Einstein, Dirac, Godel, Erdos, Weyl in Princeton

A home movie from 1947. What a place Princeton was, after the war.

@ 33 seconds: Einstein

1:06 Godel on left

1:25 Selberg at the right, his wife Heddy in the middle

1:41 Paul Erdos (left) and Hermann Weyl (right)

3:01 Paul Dirac at right, and his student Harish-Chandra at left

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Mark Twain at Stormfield, 1909 (Edison film)

Mark Twain in his signature “Don’t Give a Damn” white suit. The first true American.

(Self indulgence week runs over a couple of days, since I didn’t manage to put up the remaining clips in time, on account of having to rebuilt the site after it was hacked. I have now intstalled 3 miles of razor wire, machine gun posts and watch towers).

Mark Twain at Stormfield, 1909 (Edison film)

2 comments important dead people, self indulgence week

Nikolaus Pevsner – Reith Radio Lecture

“A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture”. So said Pevsner, who fled Nazi Germany to the UK and is responsible for one of its greatest architectural edifices. Something that is neither a bicycle shed or a cathedral, but an inimitable 32 volume foundation to the definitive history of the “Buildings of England”.

Today’s piece of self indulgence is poached from my all time favorite Youtube user, “Meades Shrine”.

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1 comment architecture, important dead people, self indulgence week

Le Corbusier Interview

Self indulgence week continues, with an interview with Le Corbusier when he was in his 70s, speaking in English. If Robert Moses was the Stalin of architecture, then Le Corbusier was its Marx: a genius who shouldn’t be imitated.

The amazing thing about Le Corbusier is that despite the fact that almost everything he built was a masterpiece, it is a very good thing that most of what he designed did not get built. Otherwise we would have gotten what the English satirical magazine, Private Eye, called the “Cite Lunatique de Ciel”.

Actually – I’m not finished on the subject of Corbusier. What is it about architects that they rebel in such overtly repressed ways, wearing a conventional suit but a flamboyant bow tie, and always having funny glasses? Did “Corbu” start this messed up behavior and was it anything to do with being Swiss? In this interview, he seems utterly devoid of what is referred to as a sense of humor.
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1 comment important dead people, self indulgence week

W.B.Yeats Reading His Own Verse

Yeats is extremely interesting because his life-span ran from the American Civil War to the beginning of the Second World War. He was at one time both Victorian and modern. This recording is from a few years before he died in 1939.

I am fascinated by accents and how they change and this is a perfect example. The interesting thing here is that professional Irishman, Mr Yeats sounds Scottish. Yeats is reading his own poems as he wanted them to sound and therefore the poetic inflection accentuates the accent.

This is not an Irish accent that you hear very often today and in many ways is similar to a West Coast (Gaelic native) Scottish accent, with a touch of Edinburgh sophistication, rather like the voice of Arthur Conan Doyle. Perhaps I am imagining this of course, but that parallel perception would fit well with the reality of Yeats as both a West Coast (Gaelic) Irishman and Dublin sophisticate.

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7 comments Uncategorized

This week is Self Indulgence Week on Smashing Telly

In an attempt to lose readers, and to celebrate self indulgence week, I will be posting items that I find interesting, which either have audio but no video or video but no audio.

3 comments Uncategorized

Leaked Christiantology Video

Is Scientology really that much weirder than the Abrahamic religions? Its total membership is less than the number of people actually killed by them, so it is less dangerous by any objective measure. Its existence as an non-accepted cult, is far more short lived. Its world view is much closer to the size and age of the known universe and its threat to science seems to be tragi-comically confined to psychiatrists. But it is much weirder, right?
Wrong.
This was the most amusing preacher video I could find, to illustrate the point. It makes Tom Cruise look like Thomas Paine.

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1 comment clips, religion

Vaccination – The Hidden Truth

This terrible movie is another great example of FEBL (Fucking entertaining Big Lie) media. For some reason, in recent years a bio-luddite movement has formed against one of the greatest, proven, scientific discoveries in medicine and biggest sources of the relief of global suffering, the process of vaccination. A growing cult has chosen to identify vaccination as some kind of grandiose conspiracy and in doing so, they are engendering paranoia and endangering lives.

The format of this paranoia is very similar to both the Scientologists war on psychiatry or Evangelicals war on Darwinism. Rather like the fact that there are a small minority of biologists who believe in Intelligent Design, this documentary shows the views of some of a small minority of physicians who have problems with vaccination. There are risks with vaccination as there are with almost any medical procedure, and people who do not believe in it, but that does not mean that vaccination does not work, or that the benefits so vastly outweigh the risks that they are overwhelmingly worth it.

In the United States, the place of Tom Cruise for a war on physicians rather than psychiatrists, is taken by the quack radio host, Gary Null (who is not in this Australian documentary but is a popular anti-vaccination extremist). Null’s method is to setup vaccination as some kind of faceless government conspiracy compared with touchy feely alternative medicine, an argument which he delivers with a pleasant, soft, reassuring voice. This is an easy way to persuade people, because it is not comparing like with like.

Rather like the way that natural child birth surrounded by candles is a preferable environment to a sterile linoleum floored hospital room, but is a more dangerous one, vaccination only works if everyone does it, so vaccination tends to be delivered through the somewhat anti-septic environment of government organized vaccination programs. It is because government programs tend to be more faceless and sterile than private ones that they raise the suspicions of those who are susceptible to paranoia and equate truth with personal desirability.

The solution to damping this paranoia was spectacularly shown when we visited our pediatrician, Michel Cohen, as group of prospective parents, before our son was born. At the end of a question and answer session, one man said that he was wary of governments and therefore wary of vaccination. Dr Cohen’s answer was that although it should be the man’s choice what to ultimately do, vaccination was not so much about the individual as about the community.

By replacing society and government with ‘community’, telling the guy he had a choice and implying that lack of vaccination put the individual before the community, i.e. was selfish, Dr Cohen had pulled a Gary Null. He had expressed something in comforting terms, but this time it happened to be the truth. Brilliant, quite brilliant.

Vaccination Information Service/Taycare Pty Ltd
45 min 20 sec Jan 20, 2008
www.vaccination.inoz.com

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14 comments FEBL, religion, science

Story of English – An English Speaking World

Ooh this is good. How can you not be interested in a documentary about the English language that kicks of with the horrible neologism “Russlish” but is, in fact, part of a very thorough and engaging series. This is utterly compelling in both a post modern and classical sort of way. Totally appropriate for a series about language.

MacNeil-Lehrer
57 min 2 sec Jan 19, 2008
www.lethalthought.com

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3 comments series, society

Battle of the Somme

If America had been continuously fighting the Iraq War from before the Mayflower landed, the US death toll would be less than the fatalities in this single battle.

If there was a specific date for the beginning of American hegemony and the death of Imperialist Europe, it would be the first day of the Somme. The Somme was the most brutal of WWI battles with over a million casualties, part of a pointless conflict fought between one country whose ruler had known the others’ as his ‘grandma’.

The Commander in Chief of the British Army at the time, was Douglas Haig, an antiquated buffoon who refused to prepare for modern methods of warfare, calling the machine gun a ‘vastly overrated weapon’. Countless tens of thousands of people died as a result, yet Haig is the name embossed at the center of every poppy worn in Britain in commemoration of both world wars, every year, to this date. This is what one might politely call – a fucking disgrace.
1 hr 19 min 7 sec Jan 2, 2008
www.caltonradio.com

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5 comments history