Month: October 2004

A guide to artists and producers who sample (remix) popculture.

Web link of note: Media Trips
(At http://www.mediatrips.com/)

Mixing styles from the ragtime and country music of the twenties and thirties to the rock and roll and punk music of their adolescence, The Devil Makes Three pushes the boundaries of acoustic music. Citing influences as varied as Steve Earle, the Reverend Gary Davis, Memphis Jug Band, and Django Reinhardt, the band combines tight vocal harmonies with idiot-savant finger style guitar to create an exciting and original sound.

Web link of note: The Devil Makes Three
(At http://www.monkeywrenchproductions.com/)

Yay accordions! Who doesn’t love accordions?!? Well, I mean, besides pretty much everyone…

Web link of note: Accordion Works
(At http://www.accordionworks.org)

Would you call someone who quit smoking a flip-flopper? You would? You must be a real asshole.

For the rest of us, no. Someone who quits smoking has come to their senses. They realized they were doing something stupid, and then they stopped doing it.

Being pig-headed is not a virtue. If you, hypothetically, lied to the entire world about something and caused the destruction of several countries and the deaths of insane numbers of people, and frittered away trillions of dollars on your rich friends, “staying the course” does not make you a good person. Hypothetically. Refusing to see when you have made a mistake in the face of insurmountable evidence is a little immature.

And for the people who make excuses for this kind of irresponsible person? Who think that someone coming to their senses or actually thinking about new evidence is “flip flopping?”

Don’t be a sucka.

Politics Makes You Stupid

This is like All Your Base… it’s a giant page of photoshopped photos incorporating the phrase “You forgot Poland.”

In case you didn’t watch the President’s disastrous performance in the first debate, what happened was Senator Kerry was describing the paltry support other nations have contributed to the Iraq War- mainly because America has systematically alienated the rest of the world, and the case for a war in Iraq is, was, and always will be extremely weak.

But rather than address the reasons for this, or how we have lost over a thousand Americans and killed wave after wave of innocent people (at last count over 10,000 people), all Bush could say was “you forgot Poland.”

The invasion force of the “49 nations” included America, Britain, Australia, and, yes, Poland. Let’s look at the breakdown:

• United States: ~250,000 troops
• United Kingdom: ~45,000 troops
• Australia: ~2,000 troops
• Poland: 184 troops

Does this look like a “coalition” to you? I count 4 nations. Look at the numbers of troops.

Web link of note: You Forgot Poland
(At http://www.youforgotpoland.com/)

Yesterday was a busy day for me. I got back on my schedule at the gym, and got in at a reasonable time. ShaC was doing something important and I got really absorbed in something I was working on, so I ended up going to “lunch” around 3 pm.

One hour and a giant Jamba Juice later, I wandered back to the office. Everyone in engineering was clustered around one cube. I started working anyway.

After about five minutes, they were still talking. I walked over and asked what was up. “Layoffs,” they said. Joshua had been laid off, along with several people in the next row. Uh oh!

One of the senior engineers told me there was one more envelope, and I should check it wasn’t mine. One the way to the section of the building where management has their offices, I saw ShaC – he didn’t know if I was on the list, but he sure was, and so was Catherine, his teammate. He was cleaning out his cube.

My manager, who had taken over our group when our previous manager left, had seemingly left for the day. For ten minutes I didn’t know for sure if I had a job or not.

I finally found the CIO/CFO. Yep, my job had evaporated, along with over half of Engineering. We went over the various papers.

So uh… there it is. The economy is recovering! That is why all the jobs are still hemorrhaging from America! Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.

Okay, I know I’m going off the deep end with this one, but I have another idea for a utility that would make outlining documentary footage a whole lot easier.

So, you shot your documentary. You’ve got your insanely large quantity of footage. The focus has changed a little from when you started the project, but you’re not quite sure how to organize the additional themes that have started to emerge from the footage.

Organizing the clips into topics is the first step. Some clips have multiple themes, where the speaker says something relevant to multiple topics of your documentary. Some of their utterances are a good transition from one into the other.

Right now I have a nice giant spreadsheet with every clip on it, sortable by themes. But keeping track of these potential transitions between topics is tricky. It requires another chart… and I get to look at two charts at the same time. Not so good.

Quick background: in computer program algorithm studies, there is a model called a “graph.” A graph in this context is a collection of points called “nodes” and lines connecting them called “edges.” Any picture you’ve ever drawn which was a bunch of circles connected to each other by lines is potentially a graph. Edges only connect nodes, they never intersect other edges.

