Shiny Things Distract Us

Facebook hires developers who specialize in coding computer software

2011-07-13T07:40:00.007-04:00

"As part of Facebook's recent growth spurt, the company has hired developers to specialize in coding computer software."
-- CNN report, July 7, 2011

I'm really excited to talk to you about some of Facebook's new features. As I've said at previous keynotes, Facebook's mission is to give people the power to make the world more open, more connected, and more awkward. That sensation you got in high school when you stood in the corner of the cafeteria, eating while standing up to make it look like you were still in line-- Facebook will spread that like paste over the entire internet, and then we will put that paste in your pocket through our mobile initiative. We call it awkward pocket paste.

Let's talk about the website. The next step in the evolution of the site and the product is to give people more power and tools to share information and confuse their grandparents. Some of the infrastructure we're developing breaks new ground in the field of computer science, which is why we're hiring coders from across five continents and twelve geological strata to improve Facebook's core usability. Here are a few examples.

The news feed shows you the status updates that your friends have been posting to their Facebook profiles, such as the running tally of their cat's hairball expectorations. Now, in what order do we show these updates? Thanks to our new hires, Facebook can apply the latest and most sophisticated sorting algorithms to present you the specific updates that are most relevant and necessary to your life at the very moment you're checking Facebook, that is, while you're on the toilet with your iPhone. Any old coder can do a bubble sort or insertion sort, whatever those are, and if you ask me, they sound kind of dirty. Our software developers can code one thing extremely well, and that's randomness. I'm just going to call up on the screen here the news stream for a random keynote attendee-- how about you in the front row, Frederick Whipplesmith. You may protest at first, but once I broadcast your stream to the conference and all our online viewers, and also the international press corps that's in attendance, I think you'll be pretty impressed with what we can do.

So, here's Frederick's stream. Lots of updates from his friends about their cats' hairballs, with a few of photos of Frederick sporting a mankini while funnelling wine coolers. Okay, very cool. Now, click "most recent" in the upper right, where it says 373 new posts, and what do you get? 373 most recent posts? No. You get a random number of status updates and photos from an assortment of friends, non-friends, acquaintances, in-laws, and congressmen. Which is pretty neat, because randomness is hard, if not impossible to implement in computer code. Facebook is introducing new frontiers of randomness to privacy, interface settings, news feed selection, and soap warehousing. That last thing? Random.

Think it's easy to be random? Go ahead, try it right now-- think of something random and post it to your Facebook status. Guess what, it's exactly the same thing as you posted yesterday, about how your landlady refuses to replace your broken recycle bin. Very original. That's not random. You clearly don't have what it takes to work at Facebook.

The next issue I want to talk about is data portability. Now, I'm really glad we've hired developers who specialize in coding computer software, because this is something we couldn't have done (or even known about) without them. What is data portability? That's an excellent question, and instead of answering, I'll give you an example. All of the data that you provide to Facebook-- your photos, messages, web surfing habits, and dental records-- all of those things are like little precious gemstones that we hoard in an undisclosed location as part of a policy we call Operation Marketer's Wet Dream. These gemstones belong to Facebook, and we can string them into necklaces that we wear while working nude in our offices. Those offices used to be in Palo Alto, but as you know we've recently moved to Menlo Park, and if your privacy gemstones weren't portable, they would have strangled our necks while we were loading the moving van with hard-copies of your frathouse bender photos. Clearly, data portability is very important, even if it isn't random.

So there you have it-- Facebook's latest changes and updates. Some of them will move the social landscape underneath uncharted waters of creepy awkwardness, which is pretty cool. If you're a software developer, and if your speciality is computer code in particular, then Facebook would be interested in looking at your résumé. Don't bother submitting it, really. Just keep it on your hard drive somewhere, or print it out and leave it on your office desk in view of your webcam. We'll get to it eventually.

The cartoon evil genius of newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch

2011-07-11T13:32:00.012-04:00

Of course Rupert Murdoch is evil. This shouldn't be surprising. Let's analyze his name.

First, your cartoon evil genius name needs a good suffix. -ock, -ok, and -och are all variant spellings of a classic with long, demonstrable history of Sinistrosity:

Morlock, Gorlock, Doc Oc, Spurlock, and to a lesser extent, Hordak.

Then, you need a stem on which to append that suffix. Evil-sounding nouns are all good candidates. Hate, Death, Hell, Crime, or in a nice self-referential twist, Evil. But to really cap off your evil cartoon genius, you just can't beat an evil-sounding adjective. Maim, kill, rape, belch-- I think we can all agree that those are evil verbs. But across all cultures, times, and places, no evil activity is more universal than murder, which is why I suggest appending the evil suffix "-och" to the evil stem "murd." Murdoch. Now that sounds evil!

How about a first name? Here it gets complicated. Even in the case of cartoon villainy, you don't want your genius to fall victim to overkill. That's why there aren't many badguys named Evilman Killestro or Hatebringer Deathovich. Evil geniuses should have that element of genteel panache to them, like Professor Moriarty, or Dr. Evil, whose first name, "Dr." connotes many long years of study at evil medical school, as he would be quick to point out.

Overkill avoidance is therefore the reason why your evil cartoon genius must have a boring, whitebread, WASPy name. In naming our cartoon evil genius, we must employ Chiaroscuro, the method of the Italian masters, in which bold contrasts between light and dark heighten the impact of the composition. To highlight the patent evil of the surname, the first name should sound elegant and refined, such as James, Winston, Preston, or Huntington. Be careful not to employ the diminutive version of these names, because that will immediately convert your genteel evil genius into a superhero, or worse, a hero's childlike bubbly sidekick. Following the the above examples, no super villain should ever have a first name like Jimmy, Winnie, Presto, or Hunt-Hunt. So forget that. Ignore the diminutive temptation. If you stick with high-falutin' pretentiousness, such as an English adaptation of the German name Hroberahtus which itself is a variant of Robert, you should be set.

Yes. Rupert. Perfect.

And that's why, when it comes to evil cartoon geniuses, Rupert Murdoch takes the cake. Without paying for it. Because that's stealing. And it's what evil geniuses do.

STDU distracts us

2009-10-07T16:44:00.003-04:00

Here on Shiny Things Distract Us (STDU), we report on those shiny things... that distract us. An example: STDU distracts us!

STDU: Scientific and Technical Documentation Utility.

Hooray for STDU!

(via Lifehacker)

Doggerel dogfight; a bad poetry competition

2009-05-10T12:26:00.003-04:00

My wife and I had a Bad Poetry Competition the other day; 10 minutes to write an impromptu dash of doggerel so eye-wateringly bad that the reader would have no choice but to commit suicide. You have been warned! Here are our entries. Who won?

Her entry:

"Poem 1"
By Pharaohmagnetic's wife, aka "A wench in the works"

The VitaMix
Is no arbiter
Of degrees of miscegenation
Whether things float to the top and are pushed down
Or incorporate in a smooth, foamy, emulsification
It cannot show you the way out.

My entry:

"Turbulent Hyperbole"
by Pharaohmagnetic

Turbulent hyperbole engorges on me verbally
While silent flights of guile
Bestride the islands of my mind.
Vanity, insanity are unto me profanity
Where more can see the side of me
Inside the violent brine.
Are thunder-tossed belittlements a little brittle
ever since
The fissures of the tissue in my brain
filled up with spit?
I cannot bluff or cough enough
to underseat the powder puff
that whittles at the spittle that exuberates my eyes.

More bad poetry featured on Shiny Things Distract Us: Here, here, and here.

"I am the author of all things"

2009-05-01T14:12:00.003-04:00

Here on Shiny Things Distract Us, Fraxas is the real Code-Wizard-Software-Developer-Computer-Programmer guy; I'm just a meatspace lab monkey. What limited experience I have with the world of algorithms and other abstractions comes from my occasional use of Mathematica to model data or solve the Python Challenge. I really love Mathematica; it's fun and easy to tool around with. If I had learned to code with Mathematica, rather than the tooth-cracking monstrosity that is C++ or Motorola 6800 machine language, I might have discovered enough enjoyment to find a calling. Oh well! Back to the soldering iron.

I've blogged (if tangentially) about Mathematica and its creator, Stephen Wolfram, before. His latest project, Wolfram Alpha, has been picking up a lot of buzz, and I'm very excited to try it out next month or so. (Here are two Slashdot posts on the subject: 1, 2.)

Stephen Wolfram's outsize ego, as made physical in the sheer mass and pagecount (1197) of his vanity-published book A New Kind of Science, is the source of much controversy. Basically, he argues that all of science and nature can be explained by simple cellular automata, a claim that may be neither New nor a Kind of Science. Nevertheless, I find Wolfram fascinating and amusing all at once, and I thank him for bringing Mathematica to the world.

But this is the best take-down of him, or anyone, that I have ever read. Hilarious:

bixx456's review of A New Kind of Science from Amazon.com.

More on Alpha below:

Quote of the Day

2009-04-28T17:35:00.002-04:00

“Hey, you self-important humorless lemon-sucking purveyor of unrelenting grimness and despair: lighten up a bit, why don’t you?”

I think I just found my new catchphrase.

Source

A pun! My word.

2009-03-23T18:59:00.003-04:00

One man's laughter is another manslaughter. That's the obvious pun. But according to Google, one man's laughter is another man's...

- poison
- disdain
- tears
- humiliation
- medicine
- painful tears
- annoyance
- annoyed grimace
- NOT...laughter?

Sheesh. There's a lot of hyper-literal, overwrought killjoys on the internet, wasting opportunities for a perfectly good pun(ishment).

Cat and Girl � Archive � All or Nothing

2009-02-22T01:40:00.000-05:00

Cat and Girl � Archive � All or Nothing

I actually do want a hug.

One Track Mind: On the Loose

2009-02-19T10:09:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago, Fraxas blogged about Stormy High by the band Black Mountain, calling them "a Canadian 70s-metal band" in all but chronological actuality. The reference touched off some free-associating on my part, and by the power of suggestion, I soon found myself listening to bona-fide Canadian 70s metal. To my delight and amazement, emusic offers a few albums from the back-catalogue of Saga, Canadian 70s metal band extraordinaire. Here I highlight their single hit On the Loose, which to this very day can be heard on the air waves of my hometown rock and roll radio stations. The unabashed synth virtuosity, the unironic pretensions to insanity, the echoing distant vocal stylings... I know I should be embarrassed to be writing this, but I'm not. I'm not. Every indier-than-thou geeky hipster has to have some guilty pleasure, right?

P.S. "On the Loose" is from Saga's 1981 album Worlds Apart, but I would like to still classify the song as Canadian 70s metal, because Saga was formed in 1977. Also, I need this post to make sense.

UPDATE: According to the titles at the intro of this youtube video, the song is actually from 1978! I win! But on second thought, upon actually watching the video, I realize just how embarrassed I should be feeling for blogging about this song. Very, very, very embarrassed.

The Pillows will Destroy us All

2009-02-03T19:25:00.003-05:00

Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling is quite often brilliant. Never is this more true than when the comic strip satirizes comics itself. God-Man and Harvey Richards Esq., Lawyer for Children are both great recurring features, but they pale before the genius of Super Fun Pak Comix. This recent example made me laugh, because I have often suffered at the cruelty of too-abundant decorative pillows.

