Monthly Archives: December 2006

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I was reading the Bad Astronomy blog’s list of best photographs of space for 2006. The winning picture was of Saturn:

Saturn

Far away is this little speck in the center left. It looks like this:

earth

That little particle of dust is our little sleepy planet. From here you can’t see the bitchy office politics or the drama of personal failures. You can’t see the difference between Democrats or Republicans, Russians or Argentinians. You can’t even see the polar ice caps melting.

I hope your New Year’s Eve brought you all the hope and promise of a new year: grandiose visions of your own future greatness. I hope you have an image of yourself as more motivated, more beautiful, shedding your secret identity as you leap from tall building to tall building, rescuing damsels and pouncing villians with an ounce of wit to boot.
Now for day one: a little persective.

This is What My Computer Dreams About

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Let’s hear it for the internet. Through constant innovation, the web seems to be buidling a better everything.
Or in this case, a screensaver.
I was just sitting here, in rapt awe of my screensaver, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to tell you why my screensaver is more bad-ass than yours (unless you have the same one, of course). Anyhow, I really want all of my readers to listen to the Derrick Jensen speech I posted in my last blog so I didn’t want to have any heavy reading in this one.

The screensaver I use is called “Electric Sheep”, so named for the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
It starts with a fractal. Now, I’m used to the electric art of Winamp visualization plug-ins. This makes those look like a fourth graders computer class project (or a Windows Media Player visualization, same thing, really). Each of these fractals is a “sheep”.

But people who have the screensaver can vote, yay or nay, on whether or not they like the sheep, as the screensaver is going. The bad ones drop and — here’s the beauty part — the winners breed.

The original sheep is soon lost, as all over the world thousands of people vote for their favorites and these beget newer, more beautiful sheep, for sheep-generations. This adds to the beauty because the sheep are always delicate and extreemely complex, with the whisps and shadows of their electric ancestors still vaguely visible. It also makes them less predictable than your average pixelated visualization, because patterns are not based on a program but on previous sheep. It does all this while your computer is sleeping. Because people are always voting, the sheep are always changing, so no matter how long you run it, it never gets old.
There’s no Paula Abdul overseer, the screensaver blends them automatically. However, if you go the website, you can look up a sheeps “lineage”
and “genomes.” It’s a great concept with a stunning execution. If you’re still using that bouncing Windows logo, you might want to give this a try. It’s freeware. It works for Linux too, but obviously wouldn’t be recommended for folks with dial-up connections.

http://electricsheep.org/

A Very Special End of Civilization Christmas

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I remember when I was nine or ten how exciting it was to have a record-breaking heat wave. I took pride in the blanket of hot water that lay in the air, and in my abilitiy to withstand it. We fried an egg on the sidewalk, just because we could.
It was around this same age that I first heard about global warming. I would be in my twenties then. Such a strange thing to imagine for a child: being an adult, having responsibility for your life, knowing all about kissing and make-up and other grown-up things I was too innocent to conceive of. The juxtoposition of the wild concept of me all-grown-up and the wild concept of the end of civilization was more than my little brain could handle. At most, I thought I would be wearing sunscreen all of the time. Ever since that supple age, I have wondered if the ever-hotter summers are connected to the climate change we are bringing on ourselves. At last, I have grown into a sunscreen-lathered twenty-something and news reports daily are confirming the suspicions I’ve been harboring since before puberty.
The last month of 2006, the news and the blogs have brought one blow after another in the bad news department. December was welcomed with the flood in Somalia that has already taken more than five hundred lives. It used to be folks would blame the fates for terrible floods; now scientists are saying that this is just another sign of global warming. Then the UK Gaurdian informed me that the EPA is considering rolling back the regulations that keep lead out of gasoline, though it is a neurotoxin and a significant source of air pollution. It was equally disturbing to learn of the extinction of the Chinese River Dolphin.
The knock-out punch came from my friend Joel yesterday. He told me about the world-wide extinction that is happening faster than that at the time of the dinosaurs. I must have been sick the week they covered this in Life Science class because I didn’t know a thing about it.

From Wikipedia:

“According to a 1998 survey of 400 biologists conducted by New York’s American Museum of Natural History, nearly 70 percent of biologists believe that we are currently in the early stages of a human-caused mass extinction,[10] known as the Holocene extinction event. In that survey, the same proportion of respondents agreed with the prediction that up to 20 percent of all living species could become extinct within 30 years (by 2028). Biologist E.O. Wilson estimated [4] in 2002 that if current rates of human destruction of the biosphere continue, one-half of all species of life on earth will be extinct in 100 years.”

