YARO

Since we are getting into Christmas season, I though I would share one of my favorite holiday music pieces with you all – the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Act II of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker.

The original, of note, was performed using a celesta, a novelty at the time of Nutcracker’s debut (1892). In the video below, Robert Tiso performs the score using something even more interesting than the celesta: a glass “harp” (i.e., a set of glasses partially filled with water) reproducing the various notes needed to play the piece. Enjoy!

The Nutcracker (Russian: Щелкунчик, Schelkunchik) is a two-act ballet, originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The libretto is adapted from the story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by E. T. A. Hoffmann. It was given its premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on 18 December 1892, on a double-bill with Tchaikovsky’s opera, Iolanta.

One novelty in Tchaikovsky’s original score was the use of the celesta, a new instrument Tchaikovsky had discovered in Paris. He wanted it genuinely for the character of the Sugar Plum Fairy to characterize her because of its “heavenly sweet sound”. It appears not only in her “Dance”, but also in other passages in Act II. Tchaikovsky also uses toy instruments during the Christmas party scene. Tchaikovsky was proud of the celesta’s effect, and wanted its music performed quickly for the public, before he could be “scooped.” Everyone was enchanted.

How’s this for a kid’s dream Hot Wheels installation? Created by Chris Burden, the Metropolis II features 1,500 HotWheels zipping around a futuristic tract, powered by kinetic energy.

In “Metropolis II,” by [the authors'] calculation, “every hour 100,000 cars circulate through the city,” Mr. Burden said. “It has an audio quality to it. When you have 1,200 cars circulating it mimics a real freeway. It’s quite intense.”

This story is all too common among many lottery winners: after coming into a large sum of money with little experience to manage it, most of it is squandered on extravagantly over-the-top homes, cars, yachts, and other “toys” as well as lost to poor financial investment decisions.

But such financial falls from affluence aren’t only among the lottery winners. In an interesting piece in the New York Times, Geraldine Fabrikant tells a story of a family that came into $14 million after a company they had a family stake in was sold in 1998. What followed was a house, car, and horse-buying spree coupled with a string of poor financial investments that were closely tied to the housing market.

First, the Martins bought a house in Somerset, England, near the home of Mrs. Martin’s parents, and he decided to write a novel. At about the same time, they spent $250,000 on the 3.5-acre camp with four structures on Tupper Lake, deep in the Adirondacks, as a summer home. They began extensive renovations at the lake, adding a stunning three-story boathouse and two other buildings…In 2002, fed up with England, the Martins chose a new base, Vermont, and plunked down about $650,000 for a home there, as renovations continued on the Tupper Lake property.

They managed their expenses for a while, but the costs mounted and mounted some more as they worked at refurbishing the Adirondack property — eventually totaling a staggering $5.3 million, Mr. Martin said. He poured another $600,000 into the Vermont property, he said.

On the face of it, this doesn’t sound all terribly bad for a very high net worth family. But you have to keep in mind that the family’s windfall was for $14 million and their houses alone took up more than half of their initial wealth! Add to that the yearly property taxes and maintenance fees, and you can see how someone with even substantial wealth could quickly be in over their head.

But this wasn’t the end of the family’s poor investment decisions. Guided by “investment experts“, the family made a string of poor financial investments that were tied to the housing bubble. In addition, they borrowed heavily while using their brokerage accounts as collateral against that debt.

In the end, the “family ultimately put the Adirondacks property on the market for $4.9 million, then quickly slashed the price by half. Last month, the Martins got an offer for just half of the latest $2.5 million asking price.

They have stopped making payments on their $1.1 million mortgage and their $53,000 in annual property taxes in the Adirondacks as well as the mortgage and taxes on their Vermont home.”

After selling the homes and a lot of other valuables, the father is now teaching English for $14,000 per year and is living in a modest, sparsely-decorated tract house. The rest of the family is due to join him soon.

This story could have had a much better ending. More appropriate than the $5.3 million summer property for a family of 4, could have been a home more fitting for their income level. Rather than listening to the investment “gurus” and putting their money into highly volatile and speculative investments, they could have relied more on no-load, low-fee index funds, bonds, or both. Rather than buying things on credit while using their investments accounts as collateral, they could have bought only things their income allowed for.

It’s the end of the world as we know it. Well, not really, but once they receive their final payment from Facebook, the US Patent and Trademark Office will allow the company to trademark the word “face”. According to TechCrunch, “the U.S. Patent And Trademark Office has sent the social networking site a Notice of Allowance, which means they have agreed to grant the “Face” trademark to Facebook.

All Facebook needs to do is pay the issue fee within three months of today and the “Face” trademark will be issued and be published in the official USPTO gazette and everything.”

While it’s bizarre that a company should have the right to trademark a common-use word, it isn’t as bad as it seems. In this case, the USPTO is limiting the scope of the trademark only to “telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, none primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars.”

What that means is that other companies in the social networking sphere would be wise to not include “face” in their names. Others, however, are in the clear.

A lot of online activity this morning regarding the alleged Street View image showing a woman giving birth to a baby on the street.

However, according to Google, the image is a fake. Too bad, it would’ve made a really cool addition to the rest of the interesting Google Street View sightings.

Here is the faked image:

You can see a woman on the ground with her legs spread out, while two other women try to comfort her and the bystanders enjoying the show.