A lot of algorithms focus on travel between nodes, along those edges. So a “Directed graph” is a graph where the edges can only be traversed in one direction. Like a bunch of circles, with a bunch of arrows each starting at a circle and ending at another circle.

How does this help us? Those circles are our documentary topics. And the arrows are the transitions. If someone talks about our film topic of “dogs,” the clip belongs to the “dogs” node. If someone talks about our film topic of “cats,” the clip belongs to the “cats” node.

If they say something like “they were fighting like cats and dogs!” that is a transition! The clip can be used at the end of the “dogs” segment to introduce the “cats” segment, or vice versa. It can be marked on the graph as an arrow between the “cats” node and the “dogs” node. For that matter, it could go either way, so it should be a double-headed arrow.

If we graphed the entire topic list like this, we could find an outline to the movie by following a path along the topic nodes and remembering which transitions represent which edges between the nodes.

So, I’m looking for an easy dynamic graphing applet which supports directed graphs. Either that or I”m going to have to draw a 40+ node graph and redraw it over and over until it looks legible… gah.

But wouldn’t that be a great add-on to my dream documentary outline software?

Maggie Muggs was made by Larry B Cottrill aka Cottrill Cyclodyne out of about $60 of hardware from the store.

ASPO: Amaze your friends! Blow up your house!

The same guy also made the Synchrodyne miniature jet engine… apparently as part of an effort to make a very very simple jet.

I like how all the jet engine products are seemingly made in his garage and have the word “dyne” in them- very 1950’s sci-fi. Larry could be up for a What Has Science Done award.
Web link of note: Coffee Mug Ramjet
(At http://www.cottrillcyclodyne.com/Maggie_Muggs/Maggie.html)

The site’s name, 妖怪絵巻, means “ghost picture scroll” – yokai emaki. “Yokai” being a genre of monster which is more uncanny than your standard bigfoot type of monster. A vampire or a zombie would be a Yokai. The Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot or a jackelope would not.

Anyway, the site is full of paintings of Japanese monsters. I’m not sure if the site owner paints them himself, or what- my Japanese isn’t that good!

Web link of note: Ghost Scrolls
(At http://www.blu.m-net.ne.jp/~uma001/FrameSet1.html)

I was reading about Electronic Voice Phenomemna– recording the voices of ghosts. The recordings themselves are pretty creepy.

According to the recording procedure posted by the AAEVP,

If the taper wishes to speak to a specific friend or loved one in the next dimension, he should ask helpers on the other side to please get this person for him. For best results, it is advised to make this request as you end recording for the day. As an example: “When I return tomorrow, I would especially like to speak to my mother, Mary Smith. If you would please try to bring her to me, I will be very grateful.”

I’m thinking this is to give the dead time to contact the requested party, and then for the Beloved to re-arrange their schedule to plan to be at the next contact meeting.

Is this such a bizarre concept? When you make an (unexpected) long-distance call into a developing country, the operator has to schedule the call’s connection, and leave a message for the call recipient. Also, sometimes the only phone is in another village and the time for the incoming call must be relayed by friends or neighbors from the village with the phone to wherever the call recipient lives. This could take several days.

What if the only phone in North America was in Salt Lake City, and you lived in San Francisco? The phone only takes incoming calls. Even with trains or the Pony Express, getting the message that you had an incoming call would take weeks. Then you’d have to travel to the phone, which would take more weeks.

So I propose the following: At the end of your recording session or what have you, list off the next few people you intend to contact, in order, from nearest future to furthest. the list only would move every week or so. That way, someone on the top of the list has about a week to make the connection, and people in future slots on the list will have ample warning, possibly several months. Sort of like a “upcoming events” list for contactees.

But there is a slight complication- we all know how communicating with the Departed is a fairly unreliable proposition. The dead aren’t as direct in their communication, and rarely stay on topic. There may be a large degree of garbling of communicated messages- like a long chain of myna birds relaying spoken messages. Or maybe being on the Other Side makes you a senile flake.

In either case, the message, even “I want to talk to my grandfather,” must be repeated simply and with a high frequency. Like a simple, easy-to-remember and therefore easy-to-repeat phrase. Maybe have a tune that goes along with it to make it even easier to recall. Whoever or whatever receives this message can then more easily relay it to the Loved One, who then can in turn be at a future scheduled recording session. For maximum exposure you would repeat this short song with a single sentence every five minutes or so, during the recording sessions, for several weeks.

Oh crap. I’ve just invented Radio Advertising for the Dead.