Art thou ready for some FOOTBALL?

2009-01-09T19:51:00.001-05:00

If on the seventh day the toil of armoured men - armed with but their wits and strength, protected by their peers, their grunts, and plastic - attracts attention; if the names of Plaxico and Manning conjure faces and fond thoughts; and if the meter of this humble verse tickles fancy or imagination:

read, then, this link.

[Recovered Scenes from the Tragedy Plaxico by William Shakespeare, by Shane Ryan, on McSweeney's. Phenomenal.]

A Soundbite from Sterling

2009-01-02T18:17:00.001-05:00

In this year's yearly interview with The WELL, Sterling issues this pronouncement:

I'm inclined to think the model [for local urban resilience in the face of nation-level leadership incompetence] is Italy. Italy has had calamitous Bush-levels of national incompetence during almost its entire 150-year national existence.

So in order to be successful and happy in the face of the kind of collapse that the US may be faced with in the coming years, it has to become more like Italy.

(Aside: one of the problems with this idea is that the USA is geographically much more spread out, and population-wise much less dense, than that boot in the Med is. So the City-State of Boston might work, but Idaho and Wyoming would have two choices: retain a 'state'-like identity and continue to benefit from governmental services (like policing, banking, insurance, and defense) or become homesteaders-with-Internet.)

One Track Mind: Pianos From Hell

2008-12-29T16:47:00.001-05:00

X-pressions, the 1997 album from X-ecutioners, is what happens when a group of DJs decide that it's time to step out from behind the masters of ceremony and take the limelight. Pianos From Hell is what happens when those same DJs have the composition chops to leave a beat almost entirely alone for three minutes. The neat thing is that by doing that, they put the turntablism in the listener's mind. I couldn't help but think of the scratching I'd do over that beat while it played. You know how pretentious jazz drummers talk about the space between the noise being as important as the noise itself? yeah, that.

One Track Mind: Frank, AB

2008-12-18T14:17:00.003-05:00

I have a dilemma. I want this post to be about a track by the Rural Alberta Advantage, but something gnaws at my conscience.

Fraxas and I started out this project, One Track Mind, to automate our music-recommendation process. And, so far, it's working swimmingly. The tracks that Fraxas highlighted are all awesome, and I've assembled a playlist with all the posts so far. Listening to it is like drinking a tall glass of eclecticism made physical.

My dilemma comes from a long-debated issue that has faced music buffs from the early mists of time:

Single or album?

Fraxas and I are busy guys. We love to talk music. But the day is short, and thanks to certain sources, the pool of good music is deeper than I can ever remember. One track a week is a small commitment, manageable, digestible, and enough to ignite a decent conversation. As much as I appreciate a good album, we confine these blog posts to the subject of a single track at a time.

Critics, performers, and connoisseurs from all across the historical spectrum vary widely on this essential question. Some acts, such as Arcade Fire and Radiohead, insist that the album is a holistic experience, going so far as to prohibit the use of their tracks on compilations or to boycott music videos. On the other hand, to be blunt, most songs by most artists are terrible. By extension, the same is true of most albums.

Industry analysts agree that the true cause of Big Music's demise was its long track-record of releasing albums padded with filler. Given the public's short attention span and appetite for easily digestible singles, the rise of filesharing technology was only the catalyst for an overdue drop in album sales.

Now, I like singles as much as the next guy. I consider an album “good” if about half its songs are re-listenable. I don't take the extreme of deleting the tracks I don't like –-after all, HDD space is cheap-- but I'd consider a lot of my favourite tracks to be a Single experience. This would be true of most of my prior posts.

That's not to say I don't have my favourite albums. Radiohead's OK computer, Firewater's recent album the Golden Hour, and-- I'm not ashamed to admit it-- Achtung Baby by U2 are best experienced from the moment you press play. These are rare accomplishments that tower over even the selfsame band's remaining oeuvre, let alone the wider music world.

So here's my dilemma. Hometowns, the debut album of Toronto band The Rural Alberta Advantage, is one of the best I've ever heard. The whole thing hangs together like the Dude's Room before his carpet was peed on. It's Canadian Rock in all its thematic, heroic, unapologetic, anthemic, melodious glory, complete with lyrics that evoke geography and virtuoso, spare-kit percussion. What am I supposed to do? I can't pick out a single track to write about. It's too difficult. As pretentious as Arcade Fire and Radiohead are for their championship of the Whole Album, I'm afraid that I have to join their ranks in this case. Hometowns is 38 minutes of bliss. That's not a lot is it?

Okay, maybe it is. I will pick a track at random and blog about it in the only way that would be appropriate. Haiku.

Track Title: Frank, AB
Artist: the Rural Alberta Advantage
Album Title: Hometowns

Pizzicato first.
Cymbals rise towards chorus.
Heartbeat speeds, wordless.

One Track Mind: Stormy High

2008-12-17T15:35:00.001-05:00

Yet Another independent rock band from eMusic's top 88 list (they make almost all my music recommendations these days), Black Mountain's a Canadian 70's-metal band. At least, they are on In The Future, the only point of contact I've had with them.

The opening track of the album is a song entitled Stormy High. I'm not sure what it's about - the lyrics are pretty vague - but the opening guitar riff is in 7/4, so they won immediate kudos for that. Then they won more kudos by extending the feel of classic metal - I'm thinking Sabbath vol 4, maybe pre-Wall floyd - through the entire track. Guitar and bass mostly in unison on rising scale patterns, the keyboards acting more like percussion than anything else, drums that just keep on stomping forward, vocals that - despite the mildly cheesy female moan that surfaces in places - fit into the melody rather than wandering around it.

One Track Mind: St. Lawrence River

2008-12-12T13:46:00.001-05:00

Lee Mellor is on eMusic's list of non-American Country artists (He's Canadian by birth). The cover of his 2007 album, Ghost Town Heart, is a moodily-lit portrait of him looking scruffy and tired and shaggy and all dressed in black, like a city dude's impression of what a country singer should look like. He's got a slightly nasal voice, a strong understanding of the tropes and patterns of alt-country, and enough Canadianness in his lyrics that I feel a connection to him I probably shouldn't. Case in point: the song St. Lawrence River. It's a catchy ballad about bad choices and redemption that could have been set anywhere with a few minor lyrics changes. I've never seen the St. Lawrence; I can find it on a map, to be sure, and I know what it is and why it's important economically and historically and culturally, but it's not home in any meaningful sense of that word. And yet, listening to Lee, I feel like nodding. You will too - but whether it's a feeling of shared experience, or just moving in time to a really catchy piece of alt-country, is up to you.

One Track Mind: I Lived on the Moon

2008-12-12T13:25:00.002-05:00

Last time, I posted a video that, if briefly, portrayed a father-son relationship touched by fantastical tragedy. Here's another song/video in that series, via a long-ago post from metafilter.

Track Title: I Lived on the Moon
Artist: Kwoon
Album: Tales and Dreams

A high-quality download of the incredible video is here. It's by the animator Yannick.

Watch, listen, react.

One Track Mind: Transdermal Celebration

2008-12-04T13:13:00.004-05:00

Track title: Transdermal Celebration
Artist: Ween
Album: Quebec

It is prudent to interpret the hipster-speak phrase "such-and-such are a band's band" as a warning that their music is inaccessible and impossible to appreciate from any rational perspective. Common examples: Radiohead, the Pixies. I love those bands, but let's not "Kid A" ourselves.

Ween is a band's band's band. They hop from one musical genre to another, all the while squirting virtuoso pieces of anti-serious songwriting, seltzer-like, into the clown-face of pop-culture. Once in a while, they record a straight-out pop-song that shows the world how easy it should be.

This video powerfully demonstrates that cartoons can be terrifying and poignant. Watch it when you have three and a half minutes to spare.

One Track Mind: Lovecraft in Brooklyn

2008-11-14T14:32:00.005-05:00

Track title: Lovecraft in Brooklyn
Artist: Mountain Goats
Album: Heretic Pride

Whither H.P. Lovecraft? He of the overwrought, modern classical horror narratives, purveyor of all things "squamous" and "rugose?" He seems to be enjoying a minor renaissance among the net's intelligentsia, despite his bizarre proclivities towards eugenics and other outright violations of political correctness. Taste-makers from BoingBoing to MeFi peddle Cthulhu-themed tea-cozies and other mind-boggling, long-tail elements of niche hipster consumerism gone awry. Modern auteurs such as Mike Mignola and Guillermo del Toro borrow liberally from the fertile, feotid soil of ol' Howard Phillips' imagination, with admittedly entertaining results.

None of this excuses the truly execrecable aspects of Lovecraft's actual oeuvre, from his gender theories to his prose. And yet, despite his horribility, Lovecraft's stock continues to rise among present-day interwebbers. I can't explain it.

Now, something exists that might excuse these aspects of Lovecraft, and that is this song by the Mountain Goats.

H.P. Lovecraft, you can keep doing whatever it is you do, so long as you continue to posthumously inspire rock and roll such as this.

P.S. I like the double entendre of the song's rallying cry: "I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn." At first listen, I did not think of Lovecraft the Proper Noun, but rather "lovecraft" the possible neologism in the vein of "statecraft" or "songcraft." I feel like lovecraft in Brooklyn indeed.

Immersion

2008-11-03T15:28:00.001-05:00

There's a link on today's Penny Arcade to what Tycho aptly describes as 'a meditation on starting into Fallout 3'. It's about appreciation and immersion, and it brought me to a pretty weird realization about myself.

This entry aside (oh god the irony), I don't spend all that much time in self-reflection; I prefer to live my life over thinking about it, even to the extent of preferring to plan as little as possible and just let events and other people's desires guide my actions. I like to think of myself as pretty immersed in my own life. But when I play games, I'm almost always playing some sort of meta-game, looking for cheats and walkthroughs on wikis. (Scroll down a bit, or ctrl-F for that link text, to see what I'm talking about there. It's important, and not just for what I'm talking about now.) Even single-player games, where there's no competition, so there's no reward for metagaming. Why do I do that? Why do I have such a hard time turning in a quest without my refer-a-friend buddy there so I get triple XP? Why do I reload my Civ games when Imperial Japan goes to war with me because of a decision I made 4 turns ago, so that I can repair the timeline and not get involved in the conflict until I have tanks and they barely have musketmen? The few times when the rules and context of a game have made it difficult to metagame -- Prince of Persia's built-in metastory comes to mind, as do the few times I've played 4x games multiplayer -- I've almost always enjoyed the game more. But I can hardly stop myself from turning to the web when I hit the slightest roadblock, or from urging my friends to use voice comm in MMOs.

How do I just let the stories happen, and not worry about the man behind the curtain?

Media, Messages, Equality thereof, importance of the former to the latter

2008-10-29T18:48:00.001-04:00

Ian posted a meditation on the importance of media to messages today. Of course, Mr. McLuhan comes to mind (although his point was more about which of media and messages is more worthy of study than anything else). The choice of medium is an important one for any message; announcing a product with a press conference is different from announcing it with a press release, which is different from announcing it in an advertisement. Heck, this blog would be a different place if it had black text on a white background, or red rather than lime green titles. And you can alter the perception of the words 'I love you' any number of ways, depending on your choice of body language and tone of voice.

