Oldest Recording?

I'll let readers judge for themselves here. A recently-formed group claims it has found a recording of a human voice that was made before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph by some 17 years. The recording was reportedly made by a Frenchman but could not be replayed until scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  could scan the recording and make it work.

The recording was discovered in February at the archives of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris by First Sounds, an informal association of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists, scientists and others who aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time.

The group was established in 2007 by David Giovannoni, who is a member of the ARSC.

"It's a very haunting song," Giovannoni said of "Au Clair de la Lune," the melody that Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded on a "phonautograph," a device that engraved sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp.

The scientific breakthrough occurred on April 9, 1860, or 17 years before Thomas Edison invented his phonograph.

It is, however, necessary to give Edison his due. At the time, the French were unable to come up with a device that would allow reproduction of his musical recording.

As many as 148 years would pass before scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory converted these scans into sound using technology developed to preserve and create access to a wide variety of early recordings on mechanical carriers, such as phonograph discs and cylinders.

For Patrick Feaster, a historian with First Sounds, that was a significant discovery for many reasons.

"We already knew that Leon Scott had invented sound recording but he just had never got to the stage of playing back his recordings," Feaster told AFP.

"But we have made a number of discoveries here. First of all we have now heard one of his recordings, something he never dreamed of happening, but it does push the history of recording sound quite a step back. Up until this point you could listen back to something as early as 1888. That was about as far as you could go.

"Secondly," the historian continued, "People tended to present Scott's phonautograph as a dry scientific instrument but Leon Scott was really hoping to record interesting stuff: he wanted to preserve great music, great speeches."

You can listen to the decoded recording over at this website. For me, this is pretty thin. If the recording is actually the oldest recording, the inventor never figured out how to actually do anything with what he captured. Even if this is an actual recording, as opposed to creative decoding (and I am not saying the people involved did anything untoward here) one has to ask, who cares? The recording had no way of being recovered until massive technology was deployed to do so. 

At most, a historical oddity.  

The Pending Prospect Of A Positively Putrid P.C. Presidency

To my mind, there is much to dislike about the idea of an Obama presidency.  On the one hand there is the purely political objection to a lightly vetted candidate whose political track record suggests a strident left-wing agenda, which most Americans would reject outright if they had any idea what Obama stood for in the first place.

The objections on the other end of the spectrum concern social matters and the disturbing trend towards hypersensitivity and censorship among people who ought to know better, but who don't.  Case in point:  Skit featured student playing Obama in blackface 

 North Dakota State University is investigating complaints about a campus skit in which a white student in blackface portrayed Barack Obama receiving a lap dance.

The same skit, part of a charity fundraiser held at a campus theater, also featured a depiction of cowboys having sex with each other, witnesses told The Forum newspaper, which first reported the backlash Friday.

"We're trying to find out the right approaches for accountability, but at the same time try to heal wounds that have occurred and allow the campus to move ahead," Janna Stoskopf, NDSU's dean of students, told The Associated Press on Friday.

The March 18 skit involving the NDSU Saddle and Sirloin Club was performed at the Mr. NDSU Pageant, which raises money for diabetes research. People who attended it said a pageant contestant from Saddle and Sirloin dressed as a woman from the Internet video "I Got a Crush on Obama" and performed a strip tease for another student who was wearing dark makeup and an afro wig.

In the background, two male students dressed as cowboys simulated anal sex while holding an Obama sign that one student ripped at the conclusion of the 30-second performance, the Forum reported.

Get that?  Agents of the state (and be under no illusion here, the administrators of a public university are indeed agents of the state), are taking it upon themselves to "investigate" students very clearly engaged in artistic speech.  It simply doesn't matter if the speech could be found offensive or not, the state has no role to investigate whatever speech adults engage in during their own free time.  Period.

What is particularly galling is the caviler manner in which a fundamental right guaranteed to us in the Constitution is so lightly tossed aside:

"One of the issues here is how do we balance what our policies and expectations about behavior are with the issue of freedom of speech," Stoskopf said. "Where does all of that get us?"

Notice anything unusual?  Here I was laboring under the impression that freedom of speech was a right, enjoyed to the fullest of its meaning by every adult in the nation.  Little did I know it was merely an "issue"; an inconvenience the state needs to brush aside as they attempt to punish people for their political speech.  And even if the "investigation" doesn't lead to actual sanctions the chilling message will have already be sent: "Say something we don't like and we will be watching you."

And that will be the rub of an Obama presidency, as sensitivity police of various stripes scour the social and political landscape looking for "inappropriate" speech to demonize and intimidate, as if Obma himself were some sort of child being picked upon by "bullies" such as these South Dakota State students.  (Do Ivy League degrees really leave one in such an intellectually fragile state of mind?  If so the elite of this country might be better served heading for the Great Plains for their higher education.) 

As obnoxious and socially poisonous as such tactics are for the bulk of the country's citizens, the real danger occurs when such intimidation is used to quell genuine political opposition.  Given the glib manner the Obama campaign has charged their fellow Democrats with the crime of racism, I do not think any such fear can be discounted out of hand.  If the conduct of the Obama campaign is indicative of the way they would rule we can look forward not to a President who will infrequently use the "race card", but a fully fledged race President.

Where Has All The Magic Gone?

Mark Steyn reflects on Sir Edmund Hillary Danger Rodham Clinton and the loss of the old Clintonian magic. It is as if everything that used to work has suddenly stopped. Clinton gets caught telling a whopper about sniper fire and has to retreat hastily. Clinton supporters try a thuggish letter to Nancy Pelosi - standard operating procedure for the Clintons, and all heck breaks loose. What's left to do? Why, break the party that won't give her the office she feels she deserves, of course.

It may be that when the Democrats do settle on a candidate – which, on present form, seems likely to be about 48 hours before Election Day – the party will then do its usual thing and unite around the winner in order to slay the Republican dragon.

But it's not unreasonable to calculate that significant elements among both the Clintonites and the Obamaniacs will be disinclined to reward the other side for what they'll see as an act of usurpation. I have no time for Obama, and I think he'd be a disastrous president. But he's your ticket out if you're a Democrat who can't face the thought of giving your party to the Clinton mob for another decade. And, evidently, quite a lot of Dems feel like that.

Why? Where did the magic go? Well, the show got miscast. I wrote a decade ago that Hillary was like Margaret Dumont to Bill's Groucho Marx. He goes around leering at cocktail waitresses, waggling his eyebrows and his famously unlit cigar. And Hillary would stand there, seemingly oblivious to the subpoenaed dress and DNA analysis and all the rest: In double-acts, the best straight men (or women) are the ones who appear never to get the joke, and that was Hillary in the late Nineties, standing on stage alongside Bill night after night with her rictus grin and droning in the robotic cadences of that computerized voice in your car that tells you to fasten your seatbelt that "I. Am. So. Proud. Of. My. Husband. And. Our. President. Bill. Clinton."

Hillary will not step aside and she will never agree to be second banana on the ticket (and Obama would be completely daft to let the co-Clintons anywhere near his candidacy). She will simply continue that scorched earth policy the Clintons know how to do so well - which may, in fact, be the only policy the Clintons know at all. The Democratic leadership has got to be going crazy right now - they finally see the trainwreck and haven't a clue as to how to avert it.

Pass the popcorn. Maggie, get another vat or two!