Guests in the margin
An experiment in perspective for the next week, Ascent Stage will cede control of the margin links to Jeff Greer, fellow geek, avid connoisseur of web goodness, and pal. Hopefully he’ll have some unique nuggets for us. Don’t let my broad readership down, Greer.
By the way, if you’re in a newsreader you’ll need to subscribe to the marginalia feed seperately to see it.
Firestarter
This winter season if updates to this blog stop for an extended period you may plausibly attribute it to this cause: I have burned the house down. I really look forward to cold weather because I love building fires — stoking, proding, accelerating them. I had my cord of wood delivered in September when it was still 80 out. But, man, I screw up one out of every five fires. Usually I know why: too windy out, didn’t heat the flue up enough, ember torched the rug — that sort of thing. But there’s that one instance out of, say, ten when I can’t explain why the house is filling with smoke. Like tonight, when I had to scurry around ripping the smoke detectors from the ceiling. I did everything right. Might it have something to do with the fact that there are two fireplaces — one right below the other — that feed into the same chimney? Some sort of backdraft coming in through the other fireplace? Or something with starting a fire with a not-completely-burnt log from a prior fire? Perhaps the arsonist is just an idiot. Is that it?
Set it to purée
“Now the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do’s and don’t’s. First of all you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a very delicate thing.” – Rob Gordon, High Fidelity
What’s more fun than making a music mix? Making it via e-mail with friends, of course — especially friends with extremely different musical perspectives. So we did. The rules of the game were that we would rotate theme selection and then pick songs one after another. You didn’t have to defend your selection (though some of them begged defense) but each person got one veto per mix. After looking at these mixes I’m sure you wish you had a few too.
Guilty!
The Top 15 Choons You Will Rock Out To Till The Day You Die.
(but won’t admit publicly…until now)
- Unbelievable – EMF (Unbelievable [single], 1990)
- The Stroke – Billy Squier (Don’t Say No, 1990)
- Night Fever – Bee Gees (Saturday Night Fever: The Original Movie Soundtrack, 1977)
- Fire It Up – Busta Ryhmes (Turn It Up/Fire It Up [single], 1998)
- The Devil Went Down To Georgia – The Charlie Daniels Band (Million Mile Reflections, 1979)
- Parents Just Don’t Understand – DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper, 1988)
- Here I Go Again – Whitesnake (Whitesnake, 1987)
- Love Machine – Girls Aloud (What Will The Neighbours Say?, 2004)
- Man! I Feel Like a Woman – Shania Twain (Come on Over, 1997)
- Rock Your Body – Justin Timberlake [Sander K retouch] (Rock Your Body (single), 2003)
- America – Neil Diamond (The Jazz Singer [soundtrack], 1980)
- I Wanna Be Your Lover – Prince (Prince (s/t), 1979)
- Billie Jean – Michael Jackson (Thriller, 1982)
- Jesus Built My Hotrod [Redline/Whiteline version] (Jesus Built My Hotrod [single], 1991)
- Jane – Jefferson Starship (Freedom at Point Zero, 1979)
Musical Meds
Songs that can make your mood do a 180°
- Hazy Shade of Winter – Bangles (Less Than Zero [soundtrack], 1987)
- Sixyten – Boards of Canada (Music Has The Right to Children, 1997)
- Electric Avenue – Eddy Grant (Electric Avenue [single], 1981)
- Oblivious – Aztec Camera (High Land, Hard Rain, 1983)
- Sexuality – Billy Bragg (Don’t Try This At Home, 1991)
- Gorecki – Lamb (Lamb [s/t], 1996)
- Uncertain Smile – The The (Soul Mining, 1983)
- Love Song – The Ocean Blue (The Ocean Blue [s/t], 1989)
- The Same Deep Water As You – The Cure (Disintegration, 1989)
- In the Garden / You Send Me / Allegheny – Van Morrison (A Night in San Francisco, 1994)
- Impact (The Earth is Burning) – Orbital (Orbital 2 [The Brown Album], 1993)
- Song 2 – Blur (Blur [s/t], 1997)
- Add It Up – Violent Femmes (Violent Femmes [s/t], 1983)
- Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me – The Smiths (Strangeways, Here We Come, 1990)
- It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) – R.E.M. (Document, 1987)
Agree, disagree? Discuss.
Tale of two online music stores
I’ve been known to buy music from iTunes Music Store. What’s that, you say? Why buy from iTMS when the Russian sites offer the same tunes for a fraction of the price? In part, I like the pay-for-what-you-buy mode better than the give-us-a-bunch-of-money-upfront-and-then-we’ll-debit-per-track mode. Something is just a tad slimy about that. Even so, there’s really only one reason I buy from iTMS and that is JHymn, the program that immediately and easily allows me to rip the crappy digital rights management out of the files. If I bought it I want to be able to play it whenever, wherever, and on as many machines as I damn well please.
