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Iggy and the Stooges at the Hordern Pavilion

3 April 2013

I’m seeing some of the big acts in the country for the Byron Bay Bluesfest as they do sideshows here in Sydney. Last night was – at last – my chance to see the Godfathers of Punk, Iggy and the Stooges.

stooges

First up was Beasts of Bourbon. Tex Perkins is one of those musical gems that never really made it outside Australia. I’d never heard of him until I saw him in a Johnny Cash tribute here a few years ago. But last night I became a convert to the Beasts. It was primal pub rock with punk sensibilities. Tex’s growl, the insanely loud guitar drone, and verse after chorus of profane, nihilistic blues made some of the best stuff I’ve ever heard that came out of the ’80s. I’m sorry I missed it. They opened with “Chase the Dragon“, kept the pace with songs like “I Told You So” and the newer “I Don’t Care About Nothing Anymore“, and closed with the nutty “Let’s Get Funky“.

Then, The Stooges. I remember hearing whispers about these guys from my cousins as a kid. How they were the most insane band ever, how Iggy had been institutionalised. Later I heard their music and saw how they took rock to its next, necessary evolutionary step.

I saw it written this week that The Stooges were, in the late ’60s, the first rock ‘n’ roll band to be completely devoid of any of the R&B influence, and I think that’s exactly right. It’s raucous, dangerous, everything that’s rough and scary and confrontational about rock music and nothing that’s groovy. Iggy Pop is the frontman that Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison gave birth to. Altogether it had to spawn punk, and that gave popular rock music the shot it needed.

Last night they (and “they” has, other than Iggy and drummer Scott Asheton, changed a lot over the years) showed that The Stooges’ vision remains a pure one. And “primal” remained the word of the night. The band are all old guys but they rock hard enough that my ears are still ringing today. They provided the aggressive aural world in which Iggy Pop could writhe and taunt and scream and spit and do things that no 65-year-old ex-junkie should be able to do.

“Raw Power” and “Gimme Danger” were fun and brutal and noisy and joyous. The three-song run of “Search and Destroy“, “1970″ and “Fun House” with its usual stage-dancing crowd invitation was one of the most powerful live things I’ve witnessed. Closing the main set with “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “No Fun” was brilliant. Even new song “Burn” was pretty cool.

Here’s the band playing “1970″ a little more than a year ago. Primal energy, love it or hate it: see what I mean?

Iggy and the Stooges: does what it says on the tin.

Bonus video: Iggy Pop and Tom Waits try to out-cool each other in Jim Jarmusch’s “Coffee and Cigarettes”.

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Curing earworms with anagrams

26 March 2013

An earworm is the name for a song that gets stuck in your head, that you may find yourself - against your will - humming and singing for days.

earworm

In yet another marvelous convergence of science and music researchers at Western Washington University claim you can rid yourself of an earworm by solving anagrams* (that is, rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to form another word or phrase). And if that doesn’t work you can just read a book.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

This can force the intrusive music out of your working memory, allowing it to  be replaced by other, more amenable, thoughts.

But the researchers warn against trying anything too difficult because this can allow the melodies to wiggle their way back into your consciousness

For those unwilling to carry around a book of anagrams, a good novel can do the trick.

Me, I’m always getting Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” in my head. But doing an anagram of “dooby dooby doo” is pretty limiting; it doesn’t get much better than “Yo, Do Booby, Dodo”.

*Exciting finding: Google still has a sense of humour.

anagram

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Coursera: Data Analysis final grade

24 March 2013

The grades are in for the Data Analysis course I completed recently on Coursera: I passed quite easily with a score of 88.8%. Yay me!

completion grade

However, the minimum score for a pass with distinction was 90%. AAARRGGGHHH!

Never mind. I had a lot of fun, and learned an immense amount. It’s not like this certificate is actually recognised as a formal qualification by anyone, nor do I need it for my job.

But I was so close.

The professor released a few course stats, and they are impressive numbers:

  • There were approximately 102,000 students from around the world enrolled in the course at the start.
  • About 51,000 watched the lecture videos.
  • About 20,000 did weekly online quizzes.
  • About 5,500 did the two data analysis assignments.

There’s no word yet if Coursera is going to offer this course again. If you want to torture yourself with data analysis you can already do so, though:

  • All the lecture videos are on YouTube.
  • All the lecture notes are on Github.

You can also watch a podcast to hear Jeff, our professor, share his thoughts on the first-time experience of teaching a massive open online course (MOOC). The key points for me:

  • He purposely made the course difficult.
  • The biggest challenge was the immense heterogeneity of students (i.e., how different we all were).
  • The message boards were really helpful and interesting, as they give students more time to explore ideas.
  • The message boards were like any other on the internet in that some people are great and some people are jerks and most are in between.
  • He knew there would be problems with peer grading but there was really no other way to grade assignments.

