NASA JPL "Reality Check" on all those wacky ideas surrounding the upcoming shift in the ancient Mayan calendar. Our favorite is the planet "Nibiru" that’s said to be hurtling into the solar system on its way to Earth.
via NASA Response to Crazy 2012 Claims – YouTube.
You know it’s Spring when you burn new car disc CD’s, when the grass starts to green and trees bud like mad. You know it’s Spring when you leave the windows open all night and the furnace off, when you get the last of those fall leaves up, it’s that time when you put down the extra rugs and mats for the dogs to track across first. It’s Spring when the mid east goes nuts, when the budget really becomes finalized for this year, and people start booking trips to Ft. Lauderdale – new songs get released, and then wow. It’s Spring Break and time for kids to hit some beaches. Egg coloring kits pop up everywhere and the Peeps resurgence begins, flowers unfurl but get eaten by hungry rabbits almost as soon as they start to bloom. You think about washing the car, but walk the dog instead, and take off your hoody half the distance through. Spring: that happy time that will just whizz by you.
Uncertainty: something to be both humble and proud of & if that seems like cognitive dissonance, please watch DPRJONES’s video before you conclude that with finality.
This week I’ve found some relatively new artists but I’m also refreshing some roots by picking up high quality versions of some songs that got recorded to tape, from tape to digital CD, from Digital CD to Itunes library. With each recording the signal to noise ratio rose, so I didn’t feel bad about going out and picking up some Isley Brothers songs that I’ve listened to for years & already purchased multiple times, including Fight the Power, For the Love of You, and of course Who’s That Lady to name a few.
The Pretty Reckless
The Neon Trees are getting replayed after I saw their appearance in a TV commercial the other night.
My favorite pop anthem band, All American Rejects, have a new single out (not an anthem)
I’m really liking D-Pulse’s “Velocity of Love” — this is a song that won’t become a skip over on the Ipod in three years and one I’ll be listening to for a long time.
To wrap up, a new band I”m looking at is Graffiti6, check out “Stare into the Sun”
It’s very clear that memory devices that use spinning platters and disks are all headed to obsolescence soon. This means Hard drives, CD players, DVD’s and DVD players. So what will the replacement be?
The most likely replacement is streaming digital mixed with the SD-MMC card in some form or another. Since manufacturers are making 128 GB versions of these chips, it’s likely that the lower GB versions will become dirt cheap soon, and when that happens 16 GB chips might become the media that movies get sold on. (The typical HD or Blu ray movie takes less than 8GB on average on DVD’s now.) There are also solid state devices using similar memory technology for capacity right now, while solid devices like the Ipod touch are relatively expensive for the average consumer for the memory (64 GB), they will improve.
Disk based industries have a vested interest in keeping spinning platter formats alive, but engineering and physics really demand that the switch be made. CD’s and DVD’s can skip when you hit bumps in cars or when you bounce while walking, while the solid state chips require zero moving parts to play. You can also plug SD-MMC chips into any player device with an SD slot, they are low energy, and the minimal storage space required makes these portable – all are media properties that consumers would desire if manufacturers only provided them. At Best Buy and other stores you could place that entire row of bins of CD’s and DVD’s on a couple of spinning racks of cards with MMC’s on them. Manufacturers already see this coming and are starting to bridge technologies – e.g. if you have an elder Sony Blu ray player, you can get a chip that enables BD-Live.
When this will happen is probably in a span of under ten years but more than a couple, however do keep in mind that many early adopters have already switched to all digital, all streaming for media purchases. The average consumer will still want physical media, but the savings for industry are clear (how much fuel and space do you save shipping MMC’s over CD’s and DVDs?)
I haven’t bought a CD in years, and the past two it’s been the same story for blu ray and DVD formats — why would you when you can just get what you want digitally?
What does this mean for car stereos? Will the MMC slot replace the CD player, and how soon? Will built-in GPS units come solid state and update via SD? Will car stereos come with memory and wi-fi — will you be able to share your full ITUNES or other player library with them? What about DVD players? Will the blue ray player be replaced by a slot in the TV pretty quickly, if not why not?
Meanwhile it’s still expensive for storage on spinning disks once you get to terabyte or better hard drives, and there is a shortage due to flooding in Thailand a while back so the prices will remain high for the short-term, but once SSD’s start dropping in price & raising in capacity the switch is going to happen fast.
