Song: “Obedear” by Purty Ring
http://pitchfork.com/news/46271-new-purity-ring-obedear/
These guys have been trickling out songs for the past several months (more than a year, maybe?), every one of which has been somewhere between good and great. They are hard to classify; it’s electronic more than acoustic, and the song structures are pretty straightforwardly pop, but the palette of sounds is quite distinctive. They are often mentioned along with Grimes, if that helps. Anyway, this one is not their best (that would be this one, in my opinion), but it is still really good, and since it comes along with the announcement that their album finally has a release date (July 24), it seemed like a good time to post them.
Article: “UN to investigate plight of US Native Americans for first time” by Ewan MacAskill
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/22/un-investigate-us-native-americans
So, this is not a particularly interesting piece of writing, but I wanted to draw attention to the fact that than UN Special Rapporteur for the rights of Indigenous people, James Anaya, will be doing a report on the status of indigenous people in the United States for the first time ever in the next few weeks. These reports are available for many other countries (you can get them here), and they are kind of the definitive international statement on the situation of indigenous people in those places. While I do not really think that this report is going to bring about any big changes in Indian policy, it does, for the first time, place US actions in this area within the international legal human rights framework, which is not nothing.
Video: “I Will Never Change” by Benga
http://www.prefixmag.com/media/benga/i-will-never-change-video/64419/
I’m not in love with this song— and anyway this is not even close to the whole thing— but the video, in which the waveform of the song gets built in stop-motion out of vinyl records, is very cool.
Article/Video: Hydro-Fold by Christophe Guberan”
http://www.dezeen.com/2012/04/13/hydro-fold-by-christophe-guberan/
(Via @spmabbott)
This video shows a printer that has been set up to deliver a combination of ink and water in particular patterns, which causes the pieces of paper that come out of it to fold, all on their own, into complex shapes. That’s pretty much all there is too it, but it is fun to watch.
Video: “The Higgs Boson Explained” by PhD Comics
http://vimeo.com/41038445
The author of the definitive statement on the graduate school experience illustrates an interview with a physicist at CERN, explaining just what the big deal is about the Higgs Boson (and, to an extent, particle accelerators in general). Of course, it simplifies everything, and I am sure there are problems with it, but I think it still gives a clueless layperson like me some sense of what the hell they are doing over there.