But this isn’t an iTunes screed. I’d like to make a simple comparison between iTMS and the other music store I use a lot, Bleep.com.
| iTunes Music Store | Bleep.com | ||
| unencrypted music | no | yes | |
| web-based | no | yes | |
| playable on all devices | no | yes | |
| full song preview | no | yes | |
| zipped download of multiple files | no | yes | |
| reviewer bias in comparison | yes | yes |
I’m not sure these factors matter to the average online music buyer, but I wonder how long iTMS can stay dominant. Sooner or later the casual music buyer will figure out the problems in the iTMS model. In fact, I know a few people who just want to make mixes for their friends — for instance, as party favors — and have no idea why they can’t do so with their iTMS-restricted files. Something’s gotta give.
OK, maybe it was an iTMS screed.
Survival
Recently, coincidentally, I read two books with remarkable similarities. You’d not think there was much overlapping advice in How To Survive A Robot Uprising and Cheap Psychological Tricks for Parents, but the techniques for dealing with children and automata run amok are mostly interchangeable.
Test yourself. Which of these tactics refers to sugar-addled toddlers and which to killer cyborgs?
Stay out of sight
Individual ——– may be weak and dim-witted, but as word spreads the entire swarm will react as a single organism to engulf and destroy you. Kicking an anthill is no fun when the ants are the size of a pit bull.
Stay calm and seem uninterested
No matter how hard you try to make your point in your best stentorian English, no matter how emotional you get, ——– just looks at you with that “whatever” look.
To save a comrade: First merge, then separate
Run to a comrade, deliver a quick bear-hug, and then dive in a random direction. A ——– might temporarily lose track of your identity during the hug, especially if you are wearing similar clothing. You can gain precious seconds while the ——– reacquires its target.
Distance before familiarity
Brief exposures and slow movements toward the object reduce fear and create an atmosphere of familiarity.
Administer punishment within minutes of misbehavior
The ——– who sees the behavior should deliver the punishment immediately instead of waiting until the other ——– gets home to do it.
Memorize your lies, or be honest
A ——– has a stellar memory and laser-beam concentration. If ——– doubts your veracity, this menace may refuse to listen to any further emanations from your slobber hole.
Useful, eh? Doubly so for those of you who skipped the adoption route and built android children instead. Good luck out there.
Simulating a simulated city
One treat from my recent visit to UCLA was meeting the Urban Simulation Team. This small group develops detailed, precise 3D models of cities past and present for educational use, as a tool for urban planners, and even to facilitate emergency response. Their main focus is currently a complete modelling of the Los Angeles basin, but what really piqued my interest was Prof. Lisa Snyder’s “side project” to recreate the fairgrounds of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She’s creating the White City — and doing a great job with limited resources.
While Leonardo di Caprio and Tom Cruise vie for the movie rights to Erik Larson’s wonderful telling of the story of Burnham, Olmstead, and proto-serial killer H.H. Holmes, Snyder patiently slaves away at the reconstruction with surprisingly scant documentation. For instance, we think of the buildings as being white, of course, which is supported by the monochrome photography of the period. But we know from architectural plans that the buildings were not uniformly white. The devil may have been in the White City, but he’s also in the details of recoloring it. Snyder has her work cut out for her.
Even in its half-finished state, the model is sublime. Viewing the fairgrounds from the gargantuan Ferris Wheel or from the elevated train or from Olmstead’s electric canal boats or from the futuristic moving sidewalk that jutted into Lake Michigan are all experiences not available with the strictly controlled photographic record of the city. The sense of scale is immediate. There’s a bleak majesty to it when you consider that it was all gone by the turn of the century. (Except for the refaced Fine Arts Building, now the Museum of Science and Industry — where, incidentally, I asked my then-girlfriend to marry me.)
I ride my bike in the area of the fairgrounds a few times each summer. There’s some historic signage and some replicated statuary, but the landscape itself is really the only place you’ll find evidence of the Expo. A long split boulevard bordering the University of Chicago marks the fair’s Midway (Snyder tells me that the concrete pads the Ferris Wheel rested on are still there, beneath the park’s sod) and neglected lagoons are evidence of Olmstead’s triumphant carving of the waterways throughout the fairgrounds. As the UST recreation of the White City proceeds one can dream of integrating it into the landscape itself, perhaps as a location-based service offered through the Chicago Park District or, better, as an outside-the-walls extension of the Museum of Science and Industry. Mapping the virtual structures onto the shadows of the fair embedded in the landscape would be a moving experience indeed.
Thanky
Happy Thanksgiving to the US readership of this blog! Here’s hoping you get your fill of family, friends, and fowl.
