I recently came across Christian Ronig, a German guy who seems to love rebetika songs, i.e. Greek songs from 2 generations ago. He has translated and modified some of them to a different style, which still captures the original essense. It is quite interesting to see what a person with completely different influences sees in a different culture. I think he does a great job.

He has an album named “Greece is mine”, here is one of the songs (morning in minor). Youtube has some more which might brighten your day.

Here is an interesting video on how editing can change a movie.

It is all on the first starwars movie, the first cut of which was much worse than the final product, and was saved by editing. This is a very useful 20 min video explaining pacing, audience engagement and storytelling in general.

I spent some time collecting some of my nicer photos into a portfolio, organised by theme.

Have a look.

Robot sumo fights are a thing!

An interesting blend of tradition and technology. Notice the video is in real time.

I got talking with a geology student recently, and we could not help not bringing up one of the subjects that bring together biology and geology: mass extinctions. So here is some information in case you ever need to impress a geology student, or plan the next extinction.

There have been 6 mass extinctions. The 5 recent ones involved multicellular life. I count them as 6 because there was an earlier major one involving the production of oxygen. Yes, oxygen was not on Earth since the beginning.

This is all relevant to the snowball earth theory, the idea that the Earth was completely covered by ice in the past. Turns out it might have happened during the mass atmospheric oxygenation event, but there are also other possible dates, all before multicellular organisms evolved. Here is plenty of information about it, a bit long but the visuals on the Earth periods over time along are worth the visit.

If you can survive more reading, here is the wikipedia page on the mass extinctions, where the mass oxygenation is not considered a mass extinction.

Here is an interesting video on the economics of airline class.

In summary, the original airline tickets cost as much as the first class of today. The main reason there are economy tickets today is that there is not enough demand for business class tickets to fill a plane.