The World... an Addendum

Oh ja, on the same August 19th broad cast of The World (look here), there is a great little feature on industrial music in China. It's really worth a listen, but they don't have a specific excerpt of that section, so click on this and skip ahead to 45'30"



 The band is called White and their producer just happens to be the legendary Blixa Bargeld (Just to put legendary into perspective: Bargeld is German for Cash, although Blixa is hardly as common as Johnny). He is one of the fathers of industrial music through the band Einstürzende Neubauten (roughly: collapsed new-built). You may be familiar with his name because he is also one of the legendary Bad Seeds backing Nick Cave. He also has solo material but I'm not familiar with it. Also he does some pretty crazy stuff. Here he is in some commercials for a German hardware shop, he's basically reading the random bits in their flyer:

Welcome to advertising in Germany.

Teaching Science in Canada

The Globe and Mail reports in Why science class has become a 'daunting slog'.

The World... it Really is That Good.

Just to be clear, The World, a daily one-hour "global perspective for an American audience" is probably the best thing going in terms of radio magazine/news right now. Take, for example August 19th, 2009.

In a single episode The World not only questions the significance of female politicians in Iran, giving a much needed Iranian female perspective...



...but has two excellent pieces of gay rights issues. One is a discussion of the only group fighting for gay rights in the arab world, in Beirut.



That is followed by a brief discussion of honouring the mistreated Alan Turing, the father of modern computing who was instrumental in cracking the nazi enigma code during WWII.

German Graphic Design, The Future of

I just found out about a neu book on German graphic designers over at CR Blog. (scroll past the horrendous goalkeepers diary to Neuland).

The book sets out to map the landscape of German graphic design - or rather, more specifically, to look at emerging, young graphic design talent in Germany. Not only does the book showcase work by a selection of 50 designers and studios, but it looks at where they are based, where the founders of the studios studied - and asks of each of them "what does it mean to you to be German and a designer?"

Oddly enough it's from a Barcelona-based publisher, ACTAR (check out their website for lots of other interesting projects). And even more curiously, it's edited and designed by a Barcelona-based design group, TwoPoints.NET. I'm always interested in these large compilations of designers, but never enough to actually buy them. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to get an outsiders perspective on German design.

SciComm Blog Roll, pt 1

Logan Banadyga: Science Club

SciComm, Day 1

I'm almost done the first day of the 2009 Banff SciComm course. There are some seriously smart people in this group! The participants range from senior PhD students, to professors, to people who have been producing original content at science centers for over 20 years. Amazing! And it's soooooo nice to be back in Banff.

Quote of the day: "Who is your who?" (Linda Campbell)