The Seed (2.0)

"The Seed (2.0)" is the second single by The Roots from their fifth album Phrenology (2002). The track, which features Cody Chesnutt on the guitar and vocals, is an "uptempo retooling" of his song "The Seed" from the album The Headphone Masterpiece. The song's music video was nominated for the MTV2 Award at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards. Jeff Vrabel of Billboard described the track as "a genre-bending mix of rock guitars and Prince-styled keyboards and drums".

Music and reception

"The Seed (2.0)" is a hybrid mix of "distorted rock, hip-hop and psychedelic soul". Brett Berliner of Stylus Magazine called the track "a rock song, featuring a little bit of funk and just a very little bit of hip-hop." The song was favorably received from music critics. Robert Christgau called it the album's "centerpiece", "2002's freshest roots rock track and jammingest avant rap track".Pitchfork Media editor Sam Chennault described the song as an "orgiastic garage funk number" and called it the album's "most immediately satisfying track". In 2009, Pitchfork Media listed it at number 330 in "The Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s".Stylus Magazine's Brett Berliner declared it the album's "best track" with its "catchy hook that stays with listeners for days". In The A.V. Club's 2002 top fifteen "Songs of the Year", Stephen Thompson listed the single at number nine. Jake Coyle of the Associated Press called it "one of the best rock songs of the decade".

The Seed

The Seed is a 2005 short-film starring Will Yun Lee and Peter Mensah, produced and directed by Joe Hahn of Linkin Park and Ken Mercado. Hahn took his career as a director further with his second film, Mall, released on June 18 2014 in North America.

Synopsis

The Seed follows the events surrounding a homeless veteran named Ken Mercado, who is portrayed by Will Yun Lee. Living along the banks of the Los Angeles River, he is attacked by masked men in black vehicles, invisible to the eye. To any passers-by, Mercado appears to have some sort of mental illness, but as he is chased throughout the city, it is revealed to the audience that he is not in fact paranoid, but rather the victim of a government conspiracy. Ken's adversaries are visible to him, yet only visible to the audience part of the time. At the end of the film, an alien ship is visible in the sky, watching the scene.

Release

The Seed was first released at the Pusan International Film Festival in 2006. It was also shown at the Festivus Film Festival in Denver, CO where it won "Best Short Short" in 2008. The Seed was awarded the "Outstanding Cinematography" award at the 2007 Veneration Film Festival in Newport. Later in 2008, The Seed will be entered at various festivals including the Swansea Bay Film Festival in England, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, the Beverly Hills Film Festival, the Malibu Film Festival, and the Los Angeles United Film Festival.

The Seed (novel)

The Seed (Nynorsk: Kimen) is a 1940 novel by the Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas. The narrative is set on a small island where a stranger settles. This is soon followed by a mysterious murder case, which creates widespread distrust in the community. The novel was the author's first departure from literary realism into a more allegorical mode of storytelling. An English translation by Kenneth G. Chapman was published in 1964, in a shared volume with Vesaas' novel Spring Night.

The Seed was the basis for a 1974 film with the same title, directed by Erik Solbakken.

References

External links

Rare earth

Rare earth may refer to:

Rare earth element

A rare earth element (REE) or rare earth metal (REM), as defined by IUPAC, is one of a set of seventeen chemical elements in the periodic table, specifically the fifteen lanthanides, as well as scandium and yttrium. Scandium and yttrium are considered rare earth elements because they tend to occur in the same ore deposits as the lanthanides and exhibit similar chemical properties.

Despite their name, rare earth elements are – with the exception of the radioactive promethium – relatively plentiful in Earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million, or as abundant as copper. They are not especially rare, but they tend to occur together in nature and are difficult to separate from one another. (The word "rare" is an archaic word for "difficult".) However, because of their geochemical properties, rare earth elements are typically dispersed and not often found concentrated as rare earth minerals in economically exploitable ore deposits. It was the very scarcity of these minerals (previously called "earths") that led to the term "rare earth". The first such mineral discovered was gadolinite, a mineral composed of cerium, yttrium, iron, silicon and other elements. This mineral was extracted from a mine in the village of Ytterby in Sweden; four of the rare earth elements bear names derived from this single location.

Rare Earth (book)

Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe is a 2000 popular science book about xenobiology by Peter Ward, a geologist and paleontologist, and Donald E. Brownlee, an astronomer and astrobiologist, both faculty members at the University of Washington. The book is the origin of the term 'Rare Earth Hypothesis' which, like the book, asserts the concept that complex life is rare in the universe.

Synopsis

The book argues that the universe is fundamentally hostile to complex life and that while microbial life may be common in the universe, complex intelligent life (like the evolution of biological complexity from simple life on Earth) required an exceptionally unlikely set of circumstances, and therefore complex life is likely to be extremely rare. The book argues that among the essential criteria for life are a terrestrial planet with plate tectonics and oxygen, a large moon, magnetic field, a gas giant like Jupiter for protection and an orbit in the habitable zone of the right kind of star.