During today’s snowfall, the Toronto Zoo’s cameras caught giant panda Da Mao ‘bear-bogganing’ in his outdoor exhibit. Perhaps he’s discovered a new winter sport?
You Can Now Have Your DNA Buried On The Moon
From CNBC:
A British company has launched a £600,000 ($1 million) Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to get to moon and drill into its surface, with punters able to buy memory on a digital time capsule – and even send their hair into space.
The Lunar Mission One project will use the initial funds to set up the plans for the moon landing and drilling and has signed up RAL Space – which has been involved in developing more than 200 space missions – as its technical advisers.
Enthusiasts can spend £60 to buy some space on a “digital time capsule” – a memory stick-like device– to upload photos or videos. This will then be buried in the hole drilled by the capsule launched to the moon’s South Pole. For a higher – yet to be determined – cost, punters would be able to pay to have strands of their hair taken on the trip.
DJ Shadow Soundtracks A Chevy Ad
When you obsess over perfection, elevate form and reinvent a category, you attract a lot of attention. That’s why Chevrolet is the most awarded car company of the year. And that’s how you can get DJ Shadow’s “Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt,” the opening song from the 1996 classic Endtroducing… DJ Shadow, to soundtrack your ad, creating an intriguing, cross-generational collaboration that sounds more fluid than most.
http://youtu.be/PspRX3Y-kn8
Grandmas Smoking Weed for the First Time
Cut Video found three grandmas who had never smoked pot and gave them an opportunity to try it for the first time. Then they gave them snacks and had them play cards against humanity.
1% of recording artists earn 77% of recorded music revenue
From The Atlantic:
Because the most-popular songs now stay on the charts for months, the relative value of a hit has exploded. The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn 77 percent of all revenue from recorded music, media researchers report. And even though the amount of digital music sold has surged, the 10 best-selling tracks command 82 percent more of the market than they did a decade ago. The advent of do-it-yourself artists in the digital age may have grown music’s long tail, but its fat head keeps getting fatter.
Radio stations, meanwhile, are pushing the boundaries of repetitiveness to new levels. According to a subsidiary of iHeartMedia, Top 40 stations last year played the 10 biggest songs almost twice as much as they did a decade ago. Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” the most played song of 2013, aired 70 percent more than the most played song from 2003, “When I’m Gone,” by 3 Doors Down. Even the fifth-most-played song of 2013, “Ho Hey,” by the Lumineers, was on the radio 30 percent more than any song from 10 years prior.
How music education influenced Google CEO Larry Page
From Fortune:
As Google CEO Larry Page looks backward, he’s realizing how much his musical education inspired critical elements of Google—especially his impatience and obsession with speed.
“In some sense I feel like music training lead to the high-speed legacy of Google for me,” Page said during a recent interview with Fortune. “In music you’re very cognizant of time. Time is like the primary thing.”
Page, who grew up in Michigan, played saxophone and studied music composition while growing up. During college at the University of Michigan, he developed a business plan for a company that would use software to build a music synthesizer. That project, which required the software to work in real time, opened his eyes to a what he saw as a flaw in the software that powers most computers.
“It’s amazing to the extent I think that modern operating systems are terrible at being real-time,” Page said. “If you think about it from a music point of view, if you’re a percussionist, you hit something, it’s got to happen in milliseconds, fractions of a second.”
“I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do,” he said. “As a technology company I’ve tried to really stress that.” Page says he learned to appreciate that “artistic component,” in part through music.
Twitter now lets you search for any tweet in history
From Wired:
This morning, Twitter began rolling out a search service that lets you search for any tweet in its archive.
Outside services have long offered ways of searching old tweets, including tools like Topsy (now owned by Apple) and Tweet Machine, and such services are still the best way to find tweets that have been deleted from Twitter proper. But Twitter’s new search engine fills a conspicuous hole in its own micro-messaging service, and shows how internet search services continue to evolve, providing ever faster access to an ever growing corpus of online information.
Though the new Twitter search engine is limited to rather rudimentary keyword searches today, the company plans to expand into more complex queries in the months and years to come. And the foundational search infrastructure laid down by the company will help drive other Twitter tools as well. “It lets us power a lot more things down the road—not just search,” says Gilad Mishne, the Twitter engineering director who helped oversee the project.
Kate Bush, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Leif Garrett On This Thing Called “Punk”
Kate Bush, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Cliff Richard, Peter Gabriel, Paul Cook, John Lydon, Meatloaf, and ummm…Leif Garrett putting in their two cents on the topic of “Punk.”
Questlove gives some of the best advice for bands you’ll ever hear
Wait until the 40 second mark for some great advice for bands from Questlove.
Infographic: Make your next Facebook contest explode
One of the best way to gain new fans is through a Facebook contest, as long as you narrow down the true fans, rather than those who just enter contests for a living. While a quick check through the feeds can help you with the latter, Shortstack created an infographic to guide Facebook marketers and page admins through this process.
