Ziff pointed to the site of the band he plays bass in, The Moonlighters. They go for that retro, latin, swing, jazz feel and include stuff from the neo-swing revival.
As an old school ska and punk fan, I agree, pop music needs a lot more horns and accordions.
A little fireworks java applet for ya! Courtesy of da Lawman!
By way of MetaFilter, I found a 17MB movie about the future of global law enforcement. In several ways, this had a greater impact on me than Matrix Reloaded or T3.
If I had a 100 dollars for every rant I’ve seen on the Internet condemning that same network, I’d be a rich man. Yes, the Internet is full of shit. Yawn. Tell us something we don’t know already. Sturgeon said that 90% of everything is crap. This is hardly news.
And I’ve been just as snobby about this stuff as anyone, I assure you. Everything was better back then, before the dirty masses came in and dumbed everything down. It’s ironic that these statements are made right after these media are democritized and made widely accessible to people. They always smack of elitism.
But let me tell you folks something, and this is something that I said way back in 1996 when I first started working on the Internet, and I say this even now, even after the truly deserved dot-com crash, the Internet serves one key function: It provides me with a job.
It gave me my first decent, pride-instilling job. Before the Internet, I was tending rats and mice for a biological research supply company so, the Internet is a-okay in my book.
By the way, let me tell you what’s annoying: A web site that forces me to page through its stunning revelation, thinking that each point will somehow register more strongly with me if I see it in stark, moody isolation. Put it all one page, dude. Scrolling is not evil despite what Jake says. And you spelled Terabyte wrong.
Found an interesting thread on Slash today about human versus robotic space exploration. As I have mentioned, I’ve always favored robots. It’s simple economics: Robots give you far more science for far less money. This will always be true.
So the WaSP has issued another manifesto now that Microsoft has declared that it will no longer build standalone, free browsers for Windows and Apple machines. Now I say this as a long time supporter of the WaSP, but I doubt Microsoft is going to issue a few last patches to fix the broken XHTML, PNG and CSS support in IE 6 or Macintosh’s IE 5.
Five or so years ago it was easier because Netscape had already lost marketshare to a, let’s be honest, technically superiour browser given away for free by a powerful company. At that time Mozilla was still a very novel idea. It was easier for WaSP to light the fires under Netscape and, by proxy, Mozilla for standards support because at that time their browsers were behind and their share was small. This time, Microsoft will be much harder to push around.
I say this with great sadness and irritation because this means that, like it or not, broken IE 6 for Windows and IE 5 for Macintosh will be the baseline for design for several product upgrades to come. Luckily the tactics we used to hide nifty CSS from buggy Netscape 4, can be used to hide nifty CSS from buggy IE 6.
So I have just spidered my site and, oh man, I have a lot of dead links. One of the drawbacks to using your web log as a hot link list is that a lot of stuff dies or gets lost as the web shifts around. It was especially brutal to remove all the New York Times and Technology Review links. I have to massively edit my old content just remove those links and still have entries make sense.
So I’ve learned some lessons:
Genetic engineering, at least in the States and in the developing world (Where they are forced to buy from whoever is cheapest, namely the States.), has conquered agriculture. Now it seems ready to invade that small specialization of agriculture, the pet industry. This has outraged some people. They worry that modified, fluorescent fish will escape and breed with natural ones, shifting the species gene pool. They worry that worse will happen. At least in fluorescent case, predators will eat all the unnatural ones, but more subtle changes might still slip through.
In unrelated news, and this should be no surprise to regular readers of Nanodot, machine-phase nanotechnology (The real nanotechnology according to some.) is looked at with great skepticism even while industry, in the pursuit of capital, carelessly attaches the label of nanotechnology to every bit of clever chemistry or materials science that has come out in recent months.
So bright sparks in Dallas, Texas and Dublin, Ireland have figured out how to cheaply make and weave nanotube fibers of arbitrary length. The science fiction fans in my audience will recognize the implications of this in a shot: Sinclair monofilament, Stratton’s indestructible cloth, Molly’s invisibility suit, the space elevator. Expect a lot of things to change.
People have told me on many occasions that I have talent for explanation. Some have even said that I should be a teacher. Every time I’ve heard this, I’ve rolled my eyes and sighed ruefully.
Education stinks. Barring tremendous improvements in psychiatry, psychopharmacology and pedagogy, education will continue to stink for many decades to come.
Personally, I don’t want to get involved in such a hopeless cause. My own admittedly irrational perfectionism keeps me from getting involved in anything other than tutoring. If there was a hell where I was forced to be a high school teacher of physics, that would bad hell. Knowing that most of the students in my class would never come to love physics like I love it, that most of them couldn’t care less, would be utter torment for me.
Mass education, the child of the Industrial Revolution, is a flawed but reasonable system by which we, with vague efficiency, produce larval workers. That’s all it’s really for. The basic fact is that a modern economy only has a small number of interesting jobs to pass out and it always has large number of boring jobs to pass out. Barring some massive change in the economy and society this is unlikely to change.
So education gets by with producing enough semi-literate workers flip our burgers, pick our apple crop, administer our paperwork and clean our office buildings. Most folks are unwilling to pay someone to play around doing science (And let’s be honest, doing science or art is play, that’s why all lot of folks are attracted to those endeavors.) because there rarely is a profit in abstract knowledge.
And so schools are fated. Fated to remain roughly as they are because they are good enough. It isn’t about making us smarter or giving us the power to make ourselves smarter, it’s about making us smart enough. Having said this as a responsible voter, I always vote in favor of school bonds and levies, but inwardly, I know the system is flawed and is unlikely to get better barring the radical changes mentioned above.
