Oliver Sacks on Earworms, Stevie Wonder and the View From Mescaline Mountain (Wired)

By Steve Silberman

A surgeon is struck by lightning and becomes obsessed with Chopin. An eminent psychoanalyst is kept awake by hallucinations of a singing rabbi. An amnesiac musicologist incapable of remembering anything that happened more a few seconds ago finds refuge from his disoriented existence by performing Bach fugues.

Music, writes neurologist Oliver Sacks in his new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, opens a window into almost every aspect of life and brain function. For his previous case-history collections Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks studied the lives of people with disorders like autism and Tourette's syndrome, turning up startling insights about the brain's capacity to heal and adapt. Sacks, 74, shared his thoughts about music in his Greenwich Village office. (more . . )

Randy's Pauch's "Last Lecture"

My friend JCO sent me this note:

I first got to hear Randy Pausch speak when he presented his paper at a conference in 1991 titled "Virtual Reality on Five Dollars a Day." I thought it was the best talk I heard at the conference.

He doesn't disappoint in this talk he gave last Tuesday and it's a keeper.

Nothing technical, all-inspirational, and could very well be his last. Set aside some time, sit down and watch this video. It's worth your time.

If you're short of time the actual lecture starts somewhere around the 8-minute mark and goes on for about an hour.

There are two background articles here, but they give away the two plot twists at the end of the talk, so I suggest you watch the video first.

WSJ.com - A Beloved Professor Delivers The Lecture of a Lifetime

Schools such as Stanford and the University of Alabama have mounted "Last Lecture Series," in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. For the audience, the question to be mulled is this: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? ...At Carnegie Mellon, however, Dr. Pausch's speech was more than just an academic exercise. The 46-year-old father of three has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months. His lecture, using images on a giant screen, turned out to be a rollicking and riveting journey through the lessons of his life.

Randy Pausch, a 46-year-old Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, gave his last lecture this week, and it's getting a lot of attention. He talked to Diane Sawyer today on "Good Morning America" about the inspirational talk. (ABC News)

Microsoft Fires Volley At Google in Ad Battle (WSJ)

By KEVIN J. DELANEY, ROBERT A. GUTH and VAUHINI VARA
September 26, 2007; Page A1

The battle of titans between Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. over the future of the Internet is about to get even hotter.

Microsoft is in talks to buy a minority stake in the popular social-networking Web site Facebook Inc., a sign of a new urgency by the software giant to jump-start its online business at a time when Google is widening its lead in the fast-growing Internet-advertising business. As part of its catch-up program, Microsoft also has quietly granted broad powers to an executive recently hired from outside the company, who is expected to help shake up the software giant's online business.

(more. . .)

A Scholar's Paris (AcademicLife.com)

by Alice Kaplan

For 25 years Paris has been the place where I do research, write, gather materials for my courses, and renew my sense of the French language — and my joie de vivre. For some people Paris is a fashion show or a gourmet meal or a museum. For me and for my colleagues in French studies, it's a library where we wander among the stacks, a fantasy captured by the French architect Dominique Perrault in his design for the new French National Library: four buildings in the shape of open books, towering over the River Seine.

The Paris I love is made of personal memories of the city and the Paris I've gleaned from a thousand books and films — reading and viewing memories that have sometimes doubled back and influenced where I have gone and whom I have met in the city.

(more. . .)

UC Irvine rehires Chemerinsky as dean (LA Times)

UC Irvine's chancellor tried to salvage the reputation of his fledgling law school Monday by announcing that he had reinstated Erwin Chemerinsky as its founding dean, but his own troubles persisted as faculty members continued to question why he had sacked the liberal scholar and contemplated taking action against their university's leader.

The agreement with Chemerinsky, made five days after the deanship was rescinded, came after Chancellor Michael V. Drake and his wife flew to Durham, N.C., over the weekend so the two men could speak face to face. (more . . )

Recruiting Sites That Draw Thumbs Down (Law.com)

Robert Ambrogi surveys the dishonorable mentions in law firm recruiting pages:

There is no excuse for failing to design Web sites that are compatible with all major browsers. Sure, IE continues to command the bulk of the market. But why would a firm exclude users of other browsers, particularly when it is the more tech-savvy users who opt out of IE? This is the problem with the careers page on the Web site of Patton Boggs. It works fine in IE, but try to open the page in Firefox and it comes up as a screenful of black. Switch to Opera and you get the same. Did no one at Patton ever test this page in a browser other than IE?

Luciano Pavarotti Divides His Estate (AP)

By MARTA FALCONI

ROME (AP) — Luciano Pavarotti left half his estate to his second wife and half to his four daughters, including three from his first marriage, an attorney said Tuesday.

In the final months of his yearlong battle with pancreatic cancer, Pavarotti made two wills, said attorney Giorgio Bernini, who represents the singer's second wife. One dated June 13 divides up his assets according to Italian law, with half going to his wife, Nicoletta Mantovani, and half to his children.

The second, dated July 29, elaborates on the first and concerns the tenor's U.S. holdings, which he entrusted to Mantovani, Bernini said. (more. . . )

Two Buck Chuck takes a bite out of Napa (Business 2.0 Magazine)

Fred Franzia, the man behind America's favorite bargain vino, has a big mouth and an even bigger winemaking empire - one that's scaring the bejeezus out of his elitist rivals.

By Joel Stein,
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- There's a war on bluster, and Fred Franzia is losing. Sure, the CEO of Bronco Wine, the nation's fourth-largest wine company, tells me repeatedly that only a sucker would pay more than $10 for a bottle of wine - including his own $35 Domaine Napa. And that Napa's and Bordeaux's claims about their special soils are bogus: "We can grow on asphalt. Terroir don't mean sh*t." After relieving himself by the side of his Jeep, Franzia recounts a trip to Burgundy where, after an elaborate tasting, he told the winemaker at Château Haut-Brion, "You can bottle gasoline if you can sell that."

Franzia, who rose to fame several years ago when he started selling a $2 bottle called Charles Shaw, calls winemakers "bozos in a glass." He really goes off on wine critic Robert Parker, who, he says, likes tannic wines that make people gag. He mocks my college ("We buy wineries from guys from Stanford who go bankrupt. Some real dumb-asses from there"), my religion ("A Jew who eats ribs? You impress me"), and my job ("Business 2.0? Hell no, I've never heard of it").

(more . . .)

From far and wide they came for a last glimpse of Pavarotti

By Peter Popham in Rome
Published: 08 September 2007

Plunged into mourning by the death of its most famous son Luciano Pavarotti, the city of Modena is bracing itself for a huge influx of devotees of the great singer for his funeral this afternoon.

The coffin bearing the singer's body was brought to the city's Romanesque cathedral at nine o'clock on Thursday evening, 14 hours after his death. The crowd that had gathered in the cathedral piazza accorded it – together with the singer's widow, Nicoletta Mantovani, and Pavarotti's three daughters by his first marriage who accompanied it – a long, solemn round of applause.

In death as in life Pavarotti wore his concert platform uniform: a black dinner jacket with white bow tie. In one hand he held a rosary, in the other the oversize white handkerchief that was one of his trademarks. Soon a long line had formed outside the cathedral and by midnight more than 9,000 people had paid their respects. A city-wide state of mourning was declared. (more. . . )