Wilczek's Grid

I'm still trying to muddle my way through Nobel Prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek's latest book about the nature of mass and trying to get clear about his notion of the Grid (and it's distinction from Lattice Quantum Gravity). The basic argument for mass is that the quarks cause a disturbance in the gluon field and that the localization energy it would require to exactly position an anti-quark to zero out the disturbance involves too much energy expenditure, therefore the net nonzero energy involved generates the mass (say, of a proton). The hand-waving necessary in a popular science book (and this is a very well-written one) has to do with

-two suggested explanations of dark matter (which seems to halo all exisiting galaxies) with very light minimally-interacting particles.
- the connection to SUSY and SO(10) and the ways the symmetry theories fold into a master theory of symmetries

Don't Fear the Mini Black Hole

In honor of CERN's Large Hardron collider, a round-up of stories explaining how mini black holes, if they are created by the high energy collisions, do not pose a threat:

• CERN's webcast video
• Science Daily Article
• Article in The Register

RIP Don LaFontaine: The Voice

750,000 television spots, 5,000 movie trailers, 1 voice, Don LaFontaine has the most recognizable voice in the game right now. Here is the legend's story told by none other than the legend himself. RIP, Don, the moviegoing world will miss you.

Just Stop!

One of my designer colleagues sent me this link which was posted on Ugly Doggy and refers to very funny design firm humor about designing the Stop sign.

Too many decisions making you tired?

This explains the feeling I get in restaurants when the menu spans several pages: Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain

Faux Vintage plug-in design case study

This "tube delay" plug-in has the simulacra vintage texture/knob UI down pat: there's scratches in the vinyl covering, shading and some wear on the faux wood finish, bakelite knobs, fake cables and switches. Audio plug-in designers take note! They really should start teaching this
stuff...

From the Harmony Central press release:
Softube is now shipping the Tube Delay plug-in for VST, AU and RTAS. Tube Delay is available today at the Softube web shop ($99 excl. VAT).

TV converter box discount coupons

I'm not really convinced by the TV converter box coupon program and I think that's what the cable companies and the TV manufacturers are counting on. People like us who only watch PBS for a few minutes each evening are not exactly anyone's cash cow. At least ABC streams Lost episodes the day after being initially broadcast.

RIP Alton Kelley

Alton Kelley, poster designer for 60s counterculture, is dead

From The International Herald Tribune story by William Grimes:

Alton Kelley, whose psychedelic concert posters for artists like the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Big Brother and the Holding Company helped define the visual style of the 1960s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in Petaluma, California He was 67. Kelley and his longtime collaborator, Stanley Mouse, combined sinuous Art Nouveau lettering and outré images plucked from sources near and far to create the visual equivalent of an acid trip. A 19th-century engraving from "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" inspired a famous poster for a Grateful Dead concert at the Avalon Ballroom in 1966 that showed a skeleton wearing a garland of roses on its skull and holding a wreath of roses on its left arm. The Grateful Dead later adopted this image as its emblem. Kelley and Mouse also designed several of the group's album covers, including "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead."

Friday's Field Guide to Generation Y

Presumably, articles like this about Generation Y and their power to shape the internet are aimed at Gen Xer's and Boomers. Generation Y is generally meant as being born 1983-1997 and being currently 13-31, and growing up with digital media.

Further reading for the older crowd:
• Growing Up Digital, by business strategist and psychologist Don Tapscott
• USA Today 11/6/05: Generation Y: They've arrived at work with a new attitude
• Time 7/5/07: What Gen Y Really Wants
• www.gen-y.org - a collection of Gen Y related articles

Band Name Generator

Every reload gets 5 randomly generated possible band names at this band name generator web site. You never know if one of these might be the one.

Meet van Vark's Harmonium

From RetroThing and MatrixSynth: Dutch inventor Tatjana van Vark designed this mechanical computer designed to perform sine wave synthesis and Fourier Analysis. It has a mechanical sine generator that can draw a sine wave onto a paper drum based on the amplitude and phase. It also includes a mechanical integrator which you can use to trace the sine curve and perform a fourier analysis to extract the phase and amplitude of the curve, which is displayed on two dials.