I'm tempted to see all this from an anthropological/biological perspective, to return to my constant theme of our monkey brains being way more important than we think they are. How fine is the line between being a good communicator and being manipulative? How much of that distinction is based on mastery of the parts of the message we normally call 'media'?

One Track Mind: DLZ

2008-10-16T15:05:00.005-04:00

Dear Science,

Let's not be humble. We both know what you are: the most successful attempt to systematize and organize knowledge in the history of the Universe. Your method is madness, your technique impeccable. You drive my life; I live your drives. You dot my eyes and tease my cross.

Science, sometimes I wish you were more than the realization of my thoughts. Other times, I feel that my thoughts are the realization of your wishes. There are no other times, because time itself is an illusion. Thanks for that one. I.e., Thanks for that identity element, so long as we're talking about the multiplication operation. If the subject is addition, I guess I should say thanks for that zero.

Is free will neutral? By that, I mean to ask, is free will free of charge? I mean, is it balanced? Am I?

Here's where I sign off. Off with my sign! I am neither positive nor negative. I am nothing.

Signed,
Pharaohmagnetic

P.S. I will leave the rest to TV On the Radio, as expressed in DLZ:

Never you mind
Death professor.
Your shocks are fine,
My struts are better.
Your fiction flies so high,
Y'all could use a doctor
Who's sick, who's next?

One Track Mind: Float

2008-10-07T12:05:00.003-04:00

Artist: Flogging Molly
Album Title: Float
Track Title: Float

Melodic, melancholic Irish bar rock is always good, isn't it? Well, Maybe. This review on Sputnikmusic nails the album pretty well. Money quote:

As sea-faring analogies go, Float definitely fits the description, but only just. Despite the conspicuous absence of a Nathan Maxwell pirate shanty, or an instrumental, that might have injected its middle ranks with some welcome momentum, Float is rescued from abject tedium by the deep, poetic lure of the subject matter and a couple of genuinely outstanding compositions in ‘Float’ and ‘(No More) Paddy’s Lament.’

Fortunately for Flogging Molly, this track has enough reeling violin, drunken banjo spirit, and emotional resonance to almost redeem the whole album. The song wouldn't feel out of place lilting from the open, beckoning doors of the Irish pubs of my youth. Pour yourself a pint, listen to this song, and imagine yourself on King Street.

One Track Mind: My Favourite Book

2008-10-02T13:40:00.001-04:00

My Favourite Book is track 4 on Stars' 2007 release, In Our Bedroom After The War. It's a female-vocalist love song with a soft-pop aesthetic: light, thin drums, syrupy organ playing 7ths on the downbeat, flute backup, strings on the bridge. It's as mushy as you'd expect it to be and as universal as any love song. Romance. Long walks on the beach at sunset. Holding hands in the grocery store. Typical Stars.

One Track Mind: Rooks

2008-10-02T11:07:00.002-04:00

Song Title: Rooks
Artist: Shearwater
Album: Rook

The AV Club is hosting the song in its review of the album here. Go listen. But first, one comment and a few warnings.

Comment: Shearwater is, by far, my favourite band with an ornithologist front-man.

Warning: That front-man is also a member of ingratiating indie darlings Okkervil River. Don't hold that against him; in fact, let that bump the latter band up a few notches. It worked for me; after thoroughly enjoying this album by Shearwater, I want back to Okkervil River after dismissing the "The Stage Names," and I don't regret it. Their follow-up, "The Stand Ins," is even better, but don't tell my hipster friends I think so.

Warning: Falsetto. Get your eardrums ready for some high-pitched male vocals. Don't let the similar, embarrassing vocal efforts of the Dandy Warhols, Beck, or David Usher taint you with prejudice. It works here, against all odds.

Warning: at 1:43 in this song, a pounding bass drum and a triumphant trumpet line enter after a dramatically descending melodic theme in the vocals. Like the unabashed guitar solo in a Dinosaur Jr. Song, it may cause you to take notice and stop working.

Atwood on Harper, via Oz

2008-09-26T17:44:00.000-04:00

Oz pulled an Atwood quote on Harper today that made steam come out my ears. Go read it.

I call Godwin. This is ridiculous. Did you seriously* just call Harper a dictator? Did I really just hear you do that? Yes, it's true that dictatorships suppress dissent -- that's the fucking definition of 'dictatorship' -- but this particular excerpt stinks of some overly self-important whiner having to shell out for the top-shelf stuff herself when she's off telling the French how wonderful they are rather than having the taxpayer foot the bill. OK, maybe that's a bit reactionary of me. But it does seem like Atwood is overreacting quite a bit - nobody's in jail, nobody's even threatened with jail. Her overreaction weakens her criticism of a cut to arts funding by leaning on the threat-to-democracy angle rather than the more obvious (to me anyway) angle of the importance of Canadian art over the market's desire for it.

I do think Canadian art is important. I think it's good for our government to support it, because there are valuable pieces of art -- paintings, theatre, music, books, among many others -- that won't be made if there aren't grants to support them, because there's not enough of a market here for them. I disagree with the Conservatives' decision to cut arts funding.

But I disagree more with Atwood's knee-jerk reaction to it.

One Track Mind: Pick Me Up, Beyond, Dinosaur Jr.

2008-09-26T14:03:00.024-04:00

I'm not familiar with Dinosaur Jr.'s oeuvre; in fact, Beyond is my first listen to the band past a few 30-second clips of avant-garde noise I turned off before they finished back before music was easy to find. I'm happy I took the plunge and bought Beyond, because Pick Me Up - the 3rd track on the album - has one of the best stadium hooks I've ever heard in this kind of distortion rock.

In fact, the whole album has a Shakespearily familiar feel; Dinosaur Jr. captures the essence of the distortion-rock sound so completely (mostly by being one of its originators) that listening to them is a little like reading Hamlet and learning where those cliches came from.

One Track Mind: Inaugural post

2008-09-25T15:34:00.004-04:00

Welcome to One Track Mind.

Fraxas and I have challenged each other to blog about one musical track per week. The queue of our mutual music recommendations grows ever longer, and we need a way to manage the quality glut. This feature of the (soon to be resurrected) Shiny Things Distract Us web-log will be a regularly recurring laser-guided smartbomb of taste-making tuneage.

If a track appears here, it may be good, it may be bad, but one thing is certain: one of us wants the other to hear it. So let's drop the puck... now.

Track title: Death Watch
Artist: Alias
Album title: Resurgam

Fractured guitar notes clip at a striding rhythm. The melody explodes on the scene like a UFO tractor beam punching through the clouds. Alias calls to mind the triumphant moments of Boards of Canada's The Campfire Headphase.

Comments?

Blind Men and Elephants

2008-09-12T11:02:00.000-04:00

Everyone's heard the hoary old tale of the 4 blind men, the wise man, and the elephant. Here's a decent crib:

Four blind men encounter an elephant. One grabs the leg and is convinced it's a tree trunk. One holds the tail and thinks it's a whip. Another touches the elephant's trunk and decides it's a hose while the fourth man pats the side and is sure it's a wall.

The wise man tells them, "All of you are right."

Ha, ha. roffle roffle, oh isn't that wise, things aren't always what they seem. What that story doesn't tell you is that the wise man can't see either.

He just happened to grab the elephant's dick.

The Legend of Linux

2008-04-17T12:57:00.002-04:00

Now that Brother Angus has told us the legend of C, it's time to gather around THIS GUY HERE and listen to the Legend of Linux.

About 15 years after the Univac guys built Unix on C because it was a funny, funny joke, computers had gotten smaller and easier to buy and not nearly so likely to have chainsaw arms. Not that they were friendly yet or anything, but at least they would talk to you without you sacrificing a goat first and lighting some black candles. And this one guy from Finland named Linus Torvalds, who was at the time (1) a student with practically no sense of humour and (2) deeply unimpressed with the operating system his computer came with, decided to write his own operating system. He wanted it to be kinda like Unix only instead of being for very very expensive computers that you had to hire guys with beards to run for you, it would be for small, pretty cheap computers that you had to be a guy with a beard to want to run yourself.

He posted about it on what passed for an internet back then, and decided that the best way to get people to use his new friend (LOOK MA I BUILT MYSELF A FRIEND that's nice dear, now eat your porridge) would be to give it away. And not just give it away, but give it away so hard that the people he gave it to had to give it away as well.

Giving something away that hard is called 'GPLing it'. You can call it copyleft too, if you want, but don't because you'll embarrass us.

So it turns out that giving away something as useful as an operating system is a good way to make friends with people who think it's impressive to give away an operating system, so now Linus has a lot of friends and people who want to be his friend because they're impressed with him. And he can yell at them if he wants, and all they can really do is yell at other people because if they make Linus angry he'll tell them they're bad and they'll be banished to neverland or something, I don't know I never figured that part out.

And that's why Linux is Linn-ucks and not Line-X, because Linus says his name Linn-us. And that's why it's still no good for people who don't have beards, because it's written mostly by a guy who only wants to be friends with people who are like him, who might have made up their own operating system if he hadn't beaten them to it.

Now someone tell the story of Apple!

Metareview: Philosophy of science in kids' films

2008-04-01T09:21:00.003-04:00

This review by Mary Elizabeth Williams earns five stars. Why? She concludes with the following observation:

The film is no overcaffeinated Narnia-like religious allegory, though. Horton and the mayor aren't hearing things. When the burden of proof falls to each of them, they scramble to produce hard evidence. And it's a nice touch, one not in the original story, that the first person to believe the mayor is a scientist. "Horton" may owe a debt to the notion of childlike belief, but any movie that fills Whoville with ladders that look like DNA strands and shows sound waves pulsing through the atmosphere is a movie that celebrates reason. It's probably not a coincidence that it's from the creators of the "Ice Age" films, which gave pretty wide latitude to Darwinism.

When scientists and skeptical thinkers are portrayed as pooh-pooh killjoy wet-blanket snotty/snobby wrongheaded villains in just about every Hollywood picture, that's really nice to hear.

Lore on iPods

2008-03-27T21:19:00.003-04:00

This blog has forged several links to the inimitable comedic stylings of the great Lore. This week, he outdoes himself in an article about finally joining the "International Order of Dancing Silhouettes."

I want useful playlists. I want "Tori Amos songs that make a damn lick of sense." I want "Beck songs where the rhythm track doesn't sound like he's throwing Ben Wa balls at an armadillo." I want "Nick Cave songs that aren't explicitly about bleeding to death."

Link

Advertising

2008-03-26T09:47:00.002-04:00

A titan of the advertising industry died recently, and of course metafilter has a comment thread about it. The comments, predictably, fall into two rough categories: "holy crap ads suck" and "I'm in advertising, ripping on me is lame and boring, you're the one with the problem if you can't make rational decisions in the face of advertising".

I'm in the first camp.

But I'd like to think that my position is a bit more nuanced than "I don't like watching ads"; in my opinion, modern advertising is immoral because (1) it manufactures demand, thereby distorting the market and (2) it does so by exploiting human irrationality.

