Something About Isabella

I stumbled upon this girl today. Her name is Isabella Selder. There are only three YT videos of her. Two as a child and one as a nineteen year old. She's twenty one now and I can find nothing of her anywhere on the internet. Here she is at seven years of age playing some flamenco music. It's not terribly dificult for an adult, but for a child this age it's amazingly good.



I know that she's German, but you wouldn't know it listening to her sing "Yesterday."



Now here she is at nineteen playing a sonata by Paganini that's one of the most dificult peices I know of in the classical guitar repertoire, and playing it better than I've ever heard it played. From just this one piece of music I could almost say that she's already the best classical guitarist I've ever heard, providing she plays everything else as well. Why isn't she better known?

Manchester Riots: Scenes From Whalley Range

Hilarious!

The Horroble Truth Behind Whipped Cream

The Rubes

Social Conscious Sign Art

A feller by the name of Norm Magnusson makes these signs as a form of art, and apparently, because he claims they're art, the city can't (or maybe won't) stop him from putting them up around town. Read the story here.

Yahoo's Ridiculous 'Religious Section'

Twenty five stories on religion featured at Yahoo's 'Religious Section' today, and every one of them in the negative. Tells me all I need to know about these yahoos.

How To Cut-up a Chicken Like a Meat Cutter

The way a meat cutter cuts a chicken is a little different from restaurants where they typically leave the backbone on the breast and thighs. I was a meat cutter from 1978 to 1993. I left this video for a friend, but I hope someone else will get some use out of it.

By the way, I noticed that when watching this video in 360p, it tends to hang up around 4:45 in. Just click on the "360p" and you'll get a choice of other settings. The others don't hang up, and the higher the setting, the better the quality. You can go all the way up to full HD at 1080p! Looks great at full screen if you have the bandwidth for it.

Kary Mullis, John Bardeen, and the Invention of the Transistor

Kary Mullis, the chemist who won a Noble in 1993 for inventing PCR (it made the Human Genome Project possible), has a fun paper available at his site called: "Conversation With John Bardeen." Bardeen was the guy who invented the transistor, for which he was awarded the Noble Prize in physics back in 1956. (He actually won a second Noble during the early 70s for his theories on super-conductivity.) If you know anything about Mullis, he's interested in just about everything. One day in 1987, Mullis was reading about Bardeen when he realized that he was still alive and living in Carbondale, Illinois. He says the following:

On a long shot, I called Carbondale information for his number. It was listed. The phone number of the father of the Electronic Age was listed. The manager of our local Circuit City has an unlisted number. John Bardeen's wife answered and said "Yes, he's sitting here at the table", and put him on the phone without asking who was calling. I told him I wanted to talk to him about the invention of the transistor, was it a convenient time? Was he in a comfortable chair? He said fine, so we talked for about an hour. He never asked me who I was or why I wanted to talk.

I guess his paper won't interest just a whole lot of people, but I thought it was nice. You can read it here: Conversation With John Bardeen

You can also see a short documentary on Bardeen here: