Indian classical music

And following up from Shakti, here are three videos to introduce you to the beauty of Indian classical music - something I have unfortunately not covered so far in my posts on music. African music, jazz, blues... but no Indian classical music so far!

L. Shankar was part of Shakti, but his brother, L. Subramaniam is eminently renowned as a master violinist of arguably even greater repute. First up, a video from a recent performance in April 2008



Here's the internationally renowned (thanks to association with George Harrison and the Beatles) sitar player, Ravi Shankar (father of Norah Jones)



and here's Ravi Shanker introducing the tabla maestro, Ustad Allah Rakha on what appears to be a French program in the 1970s.



There may be other good videos featuring the famed father-son tabla maestros Allah Rakha and Zakir Hussain -- but this video is the best that I found on youtube and will serve for illustrative purposes of what the tabla maestros can achieve in jugalbandhis. Also see this hour long feature featuring Hariprasad Chaurasia on the flute and Zakir Hussain on the tabla. (I have had the pleasure of seeing both of them live in the 1990s.)

Shakti

And now a change in flavor from Miles Davis's cool jazz*...

..hear this amazing music from the band, Shakti playing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976.





* Though there is a link .... John McLaughlin was one of the musicians in Bitches Brew and was part of the group Shakti, where he played with 3 famous Indian musicians - L. Shankar (violin), Zakir Hussain (tabla), Thetakudi Harihara Vinayakram (ghatam).

Fewer chords but infinite possibilities

Yesterday, on WGBH's evening jazz program, I heard an excerpt of the track Fisherman, Strawberry and Devil Crab from the Porgy and Bess album by Miles Davis . Sublime!

The album features arrangements by Davis and collaborator Gil Evans from George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess. The album was recorded in four sessions on July 22, July 29, August 4 and August 18 in 1958 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York City.

You can listen to the track via Rhapsody or via Last.fm.

Here's couple other great tracks by The Miles Davis quintet (Miles, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams) from 1967.

'Round midnight


I fall in love too easily


I love the above two tracks much more than the tracks (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) from his much acclaimed album from 1969- Bitches Brew. (I just realized that Teo Macero, who died earlier this year in February, produced Bitches Brew and Miles Davis's famous album Kind of Blue as well as another all-time great Jazz album - Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quintet, which includes what is arguably my favorite jazz track - Take Five, which I had linked to in my first ever post featuring music.

The title comes from something Miles said about the Porgy & Bess album:

When Gil wrote the arrangement of "I Loves You, Porgy," he only wrote a scale for me... gives you a lot more freedom and space to hear things... fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them. Classical composers have been writing this way for years, but jazz musicians seldom have.

Know your insects

An ant's social status

Whether an ant becomes a dominant queen or a lowly worker is determined by both nature and nurture, it turns out. A new study found that an ant's social status in its colony depends both on its genetic inheritance and the food it eats when it is young.

Earlier: Why ants rule.

No point to this post. Its not even blog-worthy perhaps. What can I say! Obviously, I'm just not as busy as an ant. Oh -- the phrase is 'busy as a bee', you say? Oh well -- different species, same order, wiki enlightens. (Wiki has a whole lot more information on ants, if they interest you!)

(Un)Happiness dissected and quantified

I have blogged about happiness a few times before -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 -- but it is amazing how many have tried to analyze, dissect, and quantify happiness, a state of being, in the last few years.

In the last few decades, people have tried to quantify happiness through Felicific calculus and indexing the happiness levels and quality of life in various countries through the Human Development Index and the Well-Being Index.

In the last couple years, the Freakanomics blog has had a number of 'experts' on the subject further dissecting data from these indices and from other surveys. I'll link only to the 2008 posts here; 2007 had its own share of posts that explored the link worldwide between Health, Wealth and Happiness!

In April-May this year, Arthur Brooks, author of the recent book, Gross National Happiness, caught a lot of attention with his opinion that Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals, arrived at from his analysis of several sources of non-partisan survey data. In subsequent posts he explored the reasons for this large, persistent “happiness gap” favored the political right viz. religion* and where d view matters. Apparently, even Princeton professor Daniel Kahneman, who has pioneered happiness measurement techniques, thinks that conservatives think the world is fairer than liberals do, and this makes them happy.

In a fourth piece, instead of bucketing people into liberal-vs-conservatives, Brooks looks at moderates vs. people on the extremes. The result of his analysis may surprise you.

A happiness edge enjoyed by the extremes persists even if we control for the other relevant forces like income, education, race, religion, and so on.

In a fifth post, he explored the reasons why zealots are happier than people with moderate views!

To review, then: Extremists may be the happiest people on both the left and right. But as a general rule, they don’t like you — unless you agree with them.

Being by no means extreme in any of my viewpoints, I now know the source of my apparent discontent. :) More seriously, I think this goes back to the paper I just blogged about and has to do with being content and ignorant in our biases and our perceptions of others but being supremely confident and arrogant about ourselves. If that is what it takes to be happy, no wonder I am anything but.

