dance

Security and the Cost of Living Crisis | Thin Pinstriped Line
“a workforce literally on the edge of poverty, disengaged from delivery and struggling to retain people runs a real risk of becoming a security challenge which is a foreign hostile intelligence services dream”
(tags: security civil-service espionage)
OSF | The Racial Imagination of the Lindy Hop from the Historical Standpoint – Comments and Corrections
Free review of the non-free book
(tags: lindyhop dance history race)
May We Have This Dance?: Cultural Ownership of the Lindy Hop from the Swing Era to Today | Kendra Unruh – Academia.edu
“By examining film and print media, along with influences of the Great Depression and WWII on public culture, this essay explores the evolution and appropriation of the Lindy Hop as it transformed from a black, working-class dance in the early twentieth century to a white, middle-class dance by the swing revival in the 1990s.”
(tags: lindyhop dance history race)

Covid fears have stopped social dancing in its tracks. – The Washington Post
“Some day, we’ll hit the dance floor again. And it will be glorious.”

Books mention “hope”. What *was* “hope”?
(tags: covid19 dancing lindy-hop swing)

Cluster of Coronavirus Disease Associated with Fitness Dance Classes, South Korea – Volume 26, Number 8—August 2020 – Emerging Infectious Diseases journal – CDC
“During 24 days in Cheonan, South Korea, 112 persons were infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 associated with fitness dance classes at 12 sports facilities. Intense physical exercise in densely populated sports facilities could increase risk for infection. Vigorous exercise in confined spaces should be minimized during outbreaks.”
(tags: dance health covid19)
Philosophy in the Shadow of Nazism | The New Yorker
The Vienna Circle
(tags: empiricism philosophy)

I assert that God is omnipotent, omniscient, but also all-Evil. How would you disprove this contention? : DebateAChristian
Someone takes Law’s Evil God Challenge over to /r/DebateAChristian, and makes a pretty good showing of it. Amusing for all the Thomists complaining that the poster doesn’t get it, without quite being able to say what it is OP doesn’t get.
(tags: theodicy stephen-law theology philosophy god good evil thomist aquinas)
Peter Loggins – On The Importance Of Learning Other Dances Aside From The Lindy Hop : Atilio Menéndez : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive
Loggins on how to dance at a real jazz club where most people are there to listen, and some history related to the old time ballrooms. Plus some advocacy for learning stuff other than lindy (maybe I should brush up my rusty ballroom skills).
(tags: ballroom dancing etiquette jazz lindy lindy-hop history)
Trevor Copp and Jeff Fox: Ballroom dance that breaks gender roles | TED Talk | TED.com
A couple of ballroom dancers who have developed various ways of switching lead/follow during the dance.
(tags: dance ballroom gender dancing waltz salsa)

What is this thing, called swing? | The Home of Happy Feet
Daniel Newsome geeks out about music.
(tags: lindyhop swing music jazz beats dance)
19 Tips For Everyday Git Use
Top tips for git
(tags: git software software-engineering tips)
Scott Aaronson Answers Every Ridiculously Big Question I Throw at Him – Scientific American Blog Network
A fascinating question and answer session with Aaronson.
(tags: physics quantum scott-aaronson philosophy computation mathematics)

A friend commented the other day that I don’t post much on here any more. I do occasionally write interesting stuff over on Reddit, so I thought I’d make some blog posts based on some of those comments. Here’s a little realisation I had about how we talk about the physics of lindy:

A follower was telling me how she always needs to create her own momentum or she won’t move anywhere, and I responded that if she does so, it breaks one of the most basic rules of following and causes confusion and miscommunication in the dance. — LindyEverywhere on Reddit

Followers aren’t on frictionless wheels. Naturally, they’d stop, but the game is for them to pretend to have a lot less friction than a body on legs actually does (and maybe a bit less mass, too, I think). They’re not just physically getting moved around by the leader without co-operating by playing that game. Shifting people who aren’t co-operating is martial arts, not lindy 🙂

What lindy teachers seem to be referring to when talking about keeping momentum and not injecting energy is that once you’re playing the game, you play it consistently. Maintaining that consistency is not a natural consequence of the physics of the situation, so the follower you were talking to was right to say physically, she’s actually moving herself a lot of the time, or, not having wheels, she’d just stop. Playing the game consistently is a learned skill.

Because this game is so engrained into the dance, a lot of experienced people abbreviate the description of what’s going on by speaking as if what followers do is just allow physics to take its course (when they’re not throwing in their own stuff, I mean), when what they’re actually doing is simulating being a different sort of body and allowing a simulated version of physics to take its course. I imagine this is a bit confusing for beginner follows. (The other thing is that I’ve heard balboa teachers talk about a different simulated physics for follows turning down a line, where they lose angular momentum and so curve in).

