Vinyl Tap is the laziest, smuggest, factually inaccurate, tenuous and gratuitous name dropping of an excuse for a programme around. Not to mention (as others have pointed out), sprinkled with “double-dipping.” Furthermore two (used to be three) heads of the same family are in the publicly funded radio trough. Glad others see through this phoniness — see Aaron…
Here are two very different superb interpretations — the first by Baby Huey; the second by Bobby Womack. These guys so easily and classily rework a classic song squeezing out new nuances. Isaac Hayes and Rod Stewart also had this ability, something that most covers these days fail to do. Both BW and IH reinterpret Bacharach &…
It now takes three (so credited) to come up with something that Reg Smythe on his own would have rejected as feeble. The Mirror should have let it be and just recycled 40 years worth of material. Here is the best article I’ve found on the Smythe/Capp story: Cigarettes and Alcohol: Andy Capp by Paul Slade. “[Smythe], does…
The eighth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Marco Castellani and Marco Novarese In 1960 Herbert Simon proposed the use of computer simulations in order to enrich and improve economic modelling (Clarkson and Simon, 1960). Computer science was among the many fields to…
Born on this day. The following extract from Bernard Williams’ brilliant (but dense) Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. René Descartes was born on 31 March 1596 in a small town near Tours, now called la-Haye-Descartes, where the house of his birth can still be seen. His family belonged to the lesser nobility, his father and…
I’ve been singing the praises of Glenn Loury and John McWhorter of Blogging Heads (“Where great minds don’t think alike”) here and here. Another channel that is doing terrific work in the fight against illiberalism and its most conspicuous manifestation, i.e. the suffocation of free speech, is The Saad Truth. He has had some fascinating guests who, as…
Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life. ***** Everybody talks about the horrors of drink, which are real enough, but not about…
Here’s an extract from the fourth article by Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez from this special Human-Human Stigmergy issue. Pierre-Paul Grassé identified for the first time the importance of indirect (environmental) stimulus-response patterns while studying how termites were capable of creating complex habitats through coordination without central command. The most singular characteristic of this stigmergy, as Grassé called the phenomenon, is that…
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
I’ve been singing the praises of Bulleit bourbon on the grounds that it out performs most of the bourbons I’ve tried that are double and even triple the price. So I was rather excited to discover a bottle of Bulleit aged 10 years (about $45). Unfortunately it was a big disappointment and certainly was not…
