Sam & Dave - I Thank You

I don’t need to tell you, but today is as good as anything can be.  It’s just never bad, not once.  Even that one year where the Steelers lost to the Lions because the ref screwed up the coin toss in overtime, still pretty much a perfect day.  That’s how good today is.  Any pesky annoyance just feels so minimal, because I don’t have to go to work, and I don’t have to go to synogogue, and I really don’t have to do much of anything besides eat a little too much wonderful food and hang out with the best people.

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And since I just read a story on the tyranny of metrics, you can ignore the r, I just posted.  Here’s a scatterplot of the same data from the shitty chart.  Just trust your gut.  Do you think there’s a strong relationship in there? Meanwhile, I walk to and from work every day, and I’m mega-skinny. Click for high-res photo

And since I just read a story on the tyranny of metrics, you can ignore the r, I just posted.  Here’s a scatterplot of the same data from the shitty chart.  Just trust your gut.  Do you think there’s a strong relationship in there?

Meanwhile, I walk to and from work every day, and I’m mega-skinny.

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ilovecharts: “The average American is both overweight and spends more than 100 hours per year commuting, that vast majority of those hours being spent in a car. Are those numbers correlated? Could we help reduce our societal weight gain by encouraging more commutes by bike or foot? Our latest Transparency is a look at the number of active commutes in several countries, as compared to those countries obesity rates.” -good.is I enjoy ilovecharts, but they many of their charts kind of stink (and not just all the graph jam junk).  This one particularly irked me.  We can all admit, this is a pretty graph, and it does a few things pretty well (a stacked bar graph seems totally right to me, and encoding obesity as the thickness of the bar is some clever iconicity. Yet, bending some of the longer bars seems like inforgivable artistic license to me.  It just makes comparing these bars pretty impossible.  Does Finland have more non-motor commuters than Germany? (No, but it’s close)  What about Netherlands and Switzerland? (Switzerland, but it’s also close). Worse than the graph itself, is the fact that it purports to tell a story that the data does not support.  The text asks if commuting via bike or foot is correlated with obesity.  They don’t answer the question, but clearly seem to think it the case (as do the bike-related tumblrs who are reposting and liking this, I’d imagine).  But if you actually look at the graph (which I’ll admit, the bended bars makes more difficult), is that really the case.  Germany, the second fattest country has the third highest healthy-commute percentage.  The two countries with the smallest percentage of healthy commuters, Canada and Australia, are right in the middle in terms of obesity. So are they correlated? Not particularly well: the correlation coefficient for the percentage of commuters who either bike or walk against the percentage of the population that is obese is -.323.  Which is a lot closer to 0 than to -1 (you’d get -1 with a perfect, linear relationship).  At least the sign goes in the right direction. And if you regress obesity rates on the healthy commuting variable, beta one is not significant.  So there. Click for high-res photo

ilovecharts:

“The average American is both overweight and spends more than 100 hours per year commuting, that vast majority of those hours being spent in a car. Are those numbers correlated? Could we help reduce our societal weight gain by encouraging more commutes by bike or foot? Our latest Transparency is a look at the number of active commutes in several countries, as compared to those countries obesity rates.”

-good.is

I enjoy ilovecharts, but they many of their charts kind of stink (and not just all the graph jam junk).  This one particularly irked me.  We can all admit, this is a pretty graph, and it does a few things pretty well (a stacked bar graph seems totally right to me, and encoding obesity as the thickness of the bar is some clever iconicity.

Yet, bending some of the longer bars seems like inforgivable artistic license to me.  It just makes comparing these bars pretty impossible.  Does Finland have more non-motor commuters than Germany? (No, but it’s close)  What about Netherlands and Switzerland? (Switzerland, but it’s also close).

Worse than the graph itself, is the fact that it purports to tell a story that the data does not support.  The text asks if commuting via bike or foot is correlated with obesity.  They don’t answer the question, but clearly seem to think it the case (as do the bike-related tumblrs who are reposting and liking this, I’d imagine).  But if you actually look at the graph (which I’ll admit, the bended bars makes more difficult), is that really the case.  Germany, the second fattest country has the third highest healthy-commute percentage.  The two countries with the smallest percentage of healthy commuters, Canada and Australia, are right in the middle in terms of obesity.

So are they correlated? Not particularly well: the correlation coefficient for the percentage of commuters who either bike or walk against the percentage of the population that is obese is -.323.  Which is a lot closer to 0 than to -1 (you’d get -1 with a perfect, linear relationship).  At least the sign goes in the right direction.

And if you regress obesity rates on the healthy commuting variable, beta one is not significant.  So there.

(this post was reblogged from ilovecharts)
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Holy Soul's Top 100 Soul Songs (#91-100)

Holy Soul just started a big countdown.  Dude knows their stuff, and the list will surely be jampacked with fantastic stuff, and likely a bit you (and I) haven’t heard of.  After seeing the first ten though, I’m curious how many Stevie songs are gonna make it.  “Heaven is…” is wonderful and all, but I’d have no trouble rattling off 30 Stevie songs I prefer (Stevie mixtape draft, anyone?)

holysoul:

Each day for the next two weeks we’ll be posting the next 10 songs so stayed tuned brothers & sisters!

