Attenborough joins the symphony

I liked the previous one better, but the Goodall part really made me smile :)

Again, awesome. A lovely way to start the day.

I've been reading Meyer's awful Signature in the Cell lately

Ah... yet another major characteristic that separates us from creationists: the willingness to actually read and understand material from opposing viewpoints, despite how awful they might be.

The 'Symphony of Pseudoscience' even includes one of the prominent "scienceblog" bloggers as one of the 'singers'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCD_mRjWdT0&feature=player_embedded

PZ, I am looking forward to your review of Meyers' book. I went to see him on his 'lecture' tour and got a chance to throw some questions his way. Of course he did not offer much of anything in the way of answers in my opinion!

I'm reading Paradise Lost. There's certainly poetry in it, but the mythology is rather repugnant.

Sigmund @ #4

Thanks, that was great.

Goodall, Goodall, Goodall, GOODALL!!!!eleventy!!!1!!!one!!!

(who? excited? me? ;-)

Why would you expect poetry in creationism, PZ? It's all prose, prose, prose -- taken word for word from Genesis 1 (preferably the King James Version; though it doesn't read too bad if you don't try to turn it in to a science book -- lots of sex and violence, too).

Smiling so hard my face hurts and there's a tear in my right eye.

Thanks so much.

Very nice. It's good to have a reason to smile.

People, please. Sentiment and content much appreciated, but this is terribly cheesy.

Another great video by MelodySheep. The lyrics are available at YouTube by expanding for more info.

Love Jane Goodall's line:

"It's a very wuzzie line,
and it's getting wuzzier
All the time"

People, please. Sentiment and content much appreciated, but this is terribly cheesy.

Even if you're completely right, I sooooo love cheese, and this is particularly good cheese. Screw my doctor and my cholesterol! Pass me a wheel of that cheese! ;-)

Yeah, I love the lectures, and there's You Tube for that. Autotune is the death of music. It's horrible, and makes my teeth ache.

I love these! Provide some great cheesey, yet informative, listening on bus journeys home from university.

I agree with Celtic_Evolution. At least we are willing to read books about subjects we disagree with. I've read several books/articles on homeopathy, spirituality, and religion. My views are unchanged since their arguments were pathetic. However I still read them with an open, but critical, mind.

I gave a copy of TGSOE to someone I knew thought that 'evolution is garbage', with a challenge/bet that they wouldn't read it. They refused to do so. My comment: Is your faith so weak?

I said on the last one that the gimmick is getting old. This one is better because it's more focused, and it features the illustrious Sir Dave. With all due respect to the less media-focused icons like Tyson and Feynman, TV presenters are best for these productions because they speak more clearly and articulately (at least when they're narrating something). The sound bites taken from more conversational interviews tend to be hard to understand after being autotuned, and their speech doesn't have the clear breaks and rhythm that lends itself to music.

oh jan #12, ya just gotta let go sometimes. As a former musical snob, I learned to find wonder in so many things after dropping my pretenses. Been dancing lately? Thought not.

I liked how he squeezed charming little melodies out of the fluid rhythm of the prose.

Jane Freakin' Goodall rocks.

#19 (#12) Oops. Jan. Sorry. That was mean. Sorry.

#14

Bella Bambina, sheesa a very Gouda Cheese! #12 you shuttup you a mouth, fronte della melanzana!

Attenborough really doesn't even need autotuning, but I dug this one just as much as all the others. Which is to say I loved it.

The symphony of science video would be better titled the symphony of creation, as it is blatantly obvious that the existence of a creative divine composer is the only logical and rational conclusion any thinking person could come to. If you believe all this highly complex and integrated living symphony is the product of random chance events, and blind mindless natural selection, which has no overall perspective of knowing where everything is evolving to, or why, you need to take a deep thoughtful breath and rejoin the real world.

No accounting for taste. I wonder if they would do something more like Deicide, although Deicide's own message is pressty good anyway.

I love the Symphony of Science videos. And I love even more that they used footage from a Guinness commercial in this one :)

Great video from Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, BBC 2009, and his new series Life

johnhei:

If you believe all this highly complex and integrated living symphony is the product of random chance events, and blind mindless natural selection, which has no overall perspective of knowing where everything is evolving to, or why, you need to take a deep thoughtful breath and rejoin the real world.

Not really. You just have to realize that Stockhausen is god.

johnhei:

The symphony of science video would be better titled the symphony of creation, as it is blatantly obvious that the existence of a creative divine composer is the only logical and rational conclusion any thinking person could come to.