And to those readers not in the USA thanks for reading. Here’s a list of places people have visited Ascent Stage from recently. I don’t know who you are, but I’m glad you stopped by!
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Vancouver, Canada
Beijing, China
Stockholm, Sweden
Silkeborg, Denmark
Valladolid, Spain
Pune, India
New Delhi, India
London, England
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Kitchener, Canada
Mechelen, Belgium
Hong Kong, China
Fleet, England
Arequipa, Peru
Dusseldorf, Germany (Kraftwerk, is that you?)
Nottingham, England
Coventry, England
Montreal, Canada
Meet the Friendlies
China recently unveiled the sporting event pictograms for the 2008 Olympics. I’ve been a fan of these little icons since Australia somewhat amazingly created one for each sport using little more than boomerang imagery. Athens continued the trend of using culturally-specific imagery in the pictograms by styling each event icon as if it were found etched on the side of an ancient amphora. (What, Plato never played ping pong?)
But China has gone further, entering the realm of the awesome and bizarre. Meet the Friendlies. The five main mascots — Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying and Nini — are endearing and meaningful (spelling out “Welcome to Beijing” among other things). It can’t erase the horror that is the Whatzit mascot from the Atlanta games, but it helps.
Their cuddliness is deceiving, though. The actual sport pictograms truly kick ass.
From left to right that’s the Modern Pentathlon, Taekwondo, and Shooting, also known as Plunder, Uppercut, and Make My Day.
More on Olympic pictograms and logoing:
The Graphic Design Olympics
A Mini History of Olympic Pictograms
Logos and Mascots
Dear Santa
I know this is a lot to ask, but we’re a bit strapped for cash what with two kids and a nice mortgage rate that is about to become unfixed. Are you aware of the new A/V receiver from Denon, the AVR-4306? Obviously it is high on many people’s lists, but if you’ve forgotten, this is the one that finally is doing something with the Ethernet port on the back. Sure you can listen to Internet radio — big deal — but you can also finally treat your receiver as a network-controllable device, just like everything else on your home network. Need to re-route the DVD output, adjust speaker volumes, change the input to the trusty cassette deck? Just bring up the device’s web page and do it from any computer in the house or — if you’re really a control freak — from work or on the road.
So you probably remember it now and you’ll also recall that this puppy has two built in iPod ports, one in back for a permanent hookup and one in front for spur-of-the-moment guest DJ’ing like, say, at a party. (I know, I know, I wouldn’t think this would be useful either, but some friends of mine have an iPod dock built into the wall of their kitchen and let me tell you it makes for an outstanding get-together to be able to have guests pop their ‘Pod’s into it. Trust me.) Once docked the iPod is controllable just like everything else from the unit’s web page. Oh, and another thing, there’s a USB port on the front for hooking up removable media. The AVR-4306 mounts the drive and reads the media for immediate playback. Oh, oh, and do you see those four HDMI ports there? Do you? Three in, one out. That’s the coup de grâce, the pièce de résistance, That Which I Must Have. (Is that greedy? Sorry. I’ve been good. Really.) This spectacle of modern audiovisual magic actually upconverts any video signal — composite, s-video, component, hell if you sketch it a picture it’ll probably try to convert that too — straight to digital HDMI for a single output to your TV.
Bliss, no? At forty-some pounds it’ll be a bit heavy to lug here, I admit. So maybe, if you agree that I deserve it (and, frankly, I’m unable to conceive of a scenario where you would not) then may I suggest using Fedex Overnight shipment? Preferably to arrive before our annual Christmas Party? Sure, you’re invited. Thanks!
Oh, my kids have a list for you too. But I’ve misplaced it at the moment.
FightAIDS@Home
Lots of great new things happening at the World Community Grid. It seems like it has been running for a lot longer than a year, but our first birthday just passed and we’re happy to announce a new project running on the grid to contribute to AIDS research. FightAIDS@Home uses computational methods to identify new candidate drugs to block HIV protease, a key molecular structure that, when blocked, stops the virus from maturing.
For the last year the World Grid ran the Human Proteome Folding Project, which has been providing scientists with data on how individual proteins within the human body affect health, enabling them to develop new cures for diseases like lyme disease, malaria and tuberculosis. Scientists now have descriptions of 120,000 protein domains that are critical to human well-being.
Also new is section for children at sister-site TryScience.org that explains the concept behind grid.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Grid project, it basically allows you to use idle processor cycle time (or share it with other apps) to conrtibute to large, distributed computationally-intensive problems. A great way to participate in meaningful research.
Yes, I’m still hoping for a humanities-related grid project, but it is hard to argue for limited resources when there are so many humanitarian and life sciences challenges to solve.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
