"In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.
Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane."
As always though, Ellis puts it more succinctly:
"Should all concerns be confirmed, it appears that we’re all going to die from the escape of monstrous planetary farts from beyond history."
I wasn’t sure whether to post this or not but people told me they wanted to see it, so here it is. When we went out to OR last July, I was the best man at Roscoe’s wedding. This is my speech.
In the absence of faith, what stands behind a currency based on faith?
Interesting Op-Ed from the NYT about the financial implications of the fact that the dollar moved off the gold standard ages ago and has never looked back. MattD and I were talking about this just last night (over Frito pie) and using the rhetoric of barstool philosophers to maintain that, as Speed Levitch has said, "this is outrageousness and it cannot last."
First, MDvto sent me this great Quincy theme tune…
Then, while hunting for that basketball vid from below, I checked the history of this browser and searched keyword "youtube." There were a bunch of interesting vids that never made it to the blog…here they are, random and youtubey. Individually they didn’t seem to warrant a post, but collectively, it’s some pretty good stuff…
So LeBron James challenges this trick shot maestro to a game of horse. This is actually a bad move on James’s part, I mean, horse uses a totally different set of skills than regular basketball, right? In fact, one could even argue that a pro player is *more* ill-equipped to play horse because he has spent so much time training his muscle memory to perform certain exact shots from exact positions. To try and make them perform more random ones? Tough stuff.
This brings up the whole phenomenon of trick shot youtube videos. have you seen these? Some guys are doing some amazing things. Things that they must have spent a bit of time practicing. And before youtube there wasn’t as much of an incentive, right? Like parkour or that 17 year time-lapse thing that’s going round the internets…as always, the biggest resource is time.
I went to this promo conference thing back in 2002 and went to a seminar on the power of the internet. At this time we were still delivering approval tapes on VHS (wha?), no one posted anything for review online, we still got physical DAT’s from sound studios (instead of posting aiff’s) — it was the dark ages. Anyway, in this seminar, there were 3 guys speaking, and the first two were so boring, going on and on about how our jobs in TV were going to be transformed, and we better be worried and stay on top of technology and so on (true, but boring). Snooze-fest.
The third guy spent his time just telling us what websites he thought were cool. This was kind of revelatory for me. It was so interesting to see what weird stuff was out there, and to have this attitude of surfing the net’s hidden corners, looking for the stuff that keeps the world weird. I don’t remember all the things he showed, but I remember this one that was so dark, odd and good, full of small animations that seemed like they were out of a dream.
Six years later, and they show up on metafilter. Sweet. Dutch cartoonist/animator Hans Hoogerbrugge. Really, you’ve got to click here and go to the website to get the full experience, ‘cuz the clicking and discovering is half the fun, but here’s a small mov of me clicking around on it just to give you an idea of what it is. The sounds, the visuals, the feeling of the thing — so dream-like.
His main website is pretty cool too, full of weird artworks and this great museum installation that animates the outside of a museum wall and has the character say whatever people text to it. Pretty great.
– saw a chimney sweep truck on my way to the subway — is that good luck like it used to be in Mary Poppins-era London?
– right after that I saw nuns, which I immediately took as another indicator of good luck, I’m not sure why
– reading this David Foster Wallace piece from Harper’s about proper usage of English and grammar I’m reminded of a time when a bunch of us in High School were trying to explain to someone what an ambiguous pronoun was…we came up with this scenario in which the dinosaurs somehow knew that a meteor was coming to impact earth so they scratched this graffiti that said "A meteor is going to destroy earth! We don’t like it! and that scientists would puzzle throughout the millennia as to whether by "it" the dinosaurs meant the meteor or the earth…we were drunk when we came up with this and just howled at the whole scenario…
– another bit from the DFW piece talks about how language usage follows the norms of a particular community…he makes this point with an analogy, explaining that even though it might make perfect sense for men to be able to wear skirts (cooler, more comfortable, less likely to cause sterility, etc.) in Western culture it would be looked on as some kind of statement. Then right as I’m about to go into my building at work I see a guy in a leather utility kilt! I mean, this is New York, so sure, but it’s the first kilt I’ve seen in the city…I gave him a broad smile, a thumbs up and said "I like your style."
– been toying with some samples and trying to get the whole thing to coalesce and it’s not really happening, but I thought you might get a kick out of hearing a mashup rough draft. Sometimes it’s taking me a million iterations to get something to the point where it’s working, so I had this thought that charting the evolution of the track might be fun…at this point there’s some good interaction between samples, but the flow of the track is a mess…
Sometimes I think if I got a Monome (shown below, played by Daedelus) I could totally rock it, sometimes I think it would be beyond me, sometimes I think it looks pretentious, sometimes I think it totally rocks it futureshock style.
