows, that’s only a few of the magical inventions and daring decisions made for this recording. The session contains lessons for any young producer endlessly fiddling about with their ProTools and the millions of choices afforded by a $2.99 synth app for the iPad.
When Bowie added his vocals at the end of the recording session, there was only one track left on the tape, having filled up the 23 other tracks with the band’s backing track, Eno’s synths, extra percussion, three (!) tracks of Robert Fripp commanding the gods through his guitar pickup and feedback, and more. If they didn’t like the take, they’d erase over it with the new one. Those were the analog days. But as Visconti says, that scary decision electrified Bowie. As an artist, everything was at stake. It’s like they knew they were making a song for the ages. Maybe it’s Visconti’s 20/20 hindsight, but they were right.
But there’s so much more to be discovered among those 24 audio tracks of “Heroes.” In this wonderful BBC documentary from 2012 (also see up top), Visconti sits down with the digitally transferred master tapes and takes us through the construction of the song. Here we get to hear Robert Fripp’s raw guitar tracks which sound so incredibly abrasive it’s hard to believe they exist in the song; Visconti’s “cowbell,” which is him hitting a pipe outside in the yard; Eno’s synth in a briefcase, the EMS Synthi‑A; and numerous painterly daubs of audio that all make up the mix. And then there’s that vocal, which Visconti lets play without any of the music, a song for the history books, a voice that couldn’t be constrained to just one mic. The video unfortunately couldn’t be embedded on our site, but it’s definitely worth your time.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
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