The Civil Service and the Financial Sector have been playing footsie again (as they always do), this time resulting in the allowing of gross over-credit margins in public utility institutions, in order to finance gross over-consumption, naturally resulting in the inevitable collapse of a bubble, per the normal Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds (1841). And as usual, the Prime Minister is getting blamed for it.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight we have a special off-schedule Budget ’09 show. And tonight’s 64 followed by some number of zeroes question is: where before have we seen the statists and the corporatists band together to deal from the bottom of the deck, effectively forcing the Prime Minister to play a bad hand in favour of the oligarchists? Well, obviously, and here for your delectation: in the A Conflict of Interest, II, III, IV episode of Yes Prime Minister (1987, 1/2 hour).

So happy Budget Day, everyone, and now I’m going to go into an acoustically isolated chamber, in order to prevent my hearing from being damaged by the screeching of most everyone’s fingernails on the blackboards (on all sides of the aisle) after this budget is pronounced. Because this pseudo-crisis too shall pass, and I’ll still need my hearing after that.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Sunday night classical music show, here are Murray Perahia and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performing the Finale of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s Piano Concerto No.21, James Levine conducting (6:42).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Saturday night distinguished lecture, documentary & interview series, here is David Elieser Deutsch, Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Center for Quantum Computation, Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, presenting his talk On The Fabric of Reality (2005, 19:46).

In our previous shows in this series, we took a look at physics at the largest scale and at the smallest scale. In tonight’s talk, David takes a look at the relationship between the largest scales and the vast emptiness at those scales, the smallest scales and the non-emptiness at those scales, and our relationship to those scales, as cognitive beings, thus providing us with our turning point from matters metaphysical to matters epistemological, to humans, and to the matter of the inevitability of problems v. the matter of the solving of problems.

One of my favourite parts of this talk is where David says:

“Now, the first of those two things that everyone knows, is kind of saying that we’re at a very untypical place, uniquely suited and so on, and the second one is saying that we’re at a typical place, and especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by, and to inform your life decisions, then they seem, a little bit, to conflict with each other.

“But that doesn’t prevent them from both being completely false. And they are.”

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Friday night old-time radio crime-detective show, here is The Forgetful Murderer episode from the Casebook of Gregory Hood, brought to you by Petry fine wines, perfect for pot-roast and meat-loaf (1946, 28:19, streamed MP3).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Thursday night wild-card show, here is Murray Head performing One Night in Bangkok from the musical Chess (1984, 4:19).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Welcome to the Wednesday edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your amusement, we present Robbie Fulks singing Cigarette State.
The thread is open for your Reader Tips.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Tuesday night vintage media show and to all those who hope that the President of the United States of America, whomever he or she may be (or in this case, Mr. Obama), won’t be lead in a diabolical direction, here is the silent film version of Faust as directed by F. W. Murnau (1926, 1¾ hours, and there is an English “closed caption” button to the lower right of the viewing window).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Monday night jazz show, here courtesy of mail from listener Porter are Billie Holiday and The Sound Of Jazz All-Stars performing My Man, He Don’t Love Me (1957, 7:42).

Love is like a faucet,
It turns off and on.
Sometimes when you think it’s on, baby,
It has turned off and gone.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Sunday night classical music show, here are the Canadian Brass performing Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 538 (8:14).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Saturday night distinguished lecture, documentary & interview series, here is Kim Greist, professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego, presenting his talk The Mystery of Empty Space (42:54, 2002 I’m guessing).

In last week’s show we started this series with a look at existence on the largest scale. On the other hand, what is the smallest scale that pervades all things, including emptiness itself? In tonight’s talk, Kim takes a look at what exists in nothing: introducing particle physics, the standard model, and the fascinating notion that the ten dimensions of string theory are related to the standard three dimensions of space, multiplied by the three generations of quarks, plus time.

And here’s a quick heads-up for those who may be concerned that the SDA LNR distinguished lecture, documentary & interview series is going to be a long sequence of (admittedly, so far) rather difficult physics professors: despair not, for next week we’ll put last week’s and this week’s shows together with a not-at-all-difficult physics professor to produce humans and epistemology, after which we can expect physics professors to show up rather more rarely. But I gotta’ start somewhere !-)

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Friday night old-time radio crime-detective show, here is the Masquerade Party episode of Crime and Peter Chambers (1954, 22:23, 5.1 MB, MP3).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Thursday night wild-card show, here is a video of Ansgarr in The First IT Professional at Work (2:37).

