Xenophilious

Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous Brandenburg Concertos No. 1 – 6 by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra in a playlist of nineteen YouTube videos:

Playlists for the separate concertos: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

A Czech Radio performance of the concertos is downloadable in mp3, ogg, and flac format.

Via TED: David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.

From wikipedia:

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a 2003 American documentary film about the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. The film was directed by Errol Morris and the original score is by Philip Glass.

The title is a reference to the military phrase fog of war, a concept of battlefield uncertainty during the fighting. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature. (…)

Via ABC (65m 27s):

In the early 1990s, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington developed his famous “clash of civilizations” theory. In it he argued that history is driven by distinct international forces, like Islam and the west, competing for supremacy. This seemed to be illustrated by the events of 9/11. However, delivering this lecture at the University of Sydney, world-renowned political scientist Peter Katzenstein argued that the view that civilizations comprise of homogeneous racial and religious groups is simplistic and untrue. Rather, civilizations are pluralistic and highly diverse within themselves, and more likely to engage with each other than to clash.

German born, American based academic Peter J. Katzenstein is the President of the American Political Science Association and the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. He received his PhD at Harvard University, and also has degrees from the London School of Economics and Swarthmore College. He has written several books and articles on political science and international relations, his latest book “Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in World Politics” will be published in 2010.

A similarly themed and well-known lecture by Edward Said called “The Myth of Culture Clash” :

From Wikipedia:

The Living Dead: Three Films About the Power of the Past was the second major documentary series made by British film-maker Adam Curtis. This series investigated the way that history and memory (both national and individual) have been used by politicians and others. It was transmitted on BBC Two in the spring of 1995.

On the Desperate Edge of Now

The title of this episode comes from a veteran’s description of what the uncertainty of survival in combat is like. It examined how the various national memories of the Second World War were effectively rewritten and manipulated in the Cold War period.

For Germany, this began at the Nuremberg Trials, where attempts were made to prevent the Nazis in the dock—principally Hermann Göring—from offering any rational argument for what they had done. Subsequently, however, bringing lower-ranking Nazis to justice was effectively forgotten about in the interests of maintaining West Germany as an ally in the Cold War.

For the Allies, faced with a new enemy in the Soviet Union, there was a need to portray World War II as a crusade of pure good against pure evil, even if this meant denying the memories of the Allied soldiers who had actually done the fighting, and knew it to have been far more complex. A number of American veterans related how years later they found themselves plagued with the previously-suppressed memories of the brutal things they had seen and done.

You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough

The title of this episode comes from a paranoid schizophrenic seen in archive film in the programme, who believed her neighbours were using her as a source of amusement by denying her any privacy, like a pet goldfish.

In this episode, the history of brainwashing and mind control was examined. The angle pursued by Curtis was the way in which historically psychiatry pursued tabula rasa theories of the mind, initially in order to set people free from traumatic memories and then later as a potential instrument of social control. The work of Ewen Cameron was surveyed, with particular reference to Cold War theories of communist brainwashing and the search for hypnoprogammed assassins.

This programme’s thesis was that the search for control over the past via medical intervention had had to be abandoned and that in modern times control over the past is more effectively exercised by the manipulation of history. Some footage from this episode, an interview with one of Cameron’s victims, was later re-used by Curtis in The Century of the Self series.

The Attic

In this episode, the Imperial aspirations of Margaret Thatcher were examined. The way in which Mrs Thatcher used public relations in an attempt to emulate Winston Churchill in harking back to Britain’s “glorious past” to fulfil a political or national end.

The title is a reference to the attic flat at the top of 10 Downing Street, which was created during Thatcher’s period refurbishment of the house, which did away with the Prime Minister’s previous living quarters on lower floors. Scenes from the psychological horror film The Innocents (1961) (a film adaptation of Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw) are intercut with scenes from Thatcher’s reign.

The Earth’s magnetic field varies on many time scales, waxing and waning in strength, and periodically completely reversing direction. The geologic record of these variations provides important information on the history of our planet. Join Scripps Oceanography geoscientist Jeff Gee for a fascinating glimpse into his fieldwork in paleomagnetism — from autonomous aircraft measurements over the open ocean to exploration of rock exposures in remote regions of Antarctica. Series: Perspectives on Ocean Science

The embedded video skips the introduction. YouTube offers the option to download the video as a mp4 file.

Via EurekAlert:

Researchers have found a primitive Earth mantle reservoir on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Geologist Matthew Jackson and his colleagues from a multi-institution collaboration report the finding–the first discovery of what may be a primitive Earth mantle–this week in the journal Nature.

The Earth’s mantle is a rocky, solid shell that is between the Earth’s crust and the outer core, and makes up about 84 percent of the Earth’s volume. The mantle is made up of many distinct portions or reservoirs that have different chemical compositions.

Scientists had previously concluded that the Earth was slightly older than 4.5 billion years old, but had not found a piece of the Earth’s primitive mantle.

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Until recently, researchers generally thought that the Earth and the other planets of the solar system were chondritic, meaning that the mantle’s chemistry was thought to be similar to that of chondrites–some of the oldest, most primitive objects in the solar system. Assuming a chondritic model of the Earth, a piece of the primitive mantle would have certain isotope ratios of the chemical elements of helium, lead and neodymium.

The model that the Earth was chondritic was called into question with a discovery five years ago by a team at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which suggested the ratio of neodymium on Earth was higher than what would be expected if the Earth were indeed chondritic.

That finding changed the neodymium ratio expected in the primitive mantle and in turn, changed where researchers should be looking to find evidence of a primitive mantle. According to the lead author, Matthew Jackson, “We had been looking under the wrong rock.”

Since many of the ancient rocks have melted over time, finding a piece of the primitive mantle means studying lavas. Lavas retain the same isotopic composition of the rocks that have melted into the lava. Therefore, testing the lava’s composition is identical to testing the original rock’s composition.

When the assumption about the neodymium ratio was altered, Jackson and his colleagues knew they should take a look at lava samples from Baffin Island, since those samples contained the correct ratios of helium and neodymium. They discovered that the lavas also had the correct ratio for lead. The lead isotopes suggest that the samples from Baffin Island date the lava’s mantle source reservoir to between 4.55 and 4.45 billion years old, only a little younger than the age of the Earth. The lava sample comes from an ancient rock that melted 62 million years ago.

This is the view of the basalts along the northeastern coast of Baffin Island.

When the researchers studied the composition of the lava found at Baffin Island, they discovered that the sample had the correct ratios of all three chemical elements–helium, lead, and the new non-chondritic neodymium ratio. This discovery suggests that the sample from Baffin Island is the first evidence for the oldest mantle reservoir.

This study challenges the idea that the Earth has a chondritic primitive mantle and according to Matthew Jackson is, “suggesting an alternative.” One possibility, according to Jackson, is that “the early Earth went through a differentiation event and the Earth’s crust was extracted from the early mantle and is now hidden in the deep earth; the hidden crust and the mantle found on Baffin Island would sum to chondritic.”

This discovery will help researchers understand the composition of the original, early Earth. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Carnegie Institution of Washington.