Let us blaze new trails [Letters of note]

Another classic letter to the bosses: Bill Bernbach persuading his employers to stick to their strengths.

I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance, that we’re going to follow history instead of making it, that we’re going to be drowned by superficialities instead of buoyed up by solid fundamentals.

How many people can play the piano at once? [Video]

CDZA, featuring Damian Sim, Erika Dohi, Michael Thurber, Allan Mednard, and Mark Johnson conceived, rehearsed & performed this Daft Punk cover on the piano in under one hour.
The Piano Guys play the piano differently!

Then watch this incredible duet on the guitar, performed at the Brazilian Music Institute, team playing at its exceptional best. Gets even better with this next quartet.

I went overboard there, didn’t I?

Known flying objects in an MRI [Article, photos]

You may not think that the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner can be dangerous. How about you have a look at the documented evidence to prove otherwise?

Once you’ve been in the MRI field for any length of time, you start hearing all of the various horror stories about thing that have flown into a scanner. Often, newcomers don’t take the real danger of flying objects seriously until they witness an oxygen tank or gurney flying into a magnet themselves.

Cesaria Evora: Cape Verde’s voice of hope [Music]

Listen to Sodade first. Then make up your mind if you want to listen to more (I promise you will!). A  HeadButler share (he interviewed her about 10 years ago)

It wasn’t until her 50s that she became the darling of the world-music crowd. She still performed shoeless, to express her solidarity with her impoverished countrymen. She still stopped singing in mid-concert to sit at a small table and smoke a cigarette. And she never veered from the music she’d made for decades; the last thing on her mind, it seemed, was mass success

Plutocracy invading the developing world [Article]

Few people are aware of the scale of the protests in Brazil. Signs such as these are common:

 “We shouldn’t be spending public money on stadiums. We don’t want the Cup. We want education, hospitals, a better life for our children.”

The mainstream media calls these protests against corruption, but Dave Zirin, writing in Common Dreams, has this to say:

 This isn’t a movement against [corruption in] sports. It’s against the use of sports as a neoliberal Trojan horse. It’s a movement against sports as a cudgel of austerity. 

Trusting Microsoft? How can anyone? [Article]

If you or your company uses Microsoft products, have a read through Glyn Moody’s article, in the wake of allegations that several companies in the US are complicit in helping the US government spy on the communications of people around the world.

Companies buy Microsoft products for many reasons, but they all assume that the company is doing its best to protect them. The latest revelations shows that is a false assumption: Microsoft consciously and regularly passes on information about how to break into its products to US agencies. What happens to that information thereafter is, of course, a secret. Not because of “terrorism”, but because almost certainly illegal attacks are being made against countries outside the US, and their companies.

Which is one of the other reasons why Bruce Schneir asks the question whether the US has started an Internet war.

Karzai, US, Taliban & Qatar: An interesting suggestion [Article]

Amid news that Hamid Karzai scuttled the planned meetings between the US & Taliban in Qatar (!), Richard Stallman has a radical idea for another Afghan problem:

The US should have armed Afghan women. Who knows what sort of gun a woman has under her burqa, and if a woman kills a talib, there will be no way to identify her afterward. Eventually the Taliban would be forced to order women not to wear burqas.