Music actually starts in the last ten seconds.  The tune is called "Courage in Complexity" and was completed this summer (I won't go into depth about the piece here though).  Chelsea, Dima (the one singing) and I retreated to the parking structure after watching a substantial part of the Transit of Venus take place in Michigan.  In conversation with Chelsea and Dima, I mentioned how I had hacked together some rhythms from disparate sources to try finishing this tune on viola.  One of the motifs in this tune (not heard in this clip) uses a common rhythm heard in some dubstep music (which is why they said "dubstep"), and coincidentally was figured out in the same parking structure a day before the Detroit Electronic Music festival.

Attendance for the Transit of Venus event was unprecedented--an audience of people well into the hundreds came to see Venus cross over the sun on the University's telescopes.  Celestial events with large public audiences always prompt me to ponder "WWSD?" AKA, what would [Carl] Sagan do?  At the time, I was a little distracted by how the campus observatory missed a huge opportunity to give people a quality "The Meaning of Humanity via the celestial bodies ala Carl Sagan" moment.  To make things even more existential, we had just gotten done discussing about the phrase "YOLO" (You only live once) and what it was like to prepare for going to a prison for class.

Later on I found out a brutal beating took place on our campus, possibly within a few hundred yards of where we stood just hours before this was recorded.  While the two events are so disparate that they'd seem unrelated, there's a definite privilege to recreational learning and our capacity for creativity which shares a common root: both require security.  When it comes to preventing and minimizing violent altercations, I'm certain that education, even scientific, requires some ethical context to foster compassion.

[note, this post was back-dated to the time of the video's recording for archival purposes]