The THAT Chronicles

07:42 pm - But I Didn't Eat the Mousse

01:25 pm - Who Killed Copehnagen?

An interesting article in the Guardian. Someone who was there for the final deliberations argues persuasively that China monkeywrenched the process.

How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room

12:49 pm - I Know What You're Thinking...

Speaking of science fiction, those mind-reading machines are coming right up. How about a machine that can tell—with 80% accuracy—which one of 1000 pictures you're looking at? Or one that can tell what decision you're going to make before you yourself are conscious of it?

When I was a kid, I used to imagine a machine that could record your dreams. Researchers now say that's probably possible. That may seem a long way off, but recall that before they cloned sheep, they cloned single cells. They're already talking about the mechanics of reconstructing a static visual image in your brain by reading the firing patterns of your neurons. That's a few years off and moving images are even more logistically daunting, but I have no doubt they'll work it out. That kind of work is what Thomas Kuhn called paradigm articulation, something scientists do fiendishly well.

Disturbingly, the Berkeley lab where these experiments take place is notoriously cruel to animals. I don't think all animal experiments are necessarily cruel, but I have zero tolerance for experiments that are essentially torture. If we can't figure it out without torturing animals, then we don't need to know it yet. We can wait until we find another way to learn it.

It's funny what science fiction gets right and what it gets wrong. There are always flying cars and other literal-minded extrapolations of current technology: the robot maid, making your toast. Those seemed like modest and reasonable predictions. But it turns out the guys like Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl, whose mind-reading machines and immersive artificial realities seemed like paranoid fantasies, were far more prescient.

The truth is probably that most existing technologies have been articulated pretty close to their functional limits. You can tell by ballparking the energy required. (If some new energy source comes along, all bets are off.) I doubt we'll see personal transport devices make a quantum leap. Instead, it's the fundamentally new technologies—like a worldwide network of linked computers—that change the texture of our experience. We don't need to waste huge amounts of energy zipping around the world when we can call up increasingly realistic representations of everything in the world—and increasingly of things that don't even exist—almost instantaneously. Our attention spans may soon be too short to waste time actually going anywhere physically. We may also find that we prefer these increasingly immersive constructed experiences.

But that's okay, because the machines will be able to determine what we want to experience before we ourselves are consciously aware of it. And they'll supply us with it. "Amazon recommends..." is, to say the least, only the beginning.

11:09 pm - Dimension X Minus One

Now here is a very cool thing. Over at the internet archive they've got every episode of the 1950's science fiction radio shows X Minus One and Dimension X.

All free. I just click and drag to my $20 mp3 player and boom, there you go, hours and hours of classic science fiction radio drama. How amazing is that? Some of it is terribly dated and rather dull, but some of it is mind-blowingly good. Robert Heinlein fills both bills: Universe is phenomenal, whereas The Roads Must Roll is dumb macho horseshit.

Boy, I love me some internets.

10:33 pm - Meeting Notes, Binocular Lung Things & My Martian Childhood

Here we see a rare instance of me drawing the same thing more than once. This guy starts out looking fairly normal for a guy with a dog nose:

( More... )

09:52 pm - Meeting Notes

09:12 pm - Lady Gaga Reconsidered

Well, I have to retract my post saying Lady Gaga is not annoying. Believe it or not, I had never seen any of her videos. I just listened to a couple of tracks on last.fm and saw one clip of her playing the piano and based on that, I thought she was alright.

Tonight I watched some of the videos, which are a lot like the previews for the porn channel on a hotel tv. I now see why people find her annoying.

I still say she has some musical talent. She writes her own material and can sit down at a piano and sell a song. Can you imagine Madonna or Britney doing this?

11:27 pm - That's Right, I Said "China"

I have been talking to my friend Alex and it looks like I'll be going to China next summer. He's been living there since the summer of 2006. He teaches English at a small college.

At first, he wanted to take me to the Great Wall, to Lhasa, to see the terracota warriors & all that, but I convinced him that I really don't care about seeing the sights. Having a friend who lives there and speaks the language is far more compelling to me than any itinerary; I just want to hang out while he does whatever he would have been doing anyway.

He's been making some inroads as a folksinger. He recently rented an apartment in a building attached to a theater. In the old days—say, 20 years ago—it would have been unthinkable for a foreigner to weasel his way into what was once a state-run arts housing complex. But now, what was once a tightly controlled arrangement is a much more fluid situation. This type of social transformation is far more interesting to me than any archeological site, especially as it directly affects a friend of mine.

I'll be buying my tickets in January.

12:49 am - Venturing Out Into the Darkness & Cold

I stayed in today until 8:00 p.m., when I got a text from Ben, who was down at Monk's, my coffee house hangout. When it gets this cold, ice forms srange patterns on glass:




( A couple more pictures from a cold night out... )

12:05 pm - Gosh, It's Nice Out

Current Weather
Dubuque, IA -3º F / -19º C Fair Wind: W 20 MPH Wind Chill: -26º F Humidity: 0% National Weather Service Dec 10, 2009 9:53 AM

08:17 pm - Snow Report

Well, we got the promised snow last night. Here's what I saw this morning when I shook the sleep off and stepped out into my driveway:



( More fascinating snow-blowing details right this way... )

10:16 pm - Oh, Boy. I Mean, Gee. I Mean, uhm... er...

07:28 pm - Pop Bunnifesto

A friend of mine who makes pop music sent me some tracks to listen to. He wanted me to respond in working mode. What would I do if they were my tracks? It got me thinking a bit about pop music.

