jazz

Strange Horizons – Freshly Remember’d: Kirk Drift By Erin Horáková
A lengthy essay arguing that the popular image of Shatner’s Kirk isn’t what the original episodes of Star Trek portray (but that the reboot has picked up the stereotype and run with it).
(tags: star-trek kirk james-t-kirk science-fiction television)
BENDOCKERY.COM: The Anatomy of Swing
A series of articles with examples. The bit about “laying back” was new to me.
(tags: swing music jazz)

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 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)

FOLLOWERS FIRST – Jazz As Movement
Nathan Bugh writes: “Not only is following active and difficult, it is also the prerequisite for leading. When it comes to learning and teaching basic, lead/follow skills, the follower’s technique is a much more immediate priority than the leader’s technique. Her dancing ability, her awareness, strength, balance, use of the floor, etc. are the elements from which spring her following ability AND the leader’s leading ability. She is the beginning of the logic in the dance. In class, the followers empower the leaders to lead and to learn. Leaders judge their progress according to the results that their partners embody. Followers are the focus of the lead/follow process, and they have to follow before the leaders can lead.”
(tags: jazz lindy hop swing dancing following leading)
OkCupid | Aithrobates / 29 / M / Detroit, Michigan
Scott Alexander uses his OKCupid profile to protest OKCupid’s protest of the appointment of Brendan Eich as Mozilla’s CEO: “You should message me if You have some kind of weird fetish for people who protest decisions made by online dating sites. Must enjoy long walks on the beach during which we talk about nothing except how terrible OKCupid’s decision was.”
(tags: okcupid brendan-eich mozilla homosexuality)
Why I’m cool with what happened to Brendan Eich
Chris Hallquist was in favour of Eich getting the boot: “The boycott / internal protest against Eich worked because lots of people agreed with it. The employees of OKCupid and Mozilla behind the effort have no power, not even de facto power, that they could turn against a less deserving target. Nor is Eich being cast out of polite society. Really people, get a grip.”
(tags: chris-hallquist okcupid mozilla marriage brendan-eich homosexuality)

The Course of Their Lives – JSOnline
A fascinating series of articles on the experiences of medical students dissecting a body during their training, interspersed with the reflections of someone leaving her body to the medical school. Via Mefi.
(tags: body anatomy death medical-school dissection medicine)
What Can We Learn About Human Psychology from Christian Apologetics? – Less Wrong
Chris Hallquist tries to work out what’s going on with apologetics. It’s Less Wrong, so *do* read the comments.
(tags: religion christianity less-wrong psychology apologetics chris-hallquist)
DanceSport DJ Ice
This chap has made ballroom remixes of various popular tunes. Epic (or something).
(tags: music dancing remix ballroom)
Joe Pass & Ella Fitzgerald – Duets in Hannover 1975 – YouTube
Great stuff. Via Mefi. Ella’s on about half an hour in.
(tags: singing jazz duet joe-pass ella-fitzgerald video)
Solitude and Leadership – William Deresiewicz
William Deresiewicz on the necessity for those who would lead to find time alone to concentrate their thoughts.
(tags: army leadership solitude william-deresiewicz)

▶ Jazz Fever – Rachel Bloom ft. Seth Green – YouTube
It’s the fever that you get from too much jazz.
(tags: charleston seth-green rachel-bloom jazz funny video)
Spartacus Educational: Ralph Miliband and Lord Rothermere
The man Heil got the diary quote from explains why Miliband senior might not have felt so welcome in the UK: “The Miliband family were Jews living in Belgium who had arrived in May 1940 after fleeing persecution from the Nazis who had recently taken over western Europe. Ralph was shocked by the level of anti-Semitism that existed in England at the time. Ironically, much of this anti-Semitism and dislike of Europeans had come from the propaganda campaign that had taken place in the 1930s. The man behind this campaign was Lord Rothermere, the grandfather of the current Lord Rothermere, the owner of The Daily Mail.”
(tags: hitler antisemitism miliband ralph-miliband daily-mail facism rothermere)

BBC News – How religions change their mind
How do doctrinal shifts occur in various world religions?
(tags: religion christianity mormonism islam change doctrine judaism)
I Went Down to St. James Infirmary
An entire blog full of different versions of the song. Super.
(tags: music jazz blues)
The Ethics of Extreme Porn: Is Some Sex Wrong Even Among Consenting Adults? – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic
Does consent make everything OK? An article summarising responses to another article about a Kink.com shoot. (In the comments, I somehow end up arguing with someone about whether St Paul thought Jesus would be back within his lifetime).
(tags: kink bdsm sex consent porn ethics)
Against the seriousness of theology : Gene Expression
"Theology and texts have far less power over shaping a religion’s lived experience than intellectuals would like to credit. This is a difficult issue to approach, because even believers who are vague on peculiarities of the details of theology (i.e., nearly all of them!) nevertheless espouse that theology as true. Very few Christians that I have spoken to actually understand the substance of the elements of the Athanasian Creed, though they accept it on faith. Similarly, very few Sunni Muslims could explain with any level of coherency why al-Ghazali‘s refutation of the Hellenistic tendency within early Islam shaped their own theology (if they are Sunni it by definition does!). Conversely, very few Shia could explain why their own tradition retains within its intellectual toolkit the esoteric Hellenistic philosophy which the Sunni have rejected. That’s because almost no believers actually make recourse to their own religion’s intellectual toolkit."
(tags: religion theology culture)