I am kicking myself that I didn’t make it out to the Daedelus/Flying Lotus show at (le) poisson rouge two weeks ago…
Good NYT article on why we should even care about the LHC…
My favorite bits:
"For every known species of particle (electrons, quarks, neutrinos, etc.), supersymmetry implies the existence of a partner species (called, with physicists’ inimitable linguistic flair, selectrons, squarks, sneutrinos, etc.) that to date has never been observed."
"Many researchers suspect that dark matter is composed of sparticles."
"Should the Large Hadron Collider have the power necessary to reveal extra dimensions of space — to overturn our belief that length, width and height are all there is — that would rank as one of the greatest upheavals in our understanding of the universe."
My bartender robot design is coming along. It will now have a rueben’s tube along the top of his head. Also LK has given me some great advice on the drink dispensing. In addition, it has been strongly suggested that this robot should have a mustache, bowler hat and monocle.
Best name so far: DrunkDroid.
Meanwhile, searching for inspiration brought me this which has given me nightmares.
Saturday night Maxine and I went out to this new(ish) place in the Village called (le) poisson rouge to check out a performance of Steve Reich’s "Music For 18 Musicians". Reich was one of the founders of the minimalist school of music along with Phillip Glass, and their music sounds pretty similar. Except that I love MF18M much more than I love anything by Glass. Mike H gave me the album ages ago and it pretty much blew my mind. He went to a performance in New York years and years ago, and I remember thinking how cool it would be to see the piece performed live.
And it was. It was really really great. The musicians set up in this weird in-the-round way (you can sort of tell from the pic below) with xylophone players facing each other and pianists set up so sometimes two people can play the same piano, and clarinets, bass clarinets, vocalists, strings, sitting down. The sound system in poisson rouge was fantastic, and sometimes the sounds would be so eveloping…plus, to see how some of the sounds were made was very elucidating. Things that I had thought were electric guitars and feedback were actually clarinets and vocals. Whoa. Quite a performance.
Haven’t you been wondering what all those "Maxine interviewing" pictures have been about? No? Yes? Well, after a frenzied weekend of editing, we finally finished the 6 minute tease/pitch version of our proposal piece for the Musicwood doc we’re trying to get funded. The band spanking new and improved Hitman Productions website is now rocking the internets (thanks Dana!) and that gave us a good deadline to get focused and motivated to finish Musicwood. We think this piece came out pretty well, and should hopefully be able to assist us greatly in getting this baby funded.
Check it out and lemme know whatcha think… Oh, and feel free to invest if you’re so moved! Donations of any amount accepted!
Also please note that the Dave Matthews/Ray LaMontagne footage is borrowed…for the full doc we’re trying to line up a shoot with a well-known but cool acoustic guitar player type…any suggestions?
I saw this a while back and I’m not sure why I didn’t post it. It’s a run through of the fabled "Hardest Super Mario Ever", some mod of Super mArio Bros that is sadomasochistic and crazy tough. The video is 23 minutes long, but the dialogue of the guy trying to make it is so worthwhile…even those of us who haven’t played Mario in forever can dig the frustration and glorious profanity…
There is something about the way the internet is so full of mind-blowing information — music, film, animation, large hadron colliders, etc. — that when you come across across something really great, a part of your brain lights up that doesn’t lght up all that often. I remember my friend Dr. Mercury telling me about experiments he was doing with fMRI machines that would image the brain activity during activities. He was involved with a study on humor. They would tell the participant a joke and then observe what part of their brain showed activity, hoping to get a better understanding of both the brain and humor.
The joke was this:
What did the elephant say to the naked man?
How do you drink with that thing?!
But to me the really funny part of the experiment was that they had to do a control group — a group where the participants were still scanned, but no humor was taking place — so they could compare the two. The control group joke went like this:
What did the elephant say to the naked man?
Hey there, naked man!
I love that so much. If I had heard the control part I would’ve cracked up anyway.
The point being, that this following science experiment, The Ruebens Tube, tickles some part of my brain that doesn’t usually light up. And it feels good. The guy fills a PVC pipe with gas, pokes small holes in it and puts a speaker at one end of it. He then lights the gas and plays tones through the speaker — fire EQ display. Amazing.
NY Times says “If the new collider is a car, then what physicists did today was turn on an engine, that will now sit and warm up for a couple of months before anybody drives it anywhere. The first meaningful collisions, at an energy of 5 trillion electron volts, will not happen until late fall.”