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Pop music has a lot of repetition but usually it's a theme repeated in quickly shifting arrangements. Everybody is doing the quick scan these days. If you repeat the same thing more than a couple of times without festooning it with quickly-shifting, colorful, auditory-bunting, most listeners will go, "got it, that's what that does" and click onto the next thing. In other words, the compositional elements--rhythms, melodies, words--repeat a lot but the textures, sounds, voicings and production tricks change every few seconds.

Think of a TV commercial for a product, say a bottle of detergent. The plastic bottle will probably appear against a constantly changing background, pulsing and colorful. That plastic bottle with the recognizable logo is the focal point. In a song, that would be the vocal or melodic hook. The constantly moving background serves to keep the viewer's interest while forcing him or her to anchor around the constant element. The Ever-ready bunny matches through a constantly shifting landscape. If the bunny marched through a repeating landscape, people would quickly stop watching.

And we all want people to watch our bunnies.

09:34 pm - Song of the Week: Drive-in Saturday

From the Dept. of just-for-the-hell-of-it, this month's Song of the Week is an old Bowie favorite: Drive-in Saturday (128 kbps, 3.4 MB). Just me and my guitar. If you're interested in such things, you should probably download it now because I'm sure in a day or two I'll groan and ask myself, "Why did I post that?"

10:50 pm - Monthly Song of the Week

This month's Song of the Week is something new, for a change.  I just finished this version of Anhedonia (3.6 MB, 160 kbps).  I think I'll put it on the Clydes album, whenever that gets released.

Laundry was all I got done besides music this weekend. I was holed up like a mole in my burrow with my headphones and microphones.  Since I gave up on playing the drums myself, I've been getting a lot done.  I know several drummers in Dubuque, so when I get moved in, I'll start having them over to the house.  I'm fairly passable with hand percussion, but I just have to face the fact that I'm a long way from being the kind of drummer I would work with.  And that's... okay.  It'll be great to get some different input.

I'm moving this (Halloween) weekend.  Exciting but ugh.  Renting a U-Haul, finding someone to drive my car while I drive my work car... all those trips up and down the stairs.  Well, it'll be worth it in the end.

12:08 pm - Quality Control Report From Philadelphia... Ewwww... Rotten

07:08 pm - Song of the Week: Money in the Bag

Well, I'm not very good at doing things by deadlines, so the Song of the Week is becoming a bit more like the Song of Whenever I Feel Like It, but here's the latest: Money In the Bag, (11.2 MB, 320 kbps)  It's by Hop, my old band from Austin in the early 90's.  Drums: Greg Thibeaux.  Bass: Rich Wooson.  Vocals and goofy guitar: me.

07:08 pm - Surrogates (2009)

I saw Surrogates today.  I read a bad review and wasn't expecting much, but the premise intrigued me.  I love anything with consensual unreality: eXistenZ is one of my all-time favorites.  I also liked Strange Days.

I was more than pleasantly surprised.  I had no trouble suspending disbelief.  The story is worthy of Philip K. Dick.  Everyone is sitting at home in a little pod, living remotely through a robotic surrogate.  They're all perfect-looking, of course, so the world looks like it's populated by models.  Next to them, real people look pasty and grubby, especially since they spend all their time slumped in chairs in houseclothes.

There are a lot of other things they could have done with the premise, but I think they made the right choice in zeroing in on the emotional and psychological effects: addiction and a degradation of relationship.  It feels like they've tapped into something fundamental about they way we live now.

There's a great scene where Bruce Willis, the cop, ventures out into the street in his own body for the first time in years.  He's the only real person in the street.  His partner has never seen him before.  He's freaked out by the raw nature of the sensations that overwhelm him.  He's just emerged from the hospital and his partner says, "I can't believe they didn't give you something for the anxiety."

There are robot-free zones called reservations where followers of a dreadlocked prophet live in squalor.  Another great scene is when Willis has to go in there--no robots allowed--and he sees some kids playing ball.  They're dirty and real-looking and they aren't all that great at throwing and catching.

Over the credits there was a rock song by a band I've never heard before: Breaking Benjamin.  As a studio nerd, I noticed production trends that most people don't.  The time was obviously midi-mapped and the vocal was very subtly auto-tuned.  Musicians are doing a lot of virtual polishing, creating aural surrogates of themselves that are more perfect but less human.  Listen to a Tom Waits song and hear how radical it sounds now.  He uses instruments that aren't perfectly in tune and the rhythms are full of the tiny drags and rushes that happen when people have a good time beating on trash can lids and wooden tables.  Because of my interest in music, I'm keenly aware of the trend toward synthetic perfection in that area.  In my opinion, it's sucking the life out it.

Driving home, I mused on how eerily familiar the idea of robotic surrogacy felt.  The obvious one is online, but our cars are surrogates, shell identities, maybe even more than our facebook personae.

Best Hollywood science fiction film I've seen in years.  It's disquieting.  I expect some people will have a negative reaction to it because it makes them uncomfortable.  I liked it better than District 9, more intelligent and thought-provoking, less hamfisted.

06:43 pm - Right on the Money

09:22 pm - Song of the Week: Mr. Mitochondrion

This week's Song of the Week: Mr Mitochondrion,   I recorded this on 4-track cassette in 2003, back when I was just learning to play the drums.  I'm going to redo it for the album but I kinda like the rawness of this demo version.