(this post was reblogged from holysoul)
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turnlizer:

Clipse ft. Cam’ron - Popular Demand (Popeye’s)

So, a few weeks ago, I ended up on Rik Cordero’s wikipedia page, trying to see what videos exactly he was responsible.  I learned that he directed the above “Popeye’s” video, which at the time was not yet out.  But there was some sort of making-of video on youtube, which led me to believe the entire video would consist of Pusha, Mal, and Cam hanging out in a Popeye’s.  I have to say I’m a little disappointed that’s not actually the case.

Song is fire, though.

(this post was reblogged from turnlizer)
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Outro - Ebony Rythm Band

“Outro” seems like a good place to end the week.  This is the last track on the fantastic Funky 16 Corners Comp.  It’s just a chilled-out, organ-focusing snippet of a cover of Hayes’s version.  I still have a few other songs that I didn’t get to, but I think everyone has had just about all the “Walk On By” they can handle.  Anyways, if you’ve been following along, you’ve heard:

Isaac Hayes

Dionne Warwick

Wu-Tang’s “I Can’t Go To Sleep”

The Caprells

Slick Rick’s “Mona Lisa”

Jackson 5

And if you’ve made it this far, you might want to watch MF Doom’s video for Dead Bent (which samples Ike).  Stay tuned for more spine tingling adventures…

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Jackson 5 - Walk On/The Love You Save

In another thrilling installment of “Walk On By” Week, J5 take a few of the best bars from Hayes’s rendition, do some nice dancing, and sing the words “walk on” every once in a while.  Pretty awesome.  Then they break into “The Love You Save”, so stick around for that.  The breakdown right before that is probably the best part.  But it’s all good parts.

Super Double Multiplicity Alert: The Jacksons’ cover of Isaac Hayes’s cover of “Walk On By” is the sampled in the switch-up part in Public Enemy’s “By The Time I Get To Arizona.”

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Slick Rick - Mona Lisa

When I started this “Walk On By” Week, I really assumed that Isaac Hayes’s version would be my favorite song that I would post.  And it’s definitely by favorite cover of “Walk On By” and probably still the “best” song I’ll post this week, if we can indeed distinguish between bests and favorites.  But if I had to chose between living in a world without Hayes’s “Walk On By” or without “Mona Lisa”, I’d go with the MC Ricky D world.

“Mona Lisa” makes me so happy.  Every part of it.  The intro.  The four second kissing noise, the vocal sample of “Walk On By” playing out at the end.  And everything in the middle, especially the R-I-C-K-Y acrostic.  It’s hard not to sing all the words whenever I hear it.

I’m pretty sure there’s a “Walk On By” sample throughout, so it totally counts.  Anyways, I’ve still got plenty of shots left in whatever the part of the gun that holds the bullets is called.

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The Caprells - Walk On By

I have less to say about this one.  Definitely it’s own take, and pretty fun, despite I think being appropriately sad.  (via Soul Sides).

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Wu-Tang Clan - I Can’t Go To Sleep (feat. Isaac Hayes)

“Walk On By” Week, Part 3:

So I watched a lot of Simpsons when I was a kid.  Pretty much 6-11 episodes a week for several years.  The Simpsons obviously made a lot of pop-culture references, the vast majority of which were completely lost on me as a child.  As I grew older, I began to understand these “new” things in their relation to the Simpsons reference, mixing up the natural of order of things.  It’s always an exciting moment: “Oh, now I understand.”

Not particularly relatedly, during the fall of my freshman year of high school, I was still utterly ignorant when it came to Soul music, but man was I excited for a new Wu-Tang album.  “I Can’t Go To Sleep” was by far my favorite song on the album (although, I’m a big fan of lots of stuff on the W, I highly recommend it).  Ghost and RZA rap with a kind of sadness and vulnerability you don’t see very often in hip hop.  And that beat!  So dark yet so lush.  And ghost just rides it perfectly.  “Man, RZA is the best!  What a wonderful beat he made here,” I thought.

By the end of my freshman year, I had a burned copy Al Green’s Greatest Hits and everything was different, but it was still a good while before I heard Hayes’ “Walk on By.”  I was flipping channels one afternoon, and it was playing during a scene on “Dead Presidents” to illustrate the dangers of heroin use (if I recall correctly, as I said, I was just flipping channels).  For a moment I was very perplexed how RZA’s beat could have made it into a movie from 1995.

So I had to check the internet, which is where I learned the truth.  While RZA is indeed the best, all he did in this particular instance was take a straight loop of a pretty well-known song.  Pretty soon I owned Hot Butter Soul and my life has been better ever since.  But as much as I love “Walk On By” part of me still thinks of it as that song from “I Can’t Go to Sleep”.

Anyways, now that I don’t watch the Simpsons 11 times a week, a much larger share of those time-reversing aha moments come from recognizing hip hop samples in Soul songs.

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