Leonard Bernstein performs Beethoven's Ode to Joy

Inspired Bicycles - Danny MacAskill April 2009

Some very cool bicycling right here...

Susan Boyle - Singer - Britain's Got Talent 2009

"I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables...phenomenal.

The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist

This story is extremely awesome.

Here is a preview:

In February 2003, Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves. They were accused of breaking into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and making off with at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils. The vault was thought to be impenetrable. It was protected by 10 layers of security, including infrared heat detectors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with 100 million possible combinations. The robbery was called the heist of the century, and even now the police can't explain exactly how it was done.

Milton Friedman and Phil Donahue - 1979

Not Good...

Happy Thanksgiving

Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Through The Grapevine (a capella)

And another version - this time with full instrumental.

Making Very Thin Noodles

Failed Bailout Vote Data

Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker, gives five positives that have come out of the current financial crisis. An excerpt:

Our willingness to believe that we can hire some expert to tell us how to outperform markets is a big problem, with big consequences. It underpins Wall Street's brokerage operations, for instance, and leads to a lot more people giving out financial advice than should be giving out financial advice.

Thanks to the current panic many Americans have learned that the experts who advise them what to do with their savings are, at best, fools. Merrill Lynch & Co., Morgan Stanley, and all the rest persuaded their most valuable customers to buy auction-rate bonds, telling them the securities were as good as cash.

Those customers will now think twice before they listen to their brokers ever again.

Many, I'm sure, are just waiting to get their money back from their brokers before they race for the exits and introduce themselves to Charles Schwab.

Here is the full article.

Doing the Bull Dance

Just like Happy Gilmore - this guy has to be my favorite golfer.

"I believe in Sewanee with all my heart. I do not know of any institution of its size in any part of our country which has done more for the cause of good citizenship than Sewanee has done. As an American I am proud of it; as a citizen I am grateful to it. It is entitled The University of the South, but it is much more than that; it is a University of all America, and its welfare should be dear to all Americans who are patriotic and farsighted, and therefore anxious to see every influence strengthened which tends for the betterment and enlightenment of our great common country."

— President Theodore Roosevelt, June 4, 1907

Russia/Georgia Conflict Debunks McDonald's Theory of War

Excerpt below from the article here at The Guardian.

The logic is thus: countries with middle classes large enough to sustain a McDonald's have reached a level of prosperity and global integration that makes warmongering risky and unpalatable to its people.

The Russia-Georgia conflict has finally blown this theory out of the water.

Thomas Friedman, who invented the theory in 1996, said people in McDonald's countries "don't like to fight wars. They like to wait in line for burgers."

Don LaFontaine 1940 - 2008

Read more about him here.

redress \rih-DRES\, transitive verb:

1. To put in order again; to set right; to emend; to revise.
2. To set right, as a wrong; to repair, as an injury; to make amends for; to remedy; to relieve from.
3. To make amends or compensation to; to relieve of anything unjust or oppressive; to bestow relief upon.

Before adjourning in October 1774, the First Continental Congress called for the convening of another congress at Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, only if Britain had not redressed the Americans' grievances.
-- Pauline Maier, American Scripture :Making the Declaration of Independence

Scott Russell Sanders:
There is a mystical virtue in right angles. There is an unspoken morality in seeking the level and the plumb. A house will stand, a table will bear weight, the sides of a box will hold together only if the joints are square and the members upright.
When the bubble is lined up between two marks etched in the glass tube of the level, you have aligned yourself with the forces that hold the universe together.

- The Paradise of Bombs

Phelps 100 Meter Fly Photo Finish

Also, Sports Illustrated has a very good frame-by-frame sequence of pictures that show the finish.

Also of interested is this article on how Omega, the official timekeeper of the Olympics, keeps time in the Water Cube. Here's a neat excerpt:

OMEGA touch pads and starting blocks are part of an integrated timing system capable of recording times to the nearest 1/1000th of a second. However, because it is not possible to build swimming pools in which each lane is guaranteed to be precisely the same length, Olympic and World Records are still recorded to the nearest 1/100th of a second.

List of Common Misconceptions

Per one of my favorite web resources, Wikipedia. Here are a few examples:

1. Christopher Columbus's efforts to obtain support for his voyages were not hampered by a European belief in a flat Earth.^[3] In fact, sailors and navigators of the time knew that the Earth was spherical, but (correctly) disagreed with Columbus' estimates of the distance to the Indies (see Flat Earth). If the Americas did not exist, and Columbus had continued to the Indies (even putting aside the threat of mutiny he was under) he would have run out of supplies before reaching them at the rate he was traveling.

2. The Coriolis effect does not determine the direction that water rotates in a bathtub drain or a flushing toilet. The Coriolis force is relatively small; it appears over large scales (like weather systems) or in systems such as the Foucault pendulum in which the small influence is allowed to accumulate over time. In a bathtub or toilet, the flow of the water over the basin itself produces forces that dwarf the Coriolis force. In addition, most toilets inject water into the bowl at an angle, causing a spin too fast to be affected by the Coriolis effect.^[33]