Continous Piano

Just caught this on the BBC-- Lubomyr Melnyk developed a way of playing piano at incredible speed with expressiveness, and relates it t'ai chi-- "to play at this speed, your body has to turn to water" (approximate quote).

Here's an a little about his approach, which includes on a soft touch and lack of fear of mistakes. Unfortunately, his book Open Time, is not only out of print, it's not available for sale anyplace I looked.

His work has a lot of overlap with Kenny Werner's Effortless Mastery, if you'd like something in that range for jazz rather than classical.

Talmud finally indexed

Link

The Talmud is a formidable body of work: 63 volumes of rabbinical discourse and disputation that form Judaism’s central scripture after the Torah. It has been around for 1,500 years and is studied every day by tens of thousands of Jews. But trying to navigate through its coiling labyrinth can be enormously difficult because the one thing this monumental work lacks is a widely accepted and accessible index.

I'm a little surprised it took this long-- the computer resources to make the task relatively manageable have been around for 30 years or more, I think.

Don't talk to the police

This is really important information, but you're also likely to be entertained and fascinated while you're listening to it.

The first half is a fast-talking funny law professor who used to be a defense attorney. The second half is an occasionally funny normal-speed-talking police officer, who doesn't mean to arrest or contribute to the conviction of innocent people.... but he doesn't seem to be able to wrap his mind around the idea that he's doing so. He might be lying about that last.

Anyway, cynical as I am, there were a few details which surprised me. I didn't know the Federal government can't keep track of all its laws which define felonies. Or that anything you say to a police officer which might indicate your innocence is hearsay and inadmissible at a trial, but anything which might indicate guilt is admissible. Any slight mistakes or exaggerations you make when talking to the police will be considered lies and used to wreck your credibility.

I did know that the police are allowed to lie to you in interrogations interviews, but I didn't know all the subtle implications.

Link thanks to andrewducker, though I don't know how many of the details transfer to Scotland.

ETA: Details for the UK.