search
Great, readable essay by William Gibson on the season that changed his life. He has some fascinating thoughts on H.G. Wells that have made me want to dip back into that writer's work.
Here's an article from USA Today about vendors selling fully loaded iPods on eBay. Is this a legitimate fair use issue? My gut reaction is no—if vendors were selling loaded iPods for market value or used value, it might not trip my BS detector. But when you are charging several hundred bucks extra for the 11,000 songs you've loaded on the iPod, it seems to me that you've crossed that fair use line in the sand—we've established what you are and now we're just negotiating price.
Your thoughts?
If we were late, we didn't care. An elevator showed us out onto a floor where people gathered round a table blanketed in champagne and wine. We made our way, and caught attention.
"I'll have a glass of that."
"A glass of that?"
"Yes."
"Here you go."
"And one more, please."
"Another?"
"Yes."
"Here you go."
"Thank you."
We took our glasses of white into the dark and crowded room. People swayed and stumbled, looking to discover the few empty seats that remained along the far walls and others that were lost within the circles and rows. We would…
Over at NewScientist, there's an article on an alternate gravity theory called scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG), which seems to have an edge on Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). Which one meshes best with the data? Why the one that contains quantum, of course! Well, kinda sorta.
Researchers do say that STVG explains how Pioneer 10 ended up 400,000km off course, whereas MOND can't.
Parts is parts you say? They don't make 'em like these any more.
Via Boing-Boing.
You simply have to read "The Peekaboo paradox," a fantastic piece of writing by Gene Weingarten. (It's long, so you might prefer to print it out and save it for later.) It conforms to a formula I admiringly call The New Yorker paradigm, in which a writer introduces you to a subject you think you don't have much interest in (in this case a children's party entertainer) and makes it fascinating. Then you discover that the real story is so much deeper and compelling than you could have ever imagined.
You can only do that if you totally own the story and if you have serious writer's chops—both…
These animated Nissin Cup-O-Noodle ads are great! Almost makes me want to buy some just to say thanks.
Almost.
Audiophiles are lucky when it comes to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, especially when you consider the embarrassment of riches that are the Shostakovich String Quartets. If you dig LPs, there are two essential batches of complete recordings: the Borodin Quartet and the Fitzwilliam Quartet. On CD, there's the fabulous live edition by the Emerson Quartet, rendered in superb sound by Da-Hong Seetoo.
Then there are the symphonies, which is a heck of a lot of good music—and bigger than life sound.
Gerard McBurney puts a life in perspective.
I thought I'd really begin where I always begin: with my band's first album. As I've said before, I know this thing better than I know most anything else. From the creation of a song like "50 Bullets" — sitting on my bed and turning a simple four-note riff into a complicated and violent four-minute explosion — to the recording process, marred by uncomfortable, late-night drives from Clifton to New Brunswick where Jeff Baker fooled around with tape reels and watched lazily as we somehow came up with fourteen tracks that we could only almost perform — drunk on Budweiser and stuffed on fried…