Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson

We had a chance to go see Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and TV host of NOVA scienceNOW on PBS, at the Palladium Theater in St. Petersburg, FL last week. Below is a video of Dr. Tyson answering a question about dark matter and the speed of light.

R.E.M. on N.P.R.

To those of you that appreciate R.E.M....

If you did not catch the R.E.M interview on NPR this morning, it's worth a listen if you have a minute. Steve Inskeep does a so-so job interviewing them, but of course they make it pretty interesting. I had no idea that Michael Stipe came from generations of Methodist ministers. The "Extra Interview Clips" are pretty good as well. The sound clips in the interview from the new record sound decent. They also have a full concert recording from SxSW that I haven't listened to yet.

-Harry

The Return of the Mix Tape

For a long time now I have been wanting find a good way to be exposed to new or different music that I will probably like. Way back when, the only to be exposed to new music was basically via radio or word of mouth. This wasn't all that bad; the music on the radio had to be palatable by the public and if someone you knew recommended music to you, there was a good chance you might like it.

When I was growing up, the thing to do was to make a mix tape. Throw down some of your favorite tracks, straight from vinyl or cassette or eventually CDs to another cassette. You would give these out to your friends and it was a good, actually great way to get exposed to all kinds of different music. This was real nice especially when pop radio didn't play the music you usually like to listen to. I had mix tapes galore and constantly had one in my car for years.

Eventually, the cassette format went by the wayside. Yes, I still have some cassettes, but I do not have a good player to listen to them on and most of them have deteriorated over the years. The point here is that we are no longer making or listening to mix tapes anymore. Now we have digital media, CDs, MP3s, and whatever comes next. Of course these formats offer better sound quality over the cassette, some would argue not necessarily over vinyl. However it is very easy nowadays to rip a CD, get the MP3s and put them on your MP3 player/iPod etc. You can even purchase your tunes à la carte, one song at a time. Folks I know have amassed huge collections of of digital music to the point where they have more than enough music to listen to for the rest of their lives and not have to repeat very much at all. While it may be nice to have every piece of music ever recorded at your fingertips, I do not find it practical for getting into new music, or finding music you might like that you haven't heard before.

Radio is nice in that it repeats songs at some, sometimes annoying, frequency. This gives that "oh yeah, I've heard this one before" kind of moment that might lead to purchasing music or just finding out more about the artist. The same things goes for cassettes, or even CDs that you might play over and over again in your car or home stereo. I guess satellite radio would be good for this too, except I still can't get over having a recurring payment for radio. So,mix tapes traded between friends or at least folks with similar interests in music, were an ideal way to get exposed to new music that you might like.

So now that computers that can burn CDs or even DVDs are pretty much ubiquitous, you would think that people would be making more mix CDs, but I do not really see this happening. While I have a handful of mix CDs from friends that are great, I do not see people getting into them in the same way that we used to get into mix tapes. Now, being a parent for the last 8 years and in graduate school for the 2 years before, it is quite possible that I haven't a clue what people are actually doing out there with their music. They may in fact be getting into mix CDs or even playlist sharing or something that serves the same purpose. However, I have not heard of this so much. Instead I see people sharing gigabytes of MP3s at a time, or maybe someone makes an MP3 CD with 10+ hours of music on it. Again this may be nice to have, but it does not have the repetitive quality of some kind of shorter format or radio station that I think is necessary to truly get exposed and get into new music. For me, getting this much music all at once it a little overwhelming. I think it does serve a purpose for the music collector, just not the purpose I am interested in here.

Internet radio stations can be real nice. I especially like the "personalized" internet radio stations like Pandora or Last.fm (I'm listening to last.fm right now). These are all certainly terrific ways to get exposed to new music. There is decent repetition, not too much and the stations tend to be very specialized, especially the the "personalized" stations where you can "seed" your own personal radio station with particular input related to the music you want to listen to. As great as these are, they are only good when I am sitting in front of a computer in a situation where I can listen to music. I think that currently, most folks are like me and can only tune in to these radio stations from their computers. I do not (yet) have the ability to tune into these internet radio stations from my car, where I spend at least an hour a day listening to something.

So until we have a new, better, portable, cheap, personalized technology that enables us to hear new music that we will like any time we want, I propose a return of the mix tape, or really a mix CD. In the meantime, 80 minutes of music selected by musically like-minded friends is exactly what I think would fulfill this need. I think it would be cool to get 3-12 folks with a shared interest and relative taste in music and start a mix tape club. Each person would take a turn and make a "mix tape" (CD) for everyone else. Now that some people have these massive digital music collections, it should be easier than even before to make a pretty good mix. I've been thinking about this for a while (hence the need to write this) and thought that while everyone should be free to make any mix they want to, it would be cool to at least have some kind of theme to tie the music together. These themes could be determined ahead of time or just kept in mind while the mix creator mixes.

