Earworm Farm
RSSThird Coast International Audio Festival :: Everything Sounds Episode #11: Microphone Museum
Third Coast is featuring our 11th episode about Bob Paquette’s microphone museum with a bonus Q&A about the episode and our process!
Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.
- Carl Sagan (via we-are-star-stuff)
(Source: ikenbot)
Grand Prismatic Spring
Located in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, the Grand Prismatic Spring is the largest natural hot spring found in the US. The spring has a scalding temperature of 160 °F (70 °C), a total depth of 160 feet and a diameter of 300 feet. The vivid, rainbow colors in the spring are the result of pigmented bacteria in the microbial mats that grow around the edges of the mineral-rich water.
Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2) reacting with dish soap with Potassium Iodide as a catalyst.
It’s a pretty fun experiment to do, if you do it right. (In the first gif the girl screwed it up.)
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is tied to everything else in the universe.
- John Muir (via we-are-star-stuff)
(Source: subatomiconsciousness)
This is a list of some funny performances from bands that didn’t appreciate the fact theat they were asked not to play their instruments on television.
The Stranglers, seen above in one of our favorite examples, performed “No More Heroes” on Top of the Tops in 1978. The drummer is certainly a highlight around the 2 minute mark.
Then there was the time Muse swapped instruments on Italian TV and no one on the show even noticed. The singer was drumming, the drummer sang and played bass, and the bassist played guitar and keyboard.
Nirvana had a classic Top of the Pops performance where Krist Noveselic goes overboard and Kurt hardly touches his guitar. They probably wish that they’d used the vocals from the album version of the track as well.
This kind of thing happened back in the 1960’s too. The Box Tops decided to ham it up in their performance of “The Letter.” Someone needs to make a GIF of the keyboardist at :49. Priceless.
Iron Maiden had a good time while filming a Germany TV show.
Did anyone really expect John Lydon and PIL to behave on American Bandstand in 1980?
Only the Smiths could make waving a plant around in brightly colored room melodramatic. Wait, wait?
About four minutes into the clip, Rod Stewart starts playing soccer. Makes sense, right?
If you have any others, feel free to share them!
Discovery, Animal Planet, and History Channel exposed for killing animals for profit
These channels are failing the spirit of conservationism and education. They are failing inspiring awe in young people. Failing much needed inspiration in a very confused and conflicted world.
These shows are failing their core values, their main purpose, which is leadership in environmentalism and cultural education. Far worse, they are failing millions of young people - millions - who look up to them.
Please join me in asking Discovery, Animal Planet, and the History Channels to stop, apologize, and correct.
That’s an important read up there, folks. These “reality” shows are feeding an outdated and unscientific view of predator species. These are channels founded on principles of education and conservation (TLC, of course, left the building years ago). Are they willing to sacrifice that for what appears to be gratuitous bloodsport?
Like any media, you can vote with your eyeballs. And if you support any kind of rights for wild animals and natural spaces, you can not support these programs. If the account above is true, shame on these networks.
It speaks to part of a larger issue with nature films. The amazing footage we see in shows like Africa, Planet Earth, and Frozen Planet is rarely the result of serendipity. It involves years of careful research and preparation to maximize the chances of capturing nature’s majesty on camera, and what is captured is highly edited to create story, drama and emotion. These are uniquely human interests, and nature doesn’t include them in her original script.
That’s not to say we are being fleeced all the time. People like Sir David Attenborough take these concerns very seriously, and constantly strive to find the balance between entertainment and true nature in every varying instance. What we watch is real. But is it REAL?
I wonder how many people realize that, for instance, the famous polar bear birth scene from Frozen Planet was filmed in a zoo? Disney’s adorable Chimpanzee movie was not a documentary, but rather spliced together to create an emotional tale of adoption. Jason Goldman put together a great collection of opinions on the matter.
How far can we take allowances to deliver good edutainment before we are delivering bad science? The “reality” shows surely fail the test. But the others? What do you think?
Making dubstep with chemistry
About Earworm Farm
The word farm comes from Proto-Germanic *firmō, *firχumō ("means of living, subsistence") and Proto-Indo-European *perkwu- ("life, strength, force").
This is the Tumblr of Craig Shank, host of Everything Sounds and an appreciator of good things and good people.
