April 10, 2009

"Rocket Man" by The Spotnicks

Elton John & Bernie Taupin's "Rocket Man"


Elton John


William Shatner


Stewie Griffin


Kate Bush


Dan Fonesca


Jamie Cullum


Me First and the Gimme Gimmes


My Morning Jacket

"Rocket Man" by Pearls Before Swine

My father was a rocket man
He often went to Jupiter or Mercury, to Venus or to Mars
My mother and I would watch the sky
And wonder if a falling star
Was a ship becoming ashes with a rocket man inside

My mother and I
Never went out
Unless the sky was cloudy or the sun was blotted out
Or to escape the pain
We only went out when it rained

My father was a rocket man
He loved the world beyond the world, the sky beyond the sky
And on my mother's face, as lonely as the world in space
I could read the silent cry
That if my father fell into a star
We must not look upon that star again

My mother and I
Never went out
Unless the sky was cloudy or the sun was blotted out
Or to escape the pain
We only went out when it rained

Tears are often jewel-like
My mother's went unnoticed by my father, for his jewels were the stars
And in my father's eyes I knew he had to find
In the sanctity of distance something brighter than a star
One day they told us the sun had flared and taken him inside

My mother and I
Never went out
Unless the sky was cloudy or the sun was blotted out
Or to escape the pain
We only went out when it rained



This song written by Tom Rapp, and based on Ray Bradbury's short story Rocket Man, was written and performed before the Bernie Taupin/Elton John version. According to Wikipedia, Taupin acknowledged the influence of Rapp's version.

The Beautiful, Scary Robots of Shigeo Hirose


The Beautiful, Scary Robots of Shigeo Hirose from Gizmodo on Vimeo.
Thanks to Jonathan for the head's up.
Get all the weirdness at Gizmodo

April 9, 2009

"Paradise"-Johnny Cash


When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn.

Chorus:
And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Adrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.

Chorus:
And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.

Chorus:
And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am.
(Written by John Prine)

50th Anniversary of the Mercury 7 Press Announcement


Dr. Lovelace: They are as you know family men. I am not worried about their stability, their powers of observation, or their powers to accomplish the task which they are given.

From the original NASA press conference, 1959.

NASA

Wikipedia

April 8, 2009

Announcement






















More at The Melvillain Blog

Why France has the solution to online piracy-Paul McGuinness

An intense debate is raging over how to stop the erosion of creators' rights in an era swamped by free unauthorised music. It is a critical debate that I believe will shape the lives and the working conditions of creative professionals for years, even decades, to come.

France is leading the way on this issue, with its new "creation and internet" law, and where France goes, the rest of the world may follow. This is certainly not about the future of U2, the band I have managed for over 30 years. But it is about the future of a new generation of artists who aspire to be the next U2 – and about the whole environment in which that aspiration can be made possible.

More at guardian.co.uk

And at ars technica

Early Bluetooth






















More tech from yesteryear at Dark Roasted Blend

Hi-tech






















Courtesy of Lawrence Harley "Larry" Luckham via Blonde Zombies*



*This post is fine, but Blonde Zombies also features pics not safe for work. Beware!

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)




"I am leaving soon and you'll forgive me if I speak bluntly. The universe grows smaller every day and the threat of aggression by any group anywhere can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all or no one is secure. Now this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them. We, of the other planets, have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression. The test of any such higher authority is, of course, the police force that supports it. For our policemen we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. A t the first signs of violence they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk. The result is we live in peace without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war, free to pursue more profitable enterprises. Now, we do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works. I came here to give you these facts. It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you."


Wikipedia

April 7, 2009

"It's the eighties, so where's our rocket packs?"- Daniel Amos



It's the eighties
It's the eighties so where's our rocket packs?
It's the eighties so where's our rocket packs?
Go anywhere, we strap them on our backs

(It's the eighties so where's our rocket packs?)
I thought by now I'd walk the moon
And ride a car without no tires
And have a robot run the vacuum
And date a girl made out of wires

No thing's don't change that much, do they?
We are still out of touch
By now we should discover just how to love each other
Like Klaatus' robot man your looks have killed again

(It's the eighties so where's our rocket packs?)
I thought by now we'd live in space
And eat a pill instead of dinner
And wear a gas mask on our face
A President of female gender

Though progress marches on, (new day)
Our troubles will grow strong
And my expectancies, become my fantasies
You turn my blood to sand, the earth stands still again

My hopes are running low
Things moving much too slow
There's no space men up above
And we're still so very far from love
So very far from love

(It's the eighties so where's our rocket packs?)
I thought by now we'd build a dome
Around the world, control the weather
In every house, a picture phone
Communicate a little better

But some things never change (replay!)
You are still acting strange
No way that I can see, this way we will be free
8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, Lift off!

AP launches campaign against Internet "misappropriation"


We'd better hope it's not "hot news" that the Associated Press announced "an aggressive effort to track down copyright violators on the Internet" at its annual board meeting Monday. If it is, we could conceivably find ourselves on the wrong end of an "aggressive effort" geared to fend off copycat competition and "misappropriation" in the dwindling market for timely reporting.

Ars Technica

April 5, 2009

Children of the poor

"When I was young they wrote it in fiery letters: THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE. Science, comfort, and new things for all. Ha! Eighty Years. The future becomes now! Do we fly rockets? No! We live in shacks like our ancestors before us."
The Rocket by Ray Bradbury

From Economist.com:

That the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.

The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. Working memory is the ability to hold bits of information in the brain for current use—the digits of a phone number, for example. It is crucial for comprehending languages, for reading and for solving problems. Entry into the working memory is also a prerequisite for something to be learnt permanently as part of declarative memory—the stuff a person knows explicitly, like the dates of famous battles, rather than what he knows implicitly, like how to ride a bicycle.

Since Dr Farah’s discovery, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have studied the phenomenon in more detail. As they report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have found that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop.

More from Economist.com