viz.

Image Credit: screen capture from JamieOliver.com

In last week's post, I introduced chef Jamie Oliver's campaign for real ("proper") food in the US (complete with its own ABC television reality show), and I discussed Oliver's plea that we, as a country, begin cooking real food (as opposed to eating industrial food) in our kitchens at home. For many Americans, busy schedules and limited cooking experience make this call for planning, buying, prepping and cooking scratch food at home a rather tall order, but even this potentially daunting lifestyle change looks like (forgive the pun) a piece of cake compared with the second half of Oliver's initiative: providing scratch meals twice daily in public schools. More on Oliver, Chef Ann Cooper, mind-boggling bureaucracy, and hurculean tasks after the break.

Screenshot Credit: YouTube

Zounds!  After Noel’s heartwarming welcome-back posting, I feel reinvigorated and ready to begin posting again here at viz.  I did rest my blogging muscles over the break, but managed to take a few notes for what will hopefully be more piquant posts on pop culture.

Recently, my friends have helpfully provided me with such a deluge of musical material that I don’t know what to do with it all.  My friend Cate Blouke forwarded me the NPR story about HOPE: The Obama Musical, which delights me to no end—but I was a little more intrigued by a video my friend Meghan Andrews brought to my attention—a short-form musical YouTube video that doubles as a Yale advertisement called “That’s Why I Chose Yale.”

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

I’m not sure how this video was made, but it is really amazing to look at.

As rhetoric instructors spend more and more time teaching new media like video, I think this genre—the instructional video—will become an important skill for students in their own fields.

Here’s a description of the video:

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

via Make

This New York Times article discusses the implications of new online systems that allow parents to monitor their children’s grades and attendance.