Wow. I found a really nice Iranian Classical Music station: Radio Darvish. Beautiful.
Dance, as though no one is watching,
Love, as though you've never been hurt before,
Sing, as though no one can hear you,
Work, as though you don't need the money,
Live, as though heaven is on earth.
--Rumi
Happy Arbor Day weekend! Go out and hug a tree. :)
Ahh.. My little "Elsewhere" indexer has been updated, and is now running smoothly. It was getting a bit confused when people did not format their links correctly. Also, the counts were getting thrown off when people had more than one link to something on their page (illegal double voting!). This is all fixed now. The next step is to get it to display the page titles instead of the URLs as links.
Work has been draining my creative energies lately, as I have a huge project that I've been working on. Thankfully, I'll be done with it very soon.
So, I haven't been doing much music lately. However, I did start a new song last night. I'm having a lot of fun with it. It's composed straight through, from beginning to end... No loops. It's tricky, beaty, fun.
In other news, I'm planning a trip to France for this July. My girlfriend is attending a summer painting program in Pont-Aven, and I'm going to meet her over there. I can't wait. My first trip to Europe.
Henry's Diary made me happy today. Little kids rock. (I recommend starting from the earliest entry.)
Rushkoff's comments on rejecting the relativism vs. absolutism dichotomy are on point. Word up.
Happy Earth Day everybody! Get outside and enjoy the natural world out of which we have grown, by which we are supported, and to which we shall return.
Calculate your ecological footprint. Mine was 10 acres. If everyone lived like me, we would need 2.3 earths. Hmmm...
Update: I've started a thread over at MetaFilter on the same subject.
This could come in very handy: Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies.
Just a friendly reminder that April 22-28th is TV turnoff week.
Douglas Rushkoff has a weblog. Recommended.
As you can see, there is a new section on the right hand side. This is my own little personal blogdex. It goes out and reads all of the websites listed in the spider list, counts the links (ignoring those in the ignore list), and puts the most popular links at the top. The little number to the left of each link tells you how many times that link appeared.
I am still slowly adding sites to the spider list and tweaking the ignore list, so hopefully the signal to noise ratio will improve over time. Let me know if you have any suggestions for the spider list. I'm looking for thoughtful, preferably link-heavy weblogs.
VW unveils 1 litre/100 km car. Wow. That's 62.1 miles / 0.264 gallons = ~235 miles/gallon!
UPDATE: This site has more information and better pictures.
I've been busy writing my own custom version of Blogdex. Instead of indexing as many weblogs as possible, it will only index the weblogs that I tell it to. So far it's coming up with some pretty good stuff, mostly of a political nature. I'll be releasing it to the public very soon.
The babies are growing!
We're experimenting with growing some of our own food this season. We live in an apartment so we're doing container gardening. We're growing tomatoes, spinach, beans, peppers, and squash. So far it's been very easy and inexpensive. I'll keep ya updated on how it works out.
This month's issue of Wired magazine has a couple articles about electronic music: Songs in the Key of F12, and Six Machines That Changed The Music World.
This fascinating article on artificial socities inspired me to see if I could resurrect a similar sort of program that I wrote back in high school (~1994). So, I dug up the code, found an open source C++ compiler, did a little debugging, and... here it is: al.exe (787k). (screenshot 1, screenshot 2)
I know, it's an exe, which can be scary, but I promise it is not a virus. It may, however, cause your computer to crash. Especially if you enter crazy values for some of the parameters. So, you may want to save your work in other programs before trying it out. :) Also, I've only tested it on my Windows 98 machine... so, it may not even work for you at all. But, try it out. Let me know (in the comments of this post) if it works, if it doesn't, if it crashes, etc..
Also, feel free to take a look at the source code in all of its 12th-grade-programming-skills glory. You're welcome to make modifications to it, add to it, fix things, make improvements, etc. Just be sure to keep me updated.
Although it should be harmless, I suppose I should say something to this effect: I take no responsibility for any damage caused by this program to your computer system or any of your files. Have fun!
www.maketradefair.org (Oxfam)
This is a complicated, but very important issue. I urge you to take a look around this site, read the stories. Or, if you're feeling ambitious, read the report.
On a related note, I highly recommend the movie Life and Debt, a documentary that explores the effect of "free" trade on the people of Jamaica.