Guillermo Del Toro to direct The Hobbit

Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh announced that Guillermo Del Toro, directory of Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth will be directing the 2 movies of The Hobbit, coming to a screen near you probably starting in 2010.

Unique Animal Body Part of the Week: Eimer's Organ

I'd love to say that I've come face to face with a star-nosed mole and taken this picture, but then I'd like to say a lot of other things that also aren't true. Yet. These nearly-blind burrow-dwelling moles, the only moles that can actually swim, have 22 small independently movable appendages covered with 30,000 Eimer's organs at the tip of their noses. They have about six times as many touch receptors as humans, all on their nose, and they don't even need to use soap.

22 Ideas for Earth Day

Here's a list of 22 ideas written by Joe Mohr of CleanTechnica for April 22, a.k.a. Earth Day. When my oldest daughter comes home from school and asks how she can help us recycle, some of my faith in the world is restored.

Will Ferrell as George Bush

Will Ferrell as W. - with Jon Stewart as the straight man. Almost as funny as this one.

Set List - Saturday 4/12/08

I thought I'd post the set list of my solo show from Saturday, the originals are marked *:

Too Creative *
April Come She Will (Paul Simon)
My Winding Wheel (Ryan Adams)
Sister *
You've Got to Hide Your Love Away (Beatles)
Don't Think Twice, it's All Right (Dylan)
It's Only Love (Beatles)
Where do the Children Play? (Cat Stevens)
The Needle and the Damage Done (Neil Young)
On the Inside of Your Circle *
Friend of the Devil (Garcia, Hunter)
Just Like a Photograph *

Me & Bobby McGee (K. Kristofferson)
Getting Better (Beatles)
In Tall Buildings (John Hartford)
Sitting by the Dock of the Bay (Redding)
Girl (Beatles)
Sunshine (J. Edwards)
Flake (J. Johnson)
Sitting, Waiting, Wishing (J. Johnson)
I Am the Walrus (Beatles)
Late Night Traveling Friend *
Stand By Me (King) > Redemption Son (Marley)
On Alexander Street *
Glass Onion (Beatles)

Truth in Advertising

This is from If Advertsing were true, 5 Popular Products on the Panda page.

ELF's The Manual

Patrick Wilson of Weezer spoke about ELF's The Manual, the cultish irreverant British guide to getting a #1 hit in a week. As this sells for over $150 for a rare print copy, I thought I'd post a copy of the PDF version here. This is also a pretty good episode of Mac Break Weekly (#82 - The Double Album) if you've got the time, with a lot of banter centered on the dilemmas of modern music distribution.

Using a Wii controller with Max/MSP

At the SEAMUS 2008 conference in Salt Lake City, Jeff Stolet of the University of Oregon did a fun piece using 2 Wii controllers to control a Max/MSP patch which in turn processed live video and sound. Here's a useful Max object developed by Masayuki Akamatsu which uses the Bluetooth API to let you use a Wii remote with Max/MSP 4.6.

Alta's Serene Scenery

Here's a picture I took while skiing at Alta on Thursday. Several times I had to stop for views like this while resting my lungs from the adjustment to being 10000 feet up.

Polygamy Porter

Brewpubs are apparently thriving in Salt Lake City - how could I resist Polygamy Porter whose slogan is "why have just one?".

SEAMUS 2008 in Salt Lake City

Tomorrow I'm off to Salt Lake City for the 2008 SEAMUS conference, a conference of electroacoustic music and video. Andrea and I are showing the video work I Open The Window which we made during our stay in Gothenburg, Sweden last Spring — it was commissioned by Gothenburg University as a site-specific work based on the Jonsered Manor house, an Italian style manor used as a conference center by the University. I hope to sneak in a few hours of skiing at Alta, which I still fondly remember from a ski trip to Utah 10 years ago.

Monday's Almost Famous Pick: Reed KD

Give Reed KD's MySpace page or web site a visit to hear songs such as 'Empty Bottles' which features haunting harmonies reminiscent of the way Elliott Smith used to overdub his own distinctive and evocative harmonies over guitar picking patterns and a gentle folky mix of assorted instruments.