So your Blu ray player and that 2 terabyte hard disk drive will become quaintly humorous examples of old tech like an 8 track tape player is now. The changes to storage, shipping, sales, players, and the refresh of technology and network in nodes to support streaming and some form of solid state media will drive industry for years. These are the types of changes that keep the economy growing and the world spinning, so help push back against the recidivist and entrenched industries fighting against change — I mean isn’t it past time that you should be able to stream your entire music library into your car’s stereo player? Isn’t it past time that you should be able to safely archive your photos and media for at least the length of your remaining life span?
In the Philadelphia Archdiocese case Monsignor William Lynn says he’s not guilty because a superior ordered him to destroy the lists of pedophile priests, but that’s merely admitting his guilt and a demonstration that the average priest still thinks that the church’s instructions outweigh civil law.
The fact that the church ignored civil laws and aided and abetted child abusing criminals for decades is the problem, and the reason for this case. It really doesn’t matter that his superior in the church ordered him to cover it up, he still should have reported the crimes and the list of perpetrators to the authorities. He cared more for the church and his position in it than the abused children.
The recent unexpected and shocking discovery of a March, 1994 memorandum composed by Monsignor James Molloy, Monsignor Lynn’s then-supervisor, on the topic of this review, clearly reveals that justice demands that all charges against Monsignor Lynn be dropped,” Lynn’s attorneys said in a filing. As revealed in court papers filed on Friday, Molloy’s handwritten memo dated March 22, 1994, informed Bevilacqua that the secret list of 35 priests had been shredded per his instructions. On 3-22-94 at 10:45 AM I shredded, in the presence of Reverend Joseph R. Cistone, four copies of these lists from the secret archives, Molloy’s memo stated. The action was taken on the basis of a directive I received from Cardinal Bevilacqua at the Issues meeting of 3-15-94 ….”
via Attorneys: Cardinal ordered memo on priests destroyed – CNN.com.
The church thinks it is above the law, and another example of that is the bishop’s screeching over having to let their female employees choose when they bear children by refusing to provide for birth control in their insurance plans.
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science http://richarddawkins.net/Taped live on Feb 4, 2012 by http://www.youtube.com/user/ShirleyFilmsIn conjunction with the Origins Project at ASU http://origins.asu.edu/- Show quoted text -there are still some edits and color correction to be done but we wanted to have the YouTube version out as soon as possibleJoin critically-acclaimed author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and world-renowned theoretical physicist and author Lawrence Krauss as they discuss biology, cosmology, religion, and a host of other topics. The authors will also discuss their new books. Dawkins recently published The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True, an exploration of the magic of discovery embodied in the practice of science. Written for all age groups, the book moves forward from historical examples of supernatural explanations of natural phenomena to focus on the actual science behind how the world works.Krauss’s latest book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing, explains the scientific advances that provide insight into how the universe formed. Krauss tackles the age-old assumption that something cannot arise from nothing by arguing that not only can something arise from nothing, but something will always arise from nothing.Founded in 2008, the ASU Origins Project is a university-wide transdisciplinary initiative aimed at facilitating cutting edge research and inquiry about origins questions, enhancing public science literacy, and improving science education. Since its inception, the Origins Project has brought the world’s leading scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, to Tempe to explore origins questions. The Origins Project has hosted workshops and public events that have focused on questions as fundamental as the origin of the universe, how life began, the origins of human uniqueness, and the origins of morality.
I spent much of the past two weeks ripping all of my CD”s back into ITunes again & then nuking the old copies. The old format was a lossy 128 kbps .wav file, and the new format is a lossless version using “ALAC” (Apple Lossless Audio Compression.) The sound quality difference is noticeably improved except on some antique hi-fi Kingston Trio and Merseybeat tunes I have so better quality alone really made the effort worth it, but I also subscribed to “Match” so that all of my tunes are now in the cloud.
The big bonus at the end was also being able to see all the dupes by clicking on the “match status” Icon and nuking them. I can now also pull them down to devices that I authorize from the cloud, and Apple sends down a 256 KBPS or better version. With the nuking of the dupes accumulated over the last decade I actually ended up improving the quality of all the songs, while reducing the size by a third.
