Astronaut Chris Hadfield — the tweeting , tumbling Canadian astronaut who’s a one-dude astro-ambassador from the space programme to the Internet — has produced and released a video of his own performance of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (AKA the “Major Tom song”) on the ISS. He adapts the lyrics a bit to his own situation — and changes out the whole dying-in-space chorous — but is otherwise pretty faithful. From the credits, it appears that David Bowie gave permission for this, though that’s not entirely clear. I would think that not even a major record label would be hamfisted and cack-handed enough to send a takedown notice over this one (it’s been suggested for Boing Boing more than any other link in my memory), but I’m prepared to be surprised. Space Oddity
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Astronaut Chris Hadfield performs David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on the ISS
An anonymous reader writes “BitTorrent has come up with a new way to sell music. It’s called BitTorrent Bundle, and it puts the music store alongside the torrent. At last, someone has come up with a way to turn all us entitled, lawless downloaders into paying customers. BitTorrent thinks of BitTorrent Bundle as a sort of 21st century band flyer. Post a torrent with a handful of live tracks from your latest tour, Bundle it with a store that lets your groupies buy the full album.” Put simply, the idea is that bands publish a basic torrent with a few songs as a teaser. When users download that .torrent file from BitTorrent.com, they’re shown a page asking for something — money, an email address, or social media interaction — in exchange for the rest of the album (or other bonus content). If they comply, they get a different .torrent file. It’s not intended as a guard against piracy, but as a way to link up content creators with the torrenters who are actually willing to pay. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Daniel Ryan describes his music as “a mix of Japanese folk music and glitch hop.” This isn’t normally my sort of thing — I pretty much only listen to music with words — but I played this one three times in a row this morning. There’s a lot of clever stuff going on here that I lack the vocabulary to describe but possess the aesthetic apparatus to appreciate. According to one redditor, the folk song is this track off the Samurai Champloo soundtrack. Nagasaki 
Haiti has been battling a massive cholera outbreak since, roughly, around the time international aid groups arrived in the country following the 2010 earthquake. Now, genetic evidence links the strain of cholera in Haiti to a rare strain native to Nepal — further proof that it was Nepalese UN Peacekeepers who brought cholera to Haiti . This news comes two months after the UN claimed immunity from any financial liability relating to the outbreak, writes Stacey Singer at the Palm Beach Post. 