CD Baby Interview with David Harrington

Every time I listen to David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet, I feel totally musically, spiritually and philosophically inspired about the art of music. More than anything, his focus on collaboration and the deep inner relation to music that trancends categorical boundaries is so refreshing in this era of self-oriented musical marketing and reputation building. The whole really is greater than the sum of it's parts.

I've been fortunate enough to see Kronos a few times, most recently by chance in a small hall in Gothenburg, Sweden where we lived last Spring and prior to that when they did a weeklong residency at the Krannert Center for the Arts in Urbana, Illinois.

A few CDs are still worth buying

I'm sure I'm not alone in barely being able to remember the last time I bought a physical CD. The hours I used to spend with headphones on in Tower Records' listening posts have long since devolved into grazing and browsing via iTunes and Amazon. Once you change browsing paradigms and get used to song-based picking and choosing, it is indeed hard to go back to purchasing a full CD. But when I find the occasional CD that I feel I must have, I do feel a certain warm glow as I hold the shiny disc and ruminate on it's worthiness. This month, I feel that honor goes to Punch by the Punch Brothers, the brainchild of Mando Phenom and ex-Nickel-Creeker Chris Thile (rhymes with Feely). Definitely a case where the album (we Gen X's love to say this about CDs, I know) trumps having individual songs.

In no particular order, some of my other recent album worthy picks:

Radiohead's In Rainbows
Wilco's Sky Blue Sky
Grizzly Bear's Yellow House
Panda Bear's Person Pitch
Levon's Helm's Dirt Farmer
Ryan Adams' Easy Tiger
John Mayer's The Village Sessions EP
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' Raising Sand

Feel free to send in your own lists from the last 12 months or so!

Tuesday Podcast Pick

I am a sucker for podcasts, though occasionally overwhelmed by the sheer number I collect. Just one more thing to feel good about throwing away every now and then. That said, my tuesday podcast pick is Naxos classical spotlight, which includes 20 minute segments featuring interviews with modern composers and performing ensembles. Recently I've listened to interviews with composers James Hartway, Elliott Carter, Kenneth Fuchs, and Nigel Clarke.

Nearby Glacial Bouldering

Over the weekend, Andrea discovered the existence of Ledyard's Glacial Park via Brendan Henrahan's excellent geotrip blog. Amazingly close and impressive in the pre-foliage Spring, the girls had a lot of fun taking the path that leads up and over the boulders. Someone must have had a lot of fun with all that blue paint...

DIY Leslie Speaker

I'm definitely going to try and build a homemade leslie speaker - plug-ins will only get you so far!

Memories

For some reason, Andrea has been buying these cans of vienna sausages lately. Talk about the mnemonic power of smell - one whiff and I'm four years old, sitting in the kitchen of our old apartment in Stony Creek above Betts' Marine. I can see the color of the walls quite vividly.

Honoring Gary Gygax

I was sad to read this week of the passing away of D & D founder Gary Gygax. I received the basic D & D set when I was about 10 and, during my middle school years, was an avid gamer. I still have all my original copies of the Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, and DM Guide - all of which I bought as they were initially released. I stopped playing in high school but I still occasionally venture into gaming stores (we have one nearby) where the site of the dice, miniature figures, Dragon magazine, and Avalon Hill box games (of which I also had several) fills me with a warm nostalgic glow. I glance at the notes on the board of people looking for games and think briefly about how enjoyable the pre-online notion of RPG was. Once I picked up a copy of Tom Wham's Snit's Revenge, to replace the Dragon magazine copy I used to have.

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Lead Sheet Thursday

Thursday is the day I pick songs for my band (28 Strings) to play during our weekly rehearsal. If we can figure out how to put a gentle drum beat around it, I'd like to try the Jayhawks' song 'All the Right Reasons' from their Rainy Day Music album and maybe the song 'Blue' (from Tomorrow the Green Grass) but also well covered on the Thorns' eponymous CD. Speaking of the 'Hawks, frontman Gary Louris' new CD, Vagabonds is pretty nice — I definitely recommend checking it out if you're a fan. There's also a Terry Gross fresh air interview with Louris lurking around on iTunes.

I just remixed Suspended in Alarm for the gazillionth time, trying to give the opening some bunch - I added a very subtle harp flourish in the beginning. I'm quite happy with the drum sound on this track, I'll have to document that one and use it elsewhere.