Looking for some good tunes

It's so hard making a good playlist, especially when some of the music you like best is big "I" obscure indie rock that doesn't make it to an online catalog. My theme song, "Code Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton, didn't make it to the Finetune database, sigh. Nevertheless, I'm pressing on. I think I've got a good start on my playlist, though it's a perpetual work in progress. 192 tracks so far, none of which completely suck. Like I said, it doesn't contain the "best" music, but it does have more than a few good modern rock selections and even some haunting favorites of mine from older days, those that I didn't get burnt out on (even I liked Alanis Morissette once). One of the challenges is that Finetune only allows you to pick three songs from a particular artist. That sucks. Of course half my playlist would be Modest Mouse otherwise, so in some ways I guess it's a good challenge. There's some embarrassing guilty pleasures on the list, like this one from Frente!, but it's all in good fun. Still working on my choices for older, older songs, like Bob Dylan and Nina Simone, but I have to include those. Built on giants, and all of that. Right now, while writing this (it took me a few minutes to write), I'm digging "Johnny Appleseed" by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, and "Satisfaction" by Cat Power (awesome remake of the Rolling Stones classic). If you've got some good stuff you want me to check out, send me a link.

From Maysville, Episode 13

'Nother episode of "From Maysville". A development company is sinking $500 million into building a resort community in Maysville and a new Kentucky Governor has been elected who ran on a platform of getting casino gambling on the ballot. What changes may be in store for this small remote town?

Weirdest moment in TV history, 20 years ago today

The weirdest moment in TV history took place 20 years ago today. During the November 22, 1987 broadcast of Doctor Who on Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW-11, a mysterious person wearing a Max Headroom mask broke in, hijacked the signal, and broadcasted the following bizarre clip:



I shit you not.

Neither he nor his accomplices have been found or identified to this day. I have to say, this is probably the most effective "don't do drugs" message ever broadcast on television.

More on the incident

Stem cell research, guilt free

You'll probably hear a lot more about this real soon...

Two teams of scientists reported yesterday that they had turned human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without having to make or destroy an embryo — a feat that could quell the ethical debate troubling the field.

All they had to do, the scientists said, was add four genes. The genes reprogrammed the chromosomes of the skin cells, making the cells into blank slates that should be able to turn into any of the 220 cell types of the human body, be it heart, brain, blood or bone. Until now, the only way to get such human universal cells was to pluck them from a human embryo several days after fertilization, destroying the embryo in the process...

The new method sidesteps other ethical quandaries, creating stem cells that genetically match the donor without having to resort to cloning or the requisite donation of women’s eggs. Genetically matched cells would not be rejected by the immune system if used as replacement tissues for patients. Even more important, scientists say, is that genetically matched cells from patients would enable them to study complex diseases, like Alzheimer’s, in the laboratory.

Source

Many scientists believe the treatment of strokes, heart disease, cancer and birth defects could benefit from stem cell research, along with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. This is a huge deal.

If the scanner sees only darkly

I finally got a chance to watch A Scanner Darkly, and wasn't disappointed. I started watching it for the art, because that's what everyone hyped up. It's animated, but based on live action. I watched for the art, but stayed for the plot. I must have missed that it was based on a novel by Philip K. Dick or I would have seen it sooner, definitely.

Since it was art that motivated me, let me cover that first. What makes this form of animation unique is that they start with actual live action footage of actual actors actually doing stuff -- Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, and Woody Harrelson in this movie. They then run that film through a bunch of filters that create blotches of color and strong outlines, similar to what you'd see in a graphic novel. It's a neat, surreal effect but a little hard to follow. That is, your mind is constantly switching back and forth between what it thinks is live action and what it knows is animation. It's a few minutes into the film before your mind compensates and you can comfortably watch it.

I don't know why they billed it as a breakthrough animation technique. You can easily copy the basic idea using Adobe Flash's trace bitmap feature. It'd still require some post production, but the point is it's not that much different. It's also been done before. A few years back they used a similar technique to create the movie Waking Life, a film about the bizarre state of lucid dreaming, or being conscious and aware while dreaming (I'll have to come back to lucid dreaming later because it's something I'm really into). It's been done before, but not as well, so I guess in that sense it was a breakthrough. It did look awesome.