Advertising is a necessary part of a market economy, because without information about what products are available consumers can't send price signals to manufacturers effectively. The problem starts when advertising stops being about adding information to the market ("this product is available, here are its features, this is its price") and starts being about distorting the demand curve ("here's my stuuuuuuffff, you know you waaaaaant it"). I'm not a libertarian free-markets-solve-everything kind of guy who'd tell you that all market distortions are bad, but I do think that markets are a very good way to distribute goods effectively and that distortions to them should be examined carefully and allowed to happen only if doing so improves society as a whole. Demand-manufacturing advertising doesn't improve society. The money spent on bottled water and meaningless tchotchkes and $40 T-shirts would be better spent elsewhere, on products for which demand doesn't have to be manufactured. The economic activity generated by the business model of "create a product, then create demand for that product" only rarely advances society.

The advertising industry, to the extent that it displays any conscience at all, tends to think that those two business models (create product, manufacture demand & analyze demand, create product) are equivalent; they make arguments like "If you the consumer have some sort of psychological problem where you can't stop yourself from buying Acme Co's Air In A Tube (New, improved, fresher!) because you saw an ad for it, that's your problem". But it isn't your problem if Acme Co's ad agency has enough understanding of psychology to use sex and fear and other subconscious mechanisms to sell you air in a tube. Or, even worse, to aim the ad at your kids, who are not capable of rational thought (that's why we don't let them vote or decide what to have for dinner, right?).

As long as ads are aimed at children, as long as luxury SUVs are presented as necessary, as long as the difference between "want" and "need" is blurred on purpose, I'll think of advertising as immoral.

Warning: French.

2008-01-30T09:44:00.000-05:00

... And we're back.

When Salon Commenters Make You Laugh

2007-05-31T16:51:00.000-04:00

I think Gpanos, in a comment to this here Salon article, summarized one of life's greatest truths:

"Similarly, Swisher and Mossberg agreed that in Apple's current ad campaign pitting the frumpy "PC Guy" against the hipster "Mac Guy," John Hodgman's PC Guy is more likable."

This is probably because hipsters are cool in theory, but suck in practice, like Communism.

Spread your wings.

2007-05-11T11:01:00.000-04:00

Go on, you're not going to hurt anyone. Least of all me.

Give those bastards a good flap, rev the engines, see what kind of dust devils you can kick up. Smell that warm, soft, leathery smell; take a look at that beautiful shadow. Haha yeah, it'd be a metal cover if it wasn't noon on a grassy park lawn. Of course it feels weird, you have two more friggin limbs! All right, now JUMP. Jump and beat. That's it, ride it, don't think too hard.

Fly.

The past tense of 'to cleave'

2007-05-03T09:21:00.000-04:00

A popular tool in a butcher's shop is a cleaver. After a cleaver's been used on a piece of meat, that meat is...cleaved? it's not cleft or cloven, but is it clove?

Perhaps the butcher clove the meat, and now the meat is cleaved. Can anything other than hoofs be cloven? can anything other than a chin be cleft?

"There ain't no Moore's Law for neurons"

2007-05-02T14:18:00.000-04:00

Watts says, in this comment thread, : "There ain't no Moore's Law for neurons."

Well, OK, but there should be. Maybe this is just my not-so-latent singularitarian/extropian streak talking, but there bloody well should be a way to get this giant piece of almost-meat in my head to be more efficient with its inputs and, as a consequence, develop new capacities.

A pied kiwi: wikipedia BURNS MY EYES

2007-05-02T13:18:00.000-04:00

So I'm flipping through Wikipedia's articles on complexity theory and cellular automata, by way of reading about the controversies related to Stephen Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science. This was all sparked by news of Mathematica 6's release.

Then, I stumble upon the fascinating fact that some very simple rules are Turing Complete. In the process, I read a certain Wikipedia article, the object of today's post, that has visual examples of the basic computations that Rule 110 is capable of performing.

These images (in fact, almost all conventional images of one-dimensional cellular automata) would be a lot more interesting if I could look at them for longer than 3 nanoseconds.

Warning: severe eyeball abrasion ahead.

The Rule 110 Cellular Automaton (scroll down for images)

When Film Geeks Make you Laugh

2007-04-26T13:46:00.000-04:00

A comment on one of the Onion AV club's DVD reviews made me laugh out loud(-erskates). Regarding the film "Shakes the Clown" by Bob Goldthwait, SK73 says

The Boston Herald famously described 'Shakes' as "the 'Citizen Kane' of alcoholic clown movies."

I mean sure, the Boston Herald probably gets the credit there, but still. That killed me. Maybe I'm going soft.

Pop is Crap: co-conspirators

2007-04-24T16:22:00.000-04:00

Oh, how I deeply love to rant about the inanity and stupidity of pop culture. (All in good fun, of course. You know how much I really love you, Pop Culture!)

Much to my enjoyment, there are many others who do so much better than I. First is Amelie Gillette, the blogger behind The Hater. Her every post is a pop-culture-eviscerating Garden of Earthly Delights.

And then, courtesy of MeFi, there's this article in the Village Voice, which gleefully mocks (by way of Venn Diagrams) the song by Mims called "This is Why I'm Hot." Although really, you don't have to go much farther than to quote the lyrics:

This is why I'm Hot [2x]
This is why [2x] Uh
This is why I'm Hot (Uh)
This is why I'm Hot [2x] Whoo
This is why [2x]
This is why I'm Hot

I'm hot cause I'm fly (fly)
You ain't cause you're not (Mims)
This is why [2x]
This is why I'm hot [2x]

A graphical dissertation on the number one song in America

Stross, Again

2007-04-23T17:22:00.000-04:00

Charlie Stross' Hugo-nominated novella Missile Gap is avialable online for free. It's pretty dark fiction; a classic story of war determining not who's right, but who's left. I read it through in a couple hours, and it had a powerful effect. Perhaps a bit muddied with exposition, but overall a very solid piece of work.

Talking about it with the Pharaoh, it occurred to me that Peter Watts (whose full name I'm spelling out here for ease of ego-surfing) and Stross both are teaching me the lesson I've heard Ellison and Bradbury and Spider Robinson (in full-on fellate-Heinlein-mode) blather about: SF as mind-expanding, scary stuff that teaches us as much what we're scared of the future being as what the future will be.

The thrust of the argument never really made sense to me. Their stories all seem...tame. Bradbury's tales of mars-people and sun-rockets and Tall They Were, And Golden-Eyed are...nice. Like, "That's nice, Timmy" kind of nice. Even Ellison seems more like the neighborhood pest of a kid trying to wreck automobiles with a slingshot rather than any kind of genuine menace. And then there's Stross and Watts, holding your head under water together while bellowing philosophy of the mind at you. Demonstrating the finer points of interspecies competition by watermelon-off-a-balconying your dog with a sledgehammer.

And my (grand?)kids are going to read them and think "that's nice, Pete and Charlie."

By Force of Personality

2007-03-26T15:21:00.000-04:00

Rob Bray's recent blogpost By What Authority is a quite persuasive argument against the Intelligent Design movement. The essential thrust is that biblical literalism is at the root of ID, and biblical literalism is hard to take seriously in light of the demonstrated functionality of atomic bombs.

In addition to being -- in my mind -- persuasive, it also avoids the trap of talking past its opponents; unlike Dawkins or Dennet or any of the other "bright" crowd (goodness gracious how I detest that term). It argues from similarity, rather than from difference.

the Horror

2007-03-14T14:21:00.000-04:00

Things the web thinks have horror in them:

o blimps
o XML
o culture
o Frankenstein (1970)
o Party Beach (1964)
o Iraq, in poetry
o The Heights
o European Colonization
o the Werewolf
o Battery Hens
o Coke
o Software Patents
o Disney's Old Yeller
o going bald

I dunno, they all seem pretty...banal to me. Except possibly Iraq and European colonization.

Ideas and ideas and ideas

2007-03-14T14:00:00.000-04:00

I have idea paralysis.

I have been reading a lot of random stuff lately, and listening to music I haven't listened to in a year or so, and it's giving me all sorts of quarter-formed ideas about random things like:

o Why Ole Bald Angus' "jokes are not good for laffs" is wrong

o How I could possibly extend the ideas in Blindsight

o The Pharaoh's challenge to me re: story-writing

o The visual image of unfurling batwings

I don't know what to do with them.

No Good Metaphor

2007-03-14T13:47:00.000-04:00

The Web thinks there are no good metaphors for:

o too-hard poetry
o compassion in solitude
o a "space" that we cooperatively occupy mentally
o neutrality in prison
o hunting and serving
o the idea behind Einstein's most famous equation
o "this degree of absolute wrongness"
o the release of Ann Coulter's new book

I'd add "generating software" to that list. I can't think of any way to describe what it is that I do for a living to relatives that doesn't involve blank stares of....

dammit, I just thought of one. Magic.

As per Stross in the introduction to Atrocity Archives, imagine a learned cabal whose entrance requirements are long and careful study, that invents multiple new languages and thoughts to express its primary motives, that causes the world to change by the correct and highly ritualized codification of thought, that warps its members' perceptions and actions, that's impenetrable to outsiders
(though they may benefit from the cabal's work), that can create or destroy person-years of economic effort just by uttering incantations. Now dress them in jeans and scruffy T-shirts with SIGGRAPH '88 logos, and call them "IT".

A pied kiwi: wikipedia randomness, lunacy edition

2007-03-08T10:17:00.000-05:00

This XKCD comic neatly summarizes the problem with Wikipedia. I fall prey to this almost every day. But instead of letting these hundreds of hours of go to waste, I will use "A Pied Kiwi" to inform you of the most fascinating, serendipitous tidbits that I discover.

Today, in the entry for lunatic:

The word is borrowed from Latin"lunaticus", which gains its stem from "luna" for moon, which denotes the traditional link made in folklore between madness and the phases of the moon. This probably refers to the symptoms of cyclic mood disorders such as bipolar disorder or cyclothymia , the symptoms of which may also go through phases. As yet there is little evidence for any causal link between phases of the moon and the progression of mood disorder symptoms.

You probably knew that already. But then,

In a 1999 Journal of Affective Disorders article, a hypothesis was suggested indicating that the phase of the moon may in the past have had an effect on bipolar patients by providing light during nights which would otherwise have been dark, and affecting susceptible patients through the well-known route of sleep deprivation. With the introduction of electric light, this effect would have gone away, as light would be available every night, explaining the negative results of modern studies. They suggest ways in which this hypothesis might be tested.

Yes! Test that hypothesis! Bring back lunacy!

But it's Art! Experimental Art! DO NOT CRITICISE THE ART (please)

2007-03-02T10:51:00.000-05:00

The Pharaoh and I were talking recently about the ~~art collective~~ ~~musical ensemble~~ band named Of Montreal (wikipedia link; stupidiculous vanity site) a few days ago. He thinks they have good hooks in thought-provoking, progressive pieces. I think they have decent hooks that they ruin with a lack of songwriting skill (learn what meter means, fuckers). In other words, he likes them and I don't.

