Monthly Archives: March 2020

World Piano Day: Deutsche Grammophon’s virtual festival

COVID ravages the world. America bails out Boeing, Wall Street, and if all goes to plan, assorted chunks of 45’s cancerous financial empire. Meanwhile, Germany rolls out support to its artists and musicians, a nod to what that nation holds dear and what it finds worth defending.

In honor of a plague-affected World Piano Day, the German record label Deutsche Grammophon virtually brings together a number of celebrated pianists to help us remember that our mostly corrupt, degraded, and base species nevertheless has had moments of glory.

Artists include Maria João Pires 0:00 Víkingur Ólafsson 21:15 Joep Beving 40:38 Rudolf Buchbinder 01:05:39 Seong-Jin Cho 01:25:24 Jan Lisiecki 01:44:02 Kit Armstrong 02:14:19 Simon Ghraichy 02:46:18 Evgeny Kissin 03:17:43 Daniil Trifonov 03:26:00.

Update 3/31/20: Well, so much for DG’s benevolence.  The video has been marked Private.

 

COVID’s Metamorphoses: RCSB Coronavirus resources

The CDC and WHO are giving us good advice on what do in this Plague Year.  The Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) is showing us the molecule causing the havoc.  Check out the structures of the various flavors of Coronavirus at The Protein Database (PDB).  Click on the images, most of which will go to detailed pages including 3D models that can be spun in the browser.  Knowledge will be power in dealing with this beast and let’s offer thanks to the research groups who took the lead in characterizing it which must have come at considerable risk to themselves.  When it mutates, and it will, they and others will undoubtedly don their capes and do the measurements again.

It is damnably, horrifyingly beautiful in David Goodsell’s artistic rendering of it infecting a lung:

Acknowledgement: Illustration by David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank; doi: 10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-019

 

License: CC-BY-4.0
Image used unmodified and there is no endorsement from or by the artist

Market plunges: Winthorpe and Valentine held for questioning

Be it ever so crumbly, there’s no place like Rome” said Bugs Bunny and was he ever correct.  In the face of a real problem, our farcical economy is exposed once again as a house of straw and sticks on quicksand with vultures above and weasels beneath.  And I apologize to vultures and weasels everywhere.

Youtube Channel: wKw