Um, is it not by your very same reasoning "blatantly obvious" that a super-creative divine composer composed/created this putative "creative divine composer"?

And, therefore, that a super-super-creative divine composer created the super-creative divine composer?

And, therefore, that a super-super-super-creative divine composer created the super-super-creative divine composer?

(need I go on?) :)

Sagan on Autotune sounds like Kermit The Frog.

Not that there's anything wrong with that!

PZ, you say:

I've been reading Meyer's awful Signature in the Cell lately, and I have to say — there's no poetry in creationism.

This is so surprising. I mean, aren't the cdesign proponentsists always claiming the greatest art ever created was by the religious? Why then do they drone on so monotonously and artlessly?

Perhaps, just maybe, there is another explanation for the great art of Mozart, and Michaelangelo. Maybe, as shown in the Symphony of Science, all it takes is human genius.

Get some TV interviews so you can be included. You must be in all things!

Say, would you be interested in coming to UCLA or the Southern California area at some point? I'm an events coordinator for the Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists here.
I know you're on a whirlwind tour of North/Central California, but some other time surely.

I feel suddenly compelled to mention I am not claiming that the auto-tune versions of these lectures are great art, but that the source material, Cosmos and the various works by Sir David Attenborough are.

The auto-tune videos are entertaining and fun, though.

This is super gorgeous. My son (7) caught me watching the beginning seconds of it and sat down, enthralled, for the whole thing. Awesome.

johnhei sez (in the faint hope that this is not a drive-by)

The symphony of science video would be better titled the symphony of creation, as it is blatantly obvious that the existence of a creative divine composer is the only logical and rational conclusion any thinking person could come to.

If anyone can translate that better than "I can't figure out how this might have happened naturally, and if you say you can, you're dumb" I'd be interested to hear your alternate translation.

If you believe all this highly complex and integrated living symphony is the product of random chance events, and blind mindless natural selection, which has no overall perspective of knowing where everything is evolving to, or why, you need to take a deep thoughtful breath and rejoin the real world.

Except that almost all of those people who have spent their lives taking deep breaths - and deep thoughts, too - and actually studying the real world have come to the opposite conclusion that you have.
Again, just because you're not bright enough to see what's going on, doesn't exclude anyone from being more perceptive than you are.

Of course, it's just possible that all of those people who know enough about rocks and animals and time to reach down through the rock, back through time, and find the tiny bits and pieces left of ancient animals - maybe they are all, every single one, just flat-out dumber than you, johnhei.

Anyone wanna lay odds?

Longtime lurker; big fan. Just wanted to correct one thing though...the video is not really autotuned. It's just taking the natural pitch material from speech and writing some music around it. If anybody knows the music of Steve Reich, he actually wrote a 'video opera' called Three Tales which featured some of Dawkins' speech in a similar manner. (Don't remember the exact words...but something like 'We are machines, created by our genes.') If one wants to go back further, composers like Janacek and Bartok also experimented with the idea of "speech-melody."

#24: "...it is blatantly obvious that the existence of a creative divine composer is the only logical and rational conclusion any thinking person could come to..."

You tell 'em, johnhei! Nature is so *obviously* the work of a Divine Composer who screwed up the human eye and knee and appendix, and created bacteria and viruses so perfectly adapted to preying horribly on humans, and, incidentally, is utterly obsessed with genitalia and foreskins and masturbation.

Oh, and always remember, he forbids us to to mix fiber types in our cloth. Or live in a house with a pointed roof. I'm sure you were going to mention that but didn't have time, right johnhei?

This message brought to you by People Believing Whatever Makes Them Feel Good.

Eric (#23), you mean like Pogo's been doing to Disney films lately.

That's not the case with the Symphonies though. The source material is mostly available unaltered on YouTube, and the pitches actually used by the speakers are very different. They really are autotuned.

Ah OK. Thanks for the info. I'll have to watch some of the original sources videos. Though in principle, of course, you can entirely make such a video without autotuning, though the pitches (and tune) would be different.

The "Upular" video is really cute. haha

What the speakers are saying is so inspiring that even this autotuning gimmick can't ruin it.

Um, before we go too gaga for Goodall:

BILL MOYERS: I know the story, but for my audience, tell me what happened to you when you had that very powerful experience in the spring of 1974, when you visited Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris?

JANE GOODALL: Yes. It was a sort of low time in my life. And there I was. I went into this cathedral. And as I walk through the door, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor just suddenly filled the whole cathedral. And the sun was just coming through that rose window. And it just so powerful a feeling that, you know, how could this amazing cathedral, all the people who built it, all the people who'd worshipped in it, all the brilliant minds that had been within it. How could that all be chance? It couldn't be chance.

and also:

I don't want to explain this whole life business through truth, science.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11272009/transcript3.html

I've been reading Meyer's awful Signature in the Cell lately ...

