Music Lessons Were Never Like this...

I am the musically inept member of my family. My wife and children can all play instruments, which I am incapable of doing because I seem to have retarded neurons connecting my brain to my hands, so I know what I'm supposed to do, just cannot do it fast enough. Insteas I get by with having a tolerable singing voice.

But music classes at school were never like this experiment on the ubiquity of the pentatonic scale conducted at the World Science Festival by Bobby McFerrin. It was originally posted by Tortoise of Dissent over the summer, but I was too busy enjoying myself to notice it then, and just incase you were too, here it is...

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Cheers

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A Woman of no Distinction

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We were driving back from school last week, talking about books that we had been reading and my younger son, Ciaran, asked me "Where is Babylon?" I have to confess that my history is better than my geography, and I said that it no longer exists as an inhabited city, but its ruins were to the north west of the current capital of Iraq, Baghdad. When I checked however, I discovered that it is actually about 50 miles south of Baghdad and the modern town is the administrative centre of the province of Babil... But just as the modern city is but a shadow of the historic capital of 2 ancient empires, first under Hammurabi in the 18th century BCE and then the "Neo-Babylonian" empire (under Nebuchadnezzar etc) in the 6th century BCE, so the earthly Babylonian empire/s was/were fleeting in comparison to the enduring metaphorical idea of Babylon. The original Empire under Hammurabi was probably the ultimate origin of some of the early Biblical stories, including the &quo

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