So I think the style of the film, animated, was actually a plot device as well. The story takes place in a not-too-distant totalitarian future where every aspect of people's lives is monitored in a 1984 sort of way. There's an ultra-addictive drug that's seeped into society, simply called "Substance D", and the main character, Bob Arctor (Reeves), is both an undercover detective working to stop the spread of Substance D, and a dealer/addict to it as well. As the story progresses, Arctor begins to lose his own identity and display schizophrenic behavior. A main theme of the movie is identity. As the main character finds himself in a surreal world and mind that he is increasingly unable to identify with, the similarly surreal style of the film becomes all the more brilliant.

Like I said, the movie is strongly about the main character's struggle and ultimate inability in understanding his own identity, all the while feeling a lack of control over the events that are happening to him, and being constantly watched by electronic scanners embedded everywhere. It is in this despair we get the best line of the well-written screenplay:

Whatever it is that's watching, it's not human, unlike little dark eyed Donna. It doesn't ever blink. What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me, into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly, because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better. Because if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I do, then I'm cursed and cursed again. I'll only wind up dead this way, knowing very little, and getting that little fragment wrong too.

Good stuff. Go rent it.

Ten thousand lines

The bodhisattva once said to a visiting programmer: “There is more enlightenment in one line of Ruby than there is in ten thousand lines of C.”

The bodhisattva, who was very proud of his mastery of C, said: “How can this be? C is the language in which Ruby is implemented!”

The bodhisattva replied: “That is so. Nevertheless, there is more enlightenment in one line of Ruby than there is in ten thousand lines of C.”

The programmer grew distressed. “But through the C language we become as one with the operating system and the machine, reaping matchless performance!”

The bodhisattva replied: “All that you say is true. But there is still more enlightenment in one line of Ruby than there is in ten thousand lines of C.”

The programmer scoffed at the bodhisattva and rose to depart. But the bodhisattva nodded to his student, who wrote a line of Ruby on a nearby whiteboard, and said: “Master programmer, consider this code. Implemented in pure C, would it not span ten thousand lines?”

The programmer muttered through his beard, contemplating what the student had written. Finally he agreed that it was so.

“And how many hours would you require to implement and debug that C program?” asked the student.

“Many,” admitted the visiting programmer. “But only a fool would spend the time to do that when so many more worthy tasks await him.”

“And who better understands enlightenment?” The bodhisattva asked. “Is it he who writes the ten thousand lines, or he who, perceiving the emptiness of the task, gains merit by not coding?”

Upon hearing this, the programmer was enlightened.

- Adapted from Rootless Root by Eric S. Raymond

All the little ants are marching

I quit my volunteer job/addiction of editing Wikipedia articles. Normally when someone quits, they write up a departing essay pointing out all the things wrong with the web sub-culture of wiki, namely all the things wrong with pages anyone can edit. Some of the popular critiques of social media are the lack of expert opinion and the opportunity for special interest groups to push a particular point of view, two things traditional media tries to avoid (often failing). I don't know about any of that. After two years of editing on a regular basis, I'm still a fan of the idea of Wikipedia. As I wrote in an essay some time ago:

Wikipedia is a mainstream encyclopedia, wrapped up in and documenting popular culture. It also has the unique characteristic of being an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, which means that it is edited by the masses who draw on their experiences of living in popular culture.

I'm personally fascinated by the dynamic between the established popular culture, and counterculture movements. MediaWiki itself is an experiment in countering the culture of traditional publishing. Though I was born decades later, I enjoy reading histories of the counterculture movements in the United States during the 1960s.

It really is fascinating, a system designed to chronicle pop culture, built on counterculture concepts. What a mashup! I am still, totally, a fan of the site. You won't be hearing any rant coming from me.

No, the reason I quit is actually one of the things I think is a plus of social media; it's just something I'm not personally cut out for. While at Wikipedia, through my (ahem) superior writing skills, I assisted in getting one of the articles to Featured Article status. By assisted I mean I wrote a significant portion of it myself. I had contributed towards a number of articles, hundreds of edits actually, but this one held a special place on Wikipedia, the highest status. I was rather proud of my accomplishment and set back to marvel at my work.

