assassin_696

Preludes deuxieme livres: V.Calmes - Claude Debussy

Born In Time - Bob Dylan The version off the Tell Tale Signs bootleg album he released. Good it's good, even by Dylan's standards.

I think Isaac Newton was more influential than Einstein, he was an experimentalist and a theorist and his insights were more unique at the time. As good as Einstein was (and his physical intuition was unparalleled) I don't think relativity would have gone underdiscovered for long if he hadn't been around. I'm not so sure about gravitation and Newton's other theories. Other than that I'd say Carl Friedrich Gauss ("the prince of mathematics"), David Hume (empirical philosopher), Linus Pauling (chemist) and John Maynard Keynes (economist). All stood out above their contempories.

Spectres - The Hold Steady

Oh and if anyone's interested, this is the new workout I'm following: http://www.gymjunkies.com/strength-training/ I like it because it emphasises the big lifts for low reps, and it's quite short.

Yeah well I knew I needed a Radiohead album in the list, but like with a lot of my other favourite bands I don't have a definite favourite album, I think they're all good in their own way. This is especially true with Radiohead, a band who've never been stuck in the same genre. So I agree it's a tough decision, but personally I prefer OK Computer, Pablo Honey and In Rainbows over Kid A, but i've never really listened to it properly. On listening to them both again, I agree. Good spot.

Performance was completely ruined by the stupid exageration of everything done on that show. Why the hell do we need to cut to Ant and Dec to see their reactions halfway through, and she's almost drowned out by the audience. She's got a very good voice (although nothing uniquely amazing) but I hate that program.

Does anyone here deadlift? They're my favourite heavy lift, benchpress is overrated, it's not terribly functional.

I love some of those albums, but many of them I've never heard of. I'll definitely give them a try though, you make a very convincing case for many albums I'd probably never listen to otherwise and I'm all for broadening my music tastes. I love Glyder by the way, you talked about them a while ago but I never mentioned it.

Don't put that on your personal statement/reference.

Yeah, I remember trying to do all the student finance stuff recently and there were several questions to make sure that you've been a UK resident/citizen for several years before they give you a loan. Doubt it's worth it in all honesty.

Anyone here talking with any certainty about the possibility of backwards time travel is assuming they know more than they do. Whether or not it will be possible remains a mystery for now. Forwards travel seems possible.

Well then I'm not really sure what I can say. It's nothing personal, but I remain deeply skeptical of anecdotal evidence from anyone. I suppose it remains a puzzling and interesting case. I'm not surprised you were impressed if she figured that out.

I'm not accusing you of dishonesty, but if something like that happened to me I doubt I would remember it very well. So you might have actually given her more clues allowing her to cold read (either by speaking or just even body language) than you remembered. I know these seems a little unlikely given that you seem to remember it fairly well. But the alternative, that psychic(s) exist despite years of unsuccessful experiment seems les likely.

I think I watched something about the Z-machine a bit back, if I understand correctly isn't it some research relic of the Cold War/WW2 (I forget) which they converted to do research on nuclear fusion? It's a fascinating machine, but they aren't getting much viable energy out of it are they? I think recently nuclear fusion labs have got to the point where they're getting a slight net energy output, but it's not enough yet to run any kind of electricity grid. That lab in Califnornia which is developing laser fusion is pretty fascinating, they're just getting up to a point where they're getting ready to fire the lasers I believe. Either way it's a fascinating time for nuclear fusion, which is pretty much the only viable long term energy solution we have right now.

The democracy we see in most developed nations is a compromise, which is true of nearly all other forms of implemented government. You're right, humans aren't rational and consequently politics is a very messy business. So I think it's silly to sit in armchairs and think about what the best theoretical government would be. I think if we take what you said seriously then you can't think that there is a "better" form of politics to democracy (i.e. benevolent dictatorships etc.) because ultimately we're completely fallible and even the most educated will screw it up. I think it makes more sense to accept that democracy is the best compromise and work with it in a pragmatic sort of way, and make it the best possible compromise we can.

When The Ship Comes In (Live) - Bob Dylan Volume 7 of the bootlegs. This one's a great chronology of his work.

Very excited now, a friend managed to get me tickets to go see Bruce Springsteen at Hyde Park in June! We also wanted to see the Fleet Foxes at some point, and they're playing on the Saturday before Neil Young headlines so we've got tickets to that day as well. Really looking forward to that weekend. Seasick Steve and The Gaslight Anthem are also playing.

A friend and I watched that last night with the commentary on, listening to Robert Pattinson (who played Edward) make awkward comments now and again (he never seemed to know what was going on) was the one of the funniest things I've ever done. We saw it at the cinema (not wanting to) but cracked up continuously at how serious looking the faces he pulled were. Never thought I'd see that film twice, ah well.

Leah - Bruce Springsteen

Have you heard his new album? I've heard a few songs off it, it might grow on me but at the moment I'm not so sure. I'm not sure if you'd like it. Little Shadow - Yeah Yeah Yeah's New album, sounds great. Listened to Johnny Cash At San Quentin and At Folsom Prison earlier, those are a couple of great albums. The man really knows his audience.

Climbing Up The Walls (Zero 7 Mix) - Radiohead EMI recently reissued Radiohead's first three albums with shedloads of unreleased material on each one (B-sides, live tracks, sessions etc.) The quality of a lot of the material is very high, I'm listening through the OK Computer stuff now.

A fantastic and very interesting list. I share many of the same favourites, but I'm going to make an effort to listen to all the albums you mentioned on there which I haven't already heard (through Spotify) and re-listen to many of the ones I do own in light of your comments.

I once heard that suicide rates are apparently so low in non-western countries because there is a taboo in many of those cultures surrounding reporting a cause of death as "suicide", so many doctors will put something else for the sake of the family's dignity. This seems plausible, but it's hard to assess the extent to which this is true and therefore assess whether or not suicide rates are genuinely higher in the western world. My hunch, however, is that they will be higher. Outwardly the marketing men would like us to believe that material possessions correlates to happiness, and whilst most of us know this not to be true in the long term, this kind of thinking seeps into our relationships and attitudes towards family and friends. On a different tangent, this is an interesting blog post about how suicide is reported in the media: http://www.badscience.net/2009/03/suicide/

One of my eight songs I'd take to a desert island. John Fogerty - Centrefield