The Plummet Onions

I’ve blogged before about Swedish sister country-folk duo First Aid Kit, because they’re amazingly fantastical. In addition to their own great music they’ve done some great cover tunes, like this autoharp-filled version of “It Hurts Me Too”.

We’ve now got a full version of a cover First Aid Kit did for French radio some time ago, of Patti Smith’s eerie, iconic “Dancing Barefoot”. Listen to the harmonies.

Great Big Sea are a pretty popular party-time band from Newfoundland, Canada. For 20 years they’ve blended East Coast folk music (strongly Irish-influenced) with pop-rock melodies and sensibilities. I saw them a couple of times when I lived in Canada, and once in London in 2007 (read the comments thread on that blog post; I attracted a nutter). They’re high energy. Their music is neither elaborate nor delicately crafted, but it’s delivered with punk-rock dedication.

Great Big Sea are on their first Australian mini-tour (a night in Melbourne and a night in Sydney, before heading up the coast to the Byron Bay Bluesfest this weekend). Like any good Canadian – and the Basement was packed with them last night – I went to see them play. I managed to drag along some friends, most of whom didn’t know GBS, but who had a pretty good time.

I was pleased to find out that the opening act was Katoomba one-man DIY blues band Claude Hay, whom I caught a couple of times earlier this year. It was a short set, but Claude won over the room with his smiling demeanour, soulful voice, and fiery fingerpicking.

Great Big Sea did what they’ve always done: ripped through Celtic-rock singalongs of just about all the hits I remember, including “Donkey Riding”, “Mari-Mac”, “Lukey”, “The Night Pat Murphy Died”, “Up”, “Run Runaway”, “Excursion Around the Bay” and so on and so on. The Canuck crowd knew when to sing, when to clap, and when to belt out a “Hey!”

The boys oozed enthusiasm and Newfie charm as they went. This was the first time for some of them in Australia, and there were oft-repeated jibes of Sean McCann falling for warnings about drop-bears. Sean also found it bewildering that this used to be a penal colony: if people were sent here for punishment, he wondered aloud, how bad must his ancestors – banished to Newfoundland – have been?

It was a feel-good kitchen party in a little basement club on the other side of the world, but I don’t think it felt much different from Corner Brook for Great Big Sea.

Researchers at a university in Italy have demonstrated that small guppy-like fish named Mosquito Fish can count; if they spot different groups of their comrades they can estimate which group is bigger.

That’s a useful skill to have, the researchers say. Larger groups, or shoals, offer a more effective shield against bigger fish with empty bellies.

The researchers allowed individual mosquitofish in a tank to see groups of other fish, but barricades prevented them from seeing an entire group at once. When viewing fish one at a time in each of two groups, mosquito fish spent much more time near larger groups, Dadda and his colleagues report. The fish preferred groups of three over two fish and groups with eight fish over four fish.

The article mentions that other animals, including rats and dolphons, have previously been shown to be able to count. They also mention that honeybees can also count, but only up to 3. This is something I learned growing up on the farm: when you place bee hives near crops you want them to pollinate you never put more than five or six in a row. That’s because bees know directionality and so will approach their home hive from the right side, but when counting to get the right hive they can’t go past three. If you had more hives than six in a row all the bees, on returning, would eventually cluster in the outer three hives on each side.

"And a-one, and a-two..."

I use Blip.fm. It’s a nifty web service that searches out playable music on the net, lets you listen to it, create playlists with it, tweet it with messages and tags, comment on what other people play, and give “props” to people when they play kickass tunes.

This props, or credits, feature is like a bit of karma. If I give you a credit for playing a tune I like, then you get a credit to give to someone. The more people give me props, the more props I have to give. I usually burn through all the credits I get as soon as I get them: positive reinforcement of the DJs I like is a good thing, I think. If I play 15 or 20 tunes I’ll tend to get on the order of 5 or 10 props.

