In music school, I learned to “see” music in a different way, but nothing like this. (Via my classmate Caroline, though the link isn’t on her site, not yet anyway…)
Tag: Science & Technology
TechHopeless
Okay, so this is a bit dweeby, for different reasons depending on who is thinking about it, but anyway… I was fiddling with this super-phone that Lime gave me, the one with the camera, and I noticed that it has this function to connect to a PC via IrDA. No cable was included for such a function, nor was software included, but since it’s second hand, that may not be surprising. I’m wondering how worthwhile it would be for me to go dig and find out. I know that Nokia phones are very user-modifiable — ringtones all over the net …
Tagging air travellers
Here’s another little snippet, this time from Telegraph Expat, on how privacy is being chopped off and fed to the big terror-eating monster. You know, there’s a wager being bet on right now, and it’s this: that the biggest threat to freedom today isn’t, oh, the governments who are legislating immense powers for themselves, but some guys far away who hide in caves when the American military comes half-heartedly looking for them. What you think about that wager has everything to do with what you think is the more immediate threat, but that’s unfortunate. After all, if you think of …
하라테크
Well, I got a chair from these guys and it turned out to be a great investment. You can glomp around on their website and see the way it works, but basically, it adjusts to your pelvis, and lets your pelvic bones adjust so that there’s less pressure on the area. It’s not only turned out to be good for the lower body, but also for the back… my posture’s a little better, and my back is loosening up, despite my still spending somewhat too much time in the chair. Worth it, if you’re spending a lot of time writing. …
Write about what scares you…
I just replied to an email from a classmate from this past summer. Where he lives, the ecology is having a hell of a shock, it’s just drying up — the main river system in his country is drying up — and people still go out and hose down their driveways and farmers are irrigating, and no more rains this year, and forest fires like mad. And my scattered advice was, as it turned out, to write about it. I don’t know if I believe, not just how much, but also whether I believe it at all, this idea that …
Man Can I Relate…
Sometimes I want to do this in class, too, when kids think that answering a phone and chatting is more important than a lecture, or that it’s okay to text-message during exams, and so on. Not that I would do this to a student’s phone, but I sure want to, sometimes. (Usually, instead, I ask, “Is this a life-and-death emergency?” when the phone rings, or, with repeat offenders, I take the phone and speak into it in English, or, once, in somewhat-simple but all-the-same-comprehensible Korean words, I informed the person’s girlfriend that he was in class and unavailable to talk. …
whitney music box
The very cool Shawn Scarber emailed a bunch of us something too good to miss: whitney music box takes me back to the days when I studied electronic music. We had a very early synthesizer in the Electronic Music Studio, a room that had gone unmarked for years at the University of Saskatchewan. I swear, the synthesizer looked like something out of Star Trek — you controlled it with cables and pins stuck into various appropriate-sized sockets all over the front. I did nearly nothing with it, though some of the guys in years following mine spent hours in there …
Animal Art
I’m currently reading Jared Diamond’s book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal and I’m at the bit where he’s trying to find roots for human arts in animal art, which got me curious enough to look around online: Here’s a gallery of art by Koko and Michael, two apes. Mulatta records has put out an album of recordings of a Thai Elephant Orchestra, including samples. This essay-page is the only place online that I could find where any of the line-drawings of Siri the elephant were on display. There’s a book on her art out …
Viridian links
Worthwhile links from the most recent Viridian Note: rubber sidewalks, making fuel from CO2, and evidence of the acceleration of the melting of the ice on Greenland. I worry that no matter what, everything is indeed falling apart. We humans are just stupid enough to keep pushing for cash until the world collapses, I sometime think.
Wiffiti…
Some crazy tech application going on here. Text messages from your phone to screen displays in a bunch of places across the States. Can’t message from Korea, though. Digitally, and telephonically, still somewhat of a Hermit Kingdom. I remember while in India seeing my friend Ritu getting txt messages on her phone from senders abroad, and being quite envious. (Via MissIzzy)