There has also been a series of articles on the subject by Justin Wolfers but I do not have the time right now to read them all - so will just link to them here, if any one is interested.

Happiness Inequality #3: Putting It All Together
Happiness Inequality #2: Differences Between Groups
Happiness Inequality #1: The Facts
The Economics of Happiness, Part 6: Delving Into Subjective Well-Being
The Economics of Happiness, Part 5: Will Raising the Incomes of All Raise the Happiness of All?
The Economics of Happiness, Part 4: Are Rich People Happier than Poor People?
The Economics of Happiness, Part 3: Historical Evidence
The Economics of Happiness, Part 2: Are Rich Countries Happier than Poor Countries?
The Economics of Happiness, Part 1: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox

Wolfers's recent research with Betsey Stevenson has been recently published as a journal paper, Happiness Inequality in the United States, and is downloadable here. The paper has been summarized here. (Justin and Betsey, who happen to be partners and are both economists at Wharton, have also studied and analyzed the institution of marriage through the lens of economics. You can read some of their Freakanomics posts on the subject, if interested. Happiness of married vs. unmarried people is a whole other topic, which I am not interested in getting into here.)

-
* On a related note, I found this in comments section of a post at Econlog. :)

"atheists are disproportionately rich and educated, have higher intelligence, and are overrepresented among elites."

Aah...nice to know. I'm disproportionately rich and educated, very intelligent, elitist...and unhappy! ;)

Update: Forget everything I wrote about in this post so far. I just read something that has one sentence that probably is all we need to know about happiness.
Seth Godin writes about destroying happiness:

A journalist asked me, Most people have a better standard of living today than Louis XIV did in his day. So why are so many people unhappy?

What you have doesn't make you unhappy. What you want does.

And want is created by us, the marketers.

Marketers trying to grow market share will always work to make their non-customers unhappy. It's interesting to note that marketers trying to maintain market share have a lot of work to do in reminding us that we're happy.

My post is not to highlight the unique way Seth Godin categorizes marketers but to highlight the italicized sentence (his emphasis) about what makes us (un)happy and what does not. It sounds cliched but actually encompasses a deep truism that many of us tacitly understand but likely find very hard to utilize in the way we live our lives.

Am I as Biased as You?

Seems elementary and cliched but there is a truism here. Emily Pronin, in a paper in the prestigious Science magazine in May this year, writes about how people see themselves differently from how they see others.

They are immersed in their own sensations, emotions, and cognitions at the same time that their experience of others is dominated by what can be observed externally. This basic asymmetry has broad consequences. It leads people to judge themselves and their own behavior differently from how they judge others and those others' behavior. Often, those differences produce disagreement and conflict. Understanding the psychological basis of those differences may help mitigate some of their negative effects.

You can read the above paper as well as many of her other related papers through her website.

Lightning Bolt

Twenty meters from the finish line, his celebration began. He relaxed his arms, looked toward the crowd and slapped his chest. And despite those theatrics, he still covered 100 meters faster than any man ever has.

Little wonder then that Usain Bolt is celebrating his country's first ever gold medal.

He was dancing before the race even began.

Shimmying in front of the starting blocks, Bolt struck a pose during pre-race introductions as if the race was over before it started. Turns out it was, and Bolt had post-race entertainment planned for the enthralled sellout crowd of 91,000.

It took him fewer than 10 seconds to run 100 meters but at least 10 minutes to complete his victory lap. He pulled off his gold spikes and held them aloft, wrapped himself in a Jamaican flag and clowned as if he were on stage at a karaoke bar rather than on the biggest stage of the Olympics.

“I like to have fun,’’ he explained.

Munching on a post-race snack during a press conference, Bolt said there would be plenty of time to test his limits and lower the world record. That’s the most mind-boggling part about it – what might come next.

And here is what he had to say when asked how fast he could have run if he had not eased up:

“I didn’t come here to run the world record because I am the world-record holder,’’ he said. “I came here to win.’’

Yah maaan! Came here for the gold. Got the gold. And how!

Unfortunately, thanks to an email from a friend, I knew the result of the 100m finals before I just saw it on NBC. I had seen Bolt bolt ahead of every one in the heat yesterday, casually looking right-and-left as he relaxed after the first 60m or so and easily winding up first. Unbelievable that he relaxes once again with 15-20m to go and yet beats the world record again -- finishing at an unbelievably fast 9.69, with the silver and bronze medalists coming way behind at 9.89 and 9.91! This has to be the most dominating 100m run in years and should make the updated list of the top 50 greatest Olympic moments along with a few of Phelps's races!

I can't wait for the 200m finals now. Here's Bolt in the 200m earlier this year - the lead he has on others is almost as good as Johnson's 200m in 1996. And though NBC won't make available the 100m finals from Beijing any time soon, you can see Bolt setting the 100m record in May this year.