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2005 Nov 30 (Wed) Lately I've been checking out garageband.com, a site where artists can upload their music and people can rate it on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. Perlcast is where I first heard about this site, and the great thing is that it's legit, since the artists themselves are the ones submitting music. Today I was listening to APM's Future Tense, and the story was about Jane Siberry, a reputable Canadian musician, who is distributing her music for free online. More precisely, she allows the fan to choose the price. So anyone can freely download her music, but she also gives the option to actually pay for a song to support her. She says that sometimes people give more than the suggested amount, and that the business model has been good so far. Kudos to her! Also, I thought she said an interesting quote about this development for music: "Maybe we're heading toward where we came from, which was, we never used to have physical medium ". [all posts in /] [permanent link] 2005 Nov 29 (Tue) Via /., I found out about some students who have created the ability to rock out to air guitar. Altho' the article says anyone can "create their own guitar solos", but it actually improvizes parts for you. I think it would be difficult to sell something that didn't do a little "magic" to make you sound good, so maybe that's why they decided to do that. Or maybe they're just lazy ;) [all posts in /tech/] [permanent link] 2005 Nov 27 (Sun) Sauvage Noble talks about a story from Slate where highly influential people were asked what book most influenced them in college. I have to say I wasn't too surprised that I hadn't heard of most of the books, but was surprised that a few of my favorites weren't on there (I guess that means I'm probably not going to be that influential). After reading the article, I decided to add a few more books to my never-shrinking reading least:Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson and Henry IV by Shakespeare. The books that were already on my list (but I haven't touched yet) were The Iliad and The Odyssey, both by Homer, and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (Michael Nalwalker would be proud of me), all which I've heard good stuff from. Since Angelo on Sauvage Noble listed a book that he loved in college, I'll follow suite and list a couple of the books I found most beneficial in college: Beyond Personality by C.S. Lewis and How to Read a Book(actually, this one I didn't get to until the summer after my fifth year, but that still counts, right?) by Mortimer J. Adler. Beyond Personality is actually quite small (like my attention span) and simply explained seemingly complicated theological questions. After savoring that book for awhile, I went on to read a few other books by Lewis, and have learned much from him in the process. He, along with G.K. Chesterton, always seemed to find a way to express ideas clearly, and never failed to add wit in his writing. It's a hope that I could some day write as simply, powerfully, and as carefully as he. How to Read a Book was actually assigned as optional reading in the intro course to Electrical Engineering the first quarter of my freshman year, but most of the students in that class, including myself, were quite cocky and thought we didn't need to learn how to read something for more than information (that song by Rod Stewart, "I wish that I knew what I know now" comes to mind). Anyway, I re-discovered How to Read a Book via another book (Scripture Twisting by James W. Sire) and a course I took my last quarter in college, LIGN 176: The Language of Politics and Advertising (which was my favorite course, btw). I actually didn't realize it was the same book that was recommended to me at the beginning of my college life until I looked it up on Amazon.com and recognized the funky-looking cover for it. For now, if anyone asks me a book that they should read, I recommend this one first. So go read it. ;) [all posts in /] [permanent link] 2005 Nov 21 (Mon)
caloric intake: you do the math...
Tonight I was listening to a podcast of "These Days", a local public radio broadcast series, when the first couple sentences from the speaker made me play the segment over again: A typical American eats three thousand calories during Thanksgiving dinner. That's about five thousand calories more than an adult male needs in a whole day.So an adult male actually only needs to lose two thousand calories a day?! Fortunately later on in the broadcast one of the guests said the average was "anywhere from fifteen hundred to it really tops at two thousand five hundred" [~2:30 time index] a day, but still, I would have thought the speaker would have caught himself at the beginning of the broadcast. [all posts in /] [permanent link] 2005 Nov 19 (Sat) Via /., there's an interesting article about a Darpa project intending to develop an "instant-translation" device. The article is good in that it points out the limitations of such a device, but still, if near-instant translation can be done between English and Iraqi Arabic that will be awesome. I wonder how it can be extended to signed languages...perhaps using something like the new iPod to generate a video showing the signs? [all posts in /ling/] [permanent link] 2005 Nov 08 (Tue) In part of catching up on what technology is doing, I decided to subscribe to the podcast APM's "Future Tense", and heard about an interesting "contraption" for fighting malnutrition in under-developed countries. It's called VitaGoat, and from what I understand, it allows the very efficient food-processing without the use of electricity, thereby allowing food to be preserved for consumption later. There are already nine being used around the world (in Africa, India, and North Korea), and the technology is being transferred to India and Africa for cheaper manufacturing and maintenance. So this invention is not only helping against malnutrition, but providing more jobs too! [all posts in /tech/] [permanent link] |
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