Which Song?

I agreed to dance in a May belly dance show and have been thinking about the music I want to use. Some dancers would wait until a couple weeks before the show to think about this, but I need a longer lead time to feel prepared. In dance as in life, some people are about improv and some people are about choreography. I am getting more comfortable with improv (in dance as in life) but I know myself: I am about choreography. So I want to spend some time working with my music, and because I have to fit it in among a whole lot of other things, I need to settle on music as soon as I can.

There are three songs I am considering. I sure would be pleased if you would leave a vote for your favorite in the comments.

1. Wienak (Bellyhouse Remix)
2. Al Eih
3. Habibi Min Zaman

National Hip Hop Political Convention

Yesterday I was introduced to the National Hip Hop Political Convention. All I know is what I picked up with a quick look around the internet, but I love the idea of using music to reach out and engage people politically – especially a population that probably doesn’t see much evidence that its issues and concerns are a priority for those in power.

I listen to some hip hop and rap, although what I run across and listen to is mostly mainstream. The lyrics are usually not political or inspiring, even if they are, sometimes, quite clever (though also, sometimes, a bit offensive). Often I find I like the song in spite of the stupid nasty lyrics. Case in point – Get Buck In Here, which is currently receiving airplay on the local hip hop/rap station. The lyrics are awful (although I think “one night scandal” is sort of clever) but I like it anyway.

Here’s a song I like and hadn’t heard in quite awhile but recently rediscovered. The lyrics aren’t all nasty, which makes it one of a few I can play when my kids are around.

I Wish (Skee-lo)

Texas AG’s Health Care Proposal

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott wants Texas to provide a health insurance program for children in the child support system. The lovely and talented Anne Dunkelberg, whom I trust in all things health care related, suggests that we instead allow those families to buy into the state’s existing CHIP program.

Eye on Williamson thinks Abbot is suggesting a separate system rather than folding those kids into CHIP because he is pandering to insurance companies and because Republicans don’t want to encourage anything that might get us closer to a single payer system.

Also found via Off The Kuff, Vince makes no bones about what he thinks Abbott’s motivation for this proposal is.

I would be interested to know who in the AG’s office developed his proposal as well as who, within and outside the AG’s office, was consulted in the process of developing the proposal. Did Abbot’s staff discuss the idea with the Health and Human Services Commission? With leaders of the House and Senate committees that deal with health insurance? With the Governor’s office? With insurance company or Texas Association of Health Plans representatives? With consumer advocates? While my knee jerks in the same direction as does Eye on Williamson’s, I would like to know more about how Abbott’s proposal was developed before I draw a conclusion. I also wonder whether Abbot initially considered using CHIP as a vehicle for covering these kids and, if not, whether he is considering it now that the idea has been suggested.

Boltzmann Brains (And The Limits Of Mine)

Reading this is like listening to Charlie Brown’s teacher:

The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

 

Alan Guth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who agrees this overabundance is absurd, pointed out that some calculations result in an infinite number of free-floating brains for every normal brain, making it “infinitely unlikely for us to be normal brains.” Welcome to what physicists call the Boltzmann brain problem, named after the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who suggested the mechanism by which such fluctuations could happen in a gas or in the universe. Cosmologists also refer to them as “freaky observers,” in contrast to regular or “ordered” observers of the cosmos like ourselves. Cosmologists are desperate to eliminate these freaks from their theories, but so far they can’t even agree on how or even on whether they are making any progress.

The award for understatement goes to the scientist who said “People are not prepared for this discussion.” That was the only sentence in the entire article I could get my head around.