It seems to me that the notion of experimentality, of avant-gardishness, is just a defense mechanism against criticism. "It's not bad, it's ART." OK, I suppose you could be challenging the definition of "art" or "song" or "quality", but the road down which those challenges lie - i.e. postmodern relativism -- leads almost exclusively up its own asshole. The perfect expression of any craft -- whether it's musicianship, carpentry, painting, game design, whatever -- comes from creativity within the bounds of the form. Difference without alienation; creativity without abandonment of form; novelty with familiarity. On that front, Of Montreal's experiment fails; their music doesn't sound good.

Some rules you can bend, others you can't. Mastery of a form is knowing which is which.

Reviews: Music

2007-01-12T13:59:00.000-05:00

Yo La Tengo: I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
OK, Yo La Tengo. We both know you think this is all some kind of enormous joke. Mood metal, fuzzy bass-heavy psuedojungle, power pop, and treacly emo chamber music? All in the first 8 tracks? But I'm going to get you anyway: I'm going to enjoy it all, just to spite you.

Mogwai: Mr Beast
More spare, expansive mood metal from the acknowledged masters thereof. If you like it, you'll like it; if you think that distortion pedals don't have a place outside arenas and rock bars pretending to be arenas, you'll probably want to give it a miss.

Dire Straits: On Every Street
An old record; released in 1994, On Every Street was Dire Straits' last hurrah. Showcasing lead singer and guitarist Mark Knopfler's increasing interest in Country as a genre, especially as it intersects the Blues. Displaying their typical lyrical mix of sad ballads about war and nihilistic pop tunes about partying, this is actually my favourite Dire Straits album.

Drive-by Truckers: The Dirty South and A Blessing and a Curse
Take country's regret and sadness and complaint about the unfairness of the world. Mix it half-and-half with Alt-rock's anger and malaise. Add a great deal of musical craftsmanship and some genuine pathos, and you have a ridiculously clichéd review of a couple of very, very good alt-country albums.

Radiohead, OK Computer
Why did nobody tell me this album was actually good? ...ok, why didn't I listen?

Sloan, A Sides Win: Singles 1992-2005
Sloan's one of those bands whose singles I've always enjoyed, to a point; none of them really ever grabbed me enough to make me buy a record, but when I saw a collection of their singles on eMusic the opportunity was too good to pass up. I wasn't disappointed: all the harmonized vocals, major-chord power pop, and goofy lyrics I remembered liking on the radio, all in one place.

Stars, Set Yourself On Fire and Nightsongs
A friend introduced me to the Stars, describing Set Yourself On Fire as "an album either for falling in love or killing yourself". Ah-yup. Soft melodies, a male/female vocal combo that at its best pulls at the heartstrings mightily and at its worst is entirely tolerable, and masterful arrangement.

Tragically Hip, World Container
Another 3 years, another Hip album, another painful exhibition of how ruined a rocker's voice can get. Downie's lyrics are still in top form -- obtuse poetry that somehow is all the more meaningful for its obtuseness -- but his recent musical training, and his voicebox ravaged by twenty-plus years of touring? has led him to create arrangements? that never resolve? and always end phrases on an upnote? make the album? sound? like a valley girl?!? and it's tragically annoying, because that's really the only flaw the album has.

The Black Keys, thickfreakness
I'm just going to quote the eMusic user Earwax here:

"Okay, who are these guys? Has Hendrix come back as two white guys from Ohio? Has Cream reformed under an assumed name?"

Blues rock at its fuzziest, a bluesman's voice over thick, crunchy guitars over a drum set that does more than just hold down 2 and 4.

The Decemberists, Picaresque
Brainy indie "pop" -- a word that, in The Decemberists' case, covers the gamut from persian-influenced rock to sea shanties about revenge, via early-18th-century folk ballads -- is about as close as it's possible to come to describing this masterpiece of an album. A great album to walk to work to; there's more than enough content, musically and lyrically, to occupy a mind on what otherwise would be a wasted half-hour.

The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
4 guys? Check. Drums? Check. Bass? Check. Lead Guitar? Check. Singer/Rhythm Guitar? Check. Rock songs about partying, getting wasted, recovering from getting wasted, and partying some more? CHECK. An uncomplicated, unpretentious rock record that does exactly what it sets out to do: entertain you for 40 minutes, then leave you smiling and wanting more.

TV On The Radio, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
This one, unfortunately, was a mistake. falsetto duets over tweedlyboop electronic beats, with random noise samples thrown in to approximate drums? Maybe I just don't get it.

Blindsight: Peter Watts did it again

2006-12-13T11:52:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I finished Blindsight, Peter Watts' new novel. You can get the full text here. It's hard SF to the max -- inquiries into the nature of consciousness, mind-boggling worldbuilding feats -- but it also has some human-psyche work that I find simultaneously incredibly creepy and incredibly fascinating. The most human of the main characters is a woman who intentionally gave herself multiple personalities and is referred to as The Gang of Four. And the least human of the main characters is nowhere near as mindblowingly weird as his aliens are.

Reading Watts is like watching a tarantula eat a small bird. It's repulsive, but you can't look away. It's nature at its reddest in tooth and claw. It's direct, thoughtful, extrapolations of today's nightmares into tomorrow's.

It's impossible to put down.

Metareview: The Hip in Concert

2006-11-30T12:04:00.000-05:00

Jordan Zivitz of the Montreal Gazette reviews a live performance of the Tragically Hip over here. The review starts off promisingly, with a propulsive stylistic voice delivering humour and irreverence.

For the first few paragraphs at least, the author gracefully tosses off innovative visuals and metaphors.

Unfortunately, Zivitz can't maintain the energy, and the stylistic embellishments begin to grow tiresome. Quite possibly, he's subconsciously trying to emulate the titanic poetic powers of Gord Downie, the Tragically Hip front-man, whose lyrics are evocative as they are esoteric. If so, Zivitz has propped up a huge obstacle to climb.

A dash of earnestness breaks through the conclusion, and Zivitz rescues the review with stark emotional openness. His outré style, stripped of its cynicism, regains the crack and sparkle it originally showed at the review opening.

All in all, a commendable work.

Stuck Up: A Strip

2006-11-28T13:19:00.000-05:00

This is my favourite Cat And Girl strip. The general format for C&G is to make a snarky observation about dichotomies between naive expectations and reality, thereby commenting wistfully on the cyncism necessary to cope with modern life. Most of the time, the observation's accompanied by a pun, visual or written, on one or both of the sides of the dichotomy. In this case, the dichotomy's between the seminal Magritte painting's complaint -- the difference between image and reality, the so-called use-mention distinction -- and an addict's skewed view of their own addiction. Their refusal to admit that their addiction is problematic.

There are similarities to the two sides beyond the fact that they're both negative declarative statements, too. The addict really doesn't see his habit as a problem, even though he recognizes that it can be problematic in others, just like we all realize that even though the painting isn't a pipe, it is a painting of a pipe.

The fact that the comparison between the two sides is made in comic form -- a form that plays off the use-mention all the time, one that (from a semiotic perspective, at least) requires a deep understanding of Magritte's complaint -- makes the joke even funnier.

..well, that and the fact that paint is delicious.

[This edition of the Stuck Up series guest-written by Fraxas; Pharaoh will return with regularly scheduled updates soon.]

Something I test well in!

2006-11-22T22:31:00.000-05:00

I tested my musical skills in 6 minutes just now, and of the 15000 or so people who took the test before me more than 90% of them tested worse than I did. I've always thought I had a good ear, both for musical intervals and for accents; now I have (real! official! I read it on the web somewhere that sounded authoritative!) proof that I am.

What's your score?

Misordinaty

2006-11-20T15:54:00.000-05:00

...is a word I just made up. It means dislike for computers (by analogy to misanthropy). It'd probably be more correct to use the Greek root for 'computer' rather than the Latin one, making the word misupologisy, but somehow misordinaty seems prettier.

The term came up as I tried to evade a Mac/Win religious battle (all in jest, of course!) by suggesting that the fact that I use Windows and Solaris shouldn't be interpreted as me endorsing them but rather as an accident of convenience, and that I hate all computers equally.

I just thought I'd share.

Growing Up with Boy on a Stick and Slither

2006-11-20T08:15:00.000-05:00

Boy on a Stick and Slither pulled out all the stops today.

Stuck Up: Motivation, Soviet Style

2006-11-09T13:11:00.000-05:00

Speaking of motivation, no one could do it like the cold-war era soviet communists. The streamlined design ethos of their propaganda posters is simply breathtaking.

There's some soviet propaganda posters here, all of which are fantastic.

Although, my absolute favourite I found elsewhere:

(High quality here)

This mind-blowing poster says "Smite the Lazy Worker." I have this mounted on matte-board right above my computer monitor. Whenever I start goofing off at work, e.g., surfing certain websites that are endlessly fascinating but are like whirlpool time-vortices (see sidebar links), this poster tells me to Smite the Lazy Worker within me. I grab my Soviet hammer, I swing my blocky but athletic silhouette of a body in a wide, smooth overhead arc, and I SMITE that lazy sleeping worker right on the fuzzy pate.

Works every time.

Thanks, Soviet Union!

P.S. Because of the beautiful intricacies of the Russian language, I knew that "Smite the Lazy Worker" would be a prosaic and inaccurate translation at best. So, I asked a Russian colleague to translate it for me. He gave me a half-hour explanation of the many-layered puns that appear in the original language. For example, the word isn't really "lazy worker," it's more of a Russian-only compound with a prefix best approximated by "pseudo," or "faker." E.g., Smite the Fake-worker, or Smite the Pseudo-worker, or Smite the worker-who-appears-to-be-busy-but-is-really-faking. Also, the connotation of smite is "hit," but "to work" and "to hit" are very similar in Russian, to the extent that the word for "worker" is like... "striker." So, it may very well be translated as "Strike the Pseudo-Striker," but that fails on several other levels. Smite the Lazy Worker works for me, so the lazy worker I shall smite.

Stuck Up: Motivation

2006-11-09T11:11:00.000-05:00

Long hours of office drudgery can be utterly soul-crushing, especially for a hyperactive trained lab monkey like me. That's why a few well-placed motivational posters can turn nihilistic boredom to happy-fun lollipop sunshine rainbow time!

Mark Strivers is a cartoonist who updates his webpage once weekly with wonderful webcomics. (Alliteration!) His one-panel strips are amongst the best of the genre. Here's one I printed out and stuck up, for my own motivational benefit:

(Fullsize here).

Stuck Up: Telecalculograph

2006-11-08T14:50:00.000-05:00

On "Stuck Up" I'll be discussing the things I printed and stuck up around my workspace. Today's entry is the most recent.

You've probably already seen this Boingboing post about a very cool steampunk casemod. Because I covet it greatly, I have done the next best thing. I printed out this image from the builder's Flickr photoset, and I affixed it to the front of my otherwise completely bland lab-provided Gateway:

Thanks, johnny5rd!

Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg on Beastly Technology

2006-11-06T14:22:00.000-05:00

I've blogged about the brilliant comedic writings of Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg before. This week's entry is also top-notch. As he points out in his own blog, "Those of you who enjoy comments that miss the point will particularly enjoy this one."

