Thing the first is that Morgan Freeman, many years before he went through the wormhole, was a regular on The Electric Company, along with performers like Rita Moreno and Bill Cosby. (Via Quantum Diaries, of all places.) This was public television’s show from the 70′s that was meant for kids who had moved on from Sesame Street — I was more of a Zoom kid myself, but I must have seen Electric Company episodes with Freeman playing hip dude Easy Reader.

Thing the second is that Easy Reader’s theme song, sung in the clip above, is a dead ringer for Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” Flip back and forth between playing them if you don’t believe me. So much so, I am told, that DJ’s in clubs will sometimes mix the two tunes together. Not at the clubs I go to, I guess.

I recognize the first questioner at this press conference. I’m pretty sure he’s been at some of my own talks.

But John Entwistle has some thoughts he would like to share with you.

Naturally, there was singing. The Glee Club sent spirits soaring with the Caltech alma mater, “Hail CIT.”

In southern California with grace and splendor bound,
Where the lofty mountain peaks look out to lands beyond,
Proudly stands our alma mater, glorious to see.
We raise our voices proudly, hailing, hailing thee.
Echos ringing while we’re singing, over land and sea.
The hall of fame resound thy name, noble CIT.

The one that got my attention, however, was the other song — Gaudeamus Igitur, apparently a “traditional college song.” How have I spent so many years in academia without coming across this one? It was sung in Latin, but a helpful translation into English was provided.

Therefore let us rejoice
While we are young
After pleasant youth,
After troublesome old age,
The earth will have us.

Where are they who before us
Were in the world?
You can cross the heavens,
You can go to hell,
If you wish to see them.

Our life is brief,
Shortly it will end.
Death comes quickly,
It snatches us cruelly,
No one is spared.

Long live the academy!
Long live the professors!
Long live each student!
Long live all students!
May they always flourish!

Cheerful, no? We’re all going to die, but at least the university will live on. Comforting.

And now Wikipedia informs me that a few verses were apparently left out of our version. To wit:

Long live all girls
Easy and beautiful!
Long live mature women also,
Tender and lovable
Good [and] productive,

Long live the state as well
And he who rules it!
Long live our city
[And] the charity of benefactors
Which protects us here!

Let sadness perish!
Let haters perish!
Let the devil perish!
Let whoever is anti-student
As well as the mockers!

So they left out the bits that were veering uncomfortably close to sexism, fascism, and serial killer-ism. I’m thinking they didn’t want the ceremony to drag on for too long.

But I gave a colloquium yesterday at Caltech, and afterwards one of the folks who came to dinner was Lloyd Knox, an old friend and a cosmologist at UC Davis. Talk naturally turned to his most well-known work: the Dark Energy Song, sung to his class and (inevitably) captured to video and posted to YouTube by a quick-thinking student. But to my surprise, it only has about 1,000 views! Surely we can help bring this masterpiece to a wider audience.

Note that musical/lyrical critiques by people who have not demonstrated bravery by putting their own performances on YouTube will be derided as acts of base cowardice.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

This is a clip from the Johnny Cash show in 1970, less than a year before Armstrong died. It’s great to see these two performers together, but Armstrong’s playing is pretty restrained. Here he is with Dizzie Gillespie, doing “Umbrella Man.”

I presume there is no video recording of Armstrong back in the 1930′s with the Hot Fives or Hot Sevens?

What will change everything? is this year’s Edge Annual Question. Many interesting answers, as you might expect. Choose from Massive Technological Failure (David Bodanis), Breaking the Species Barrier (Richard Dawkins), Coordinated and Expanded Computational Power (Lisa Randall), Faster Evolution (Jonathan Haidt), Happiness (Betsy Devine), Synthetic Biology (Dimitar Sasselov), and more. The book of last year’s question is out soon.

The blog posts to be reprinted in the Open Lab 2008 anthology have been announced — only 50 selections from over 500 nominations, I’m glad I wasn’t responsible for making the tough choices. Also glad that they chose one of my posts, The First Quantum Cosmologist. You can also read about The Igneous Petrology of Ice Cream (Green Gabbro), Expect the Unexpected (A canna’ change the laws of physics), How do cave bats know when it is dark outside? (Pondering Pikaia), and perhaps the most courageous blog post of all time: Liveblogging the Vasectomy (Terra Sigillata). Some sort of new journalism” going on there.