Some mix tape themes I've been thinking of:

• Great covers
• The worst songs from the best bands
• Music history for your kids (à la School of Rock): the songs/artists that they must know about
• Songs about animals (Rock Lobster, The Monkey Song, Mammal, The Love Cats, etc)
  
• Food songs (like Weird Al, but not Weird Al)
• Songs that 'B' (or some particular letter)
• B-sides / rarities
• Old School
  
• Songs that make feel blue
• Songs that make you feel ???
• Songs that mention New York
• Songs about any city
• Acoustic songs
  
• Live music / bootleg compilation
• A compilation of songs from other compilations
• Favorite Reggae songs
• Putumayo favorites
• Great music to dance to
• Songs you can't play on the radio
  
• Punk influences
• The DC scene
  
• The _____ scene from the 19??s
• Great local bands
• Tallahassee in the 90s
• Songs ripped from vinyl

It would be nice to get something like this going. I've had some friends that have tried this type of things before with some success, I think. We'll see...

Keep on listening.

-Harry

Scans From The Tech

As part of my trip to San Jose, CA, I had the pleasure of visiting The Tech Museum there. Arriving at the museum, you are given a "TechTag" which you can then use at the various exhibits inside. Some of the exhibits provide some sort of output or digital souvenir about your experience with the exhibit. The TechTag is just a piece of paper with a scannable code on it which can be used at the museum's website where you can view your digital souvenirs.

Two of the exhibits that had especially interesting souvenirs were the 3D Head Scan and a Thermal Image Scan. The 3D Head Scan exhibit scans your head with a laser and gives you a pretty good, well at least interesting, 3D rendering of your own head, kind of like Max Headroom. The Thermal Scan takes a thermal image of your body.

After visiting the museum I got online with my TechTag, looked up my digital souvenirs and created a web photo album from some of the images from these exhibits. The album contains several images for the 3D Head Scan one one image from the thermal scan. I got the 3D Head Scan images from screen shots of the 3D rendering client you have to use to see your 3D head. The 3D client software allows you to pan, scan, turn and zoom your 3D head around to view it. Doing this was actually pretty freaky, given the imperfections in the scan. Take a look at the some of the screen shots to see for yourself.

Another Letter to Superdelegates

I believe in Barack Obama. He represents what this country so desperately needs: the audacity to force a new political paradigm, the desire and vision to finally make honest, positive change in our country and the hope to make it all reality.

I did not know much of Barack Obama 18 months ago. My wife and I started discussing him as the buzz about his presidential bid was becoming louder. I checked him out, tried to see what he was all about. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he was not the typical Washington politician I was used to. He was sincere; he was real, more so than any politician I has seen or heard in my 35 years.

We read his book, The Audacity of Hope, last summer. Reading it I got real feel for his integrity, honesty and leadership. I learned that he is well versed in the political system and that he has the wherewithal and persistence to make good things happen. He is not selfish. He is not greedy. He does not do what he does for himself; Barack Obama truly serves his country and the people he represents in every sense of the word.

Superdelegates, consider Barack Obama. Be diligent in getting to know him, what he can do and what he stands for. Understand that he is the only one on the playing field that does not closely represent the establishment that has steered our country away from hope and prosperity. Vote for Barack Obama, he is right choice for the right future of America.

Letter to Superdelegates

Barack Obama is the only candidate that cannot be bought by lobbyists. Because politicans have sold our fragile democracy away to the highest bidder, the Founding Fathers' immense sacrifice and legacy to us, the common people, has been trampled and defiled. Democracy itself is undermined and the power of the people is marginalized when corporations, through their lobbyists, in effect buy laws.

The triangle of corruption turns to iron (the iron triangle) when, in wartime, defense contractors buy laws that subsidize their own private businesses. Perpetual war, waged on the blood of our underpriveleged, undereducated young people, is not a moral choice for the engine of our economy.

Barack Obama does not oppose all war. He knows (like all sane Americans) that Islamic extremists and more want to kill us as much as possible. But Obama opposes a rash war. He opposed this dumb war, when the rest of America was duped into thinking Osama and Sadam are the same person.

Hillary Clinton was duped and takes lobbyists' money. John McCain is still duped into continuing a perpetual war. Only Obama talks about how his campaign is not his, it is instead a social movement of Americans standing together to voice the changes they want to see: world reconciliation, a retraction of imperialism, and kicking the lobbyists' influence right out of Washington entirely.

This is why I got "hooked on hope" and now, I see that once again only Obama has provided the judgment and vision out of our economic slump towards a future spurned on for generations by growing a green energy sector. Superdelegates, Mama says, "Vote for Obama!"

False Pretenses

I came across this the other day. Someone analyzed all of the Bush administration's references to Iraq's WMDs, Iraq's links to Al Qaeda or both over time up to a shortly after starting the war with Iraq in 2003; it even shows a bar graph shedding light on an organized PR campaign to fool the Americans and everyone else into going to war with Iraq.

It's an interesting read. It kind of makes them all murderers in a sense, IMO.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/