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I've Now Heard: John Legend and The Roots Covering Arcade Fire

John Legend and The Roots are collaborating on things!   They covered an Arcade Fire song! IN THE FIRST MINUTE I REALIZED I HAVEN'T HAD ENOUGH COFFEE TODAY OH MY GOD!! 

 

I may sit on the border between "They're Impressive" and "I Think They Want Me To Like Them More Since They're Down With HTML5",  I very much understand that "Wake Up" is more meaningful than our national anthem to most Arcade Fire fans.  But why cover it?!  Just like the stadium-loud delivery of Arcade Fire, the chorus of the cover is the strongest part of the song.  Who wouldn't remember the song of "oooh whoa!  whoa whoa whoa whoa whooooooooa whoa!"?  It's like peanut butter stuck in my ear canals.  But in the verses of the JL&TR cover, John Legend is practically a capella.  Like me, The Roots aren't really into that part of the song, so they silently protest until they can rock out again during the chorus and the middle bridge/breakdown thing.  

But seriously, what can't The Roots and/or John Legend cover?  They're invincible comic-book heroes to most people. They could do Beethoven.  They could do Gaga.  They have already done Fallen.  They could do BIEBER.  If Katy Perry had sang this song as a duet with John Legend and The Roots backing her in the same outfit that she wore on Sesame Street, it would have aired.  

And what band can't cover the Arcade Fire?  Most, actually.  Some fans that I know consider the music of The Arcade Fire a religious experience.  Very few stars could deliver a sermon written by our AF brethren without a global outcry, but I'll admit that the audacity of The Roots and John Legend is inspiring.   Would I enjoy a nice Kelly Clarkson cover of a Greatful Dead song? Yes. Or a nice La Roux rendition of an Eagles song?  Yes.  

And if you think that I'm suggesting Ke$ha as the universal connector on the level of John Legend or The Roots, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.  

Disclaimer: An Arcade Fire fan asked me to write this post after I watched the Roots/Legend video and made that face that people make while drinking orange juice after brushing their teeth.

@angrycatering's first delivery (ever?)

John Legend, The Roots, and Arcade Fire

via www.theatlantic.com

So sad to find out that Ta-Nehisi Coates' commenters are idiots. This is incredible.

"Mom, What's for Dinner?"

Do these three words — what's for dinner' — send a shiver down your spine?

Well, my daughter at age 14 months can only muster "mom," "dada," and "duck," but soon enough I'm sure she'll be asking me that question, too, and I'll want a good answer. Thankfully, a website launches today that provides parents of kids of any age tips to respond to this question with aplomb.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Over at Huffington Post, Anna Lappe introduces Parent Earth, an exciting new project by Nicole Betancourt. Bonus points for the (probably zero!) Hello, TypePad readers who remember Anna Lappe's guest-blogging from June 2004.

James Gosling: There's a lot of cool stuff. I'm all over the map on what's cool. The project I've been helping out on is the control system for an Audi TTS, and that's just indescribable cool. In the enterprise space, things like Cassandra and Voldemort and some of the NoSQL database. I've never got it when it comes to SQL databases. It's like why? Just give me a hash table and a shitload of RAM and I'm happy.

via www.basementcoders.com

Fun interview with James Gosling, the inventor of Java.

via www.parenting.com

The Sabermetric Project and the “Science of Words”

Josh Levin considered something like this back in 2003, in a piece he wrote for Slate. In his article, he asks a simple question: Why doesn’t football have a Bill James?

Aaron Schatz of Football Outsiders answered the question ably, stating that “baseball analysis exists as it does today because Bill James is one of the people who, in American intellectual history, is a force of nature.”

Levin is smart enough to recognize some other obvious reasons as to why baseball analysis has proliferated. Like, for example, that baseball is older, and also that, being a turn-based game, it lends itself more to quantitative analysis.

Still, it’s a fact: especially in the early years of the Abstract, when he was writing and publishing his annual almost entirely by himself, James’ output was incredible. For not only was he doing all that junk on his own, but he was, more or less, inventing a genre of literature.

via www.fangraphs.com

The original PECOTA process, as long-time readers know, was designed by Nate Silver and first offered at Baseball Prospectus when we went to a subscription model in 2003. The basis of the system was groundbreaking for the time: similarity modeling of all possible comparables in baseball history to determine likely future performance, separated into percentile bands. We heard from people who just loved that they could take guys who "they had a feeling about" and kick them up or down the percentile ranges a little, while taking the weighted mean for players they didn't have a feel for. We had some neat graphs on the PECOTA cards which helped break out of the sea-of-tables presentation that was common for player cards of the day. BP staffers and subscribers alike had fun using PECOTA projections to do mean things to their fantasy leagues and predicting, quite seriously, that Nate had a future in PR or politics.

Behind the scenes, the PECOTA process has always been like Von Hayes: large, complex, and full of creaky interactions and pinch points. It started with Clay Davenport and Keith Woolner delivering Nate the data he needed, which took some time to compile after every season. Once Nate got the data, he picked up a case of Red Bull. Then he took that data and built constants and preprocessed the dataset with STATA, which took days for each iteration. He took that output and loaded the results into the heart of PECOTA—a Rube Goldberg contraption of an Excel spreadsheet. He'd finish making his changes to the PECOTA

via www.baseballprospectus.com

This is big news for nerds.

You may have noticed that our Web site looks different. It's prettier, less cluttered, easier on the eyes—it's a delight to click on every page. Meet Jennifer, the Web designer with Tierra Innovation who was crucial to envisioning our redesign. Who better to explain our magical transformation? She recently answered some questions about the site via e-mail.

via www.theparisreview.org

Good interview.

Joan Didion is the Shakespeare of things that don't quite add up. Situations where what's being said and what's being done are at odds and places where the postcard picture hides ugly, painful truths. Her non-fiction is the opposite of easy reading: the sentences uncurl slowly, and sometimes you don't quite know where she's taking a paragraph or a page until the last few words, when suddenly everything stabs into focus.

via www.goodreads.com

Nice book review by my friend Jake Dobkin, who reads quite a lot. I read too. But some people say boys don't read:

Lately, the conversation has taken a turn for the weird, as people, worried about boys' slipping grade-point averages and college-attendance rates (compared to women's), have started to wonder why, if men do in fact like to read, they don't actually buy books—not in the numbers women do. The answer some people have come up with is that it is all book-publishing's fault, because the industry is staffed mostly by women, leading to a lady-lit bias in what gets published.

via www.newyorker.com