MetaFilter posts tagged with Gould

Fake fossils down through the ages

Kattullus — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:46:23 -0800

Stephen Jay Gould tells the story of the 18th Century German professor Beringer who published a book, Lithographiae Wirceburgensis in 1726 which purported to show remarkable fossils, including spiders in their web, copulating frogs and Yahweh written in Hebrew (high resolution images of the original plates: 1, 2, 3, 4) This turned out to be a fake but the conventional story of the humiliated Professor Beringer and his Lying Stones of Wurzburg is not as simple as the one usually retold in textbooks. And as Gould mentions fossil fakes are not a thing of the past.

Sculptor Nemo Gould makes robots out of found objects

lee — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:04:37 -0800

Sculptor Nemo Gould makes robots out of found objects.

"Science is an integral part of culture"

nickyskye — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:31:16 -0800

The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive, an online library dedicated to the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002). Includes an excellent selection of videos. And The Official Stephen Jay Gould Archive [still under development], which includes two of his books and his Harvard course online. The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive was created by Miguel Chavez, a student at Yuba College in Northern California. From The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive, links. Fun Steinberg cartoon in Gould's book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Darwin's Origin of the Species online at The Official Stephen Jay Gould Archive.

Glenn Gould's chair

carsonb — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:00:14 -0800

Monsieur, you vill not speak disrespectfully of a member of ze family! It is a boon travelling companion, without which I do not function, I cannot operate. It has been with me for 21 years, zis thing, this chair!

Glenn Gould performed for 21 years seated in a folding card chair modified by his father to be height adjustable. That one chair accompanied him around the world in support of each of his recordings and performances, and now resides on a pedestal at the National Library of Canada. Luckily, exact replicas of the skeletal, cushion-less chair are available for only €990. Glenn Gould was quite the eccentric musician. Witness his quirk firsthand at the CBC Digital Archives' Glenn Gould: Variations on an Artist. Via AskMe

Fugue States, YouTube Edition

maryh — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 23:03:23 -0800

Britney is not known for her fugues. But you- do you think you got the clever to write a fugue? Get Bach, JoJo!

Dear Earth: Send More Chuck Berry

Hadroed — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:29:11 -0800

The Golden Record: Hear what the aliens will hear.
30 years ago today, a collection of images and sound recordings engraved on a record was launched toward the stars. The playlist covers an amazing collection of music, and has been called the Mix Tape of the Gods.

Original Performance, New Recording

chuckdarwin — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:10:29 -0800

Zenph Studios has developed a process (using high-resolution MIDI) which "re-performed" Glenn Gould's famous 1955 piano recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations in hybrid multichannel SA-CD format.

Whether you slither, swim, or fly, it's all the same

orthogonality — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 03:36:42 -0800

"[E]ven though you couldn't predict exactly what animals would look like if you started evolution over on earth, or it happened on another planet -- with a given gravity and density of their tissues, the same basic patterns of their design would evolve again." A new study models all forms of locomotion -- swimming, walking, flying by muscle or flying by 747 -- in one physics theory, and stultifies Stephen Jay Gould's conjectures about the "contingency" of evolution. [mi]