Update: some commenters have reported problems with the above link, if you experience same you may wish to try this alternative recording of the same content.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening, EBD here, welcome to the Wednesday edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, a real treat for SDA opera buffs: we present Der Holle Rache, aka the Queen of the Night’s Vengeance Aria, from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
Opera fans typically love to while away their evenings debating which performer’s version of any given aria is the best one, so tonight we give you two quite different versions of the Queen of the Night Aria, one by French Coloratura Natalie Dessay and one by Florence Foster Jenkins so that SDA readers may decide for themselves which version is best for them. Feel free to discuss the matter, just not in the thread. If you feel it necessary to comment, remember that musical preferences are strictly a matter of taste, so please avoid heated arguments, profanity and all-caps. In my personal opinion, both versions of the aria are exemplary in their own way.
So, grab your opera glasses and work up a persistent scratchy cough, we’re off: first, Der Holle Rache as sung by French coloratura Natalie Dessay, and then by the remarkable Florence Foster Jenkins.
The thread is open for your reader tips.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, we have a special presentation in honour of Tuesday’s results. Dedicated to the lovely and gracious Miss Kate McMillan, here is Mr. Louis Armstrong performing Hello Dolly (2:29, live). And now, if y’all will very much forgive me:

Hello, Katee. This is Vitruvius, Katee.
It’s so nice to see you back where you belong.
You’re lookin’ swell, Katee; I can tell, Katee:
You keep glowin’, still crowin’, you’re still goin’ strong.

I feel the room swayin’, while the band’s playin’,
One of our old favourite songs from way back when.
So: take her wrap, fellas, find her an empty lap, fellas,
Katee’ll never go away, oh yeah.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Monday night jazz show, here are Nat King Cole, Mel Torme, and June Christy performing How High The Moon (3:05). And, yep, that’s Nat on piana and Mel on drums. You saw it here first, on SDA Late Nite Radio.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Sunday night show, here is a special presentation of Here it Comes (4:20), as performed by the Manning Chorus, from the National Geographic’s series “Monster Moves”.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Plato & Aristotle

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio and to our new Saturday night Distinguished Lecture, Documentary & Interview series. To provide an overall structure for these shows, at least for the next several months, we’re going to start with the first part of philosophy: metaphysics, that is to say, what exists? From the largest to the smallest, from empty to infinity, what is the fundamental reality we exist in? These questions address the undergirding upon which all else rests, so let’s take a look at some of them first. Then we intend to head toward epistemology and axiology, and eventually politics and art, though there may be deviations from time to time.

Before we get started with tonight’s show, if you are not already familiar with the Hubble telescope’s ultra-deep-field images of galaxies, which Richard refers to near the beginning of his talk below, you may wish to first watch this video: The Most Important Image Ever Taken (6:13). In this video, we find that a little tiny portion of the sky, that until these images we thought was dark, actually contains on the order of ten thousand galaxies (of the roughly hundred billion galaxies that we think exist, each with on the order of a hundred billion stars, which works out to about 10²² stars in total, for those of you keeping score at home).

So now, tonight, without further ado, for your delectation, here is Dr. Richard E. Rothschild‘s excellent talk: The Universe is Rated “R” for Violence (46:03), in which he, a professor of physics at the University of California in San Diego, discusses the changes that are happening on huge scales within known existence, of which neutron-star thermonuclear flash-burning is perhaps my favourite. And you may well say, but Vitruvius, metaphysics is above or beyond physics, so why are we doing physics tonight? Well, it’s because I disagree with that taxonomy. I think that meta-foo includes foo. I don’t want to argue about it, if you don’t agree, just ignore me and watch the videos, already.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Friday night old-time radio crime-detective show, here is the Music To Die By episode of Casey, Crime Photographer (1948, MP3, 6.6 MB, 28:36), brought to you by the Anchor Hocking Glass Corporation. Interestingly, perhaps, the last word in the show, before station identification, is Canada.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Thursday night wild-card show, here are Ian Dury and The Blockheads performing Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3 (1979, 4:46).

Nota Bene: I’m modifying the SDA LNR schedule slightly, as follows. Firstly, starting last week, Saturday night will, at least for the next some months, now be our Distinguished Lecture, Documentary & Interview show. Secondly, our old Saturday night contemporary music show has been merged into our Thursday night wild-card show (which already contains country, folk, comedy, and miscellanea), thus explaining tonight’s show. Our other shows remain as currently scheduled: Sunday is classical music, Monday is jazz, Tuesday is vintage music, Wednesday is DJ EBD, and Friday is old-time radio.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening, welcome to SDA Late Night Radio.
On New Year’s Day, after more than a thousand cars were set on fire in France, mostly in the, how you say, banlieues, French security forces described the previous evening as having been ‘rather calm’ and ‘without major incident.'” Oui, tout va tres bien, tres bien, cela n’est rien.
Tonight, for your delectation, we present a musical tribute to the certain je ne sais quoi that has had a huge effect on Canadian politics, particularly on our government contracting….procedures. I am referring, of course, to the Gallic shrug. So without further ado, here’s Ray Ventura et ses Collegiens performing Tout Va Tres Bien, Madame La Marquise.