In honor of the coming end of civilization, I’m posting my all-time favorite speech (and as a former SGA devotee, I’ve heard plenty). When I first heard this compelling bit of environmental activism, I sat in my car after I arriving at my destination, riveted by Derrick Jensen’s words.
After you have cleaned up the shiny, non-recyclable gift wrap and are wallowing in the digestive frenzy of seasonal gluttony, please take some time to give this a listen. Haven’t you seen Miracle on 34th Street enough already?

the Ever Expanding Blogosphere

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Last night I was looking for a good way to host pictures on myspace when I got sucked into the blog mashable until three o’ clock in the morn’. This is a blog about blogs and the social networking sites, specifically the economics and business models they are using. But they also do a lot of research and talk about various newcomers to the scene. Here is a summation of what I learned:While everyone knows that myspace has the lead when it comes to the width and breadth of social networking sites, there are some contenders for specific interests. I had heard of deviant art (for artists) but not urbis.com, social networking for writers. There is a new competitor for art by the name of humble voice, which supposedly has a noteably more beautiful interface than myspace. Urbis’s strength is the opportunity for criticism of one’s work. Both sites have a ranking system, in the tradition of sites like hotornot.com but judging your work, rather than looks. I will most likely start an urbis account for my creative writing, as this blog isn’t the appropriate outlet for it.

I am also excited to start an account with bikespace, a social network for cyclists. On bikespace, you can create route maps, form groups of riders, and evite folks on rides. Bikespace is still in beta so newcomers could be influential.

If you are looking for someone to host all the pics and songs you want on your page, try badongo.com. They give you a gig and you can upload files from your computer. They will spit out the html to put it on your page. The only catch is that they delete your content if you are inactive for a month.
If you just want to throw some pics on your myspace, most folks have been using flickr and photobucket. But I am more excited about tinypic, allyoucanupload, and imageshack, which don’t require any login information. I’m not a professional photographer, I don’t want to chat about my pics. I just want to get them up and out to myspace.

Another interesting addition to the blogoshere are the remixing sites splice and jamglue. At these sites, you can take songs and sound clips with creative commons liscensing and remix them to make new songs.

I have been downloading mixing plug-ins from winamp.com but now you can just do it all on the web. Then you can upload it to your blog for all the world (okay, the myspace world) to hear.
Here’s an example:

.. classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0″ height=”150″ width=”400″>..>
I am most excited about weedshare.com. Put your pipes away, my Oakstermdam friends; it’s a music sharing site. If you have been looking for a way to give money to the bands you love but want to keep downloading and sharing music, weedshare might be the answer. Personally, when I get my hands on good music I can’t wait to share it with others, particularly because the music I like is not playing on MTV (but then, what is?). The problem is that bands need distribution and the only way to do that has been through record companies. But with weedshare, you become the distributor. You can play any song free three times, then you buy for five dollars. If your friend wants the track, instead of buying it from itunes, they can buy it from you. You get a percentage of the money. Then if your friend passes the song on to someone else, they get a percentage, too. It is a concept so beautiful it makes me want to cry (or are is that the last vestiges of PMS?). More on this later, after I’ve thoroughly checked out their site.

All in all, the mashable blog raises one particularly interesting point: the more myspace expands, the more it cuts into the business that it is creating. If myspace video becomes hugely successful, youtube will lose their business. While this looks unlikely, it is certainly possible for smaller contenders like those mentioned above. Yet add-ons like this are what made myspace hugely popular. On the other hand, one can’t blame myspace for wanting to provide everything, so folks don’t have to look to other websites to complete the social networking experience.

All this means to my awesome, devoted readers: you will be seeing more and hearing more on my blog in the future. As usual, your comments are always welcome.

Stop the Genrefication!

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I have a long-standing debate with my sweetie (one of thousands) about the word, “indie rock.” We all know bands that are clearly indie rock, I’m not even going to bother to list them. The question is, does it refer to a genre, or does it refer to the way the music is produced? If it is a genre, then bands like the Killers and Interpol, both on major labels, are indie. If it simply separates small-label stars from the bigguns’, then bands like the White Stripes, or before that R.E.M. or even before that, Lou Reed, are former Indie rockers, though musically dissimilar. Really, I’m not so sure what the electropop sounds of I Am the World Trade Center have in common with the rough vocals of Modest Mouse, other than independent label status.
Before you answer, let me take you back ten years, to 1996. Blockbuster Music (this is where you shopped in the suburbs if you were 16, because your mom didn’t know about Sound Exchange) has a new section of music called, “Alternative.” For about ten minutes I was excited about this exciting new genre that included all of the cool new bands: Nirvana, Bush, Radiohead, the Eels, Cake, Poe, Bjork.
Wait– Bjork?
Yes, Bjork.
That’s when it became clear that the only difference between “Alternative,” and “rock,” was that it was the music that appealed to people in my age group (make that, market segment). The actual musical styles had little in common. Perhaps there is nothing sinister in this. Blockbuster wanted my shopping experience to be as convenient as possible.
But it is a little bit like naming art movements, “Modernism,” or “Contemporary,” suggesting all that they have in common is that this is what people like right now. Well, (as I would have said at sixteen) duh. Is that the best description you can give?
I understand that many want to identify themselves as “indie-rockers.” That is the best music out there and anyone who listens to anything else is inferior (What? That is exactly what the indie-rocker is thinking). And an indie-rocker listens to what? Indie-rock music, of course.
But the way I see it, this can only go two ways:
1. Indie-rock is a genre consisting of any music that is on the verge of breaking big circa turn of the millineum (like “alternative” before it, which means jack shit now).
2. A band on an independent label is fantastic and mind-blowing until they get a record contract at which point they are not indie-cool anymore and they are sell-out snot-munchers.
Both of these are to be avoided! Please! I love indie-rock music! But let us not genrify.