Doesn't this prove God exists and he hates you?

Rich,

[Goodall] How could that all be chance? It couldn't be chance.

Sigh. I didn't need to know that, but thanks anyway.

Deal a bridge hand — any hand.

The odds of getting that particular hand (deck = 52 cards, 13 cards dealt) is 52C13 = 635,013,559,600.

How could that all be chance? It couldn't be chance!

Yet it happens again and again...

@#37

Or live in a house with a pointed roof.

(first try, see if it works...)

I'm not familiar with that one, which verse is it?

@#41 I read her books and she explains it more there, she's more like a pantheist. (sexed-up atheism w00t) But even if she were xtian/muslim/jew/whatever that does not diminish her work one iota. And what a work, what a life! Just like Attenborough, they are great people living among us.

Quit posting videos until I can fix my computer! I love these symphony of science things, but since I put a new video card in my computer my sound doesn't work. I have no idea how the two are related, but until I can figure it out you have to stop making me scream with frustration that I can't hear anything!

From Rich Wilson's post

JANE GOODALL: Yes. It was a sort of low time in my life. And there I was. I went into this cathedral. And as I walk through the door, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor just suddenly filled the whole cathedral. And the sun was just coming through that rose window. And it just so powerful a feeling that, you know, how could this amazing cathedral, all the people who built it, all the people who'd worshipped in it, all the brilliant minds that had been within it. How could that all be chance? It couldn't be chance.

I was at a music festival once. It started raining the instant the band Slayer started playing their song 'Raining Blood'. Me & my friends were utterly convinced that Slayer could control the weather.

If we were wrong we appear to be in good company, ahem.

Its not AUTOTUNE! its a technique called VOCODING (VOCODER), where you use the voice as a modulator and a synthesizer as a carrier wave. This way you can modulate any musical material (single notes, chords, anything) with the nuance and expressions of another sound source (in this case the voices).

Autotune is a process to tune notes to a musical scale. When badly done it sounds like those awful rap songs, and when correctly done you don't hear it at all, but it can be used in a stylish way (like Madonna in die another day)

Personally I think this wave of songs are just bite sized lazy collages with a theme. Whenever the original is better then the remix the attempt has failed. And IMO all those documentaries and lectures are far more interesting than this songs.

Dan Barker, Tim Minchin and TMBG are far more interesting. Wouldn't mind have more music like this popping up, the symphony has stopped being interesting from the third one.

Did anybody else notice that this "signature" might be the same one left by an RNA virus?

http://www.uta.edu/ucomm/mediarelations/press/2010/01/genome-biologist-…

Sadly Greg Goebel's review at Amazon of this garbage book was removed. He had made the Poe of the century, and also got the IDiot author to respond. It was hilarious, because IDiot author tried to explain that what sounded like high praise was only awarded by one Amazon star, and GG said that one star meant it was no. 1, which the IDiots tried to explain was not the case.
But alas, now gone.

GG unfortunately made very similar reviews for other IDiot literature drivel, so Amazon and the IDiots cottoned on to him. Fun while it lasted though, and GG really had them in a spin.

Oh the above is about IDiot D. Johnson's drivel, and DEFINITELY not CS!!

Sounds like a lot of folks here want these damn kids to get off their lawn.

I appreciate electronic music, and playing a vocoder is no simple task. It takes skill and artistry. Cheapening the work done here by calling it a gimmick is unfair. This artist is making music and getting names out there that are not well-known to most of the population (at least in the States).

Furthermore, kids these days like it.

(No, I'm not a kid. But I play one on tv.)

I don't think Goodall's religious views diminish her message. It is indeed a wuzzy line and getting wuzzier. And I think there is good reason to go gaga for Goodall, but for me that reason isn't her religious views, it's the actual work that she's known for.

@#47

Its not AUTOTUNE! its a technique called VOCODING (VOCODER), where you use the voice as a modulator and a synthesizer as a carrier wave. This way you can modulate any musical material (single notes, chords, anything) with the nuance and expressions of another sound source (in this case the voices).

You know, I'm pretty sure that AutoTune is a form of phase vocoder. While it is true that these modified voices are vocodered, according to the web site for Symphony of Science AutoTune was indeed the tool that did the modifying.

It's one thing to be pedantic... but another entirely to be pedantic and wrong.