After a few ciders during a viewing of the hour long ‘A Universe From Nothing’ by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009 on the curiosities of cosmology at a Richard Dawking Foundation event, I return to the the glorious creations of John Boswell (aka melodysheep on YouTube), who edited, vocoded and accompanied various video clips on the science of everything, primarily featuring Carl Sagan, into a couple of amazing music videos that fill me with awe and make me wonder so as to how anyone can believe in mysticism when science can, while explaining so so much, offer so many other opportunities in the realm of unknowns to be explored and explained.

• Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)
• Symphony of Science – ‘We Are All Connected’ (ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye)

In saying that, it’s not that schools of thought based in mysticism don’t have insights and perhaps truths to tell, whether it be from morality to psychology or sociology, but, if you’re going to argue towards a system being right or wrong, you have to understand that a) a system isn’t greater than the sum of it’s parts and b) other systems may have rationales better than others and thus your own ’system’ is the wrong kind of paradigm to think of ideas as, and thus be willing to factor in alternative arguments and potentially even “hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted” and start from afresh to get closer to a ‘truth’ of a matter before declaring you’re on the right path to a fundamental knowledge of something. If you don’t understand the arguments, go back and see what they are based on. Be radical. It’s not like that word doesn’t have it’s etymological root for nowt.

n.b. the paragraph above is half-baked and requiring of a sober milky to write a proper essay on it at some point, maybe.

p.s. some comments on the videos

I can now forgive They Might Be Giants for their earlier misleading comments.

elevated - a stunning 4 kilobyte demo released in April of this year. I wish this computer could play HD video. 4 friggin K! The app uses Perlin noise procedural textures (a more detailed explanation here) among other things to get it that small.

Also from April, Excelence, done in Excel.

And, again, the fantastically psychedelic palindromeda suger, not for epileptics. The switchback occurs at 2:00.

That and a couple of my older favourites by tpolm; the sorrowful Staying Pictures and the eerie tomthumb.

Open source SingStar clone + some of these + maybe those + requisite hard drive space = wai nice!