A few weeks later someone came in and changed a few words around. Not a significant change, but not the wording I would have chosen, and so it was mildly irritating. No big deal, so I let it go. A few more changes here and there. I let it go. Some other guy thought it needed to be rewritten completely, and I had to argue for the current version. He eventually let it go, and so did I. But more and more as time went on, the idea that I was somehow "finished" with the article became less and less true. Wikipedia is built on process, not product.

This is a very cool thing and the defining thing that separates web media from print media. You write, say, a book and have it printed. Once those presses start rolling that thing is set in stone, and you have to wait for a second edition (if ever) to correct any part of it or make any improvements. Not so on the web, obviously. Web documents can be updated, modified, fixed, all at a moment's notice. No more is this apparent than at Wikipedia, the "Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit". Thousands of editors participate in the process, and as such, Wikipedia is an ever evolving phenomenon. It is a living document.

I could hardly be pissed at that. That's beautiful. It reminds me of an ant hill after a storm has wiped through. You see dozens of little ants scurrying about, rebuilding, modifying, growing the hill, all so it can be wiped out in the next storm. It's about process, not product. Nothing is ever "finished" because that was never really the point to begin with. It's about the process of living, and big surprise, it's not that different in a living document.

I am a fan of the idea. It's just hard for me personally. Though it's not very Zen, I've always had trouble with the maintenance side of life. Mowing the lawn and watching it grow. Mowing the lawn and watching it grow. Mowing the lawn and... what the hell? I just mowed it the other day! I'm very product-orientated. I'm not saying any of that is better because it probably isn't. It's just more my style. I'd like to be in Zen harmony with the ebb and flow; I'm just not there yet.

So some guy came in and proposed an entire rewrite of my featured article and for the first time I thought, you know, I think I'm done here. Maybe I'd be more product-ive elsewhere. I thought all of that, and wrote up this departing essay in favor of processes, and as I was writing the words "I think I'm done here," I realized... that's the product. How narcissistic of me to have not considered that there'd be anything after. Has an ant colony ever been about just one ant?

Street signs are eductational

Really? I had no idea.

From Maysville, Episode 12

'Nother episode of "From Maysville". In this episode we poke around town to take a look at some of the area's landmarks, and I climb on the roof of one of the buildings downtown to give you a bird's eye view.

Looking for finer things

While this post wasn't inspired by Dunder Mifflin's "Finer Things Club", the recent episode of The Office did remind me that I wanted to post it. You see, I too have an interest in finer things. A particular interest of mine is fine music, which is a bit disappointing because I make a poor musician. I haven't played an instrument since Junior High, wasn't very good at it back then, and never kept with it. I'd like to change that, and I want to challenge the web to help me do it.



Above is a picture of the violin I've had sitting around my place for at least five years now. I don't even know how to tune the damn thing. I thought I might take a class on how to play it, but not surprisingly there's few offered for the violin. Everyone has a guitar (even me) and everyone knows someone who plays guitar (yep, me too), but if you're not in school, or don't live in a town of ultimate diversity (NYC or something), you're pretty much out of luck on finding a violin tutor.

When I want to learn something, I usually don't care about my physical environment or what resources it has to offer. I just fire up my browser, locate a tutorial, and jump right in and get my hands dirty. I once replaced the convertible top on my car -- all on my own -- using a tutorial I found on the web. I use these web-based walkthroughs to learn new technical skills all the time, so I'm wondering if there's anything out there comprehensive enough to teach you how to play a complicated instrument like the violin?

I don't aspire to be a concert violinist. I just thought it'd be cool to hang out on the street corner and play -- a street musician -- and chose the violin because, you know, everyone plays guitar. I'd like to get to the point where I can play the violin part of the song on this bizarre video ("One Million Miles Away" by J. Ralph).

Anyone out there know of a good online class that teaches one how to play the violin? Please spam me. Heck, I'd settle for a tutorial on tuning it : ) It sounds horrible. Oh wait, that's probably just me.