One good exercise I’ve seen for teaching this is to play “lindy tennis”: half of you get into a circle, half of you are the tennis balls. The people in the circle set the balls off across the circle with some direction and rotation, which the balls maintain (except for avoiding collisions with teach other). When the balls reach the edge of the circle, the people there catch them and re-direct them (gently!). Playing this fixed an awful lot of “followers stopping themselves” i.e. killing the momentum rather than continuing the line around beat 4 in swing-outs from open, because it teaches what the pretend physics is.

Edit: Thinking about it some more, it seems more “real” at high speeds and when the connection is transmitting an impulse, and more “faked” at low ones and when the leader isn’t exerting a force: in the first case, it may be that it feels like your upper body is being moved by the connection to the leader and you’re just keeping your legs under you so you don’t fall over (which is still kind of a choice, but a natural one), but the thing where follows are told to keep moving at a slow pace having been given a small impulse seems like something you learn to do so as to pretend you’re a frictionless follow moving in a vacuum.

Lindy Hop Event Organizers Conversation on Creating Safer Dance Spaces – YouTube
An hour’s conversation between various scene and event organisers on codes of conduct and whatnot. Including the Swing Patrol UK’s Scott Cupit, and Nina Gilkenson of Mobtown Ballroom, whose CoC I’ve previously linked to. Good stuff. One thing I didn’t realise is that organisers are regularly giving offenders the boot but doing so quietly so people don’t get scared. Organisers don’t want to stop the party (are camps total debauches only in the USA, or do I just not get invited to the right afterparties?), want to treat people as adults (Cupit rejects the idea of CoC specially for teachers on that basis), and don’t want to police every damn social interaction. OTOH recognise that there’s a groundswell for more explicit policies and enforcement.
(tags: lindyhop lindy-hop sexual-assault dance dancing)
What ISIS Really Wants – The Atlantic
“The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.” Via Mefi.
(tags: isis islam war terrorism caliphate apocalypse)

Image by Graham Stratton
Alexei Sayle’s Marxist principles mean he doesn’t like Strictly Come Dancing, and by extension, all ballroom dancing.

Sayle doesn’t like SCD because it’s a dumbed-down popularity contest. This might be fair: the judges do have dancing knowledge, but the public get a say via a phone vote, and on the programme itself there’s lots of other bollocks which has little to do with art or skill, which is why I got bored with SCD.

Alas, Sayle seems to have falsely conflated the whole of ballroom dancing with SCD. tangokitty’s excellent comment at the Guardian points out that this neglects the large number of social dancers. One unfortunate effect of SCD is that it leaves people (including prospective and newbie ballroom dancers) with the impression that true ballroom dancing will culminate in fake tan and sequins.

Sayle likes the freedom of Northern Soul, which isn’t a partner dance, so is an odd choice for comparison with ballroom. There’s a limit to how much you can go crazy on the floor and also keep dancing with another person. (Neither was Nothern Soul “unselfconscious”, according to the Guardian’s expert commenters). Silly Sayle: improvisation and freedom is why lindyhop is better than ballroom, not why Northern Soul is. Naturally, you should also feel free to make up your own reason why ballroom is better than lindy.

Sayle goes on to say that ballroom tango is “robotic”. I say staccato, you say potato: Sayle’s free to prefer chocolate ice cream to strawberry, but it’s not clear what that has to do with our moral obligation to assist in Marxist class war. He adds that the music is terrible, but in fact, SCD’s music for tango (and paso doble) is often the wrong music for the dance, leading to horrors like this. Ballroom can in fact be sexy (previously), although Sayle’s assertion that a partner dance involving a man and a woman is always about sex is problematic and I’m tempted to set the Tumblr SJWs on him til he’s sorry.

tl;dr: Sayle’s at his best when talking about how crappy popular TV is, but knows bugger all about dance and/or is just trolling to drum up publicity for his new show.

Edit: Metafilter has some interesting discussion on the article.

A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies – Less Wrong
Yvain/Scott Alexander on why it might be a bad idea to continue to espouse a belief in God, the Devil and whatnot while having a sort of private understanding of what that means, even if that understanding is more palatable than the original theology.
(tags: psychology religion rationality hitler)
The Definitive History Of The West Wing
(tags: west-wing aaron-sorkin television politics)
The Fox Trot in the Jazz Age – YouTube
What they called Foxtrot in the 1920s was rather different to the modern ballroom version.
(tags: dancing foxtrot jazz)
Jazz Age Ballroom Dancing (“The Modern Dances”) | Mass Historia
A set of web pages on the Jazz Age ballroom dances.
(tags: 1930s 1920s dance jazz foxtrot ballroom)
Take The A Train
The AABA structure of “Take the A Train” illustrated in a neat little presentation which tracks the music.
(tags: jazz music)