Every flat surface looked like this as I started sorting the CD's into artist piles.
During conversion the only songs that gave me any problems where some old tunes purchased digitally through rhapsody and Walmart, and then converted into a version playable by my phone and other devices by Tunebite a few years back. I was able to pull down good copies for everything except a couple of Sony tunes, which I just repurchased.
I am also playing with some macro tube lens extenders for my Canon T2i, which allow me to put the camera lens bare inches away from what I am photographing. I’m pretty happy at the price, and with the results. The section of bubbled glass you see below is about the size of a normal asprin.
A tiny section of a sea glass float
Someone wise once said something to the effect that 90 percent of x was shit, but that 10 percent was pure gold – and that if you wanted the gold you had to wade through the shit. The goal with that saying isn’t to solve for x, since x could be anything from literature, to music, to practically any human product or creation, but rather to recognize that much of what humanity produces is somewhat throwaway stuff — fluff, dreck, filler, spam, and for the most part nothing new. Stuff that comes on the scene, seems valid and valuable for the moment, and then passes on forgotten by most forever.
What comes to my mind when I think of that forgotten stuff is the record vault at the old Cabaret Club in Fairbanks Alaska, and not far from there, KFAR radio. The Cabaret where I DJ’ed a short while is long gone, and KFAR, where friends and relatives DJ’ed, has since changed from a music station to a wingnut talk radio muckpit. (Hannity and Beck shows featured…)
In those vaults were tons of vinyl LP’s – each with lots of songs on them, some even had a hit song or two on them. The great bulk of them were promotional and free, or arrived via a cheap subscription to chart services. Most of the tracks on most of those LP’s are long forgotten, never having risen to the level of transcending a week on the charts, much less a month or year. Much of the music was wholly derivative, repetitive and sub-sub-sub superlative…
That throwaway junk would be the shit, (and not the “good” shit…) and the few songs from that mountain of old vinyl still being purchased on occasion at Apple and Amazon would represent the gold. If you are someone like me, who has DJ’ed and spent most of their waking lives listening to a wide variety of music then a strange thing happens. The gold, or popular stuff that lasts, sometimes converts through some weird alchemical brain process from gold to shit because you’ve heard it wayyyy too much. Some songs you listen to past their shelf life because they’ve worn a groove or pattern in your psyche, or they bring back memories, or because it’s what’s on, but some gold goes beyond, some transmutes into a rarer element still.
It’s a real rare song or tune that can hold up over the years and survive the excessive listening gate (why I don’t listen to most of the Beatles, the Stones, The Who, the Doors anymore.)
So when you get to that state — you realize that you aren’t just mining for gold, you are looking for that rarest thing in human endeavors – something that’s good, and something that’s still spring fresh no matter how many times you hear it, something that’s great and that lasts forever — beyond the gold. You’re looking for art that transcends time, stuff that wins out not because it fits a pattern for a particular time or because it’s a novelty item, but because someone a hundred years from now could hear it or see it and love it beyond all time too.
But to get there you still have to give everything a chance, and so you listen to things awhile and you keep an open ear, some stuff you like and some you throw away. So you have to listen to the pop, wade through that stuff … Some stays on, some falls away. It always helps however if someone tells you what they’ve found, and what they think, especially if it’s unsolicited and not paid for, especially if it’s not their job. That’s how you wade through the shit and how you get by life’s hucksters packaging shit and telling you it’s gold. You have to get recommendations from friends and others you trust to wade through life…
That said then, here’s what’s tracking with me this week — will it survive? Who knows, but it’s caught my attention:
Nightwish, a Finnish band that came on the scene internationally at Eurovision a few years back — they are symphonic metal with goth influences – think Abba Meets Rush and Transiberian Orchestra in Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Blender…
Grouplove: This is really from last year, but I just found it so it’s new to me, they seem to effortlessly mix folk, pop, it electronica, into that weird infectious blend that signifies “today’s indie-alt”
One of the golden oldies of science denial is the “impending ice age” myth.
As usual, the climate denial noise machine distorts what an actual scientist says about his research — That there is no prediction of any ice age. – mini, maxi, little, big or or otherwise.
via Myth of the Mini Ice Age – YouTube.
