Astor Piazzolla – Milonga del Angel
Milonga del Angel by Astor Piazzolla y su Quinteto Tango Nuevo. Concert in Utrecht, Netherlands, 1985.
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RichardPrins
The Edge Annual Question 2012
Edge’s question for 2012: What Is Your Favourite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?
The Lists of 2011
The end of the year comes with the customary lists of the best and the worst that has happened over the course of the year. A selection of 2011…
PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
To commemorate International Day of Peace, I thought it would be a nice idea to create a playlist that features all the songs of PJ Harvey’s latest album Let England Shake. Its theme is war, so that makes it quite apposite for this day.
Edge: Jaron Lanier – The Local-Global Flip
In a freewheeling hour-long conversation, Lanier touches on, and goes beyond the themes he launched in his influential 2006 Edge essay “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.” What he terms “The Local-Global Flip” might be better expressed as “The Lanier Effect”. We used to think that information is power and that the personal computer enabled lives. But, according to Jaron Lanier, things changed about ten years ago. He cites Apple, Google, and Walmart as some of the reasons.
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne: The Theory That Would Not Die
Authors@Google Talk: In the first-ever account of Bayes’ rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years—at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information, even breaking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II, and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes’ rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security.
David Cannadine: The Construction of National Identities
The wartime memoirs of Charles de Gaulle open with a celebrated evocation of his native land: “a certain idea of France”. The words express the widely-held view of the nation as the most significant focus and resonant form of collective human identity, the end point to which the whole of history was inexorably tending, initially in Europe, and eventually throughout the whole world. In the course of his lecture at Melbourne University’s Festival of Ideas, British historian David Cannadine looks at the evidence for such a proposition and the evidence against. He also explores the part historians themselves have played in the creation and the undermining of national identities. Will the notion of the nation survive in an increasingly globalised world where boundaries are more porous and less defined than ever before?
Marc Kaufman: First Contact
In his riveting, game-changing book FIRST CONTACT: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth, Marc Kaufman, The Washington Post science and space reporter, tells the incredible true story of science’s search for the beginnings of life on Earth and the likelihood of it existing elsewhere in our universe.