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Kraftwerk – The Catalogue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 for Vivid Sydney

15 March 2013

Following sell-out performances in New York, Düsseldorf and London, electro-pop music pioneers Kraftwerk are bringing their eight-album cycle of shows to the Vivid Sydney festival.

They had a random ballot to allocate tickets and I’ve been successful for the show I put in for. A few mates and I are therefore going to see the live performance and 3-D show of their Radio-Activity album on May-24. If one of them is also lucky we may be catching The Man-Machine as well.

This is very cool.

kraftwerk

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Coursera: Data Analysis complete

14 March 2013

I just finished an 8-week online data analysis course that challenged my brain more than has been done in a very long while. I wrote about this course on my personal blog some weeks ago. Now that I’ve completed it I’ve realised that discussing it definitely belongs here in my science blog.

I took it via Coursera, a relatively new online source of free, compressed, university-level training. The quality of educators involved is very high. My course in data analysis was taught by Jeff Leek, a Ph.D. and associate professor in biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University.

coursera

The course was much harder than I expected. I mentioned that after my first week, but it got really difficult later on. I had to learn a whole new statistical programming language (R), build on a lot of stats I took at uni many years ago, and learn many advanced numerical concepts besides. Moreover we learned how to know when to use different techniques; it becomes an art as much as a science.

We had to do an online multiple-choice quiz each of the eight weeks, and two lengthy written peer-graded assignments. The assignments were quite practical: for example, use Samsung phone accelerometer data to predict, from phone sensor readings, whether the person holding it is sitting, walking, standing, etc.

It will be a few more days before I get the score for the final assignment but I did well enough to know that I’ve passed already regardless of that grade. I’m hoping (though not expecting) to get a pass with distinction.

One of the best parts of the Coursera platform is that there is an extensive discussion forum for each course. It was like having a virtual study group of thousands of people around the world to bounce ideas off of, discuss the lectures, brainstorm how to tackle the assignments, and chat and bitch about the difficulty. There were plenty of people who felt entitled and complained about errors or things that were unclear. I was of the opinion that those people needed to think about how they were taking a detailed course of great complexity from a globally-recognised expert over the internet for free.

I’m planning to take another Coursera course later in the year; topic is to be determined. I recommend it highly, but caution those who think it will be a simple pastime.

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The Tallest Man On Earth at the Sydney Opera House

6 March 2013

Kristian Matsson is a singer-songwriter from Sweden who performs as The Tallest Man On Earth. He is, in fact, very small.

Irony aside, I enjoy TTMOE’s songs a lot. They’re quite troubadour folk-y, very Dylan-esque. His voice is heartfelt and unique, and it makes the songs feel ethereal. His lyrics turn some very clever phrases, and his instrumentation is simple yet accomplished. Matsson typically just sings and plays guitar, or occasionally piano, with no other accompaniment. The Dylan thing is really striking, especially when he includes lyrics about “boots of Spanish leather” and when you find out that his wife Amanda Bergman performs under the name Idiot Wind.

He had a show at the Opera House last night that I found out about late in the game. Luckily one became available at the last minute and I was able to sneak along.

The Tallest Man On Earth. Photo from Sydney Opera House.

The Tallest Man On Earth. Photo from Sydney Opera House.

I found TTMOE live a more rewarding experience than I’d expected. It’s just Matsson with his voice and guitar, and a piano for one song. But he swings his tiny body all around the stage, strumming and spinning his legs and his guitar, ducking and diving. It’s a far more expressive use of the stage than just sitting and playing and singing. It endeared him to the crowd, as did his sips of tea (or of whatever was in that cup) and his assertion that Swedes are discouraged from feeling overly proud of anything.

He started strong with “King of Spain” but covered all his albums (highlights: “I Won’t Be Found” from Shallow Grave, “The Wild Hunt” from The Wild Hunt, and “1904″ from There’s No Leaving Now). He sounded great live, clear and vibrant, and he put lots of dynamics – volume and tempo – into the performance. We got one last highlight at the end when Bergman came out and duetted much of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” inserted at the end of “The Wild Hunt”. So pretty.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so strong and spontaneous a standing ovation at the Opera House.

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Chris Hadfield: the superstar astronaut taking social media by storm

23 February 2013

Related to the post I made earlier about NASA’s Google+ Hangout with astronauts: one of those who participated live was veteran space-goer Chris Hadfield.

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Chris Hadfield, Space Oddity.

A Guardian article describes how Chris has become a social media superstar over the last few weeks with the help of his sons.

In a deliberate campaign to take Earth by storm, Hadfield harnessed the power of social media to inspire the sort of interest in space exploration that NASA and other agencies have been trying to attract for more than a decade. In the process, he is on the way to becoming a breakthrough star in his own right, the first internationally recognisable astronaut since the grainy black and white television images made Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and the original Apollo astronauts into superstars.

Posted in Canada, science | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

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