A nice musical detail from the film, Inception.
If you’ve seen the movie, you know that a grainy recording of Edith Piaf singing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” is used as a cue for the dreamers. You also know that while dreaming, time slows down.
With that in mind, it turns out that the throbbing musical sting we hear throughout the movie is that original piece of music… slowed down.
That’s a screenshot of an interactive map I built for KQED’s Health Dialogues using the Google Maps API for Flash.
We just aired our July 2010 episode on rural health in Northern California, featuring stories from people living and working in towns all along State Route 299. The map features photos and interviews with people who are in the radio broadcast, plus many more we couldn’t fit into the hour.
I grew up fly fishing on the rivers and streams in this far northern section of California, and have spent some time in many of these towns. It was great to hear host Scott Shafer and reporter Sarah Varney file stories from Weaverville, Trinity Center and Fall River Mills, among other places.
Even greater, in my opinion, is that rather than talking to “experts” on rural health issues from the comfort of a radio studio, we took the show on the road and did all the reporting in the field. I think the show really worked, and the map helps bring a sense of place to Scott and Sarah’s terrific reporting.
A very interesting and candid interview with Penn Jillette. He talks about his philosophy toward performing magic, his working relationship with Teller and Penn’s unabashed mistrust of government and religion.
Steve Martin’s tour rider has been leaked (by Steve Martin)!
photo by Dundas Football Club, used under Creative Commons License
There’s been plenty of talk – rightfully so – of the annoying swarms of bees that are the Vuvuzela horns you hear during the 2010 World Cup. There reportedly have been more than one million sold since the Cup began last week.
Nothing short of a ban on the horns (it’s not going to happen) would help the players, broadcasters and fans at the matches, but as TV viewers, we thankfully have technology on our side. A German sound engineer has created a 45-minute sound file you can buy and play during broadcasts. It’s supposed to cancel out the sound using active noise control, the same way noise-canceling headphones work.
But thanks to another more industrious method, also originally posted by a German (Google translated page), you can just set your computer, stereo or TV equalizer to filter out the sound of the Vuvuzelas.
Apparently, all you have to do is duck your equalizer by at least 40dB at 465Hz and 235Hz. If you are using your TV equalizer and it doesn’t offer those specific Hz levels, you can probably get away with approximating.
If you really want to get nerdy with it, here’s a video from Lifehacker that shows the before and after results:
I don’t know why I ever left North Carolina. I’m missing out on reporting stories like this one.
Photojournalist Brian Skerry gives a TED talk about his “underwater war photography” aboard a Mission Blue Expedition in the Galapagos Islands. Skerry aims to convey with his work the majesty of underwater life and the horrific effect that many of our practices have on it.
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How else would we get such hard-hitting exposés?
Here’s the latest from our series of You Decide activities at KQED – designed to question your assumptions on economic issues.
With talk bubbling up lately about whether people who are underwater should just treat their home as a bad investment and simply walk away, we decided to take a look at Case-Shiller values over the last 20 years or so. Some markets appear to have climbed back toward their previous peak values – enough that your home might still be a good long-term investment. Other markets look like they have a long way to go, especially if you bought close to the peak.
In researching the topic, I found that a lot of commentary was ignoring the fact that you might live in a recourse state, where the lender can claim more than just your house if you walk. So the map also shows which states allow recourse, and which don’t.
You can find the full activity (discussion, links, embed code) here. If you just want the interactive that I embedded above, you can grab it here.