The other day I was blipping some songs and giving folks some props when suddenly I noticed my credit counter – which should have been around 3 or 4 credits remaining – changed to a slightly different number. Here’s a screenshot of the moment:

The rush of unlimited power ran through my body. Limitless nods of approval at my disposal: every music snob’s dream. I started giving away props like mad. But to be honest 18 quintillion credits is more than I’m liable to burn through even if everyone had good taste. I let Blip’s support team know and they’ve corrected the bug.

May’s Scientific American has an article describing some amazing advances in nanotechnology. Researchers from Penn State and Rice Universities have taken a big step towards making Fantastic Voyage a reality:

In recent years chemists have created an array of remarkable molecular-scale structures that could become parts of minute machines. James Tour and his co-workers at Rice University, for instance, have synthesized a molecular-scale car that features as wheels four buckyballs (carbon molecules shaped like soccer balls), 5,000 times as small as a human cell.

From ScienceDaily: James Tour and coworkers at Rice University synthesized a molecular car with four carbon-based wheels that roll on axles made from linked carbon atoms. The nano-car's molecular wheels are 5,000 times smaller than a human cell. A powerful technique that allows viewing objects at the atomic level called scanning tunneling microscopy reveals the wheels roll perpendicular to the axles, rather than sliding about like a car on ice as the car moves back and forth on a surface. (Credit: Y. Shirai/Rice University)

Remember when I used to blog about my life and stuff I found interesting? Before I decided I was going to blog about science and music?

Well, I decided I missed blogging about that stuff. So I’m going to do it again, but separately. Over here, on Timinator: The Blog.

As I mentioned the other day, the Ealing Summer festival has a lot of music events going on right now. I attended bits and pieces of the Blues festival yesterday. No top-tier acts, but it was a lot of fun (and when entry is only a quid you can’t really moan).

The first act we caught was the Dani Wilde Band. Only 21 (and her band looked younger than that), Dani’s a singer and guitar player. She plays an unpolished blues, though her singing style is more soul. Her original songs were predictable but delivered with guts. Her voice was powerful enough to be engaging. Her band laid down the requisite groove (in fact, her brother’s harmonica was a highlight). A couple of the covers were safe bets but classics – Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man” and John Lee Hooker’s “In the Mood”. Shemekia Copeland’s “Ghetto Child” was different, and quite good.

We watched the Soul Britannia Band (a spinoff from the BBC TV series of the same name, I’m told) for a while. Their musicianship was a step up and it was great just listening to them groove. The singing wasn’t as spectacular and it was sometimes hard to tell which blues standard they were funking through. Great head-bopping tunes, though.

After leaving the festival park for a meal we returned to catch the last few songs of Ray Stubbs & His Amazing One Man Blues Band. And Ray was amazing. Wailing harmonica, great guitar, unshakable kick-drum beat, and whatever else he could fit in (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kazoosaphone before). Ray was feeling it, and so were we. He was sweating a river by the end. Check out Ray on YouTube. I’ve got to catch him again: the real deal.

The last ones we caught were Downliners Sect. I’d never heard of these guys before. This is surprising because they’ve been together since 1963, and started out as R&B bands just like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. Maybe it’s not surprising, though, because – unlike those bands – they never had a UK hit. And despite some forays into rock and country they pretty much ended up back at good-time singalong rhythm and blues. It certainly looked like all the originals still in the band. They were fun for a few songs but then it stayed pretty same-y.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN, Switzerland, is going to fire up this summer. I’m very excited, and much more optimistic than the guy who – as reported recently on Mental Floss – is suing CERN because he believes that their experiments might create a black hole that destroys the planet.

Check out that Mental Floss link, above, for a superb 15-minute video from physicist Brian Cox about the LHC and what mysteries of the universe they hope it will reveal: namely, the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson and possible verification of supersymmetry. The bottom of that page also has some nice photos.

Sexy science, for sure.