- For the first time, a significant evolution has been caught in the act in a lab setting: an E. Coli bacteria acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, something it normall can’t do.
- The New Journal of Physics reports a new “meta-material made up of array of small cylinders” can create a substance that is essentially impervious to sound, with lots of potential applications. Noiseless courdoroy!
- Great news from the upcoming iPhone/iTouch app store: a new version of iTunes and free software will allow remote control of iTunes from anywhere in the house (presumably anywhere on the network). This is a feature I’m definitely going to use a lot.
- Hall & Oates reunited for a show in L.A.
- The last period on earth with so few sunspots resulted in a little ice age in the late 17th century, and some geophysicists think that within 500 years the Earth’s magnetic field may be gone entirely– or at least enough to severely screw things up– but don’t panic! It may be that our universe was just a “bubble pinched off from a previously existing universe.”
June 27th, 2008
Usually prefacing an involved explanation of something very technical, I would conservatively estimate that I hear the word “basically” used in a sentence a couple of hundred times a week. I also hear it used in the middle of any particular sentence, presumably to describe a simplification of what’s being said. In reality, I think it’s become just a bridging word, but its use has become overwhelming.
It wasn’t driving me quite so insane, of course, until Amy noticed, and we started pointing it out to one another. Now that the secret is out, I can’t help but suppress a slight cringe. At first, I would smile to myself, but now I can’t even use it — or even replace it with its cousin, “essentially”– and I find my spoken sentence structure has a more tightened, perhaps even erudite, quality to it, due to the lack of vague transition phrases.
A quick Googling of the word shows that it’s a popular word in all sorts of business names, particularly ones that begin with the letter “B”: Basically Babysitting, Basically Beds, Basically Bushwalking Club, Basically Brazil…
June 26th, 2008
Just a picture I threw together while I was on the endless train ride home. I guess I’ve always liked the idea of a cyborg Lincoln, perhaps it’s the iconicity of the guy.
June 19th, 2008
I mostly use MySpace as a place where old friends and enemies alike can hunt me down with surprising ease, but once in a while– generally on the order of a few times a week– I get MySpace spam too, scantily clad “real girls” advertising some online hookup service or another.
Usually they’re pretty dull, but sometimes you come across something that just makes you smile. To wit:
Obviously, we’re soul mates.
March 25th, 2008
In the end, it wasn’t so very secret.
Ostensibly, you would find out about it via MySpace, by having the band listed as a friend and having the fortune of logging with the right window of time. Or you could have read the blurb in The Mercury and tried to guess at their oblique reference to the venue (and having never before been to The Satyricon, would have failed that).
I got lucky and happened to be going to Matador’s site to purchase the album– Real Emotional Trash– when I saw the blurb about the show off of the main page. You could go and pick up a wristband at specified Music Millenium to get in to the show, or you could just go to the door close to when the show might open and hope to get in, which is what we did.
I expected a crowd to have already massed, but we were lucky. Space was at a premium, but the secret seemed to be well-kept enough to keep us from being crushed to death.
After spending the first hour outside and the second hour in the bar next door, thoughts of playing Arkanoid crushed under the overwhelming mass of people in the bar, the show finally got rolling.
“Welcome to the free show,” SM said when at last they took the stage, “would that they could all be.”
After sorting out Joanna’s battery problems, they opened as the album does, “Dragonfly Pie” leading in to “Hopscotch Willie”, from there tracking through “Gardenia”, “Real Emotional Trash”, and a handful of other tracks, all from the new album. Despite some minor lyrical missteps, they were on their game, with Janet as always pulling everything together with her impeccable timing even in the face of the daunting SM, who likes to toy with his composition and delivery at every turn. But that what makes a live show worth it, isn’t it?
I was standing right in front of the speaker on stage left and had to improvise an earplug. That wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was good to be up so close in such an intimate venue. Spencer guessed that there were maybe 200 people which, in The Satyricon, means it’s basically packed. And, Oregon being Oregon, it wasn’t long before the cheeba smoke filled the room. (At one point, Joanna joking, “We’re allergic to weed.” SM quips about not smoking the reefer, Janet replies, “Obviously, you’re not from Oregon.”)
They wound the set down, again, as per the album, with “Wicked Wanda”, before being urged back on for the nigh-inevitable encore number. “We don’t really know internet etiquette,” said SM as he returned to the stage, questioning whether or not an encore was “appropriate” for an internet secret show, but they obliged anyway with, if I recall the name correctly, “Church on White”.
As they left the stage a second time, the crowd was still hungry for more: a chant from the center section came up, “MALK-A-MUS! MALK-A-MUS!” In true call-and-response fashion, a second contingent began their own shout: “JICKS!” “MALK-A-MUS!” “JICKS!”
Apologetically, Steve returned to the stage and told us that they would like to play more but they didn’t have anything else prepared. To the sound booth: “Don’t you guys have some house music to play about now? I know the Satyricon has fallen on some hard times…” Cue: house lights, music, and the small crowd quickly disperses, getting a bonus as we head out the door: a numbered show poster. Very cool, and certainly the best damn free show that I’ve ever seen. I look forward to catching them again at the Wonder in May.
March 7th, 2008
Ruidh’s Corollary
“In the future, everyone will be a suspect for 25 hours.”
-Ruidh’s Corollary to Warhol’s Law
's Corollary">Add comment January 18th, 2008
Something frequently encountered when using computers is the ubiquitous error message. There are lots of them that are inane, and, indeed, there are sites out there with whole sections devoted to this.
But there’s another peculiar brand of error message: The Incredibly Specific Error. For instance, this java.lang.IllegalArgumentException:
Path does not start with a "/" character.
I could understand if, perhaps, the path as a whole was invalid, or otherwise syntactically incorrect, but in this case, couldn’t the software try just a little harder? Couldn’t it throw the slash on there itself and just kick out a polite warning?
January 14th, 2008
Rather than discuss any of these at length… here were my favorite things from this past year.
Video Games
7. Guitar Hero 3
6. Puzzle Quest
5. Assassin’s Creed
4. Super Mario Galaxy
3. Skate
2. Mass Effect
1. Rock Band
Albums
7. Sondre Lerche - Phantom Punch
6. Apostle of Hustle - The National Anthem of Nowhere
5. Pseudosix - Pseudosix
4. Radiohead - In Rainbows
3. Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero
2. The New Pornographers - Challengers
1. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Top Films
7. 28 Weeks Later
6. Grindhouse
5. Day Watch (Dnevnoi Dozor)
4. 300
3. Zodiac
2. Sunshine
1. The Darjeeling Limited
December 11th, 2007
Democratic presidential debate canceled over strike
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A televised debate set for next month among the Democratic presidential candidates will be canceled to avoid a potential conflict with striking Hollywood screenwriters, a source close to organizers said on Wednesday.
December 11th, 2007
A minor tragedy. All of the music is replaceable, but not all of the CDs are. I hardly ever forget to lock my car, but I guess the threat level has been upgraded to orange, now. The silver lining here is that they didn’t take anything else, half of the CDs were just burned copies, and I had just burned a couple of other things to listen to so I wasn’t music-less on the way in to work. Still, of the 23 wayward discs I can recall being in there, I will miss these ones the most:
- 5. Pseudosix - Pseudosix
- 4. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema
- 3. Quasi - Field Studies
- 2. 20 Minute Loop - Yawn + House = Explosion
- 1. Pavement - Wowee Zowee
Godspeed, may I recover some of you in a used record store someday.
December 5th, 2007
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