Link

I think Bible believers, followers and/or thumpers are really overlooking the other technological warnings inherent in Revelation. Here are some actual Bible verses, and the cutting-edge technology to which they clearly refer:

"And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind."

This is obviously a reference to file sharing. The "stars" in question are the hard-working entertainers of the world, "falling to earth" because of the "casting" of their works to and fro like figs (figs were the main form of entertainment in the ancient world) by a "mighty wind." A mighty wind? Like a "torrent," perhaps?

"Forget violence, you are now driving war."

2006-11-01T10:03:00.000-05:00

It's a Metafilter day here on Shiny Things. The Truth About Cars reviews the Audi RS4 and, as a car review, this one hits all the high points.

It's articulate, clear about the car's faults and strengths, and displays a genuine love for people-movers that's palpable even to someone as idiotic where cars are concerned as I am. Plus, it actually uses metaphor correctly and effectively!

After You

2006-10-31T18:00:00.000-05:00

I saw this animated short film a while ago via metafilter, but it has stuck in my mind since then. That's why I link it here, for you.

After You.

Google Calculator is amazing.

2006-10-30T12:01:00.000-05:00

Want to calculate the surface temperature of the sun?

Paste this string into google:

((4 pi (1.5 * 10^13 cm)^2 * 0.136 J / (s cm^2 ) / (2 pi^5 * k^4 * 15^-1 * c^-2 * h^-3) ) / (4 pi (7 * 10^10 cm)^2))^0.25

Here's a breakdown of the factors:
10^13 cm is about the distance from the earth to the sun. So, 4 pi r^2 is the surface area of the sphere with that radius.

0.136 J / (s cm^2 ) is the radiant flux of solar energy that we recieve here on Earth. So, multiplying that flux by the area of the earth-orbit-sphere will give you the total radiant power that the sun emits.

Then, we can apply the handy-dandy Stefan-Boltzmann law. The Stefan-Boltzmann "constant" isn't built into google, but Planck's Constant, the speed of light, and Boltzmann's constant are. So, we can put those right into the expression above with the right prefactors and powers.

The radius of the sun is about 7 * 10^10 cm. To scale all the radiant power back to that size, we divide by that surface area, and we're left with something proportional to the fourth power of the black body temperature. Raise the whole thing to the power of 0.25, and you're left with the surface temperature of the sun, approximately.

So cool.

Terry Eagleton on Dawkinsian evangelical atheism

2006-10-25T12:11:00.000-04:00

Here's the link from the London Review of Books. Terry Eagleton is a literary critic and philosopher who holds ever-so-slightly more nuanced views on the topic of religion and faith than either Pat Robertson or Richard Dawkins.

I've pontificated before about evangelical atheism; I lean mostly to a Null Interpretation myself (title borrowed from Dirac's commentary on quantum physics). Subtlety and moderation in all things.

[Editor's note: the word "evangelical" in the title and the body of this work has replaced the previous choice, "militant", for reasons put forth extremely clearly by Oz in the comments.]

Quizzing all over the Carpet: Pop Music Edition

2006-10-22T21:46:00.000-04:00

The format of today's question is multiple choice.

What was the title of the first Australian song to acheive popularity in the United States, charting as high as #3 in 1963?

A) "Put Some Shrimp on the Barbie, Mate"
B) "A Dingo Ate my Baby (Help Help)"
C) "We All Live on a Penal Colony"
D) "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport"

This is a blogpost title that references itself as well as its contents: A link to a Self-Referential Story.

2006-10-19T13:28:00.000-04:00

This is the link that takes you a Self-Referential Story by David Moser. I believe he is the same David Moser who is the sometime collaborator of Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Trip report: Niagara wine region

2006-10-15T18:39:00.000-04:00

On Friday afternoon, my lovely wife and I rented a car and drove 150km to the Niagara wine region, just South around Lake Ontario from Toronto. Normally, the drive takes about 2 hours; it was more like 3 and a half today because of Friday-afternoon traffic leaving Toronto. Not quite stop-and-go, but it came close a couple times.

We stayed at Down Home B&B, our first non Harbour House Niagara visit (it was full up; odd, since there was nothing particularly special going on in town this weekend). Quite a pleasant room, with good breakfasts and a comfortable bed -- though the room got hotter than optimal sleeping temperature. We ate at the always-spectacular Charles Inn on Friday night; spinach salad and beef tenderloin for Her, parsnip & pear velouté and trio of duck (grilled breast, leg confit, and foie gras) with wild mushrooms accompanied by a glass of Lailey's Pinot Noir for me.

Saturday was spent lesiurely touring wineries, starting with Reif Estates (decent Cabernet Sauvignon from 2002 recently released; we bought 2 bottles) and heading from there to Frogpond Farm which has the distinction of being the area's only certified-organic winery. We bought 2 bottles of their 2002 Riesling, and 2 of their 2002 Cabernet Merlot. A short drive from Frogpond is Coyote's Run, who won best Pinot Noir of the year at 2006's Cuvée in February -- but they've since sold out of it entirely. Sigh. We had to make do with 2 bottles of their 2004 Meritage (which is an invented word, by the way, used by non-French wineries to describe Bordeaux-style blends). Right around the corner is Chateau des Charmes, a relatively old winery with a distinctly new facility and a decidedly anachronistic label. Tastes of their Aligoté and Sauvignon Blanc didn't impress -- very light wines, without much nose at all -- but their Gamay varietal, which they call 'Droit' for its unusually straight growth (Gamay's usually pretty gnarly), was quite nice and we left with 2 bottles of it and one of their 2004 late harvest Riesling we'd had in the past and liked. At that point, with both of us hungry and unwilling to wait much longer for food, we made our last winery stop at Lailey. We arrived at the same time as about 4 other cars. The tasting bar was packed, and they didn't have any of their Canadian Oak wines open, which was a disappointment since they're almost the only ones in the region who are using it and we'd been looking forward to trying some out. The 2003 Cabernet Franc and 2004 Cabernet blend were good, though, so we got a bottle of each.

Our trunk full and our stomachs empty, we headed back into town. There being few other options, we ate at the Churchill Lounge of the Prince of Wales Hotel -- fish & chips for Her, a burger for me. Uneventful and unremarkable, aside from some truly dreadful muzak and subpar tea. A quick walk through the slightly tourist-trappy ("it's not tourist-trappy! it's Quaint!" She says, from over my shoulder) main street of Niagara-on-the-lake took us to Greaves Jams, where we bought at least a 3 month supply of various wonderful sweet fruit preserves. It's a necessary part of every Niagara trip. A 3 month supply weighs about 15 pounds, and we were 10 minutes from the car at that point, so we left our box of jam behind the counter and told the nice lady we'd be back in 10 minutes or so.

We forgot about our jam.

Now, we did have good reason to. It was 3:30pm by this point, and we only had until 5:00 to finish up at Hillebrand's Buyers' Weekend event, 15 minutes out of town. We're members in their wine club -- they send us 2 bottles a month, one red one white, and we get discounts on tours and tastings at the winery -- and one of the perks of that membership isthat we get first crack at their new vintages and a few rare back-list wines at a Buyers' Weekend once a year. You wander around a big tent with a wine glass and a notebook, and when you find one you like you mark yourself down for a half a case. Or more, if you're feeling particularly enthused. We found some we liked -- a 1999 Cabernet Sauvignon, well-integrated tannins underneath a nose of ripe red fruit, with a wonderfully soft mouthfeel and just enough acidity. A half-case of that, and 2 bottles of a really nice 2004 Vidal icewine, rounded out our purchases for the day.

We finished at Hillebrand around 4:45, and we had to hurry back into town to get to our 5:00 dinner reservation at the Stone Road Grille, aka REST. When we were partway there She remembered our jam, and so we had to drop in at the restaurant, tell them we were going to be late, go get our jam, and scoot back to the restaurant... luckily, they didn't mind and we enjoyed a wonderful meal: butternut squash soup and a mushroom risotto for Her, lightly-battered calamari and the biggest pork chop I've ever eaten for me. The nicest thing about the evening was that REST's wine list had a very pleasant surprise -- a half bottle of Lailey's Canadian Oak Cabernet Sauvignon! A great bottle, and the perfect size for the evening. After our late lunch and early supper we were both pretty full, so we just went back to our room and read books for the evening. A quiet end to a busy day.

This space will be replaced tomorrow by an account of our trip to Fielding Estates for their Crush event -- picking, processing, and tasting wine for 4 hours on a beautiful early fall Sunday.

If you do not program for a living, please read this

2006-10-13T10:39:00.000-04:00

Joel Spolsky pointed at No Silver Bullet today and it expresses clearly a truth which I had thought I'd realized independently and could never really express. It's an essay on why writing software is hard, and it's very very good. Skip over the jargon; there's a lot to be gleaned from the essay without even reading the technical sections.

Books

2006-10-12T20:11:00.000-04:00

I am cursed with a peculiar ailment of the mind: I read books very, very quickly. I get most of the detail from them, at least as long as I have the book in my hands; some things I miss, but I trap some of those on the next read through, which has the advantage then of being at least partially new.

For whatever reason, I've been reading a lot of books from the library in the past few weeks: here are some capsule reviews of my first time through them. Maybe I'll reread them in a year, see what's changed.

Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson — Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, stars go out, Earth is encased in a pseudomembrane that causes time on the inside to pass at 1 second for every 3.17 exterior years, boy gets girl back. Good science, better characterization, weak plotting at the final reveal.

Newton's Wake, by Ken Macleod — Earth goes through a singularity event that leaves the people left behind warring over weird and wonderful posthuman artifacts, not the least of which is a wormhole network and a gentle but firm refusal for causality to be violated even though faster-than-light travel is possible. A good space-opera romp, pleasantly absent of Mr. Macleod's eye-rollingly leftist politics.

The Thousandfold Thought, by R. Scott Bakker — Third in a Tolkien-scale fantasy epic, the conclusion to a tale that, while suffering a few of the standard high-fantasy delusions, manages some pretty interesting gyrations. Tedious in places; gripping in others. the latter outweight the former by a considerable margin.

Glasshouse, by Charlie Stross — Stross's books tend to be answers to hypothetical questions. "How would an interstellar metacivilization uninterested in faster-than-light travel but happy to use faster-than-light communication survive past the collapse of its member civilizations?" (Singularity Sky.) "What would conflict between weakly godlike posthuman Grand Intelligences look like to humans caught in the middle of it?" (Iron Sunrise.) "How would the world's governments react to the discovery that demons are real, and they can be summoned by doing a specific kind of mathematics?" (The Atrocity Archives.) "How does a society that allows perfect copying of humans, transporters-that-replicate, feel like to its members?" (Glasshouse.)

More to be added.

Colour me sociopathic, then

2006-10-10T18:09:00.000-04:00

In his article "Disney exec: Piracy is just a business model", Doctorow points out at the bottom that conversation -- rather than content -- is king. Well, yes, to a point; I probably would choose friends over movies for my desert island sojourn, but 'conversation' in that sense of the word cannot be delivered to me by Disney. They can try to talk about their content, and they can make it easier (or more difficult) to have a conversation about their content, but to the extent that they have to have product to sell in order to make quarterly P/L targets they have to produce content.

