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Maths Comedy Double

Comedy double, Culture, Merkins..., Video
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Well, triple, actually. What the hell, quadruple. Quintuple even. I may be a little bit nerdy, but I still can’t add up.

First up, much obliged to the endless thread at Pharyngula for this clip, in which Abbott and Costello prove the fungibility of numbers:

Just to prove I’m down with the kids, some rap. First, quadratic equations:

Lamar Queen is a rapping 8th grade math teacher in Los Angeles:

Mr Purdy does the Dance of The Parallel Lines:


Why didn’t I ever have maths teachers like those two?

Sing it, nerd girl! Baby got back math:

But let’s not let the Merkins have all the maths glory.

I will derive, hey hey…wish he’d done it in the sparkly boobtube and rollerskates, though:


Go Aussies, with Pythagoras’ Theorem, TTTO Waltzing Matilda:

Bonus podcast link:

From the Mark Steel Lecture Series on the BBC here’s his lecture on Isaac Newton. 30 minutes of sciencey hilariousness.

Must we imitate everything in US politics?

Funny, UK elections, Video
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You thought the McCain girls were bad enough, but the Cameron girls beat everything… Not quite meant to be taken serious though.



Horrible thought. Everything that happens in the US, politics wise shows up in the UK about two-five years later and in the Netherlands two to five years after that. Does this mean that in the next election after this one we might just see the Balkenende girls?

Glad to be Gay

GLBT rights, Music, Video
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What with Tory prominents like Chris Grayling making noises about understanding wanting to keep the poofters out of good Christian homes again, is there a better time to launch a site devoted to the first political gay pop song? As the site puts it

Glad To Be Gay is unusual for being a precise and prominent song about an issue that simply had no precedent. Apart from a few gay activists nobody had heard a gay song before, let alone one as militant and furious. Tom Robinson put one in the top 20 and into the mind of the straight public.

It had been written a year earlier, to be performed as a one-off at London’s 1976 Gay Pride rally. It was a bitter, snarling assault on the attitude of gay people who’d turn up to gay events wearing the ‘glad to be gay’ badges then in circulation, yet take them off in public, try to pass for straight at home and in the workplace. It accused them of tacitly accepting repression rife in the media, and out on the streets from thugs and the police.

Once it was played to a wider audience with punk pioneers the Tom Robinson Band, it became an anthem of combative pride. Audiences largely composed of straights would sing along in solidarity with gusto.

[…]

It’s hoped that this will balance the scales a little – a songwriter as socially aware and politically forthright as Robinson deserves to be remembered for more than 2-4-6-8 Motorway.

Beyond that, it’s not just about musical history and insight into the creative process. It’s social and political history too.

Glad To Be Gay was written in a world where people were routinely referred to as ‘self-confessed homosexuals’, the same way you’d talk about murderers and rapists.