Finally, if all those ideas are weighing you down, play with the David Lee Roth ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ Soundboard (via Cynical-C). Deconstructed from this classic track.

The complete version is here, but it only detracts.

To put us all in the proper year’s end party mood, here is some music.  Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Fats Domino on stage simultaneously, with pianos. Ron Woods and Carl Perkins, amongst others, are on back-up.

The good news is that pianist Gabriela Montero will be performing at the inauguration! (Along with some other jokers: Aretha Franklin, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, and Anthony McGill.) Hopefully this prestigious venue will bring an incredibly talented performer to much-deserved wider recognition.

If you tend not to click on YouTube clips of musicians, you might want to make an exception this time. Here is Montero at a concert in Germany. She asks the audience to suggest a German song for her — “Mer losse de Dom in Kölle,” if commenters are to be believed — and gets them to sing it. She catches the tune (which apparently she’s never heard before), and starts improvising based on it. (There’s not nearly enough improvisation in modern classical music, in my jazz-inflected opinion.) It’s a throwaway, but quite joyous and beautiful. And most of all, fun.

The Boys first got together in 1939. And they’re not some ongoing concern whose membership turns over, like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; their current lead singer, Jimmy Lee Carter, was a founding member of the group. Other charter members were active until recently: vocalist Clarence Fountain cut down on touring in 2006, and George Scott (singing lead in this track) passed away in 2005. They gained a bit of late-career notoriety when their cover of Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole” was used as the theme song for the first season of The Wire.

Sorry for the lack of substantive blogging of late. Science comes first.

And here is an interview from 1960. “The reason I play so many — maybe it sounds angry, because I’m trying so many things at one time, you see — I haven’t sorted them out. I have a whole bag of things that I’m trying to work through and get the one essential, you know?”

Here is a computer animation, to the tune of Giant Steps.

And here is a robot playing the Giant Steps solo. Not as good as the original.

Coltrane died in 1967, at the age of 40.

So here is Up the Junction.

Note how the lyrics play with the notion of chronology. The temporal point of view shifts gradually throughout the narrative.

This morning at 4:50
I took her rather nifty
Down to an incubator
Where thirty minutes later
She gave birth to a daughter
Within a year a walker
She looked just like her mother
If there could be another

Sadly, I couldn’t find a decent video of Slaughtered, Gutted and Heartbroken.

Usually I like my jazz a little less adulterated — and the Bad Plus have stirred up considerable controversy by mixing in frequent pop covers along with their straight-ahead tunes. But these guys are playful, intelligent, and infectious, as well as accomplished musicians. The blog is worth reading, too — here’s a thoughtful commentary on Barack Obama and discrimination in jazz. Besides, it’s named “Do the Math”!

D is for djinn, E for Euphrates,
F is for fohn, but not like when I call the ladies.

But I digress.

The first song on the album is “789″, about the nefarious dealings of the number 7.

1, 2, 3, 4 and more makes 7
Why is six afraid of 7?
Cause 7 ate 9

Recently the eldest kid piped up: “Seven eats all the numbers. There are no more numbers after 8.” I asked why. “Well, seven ate nine, so it’s 7-8-10, so then seven ate ten, so it’s 7-8-11, so then seven ate 11, and then it just keeps going.”

So, the Barenaked Ladies just inspired my seven-year old to discover the principle of mathematical induction, which is one of the first techniques you learn when you venture into the land of advanced mathematics. The idea is that if you can prove that something is true for some integer n, and that it is also true for n+1, then it has to be true for all integers greater than n. So, for a simple (and somewhat silly) example, if you can first prove that if n>0 then n+1>0, and then you also prove that 1>0, then all positive integers are greater than zero. I remember having a hard time wrapping my head around this idea when I first bumped into it in high school (though I got over it in college after enough algebra classes with Michael Artin). I just find it pretty nifty that you can get the idea from a kid’s song.

Via Adam at US/LHC Blogs, although the video was posted by writer/rapper Katherine McAlpine, formerly of Physics Buzz.

Via Cynical-C.