But according to TechCrunch, this is a fake. That’s because when you go to the actual coordinates of the location on SV (Wilmersdorf, Germany), the houses in the background are all blurred out and no woman is seen sprawling on the sidewalk.

I think this is a publicity stunt of some kind. Perhaps it is even related to the recent reports of German Google fans egging the homes of those folks that have intentionally told Google to blur out the images of their residences in Street View.

I hate, hate, hate bad design. I know the old adage of “content trumps design”, but great content usually suffers if the presentation of the material sucks. With that in mind, lets take a look at

Want to give a DIY functional external track-pad a try?

A member of the Afrotech online community has made a fascinatingly simple device that tracks your finger’s movement over it out of nothing more than paper, pencils, a few resistors and a Arduino kit.

To make the paper conduct a current, it is first completely covered with graphite (i.e. draw all over it with a pencil). This also produces a nice, smooth surface that’s fairly easy to glide over with your finger.

A four point lead is created by connecting the four corners of the paper to the Arduino. With some basic geometry, the Arduino calculates the coordinates from the current sent from your grounded finger to each of the corners and translates that into cursor placement on the on-screen x-y plane.

It has been a few weeks since Google announced their newest advertising product for local businesses: Google Boost. The new program is essentially designed to make it very easy (a caveman could do it ) for a non-ppc savvy local business owner to create and launch their own pay-per-click advertising campaigns right from their Place Page account. As Google describes it, Boost is

a quick and easy way for local businesses to market themselves and connect with potential customers in their area. Based on the information you’ve already provided on the Place page for your business, we provide a suggested ad description, a web or Place page, your business categories and a monthly budget. Once you’ve confirmed these four simple elements, our system automatically creates an ad campaign. Your ad may start appearing almost immediately when people in your area search online for products and services related to your offering. And what’s more, you’ll only pay when a potential customer actually clicks on your ad. To be clear, the ranking of Boost ads in the “Ads” section of the Google.com and Google Maps search results pages are based on relevance and quality factors; and Boost ads do not impact the ranking of your free, organic business listings.

At the time of that announcement, this simplified Adwords advertising feature was only available in San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston. As of today, Google is making the feature also available in:

• San Jose
• Seattle
• Wichita
• Charlottesville (VA)
• Atlanta
• Chapel Hill
• Orlando
• Washington D.C.
• Boston
• Cross Plains (TX)
• Portland (ME)
• All local businesses in Illinois.

To try out Boost, simply log into your Place Page account and if the feature is available, you will see an invitation in your account to start using it. Everyone else who is located outside of the cities listed above can fill out a form to be notified when Boost is available in their area.

As if we didn’t have enough from the likes of Microsoft (and Sony) re their proprietary formats, Engadget is reporting that using a regular micro-SD in your Windows phone might not be the best idea at this time:

The Windows Phone  7 operating system treats the SD card as an integrated part of the phone. This is in contrast to other devices, where you can use an SD card to increase the memory available to the device at any time or to transfer files  to other devices,” the page reads.

Meantime, AT&T has warned customers via Engadget that only ”Certified for Windows Phone 7” microSD cards should be used in Microsoft’s mobile devices. The reason, according to the mobile carrier, is that the Windows Phone platform ”requires a certified high-speed microSD card for optimal performance.”

At present, no such ”certified” cards exist and no indication has been given as to when they will hit store shelves. According to Microsoft support documents, certification comes down to more than just ”a simple matter of judging its speed class.

Several other factors, such as the number of random read/write operations per second, play a role in determining how well an SD card performs with Windows Phone 7 devices,” the page reads.

If you’re a fan of both Google Calendar and Chrome (who wouldn’t be?), you might like the new extension Google has just released for the browser. Essentially, it allows you to preview am agenda drop-down of your Google Calendar without having to visit the full calendar website.

The cool thing about the extension is that it allows you to add events right from any website where the hCalendar microformat is used (or a derivative thereof).

From Google’s extensions site:

Get a button on your browser toolbar that you can easily click to see upcoming events from Google Calendar, without ever leaving your page. And if you’re on sites like Facebook or Evite, you can click the button to instantly add events to your calendar. The button shows a green plus sign whenever there are events on the page you’re viewing that can be added to your calendar.

The extension detects events on any site that uses the hCalendar microformat or derivative microformats like hResume. Event detection on Facebook is not 100% reliable because the page markup keeps changing frequently.

The folks at Firefox have been busy since June working on their latest release of the award-winning browser. The latest beta release (Version 4, r7) has been showing much improvement. As LifeHacker reports:

Mozilla has let loose the JaegerMonkey engine, enabled hardware graphics acceleration on Windows and Mac, and integrated Sync and the awesome Panorama/”Tab Candy”.

Mozilla says their JaegerMonkey compiler, combined with their other improvements, leaves Firefox 4 with a seriously impressive engine for rendering web pages and interpreting webapps and games. Their chart of three benchmark tests, including their own, shows what looks like some serious improvements, at least over their previous releases (and we can’t wait to put them to the test):

While those are impressive numbers indeed, the beta release of the browser still lags behind some other strong contenders in the rendering speed race. In particular, various tests have shown that Opera, Chrome, and Safari beat FF:

While there is some disparity between the results — it’s surprising that Opera 10.6 does very well on the Peacekeeper test (and in my previous SunSpider tests) but not so well on Dromaeo — it’s clear that although the beta of Firefox 4 shows a definite improvement, it’s still lagging behind the other browsers, particularly Chrome, which was the fastest on both tests.