Conversation might be king, but corporations aren't kingmakers.

Garfield meets Black Math

2006-09-06T21:53:00.000-04:00

One of Charlie Stross' series, the Laundry books, is in the horror genre. Of course, it has a representatively Strossian twist: in that universe, the incantations required to bridge the gap between our world and the Ones Where The Demons Are take the form of mathematics. There are equations that can drive you insane; thoughts that, when you have them, your head becomes a conduit for Evil. It's an extension of the forbidden-knowledge meme, and it has all the standard trappings thereof; when it's well done, that meme drives the horror stories that I find most creepy. And Stross does do it well.

Anyway, the real reason I brought all this up is to show you this image, which demonstrates pretty effectively the idea of black math:

I think I speak for us all when I say that that is probably the best Garfield cartoon I've ever seen.

Lightning Strikes in Toronto

2006-08-04T14:49:00.000-04:00

This incredible photograph makes me miss Toronto. Using my powers of triangulation, I was able to determine from the satellite images at Google Maps that the photographer was at the high-rise on the northeast corner of Bay and Edward.

This is why Friendster and Orkut and all those other FoaF services don't work.

2006-06-29T09:37:00.000-04:00

Because we have Real Social Networks already; we're homo sapiens sapiens and that particular ape is very good at tracking social relationships all by itself.

On the naming of Sports Teams

2006-06-26T11:39:00.000-04:00

I know someone who simply cannot grasp the modern naming style of certain sports teams. Oilers, Hurricanes, Penguins, even Maple Leafs she can understand - on these teams such as these, each player is a single "senator," a "knickerbocker," or perhaps a "Red Sock." The team is therefore collectively called the Giants or the Jets or the Argonauts or what have you.

But these basketball team names really confuse her. The Miami Heat? Heat is singular! How can many players form a team called a "heat?" What is a "heat" anyway? Same thing with the Utah Jazz or the Orlando Magic. These teams should be called the Miami Heat Sources or the Orlando Magicians or the Utah... uh, Jazz Musicians.

These modern-sounding American-style names really confuse foreign ears too. When Major League Soccer was founded in the United States back in 1993, many of the teams had wacky names such as the Kansas City Wiz (later the Wizards) or the San Jose Clash (later the Earthquakes). According to the Wiki article, these name changes occured to lure more traditional-minded Hispanic soccer fans to the league. Witness the Dallas Burn (hunh?), which became FC Dallas in 2005. FC stands for Futból Club, a naming convention popular among many Latin and European teams.

Letting the popular masses name a sports team may not always be a good idea. The Toronto Raptors started their first season in 1995, but well before that, the organization held a contest within the city to name the new NBA expansion team. Jurassic Park was the movie-du-jour at the time, so instead of receving a name that reflected Toronto's rich botanical or avian diversity (as its hockey and baseball teams respectively do), the basketball team was named after a species of dinosaur popularized in a Michael Crichton adaptation.

I guess it's all for the best. You can guess what the Toronto Raptors would be called if they had been founded this year: The "Toronto Snakes on a Plane." I can just picture the logo.

Dayvan Cowboy

2006-06-25T15:49:00.000-04:00

Is it fitting that one of the best instrumental minimalist electronic tracks of all time should have the best video?

Yes.

why did nobody tell me the DJ Championships were going on in Paris?

2006-06-21T17:08:00.000-04:00

Birdy Nam Nam - Absesses. 4 DJs, no MCs. a rockin' good track.

Are these guys signed?

Don't sound stupid.

2006-06-16T11:43:00.000-04:00

Stop using comma splices.

Geez, Academy of Linguistic Awareness! Either of these would have worked:

Don't sound stupid; stop saying like.
Don't sound stupid. Stop saying like.

Now your cover is blown, and your chances of affecting a perfectly good cause are shot.

(via boingboing)

P.S.

This is sadly similar to Stephen Notley's attempt to correct society's greivous apostrophe errors. (He of Bob the Angry Flower fame.) He publishes this insanely brilliant, popular, and world-altering strip:

Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, you Idiots

But then he blows his cover with this one.

Worlds

He mistakenly thinks that the name of the competition, the "World's" is incorrectly pluralized, when in fact it is simply the World's Gymnastics Competetion or something like that. There are no multiple "worlds" participating.

To be fair, he fessed up to his error in the annotations of the printed book, and he more than made up for it with a series of other linguistic propaganda leaflets such as this one:

Bob's Quick Guide to French, you Idiots

P.P.S. The "Acadamy [sic] of Linguistic Awareness" is a satirical group. Notice the spelling errors in their poster, not to mention their name. Is the comma splice intentional? I don't know, but one thing is certain: people should stop saying "like" so often.

They Lied To Us

2006-06-06T17:00:00.000-04:00

This was supposed to be the ~~future~~ apocalypse.

Where is my ~~jetpack~~ river of blood,
Where are my ~~robotic companions~~ locusts,
Where are my ~~dinner in pill form~~ boils,
Where is my ~~nuclear-powered levitating house~~ Earth rent asunder?

(thanks, The Bishop Of Turkey.)

The Cost

2006-06-05T15:54:00.000-04:00

Schneier points out a Solzhenitsyn quote from Cancer Ward, and it got me thinking. (Thanks, James.)

As one of the comments says, there's a cost to everything nowadays. We're richer now, as a society, than anyone has ever been at any time. We have more than enough food, we have warmth and safety in the dead of winter, we have a say in our government, we have rich, soft clothes, we have entertainment, we have long lives, we know an incredible amount about how our world works, and those of us sufficiently 'net-savvy as to be reading this blog have access to the almost all of that knowledge. But there's a cost! We paid for our food with environmental degradation. We paid for our warmth with the creation of dams, and the exploitation of fossil fuels. We paid for our freedom of goverment with the requirement for eternal vigilance thereof. We paid for our soft clothes with the time and energy it takes to keep up with fashion. We paid for our entertainment with advertisments selling us things we don't need. We paid for our knowledge with immense amount of wasted effort pursuing ultimately worthless ideas, and lastly but certainly not leastly we paid for the internet with our privacy.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Everything has a cost. Most times, we don't even know we're paying it, but we are.

Peter Gabriel

2006-06-02T11:31:00.000-04:00

...writes good music. Or at least, he did on Us and So, the two albums of his I recently got in a fit of "hey, I remember liking that stuff in high school". It's like getting two more Dave Matthews albums for free! (OK not really, but they're similar enough that someone who doesn't listen to either at all might confuse them.)

I'd never really listened to his stuff all the way through before. I mean, sure, it's been on while I was over at people's houses, so it all seemed vaguely familiar (or is that just that all his songs sound the same?) but now, I'm actually listening to it. Amazing how long it takes to (re)discover some things.

The City of Brotherly Love and Spousal Castration

2006-05-19T12:58:00.000-04:00

She's in jail, where she belongs.

Yup.

The Meme of Ten

2006-05-04T13:55:00.000-04:00

Life is random, at least for the next ten tracks. Here we go.

1. The Zutons - Moons and Horror Shows

Oh thank heavens I got the one good Zutons track. I'm a big Album Person - I prefer to listen to whole albums in one sitting rather than one single at a time. Who Killed the Zutons? is on my iPod in its entirety despite the fact that I only like one or two of its tracks. This is one of them. Catchy!

2. Tea Party - Shadows on the Mountainside

Edges of Twilight. Now there is an album. Fraxas and I had an interesting conversation about it a while back, which I'll quote in the comments.

3. The Chromatics - Doppler Shifting

I have always been a huge fan of science-themed acapella. Finding it is tough. Thanks, Jeremy!

4. RJD2 - Since We Last Spoke

Is this Rock? hip-hop? Dance? Electronica? Who cares. I like it.

5. Cello Suite I in G Major by J.S. Bach, Edgar Meyer, Unaccompanied Cello Suites on Double Bass

As a lapsed bass player, I enjoy listening to ridiculous acts of virtuosity that hardly sound like they could have been performed by a human being. Oh wait, no, that only depresses me.

6. Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows

Hey, there's Bono of U2 covering a Leonard Cohen song in a trailer. Leonard Cohen is probably the only buddhist monk to ever write a song that Bono covers, which is a strange distinction indeed.

7. The Odds - Domesticated Blind

Finally, my iPod takes me to a song I've never really listened to before, which is odd (no pun in ten did!). I'll pay attention now.

Hmm. Clever lyrics, jangly retro tune, what's not to like? Next.

8. Boards of Canada - ROYGBIV

The bright, sinuous airiness of this track is what launched me on a Boards of Canada obsession. It's a perfect 2-minute morsel of music that solidly anchors rest of the album Music has the Right to Children, which otherwise consists of fleeting, fragmented melodic structures that play patty-cake with your brain.

9. The Roots - Distortion to Static

Okay. This is from a playlist that a friend put together for me. I have only recently started to discover hip-hop, so I'll try to sound off on this track without sounding maximally lame. It is - how you say? Fresh. Its qualities are not what you would call "whack" at all, as far as I can tell.

10. Rondellus - Rotae Confusionis

This is from this album, a bunch of very authentically delivered medieval-style latin-language covers of Black Sabbath songs.

metareview: The Onion AV Club "savages" the "summer" "movies"

2006-05-04T11:14:00.000-04:00

The Onion's ridiculously ~~highbrow~~ ~~lowbrow~~ ~~highbrow~~ ironic AV Club has a feature on summer movies. It's run-of-the-mill fare for them, but it did have this gem:

Suggested alternate activity: Dressing up as Depp's character [from the new Pirates of the Carribean movie], saying 'Arrrr' a lot, quoting the first film extensively, taking a long, deep look in the mirror and admitting you live a sad and lonely life."

When you think about it, that's actually surprisingly widely relevant advice.

Back On The Wagon

2006-05-02T13:00:00.001-04:00

My name's Fraxas, and I'm an addict. I've been clean for 2 days now. I still think about it all the time; sometimes, I even talk about it. I know I had some good times while I was using, I know the use let me discover things about myself I couldn't have found out any other way -- and they weren't all bad things. I learned about loyalty, I learned about teamwork, I learned about mastery, I learned about conflict resolution, and about perseverance.

But it hurt me, too. I'd use and use and use, trying to fill that void in my life, succeeding in the short run but failing in the long. I lost a lot of sleep. I lost some friends. I got a lot worse at my job. I almost lost my relationship with my wife.

And that's why I quit Everquest 2.

This isn't the developer's fault, any more than alcoholics can blame Diageo. This isn't the media's fault, this isn't anyone's fault but my own. I'm flawed, have always been flawed, in that computer games suck me in and entrance me more effectively than anything else I know of. It seems silly to admit this; after all, "video game addiction" is still pretty fringe as a concept, and I'm not sure it holds water as a Real Psychological Condition rather than a character flaw. But it's a useful metaphor if nothing else.

I've tried to get over this ~~pastime~~ ~~hobby~~ problem before, taking periodic breaks and switching flavours of poison every once in a while, but ultimately they're all the same. All these slow-advancement, highly-social, highly-time-dependent games trigger the same pathological behaviours in me. So I have to stop them all, or accept the life my flaws force on me when I play MMOs.

