Posts from — February 2009

Just days after re-initiating my emusic account, and I’ve already used everything up.

Pierce Pettis-That Kind of Love

Bon Iver-Blood Bank

My favorite artists’ tracks from the Dark Was the Night compilation. I intend to get the rest, but didn’t have the downloads for it this month. Here are the songs I got…

• Feist + Ben Gibbard-Train Song
• The National-So Far Around the Bend
• The Decemberists-Sleepless
• Iron & Wine-Die
• Sufjan Stevens-You Are the Blood
• Arcade Fire-Lenin
• Beirut-Mimizan
• Stuart Murdoch-Another Saturday

So that polishes off my 50 downloads. Sign up to get 50 free downloads yourself!

It’s been quite a while since I’ve listed any of my emusic downloads. Part of that was just my sabbatical, part of it was that I suspended my account for a few months. I started it up again today, mostly because new M. Ward and new Beirut music. Great stuff. I’ve sort of kept track of what I’ve downloaded the last seven months, and here are the standouts, in no particular order…

M. Ward-Hold Time

Beirut-March of the Zapotec & Realpeople: Holland
This is a split album/double ep type thing. The first half is Beirut, the second half is Zac Condon’s old band Realpeople’s ep Holland.

Waterdeep-Pink & Blue

Stars-Sad Robots EP

Anathallo-Canopy Glow

Danielson-Tell Another Joke at the Ol’ Choppin’ Block

She Swings She Sways-Wasted Love Songs

The Welcome Wagon-Welcome to the Welcome Wagon

David Mead-Indiana

Andrew Bird-Noble Beast

As usual, check out my ever-growing list of recommendations on emusic, and sign up for 50 free downloads.

In another attempt to revitalize my blog, I’ve replaced the theme header images with 18 various biology related ones (that load randomly). I took half of the photos, the other half I collected from license free websites for the college’s online biology lab classes.

Can you guess which ones I took and which I scrounged?

Well, that theme was short lived. But my thanks to Michael for the now unused image are eternal.

I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Dr. Paul Nelson Thursday night. His title was, “Whatever Happened to Darwin’s Tree of Life”, and the subject was… Common Descent. According to Nelson many evolutionary biologists reject the idea of a single tree of life, or a single universal common ancestor. He gave much evidence to support his case (which I will not delve into here), and argued that in our lifetime we would see Science shift from a single origin of life event to multiple events. From a ‘tree of life’ to a ‘mangrove of life’. Intelligent Design, he was quick to add, was not going to be an accepted option for some time to come.

I very much enjoyed the lecture, and learned a good bit from it. If you want to hear it, a friend that went with me recorded it, and I think I could manage to get a copy from him.