Saturday, February 27, 2010

A little Saturday afternoon smoothness with Tom Verlaine

Tom Verlaine under his Marquee Moon! Bravo.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Keyboardist Jon Lord To Release New Album In March

An interesting conceptual enterprise from Jon Lord, who once attacked keyboards with great ferocity  for Deep Purple.
According to JonLord.org,  Jon Lord will release his next album, To Notice Such Things, on March 22 through Avie Records.

Titled after the main work -- a six movement suite for solo flute, piano and string orchestra -- the album was inspired by, and is dedicated to, the memory of Jon's dear friend Sir John Mortimer, the English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter, author and creator of British television series Rumpole Of The Bailey, who died in January 2009.

"He was a great friend and a great inspiration to me and I hope my love and respect for him comes out in the music," says Jon.
I can't wait!

Soft Machine in Italy

One of the great progressive music bands in my lifetime: Soft Machine.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

TSA brilliance

Let's put a 4-year-old with leg braces through a little airport screening hell. But let's not call it a war on terror.

Monday, February 08, 2010

What I share with Joseph Schumpeter: a birthday

Joseph Schumpeter was born on this day. So was I.

Hat tip to Organizations and Markets: "Happy Schumpeter Day"

Sunday, February 07, 2010

It was, from the beginning, a power grab!

The global warming consensus is falling apart.

Good for climate change skepticism. That's how science is supposed to work, isn't it?
But the claim [that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away] was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.

The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do – a global deal was never in the cards. As Mr. Mead writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end.

And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.

Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian – among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.