And I'm not willing to lose any more of my best years to any game, no matter how good it is.

I can't play Fallout anymore.

2006-04-30T12:13:00.000-04:00

If it looks like mastery and it smells like mastery, it's probably mastery

2006-04-26T17:22:00.000-04:00

The fine folks at eGullet show us how to sharpen a knife.

In mind-crushing, fifteen-thousand-word detail, getting into math, specializing knives for different jobs, and the various theoretical disputes still extant in the field of knife geekery.

cool!

not dead, just....resting.

2006-04-24T11:24:00.003-04:00

Recent interesting things: I received for my birthday (which was recent) 4 killer old games -- Fallout 1&2, Planescape: Torment, and something else that I can't remember. I have started playing two of them. I have made some progress in them. No super-mindblowing moments yet though. I also got Oblivion and Stubbs The Zombie and (oh god) the hardware to run them well. So what did I do with the New Machine Of Hotness?

yeah, you know it.

Everquest 2, all day and all night.

Since it's still vaguely (vaguely? who am I kidding? DEEPLY) shameful to admit you play One Of Those Games, I haven't been posting much. After all, do you really care that I now I have a 70 Coercer on Lucan Dlere, and that my guild Transcendance is running a Mark of Awakening raid this coming weekend? 68+. Bring your Mental resist gear.

Ahem.

A short, sweet nugget from a founder of Brunching Shuttlecocks

2006-03-30T11:19:00.000-05:00

Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg of brunching fame is writing a regular collum for Wired online. I will quote from this week's entry, which contains a high density of truth.

3. More Grav Guns
Let's be honest here, game developers. There are maybe three of you who are working on new game ideas. The rest of you are just combining turn-based sandbox squad shooters with extreme sports party RPGs and wrapping it all in a Shrek license. I know you rip off all your ideas, you know you rip off all your ideas, so let's get down to it: Rip off the Grav Gun from Half-Life 2. I just got a chance to try out Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and it was not only like finding God, it was like finding God in an inexpensive but excellent Asian-food restaurant that always has a table open. Now I require the ability to throw a toilet at my enemies in every single video game in existence, including the Bible quiz games. Especially Bible quiz games.

I have no idea what he's talking about, not being a huge gamer myself, but dang if that doesn't sound fun.

RIP Stanislaw Lem

2006-03-27T14:31:00.000-05:00

The seminal Science Fiction writer died today of heart problems at age 84.

He lives on in his work.

What You Really Own

2006-03-24T11:37:00.000-05:00

In his most recent blogpost, Raymond Chen thirdhands an expression I now fourthhand to you:

you don't really own anything you can't carry at a dead run while firing an AK-47 over your shoulder.

Ha ha, we think; how glib. But what about data? One thing you can carry at a dead run while firing an AK-47 over your shoulder is passwords, and the mobile phone in your pocket -- you know, the one with more compute power and local storage than the entire WORLD 35 years ago -- probably doesn't slow you down that much. Not to mention the fact that, as long as the war you're in the middle of isn't global, you probably have some safe (virtual) place to store a bunch more bits. Greg Papadopoulos, in a spiel I attended, made the analogy between data storage and money storage. Nowadays, it's totally obvious that the safest place for your retirement nest egg is a bank and not your mattress. But not only was that not always the case in the past, but it took people's perception a bit of time to catch up to the reality that yes, banks are safer. Not always more convenient, but safer. And the money's no less yours for you not having actual specie in your posession.

And the same thing goes for data, we just don't all know it yet.

Charlie's Diary

2006-03-21T15:28:00.000-05:00

Charles Stross on his new novel:

"Being inclined towards crazy stunt performances, I'm planning on writing 'Halting State' on my mobile phone. This is technologically feasible because the phone in question has more memory and online storage than every mainframe in North America in 1972 (and about the same amount of raw processing power as a 1977-vintage Cray-1 supercomputer). It's a zeitgeist thing: I need to get into the right frame of mind, and I need to use a mobile phone for the same reason Neal Stephenson used a fountain pen when he wrote the Baroque cycle."

As I just mentioned to a close friend, not one of Charlie Stross' books has failed to break my head open and induce at least one thousand-yard-stare "Oh. My. GOD." moment.

Shirky on CMOMENTS ON THE INTERNETT!111!11!!! -- good stuff.

2006-03-10T15:13:00.000-05:00

Clay Shirky gave a talk on moderation strategies at ETech. The following quote grabbed me:

Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we're supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right.

Heady stuff.

How to convince the Japanese to Stop Smoking

2006-03-07T15:16:00.000-05:00

Writes the band Cake on their update website,

Are you trying unsuccessfully to quit smoking? Perhaps this Japanese argument against smoking will help you.

I love it. There are pages of these zen-like, haiku-like, stirringly poignant, puzzling, and beautiful anti-smoking ads. Here's another one of my favourites. And here are the rest.

Death Cab for Cutie

2006-03-06T17:30:00.000-05:00

I mentioned to my illustrious co-blogger today that I'd listened through a Death Cab for Cutie album today (We Have The Facts And We're Voting Yes, if you care) . He expressed surprise that I was listening to pantywaist indie girlman music, and my reply was that although they do make pantywaist indie girlman music, they make very listenable pantywaist indie girlman music. Which (far from it!) I am not above. I'm not even sure it's something that you can be "above". From one listen through, I'd put their sound at Weakerthans Only Less Maudlin And More Twee.

Pharaoh mentioned that he'd judged that particular book by its cover, and avoided the music of Death Cab for Cutie because they had a clever name, and that clever names are -- his words -- Signposts for Avoidance. He'll check them out now though, on my recommendation.

BAND NAME ALERT: Signposts For Avoidance is not a bad Clever Band Name. heh, neither is Clever Band Name (though it's taken). meta-heh, so is Band Name Alert!

AAAAAAGH!

2006-02-28T14:37:00.000-05:00

Shout Run is , as JWZ says, inexplicably hilarious.

Who the hell am I? For that matter, who the hell are you? And how do you keep track?

2006-02-18T18:15:00.000-05:00

I have a problem. I have too many identities.

I have accounts on 4 IM services, and I access those accounts from 2 clients each, on at least 3 computers, on a regular basis. I play 3 online games regularly and a few more sporadically. I log into websites and post on blogs, as well as blogging myself. I have three names/handles/monikers, each for a different group of activities. I have more logins and passwords than I care to think about. Sometimes, I have to think carefully about who I am right now, to avoid tying my identites together.

Not all of that is bad, of course. I don't use my real name on this blog so that if and when I say something that someone (or something) doesn't like, it's not trivial to find my home number and bother my wife about it. I don't use the same name to blog as I do to IM, because I don't really want people I don't know sending me IMs. Same with gaming -- the fact that you read my blog shouldn't let you find me in-game.

All that said, I do often wonder if my online identity is too fragmented, if I'm doing myself a disservice by keeping my interests separate. The problem is, how do I tie everything together? I don't really want to take the time to implement a personal portal (thanks for the link, and the plug, Coté!), and even that would probably not be of much use to anyone besides me. I don't want to have to put all my eggs in one basket, either. And I haven't found an application -- hosted or installed -- that I trust to maintain my identities for me. In fact, since the whole point of having separate identities is not to link them on the Internet, I don't think I'll ever trust a hosted application to do it for me. And the downloadable tools I've briefly looked at to do that kind of thing don't link sufficiently well with my online life as to make them usable. Flock comes closest, but it's scarily beta, and scarily web 2.0. It seems to me like there might be no right answers to this problem.

Do you, gentle readers, have similar problems? How do you solve them? What haven't I thought of? Are there no right answers because I'm asking the wrong questions?

Comic: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

2006-02-15T08:28:00.000-05:00

If you're not reading The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, you're missing out.

The Insufferable Trollishness of "Brights"

2006-02-08T16:08:00.000-05:00

Pharaohmagnetic linked a Salon article on Dennet's new book. Oz linked a Globe and Mail review as well. I haven't read the book, and out of a lack of desire to dent my drywall with it in frustration, I don't think I will.

My problem with the book -- indeed, with Dennett's whole modus operandi -- isn't so much his ideas. In fact, I'm quite happy to adopt a reductionist approach to religion and the mind; personally, I've never really had any reason to believe I was anything more than meat. That said, the term "bright," as a rebranding of the atheism associated with the reductionist approach to the human mind, is tragically misguided.

The analogy to the term that homosecual activists introduced --"gay"-- is instructive mostly for the main difference between "gay" and "bright": the former has no connotations that related to what homosexuality was or wasn't. On the other hand, "bright" most certainly does. By choosing a word that is already loaded with positive connotations of intelligence, Dennett not-so-subtly trolls the theists of the world by suggesting that they are NOT bright in *any* sense of the word -- that they are, because they believe, stupid.

Having chosen that term, Dennett condemns his arguments to two separate ratholes:
(1) the term won't see any uptake among people who do consider themselves part of the group, because they will preceive it as derogatory
(2) When other works criticise Dennett, criticism of his arguments will get obscured by objections to the term itself.

The latter is by far the most pernicious, because it allows Dennett a defense against his critics that has nothing to do with the strength of his arguments. He gets to spend time lording it over theists who object (rightly!) to his terminology, pointing out that the terminology is beside the point, rather than addressing their concerns with his logic. He's manufactured a totally unnecessary controversy, one that will take time and column-inches on both sides of the debate while contributing very little to the advancement of the state of the art. Breaking the Spell is the inverse of a polished turd: it's a good idea, presented with a coating of stank-ass slime. As such, I propose that we refer to Dennetian ideas, and the people who present them, as "rectal" (or perhaps "sewerish"; please comment if you can come up with a better term. I'm looking for something that conveys the idea of something that produces something good covered in something bad.)

Really, Dennet has crafted an extended troll of the religion-vs-science debate. An admirably complete and successful troll, but a troll nonetheless. In fact, I've succumbed to it myself. I just wrote -- and you just read -- close to 600 words about it. I'd rather them to have been about the book itself, but the best trolls demand a response, don't they?

Goodbye, Angus

2006-02-05T16:29:00.000-05:00

Angus deleted his blog today.

Thanks for taking the time to share what you did, dude. It was good while it lasted.

Mirrormask deserves your attention

2006-02-04T22:37:00.000-05:00

In mid 2005, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean put out a movie called Mirrormask. It won accolades, if not awards, in Toronto and at Sundance.

I saw it tonight.

It was unbelievably cool.

It deserves your attention.

(Also, I'm not dead; haven't been writing much lately because what I've wanted to say has been better covered elsewhere.)

Print Magazine Zen

2006-01-23T11:54:00.000-05:00

I was reading the most recent Atlantic Monthly the other day, happily perusing an article about the "so-called culture wars" in America. The article deals with religion, culture, values, mass media, consumerism, etc, and it had a bunch of whimsical cartoon illustrations to complement its points and ideas. Here is a scan of one of them. Study the image closely.

Interesting. Yes, clever, okay, I'm sure you get it. So, flipping a few pages over, I saw this actual paid advertisement that was just too good to be true.

Remember, this is from the same magazine.

(flip)

(flip)

(flip)

Click on the image to read the ad copy.