Halle Berry, on James Bond set in Spain, has inflamed eye from blowing dust. Ok... You know... This is what I hate about the mainstream news. I have seen this at least three times today! Who cares!? I don't need this trivial crap invading my mental space. I got a few splinters in my hand last week. Why don't they announce that to the world? Blah!
Erm.. Sorry about that outburst. Had to vent.
The Fine Art of Sitting - Galen Cranz on the Perfect Chair
DB: You frequently mention cultural reform throughout your book. Near the end you have a section discussing how cultural change happens. How does the physical chair relate to cultural reform?GC: If I am asking people to change the way they sit, I am asking them to change a lot. Ultimately, I am saying we shouldn't sit in any one position for very long—that means moving. If I am asking people to move, I am asking them to change how we generally show respect for one another—by sitting still, looking at them and paying attention. It challenges authority, relationships in schools and in the workplace. I'm really asking for people to rethink the value of movement and health in relation to creativity, learning and productivity. I'm not just asking to change this one little object, [but] rather, a whole cultural set of rules for how we relate to each other when we are doing different kinds of activities like working, recreating, resting, learning…
DB: Which would be a cultural reform.
GC: Well, yeah. By culture, I mean the whole pattern of how we do things. I don't mean just fine art. We are going to have to value the physical way of being over authority; to say that the body is an authority, that physical welfare is a value. We are embodied entities for some kind of reason; somehow, to dwell in the bodies that we have is important to us spiritually. Our culture has valued the mind over the body, by and large, and people find it regretful that they have these bodies that they have to take care of. The body is not so base and so low, as certain parts of our culture would have it. So, yes, it is cultural change. It is asking to honor the body, make it central.
I may catch flak for this from my Techno-buddies, but, I'm sorry, Ani DiFranco rocks. I caught her solo acoustic show at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston on Friday. It was wonderful... musically and lyrically.
I especially liked the brand new stuff she played. She seems to be experimenting with unusual chord changes, playing with a touch of dissonance.
One of the highlights was her reading of this poem.
Did you know that the only part of a tree that is alive is the layer just underneath the bark? The rest of it is dead and gives the tree structural support. Neat.
Hah! Someone found my site by searching on Google for: "The road to hell is paved with butter" !?
FYI, for those of you who come directly to the weblog, the splash page has been updated. (If you are a modem user you may have to wait a few seconds before the music fades in.)
Are You Deciding On Purpose? - An interview with Richard Leider
For nearly 25 years, I've been doing interviews with senior citizens, asking them to look back over their lives and talk about what they've learned. I've conducted more than 1,000 interviews with people who were successful in their jobs, who retired from leading companies after distinguished careers. Almost without exception, when these older people look back, they say the same things-things that are instructive and useful for the rest of us as we make decisions going forward in our lives.First, they say that if they could live their lives over again, they would be more reflective. They got so caught up in the doing, they say, that they often lost sight of the meaning. Usually it took a crisis for them to look at their lives in perspective and try to reestablish the context. Looking back, they wish they had stopped at regular intervals to look at the big picture.
They also sounded a warning: Life picks up speed. The first half of your life is about getting prepared and getting established. Then time shifts gears. You hit the second half of your life, and everything moves faster. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and all of a sudden, you're 65 years old. Looking back, they say, you realize that time is the most precious currency in life. And as they got older, having time for reflection became even more important.
Second, if they could live their lives over again, they would take more risks. In relationships, they would have been more courageous. And in expressing their creative side, they would have taken more chances. I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, "Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside us." Many of these people felt that, despite of their successes, their music was still inside them. Almost all of them said that they felt most alive when they took risks. Just being busy from business made them numb. Aliveness came with learning, growing, stretching, exploring.
Third, if they could live their lives over again, they would understand what really gave them fulfillment. I call that the power of purpose: doing something that contributes to life, adding value to life beyond yourself. Purpose is always outside yourself, beyond your ego or your financial self-interest.
"Silence machine" zaps unwanted noise
You will soon be able to silence the deafening racket of a road drill or the thumping beat from a nightclub without blocking the sounds you want to hear, according to Selwyn Wright, an engineer at the University of Huddersfield in Yorkshire, UK.He has developed what he calls the Silence Machine. It works by analysing the stream of sound waves from a noise source, and generating sound that is exactly out of phase and neutralises the incoming sound waves.
Interesting thread over at Metafilter on being overwhelmed by the news, by everything that is going on in the world, by the feeling of helplessness.
Dispatches From Ramallah. This is upsetting. Out of control.
"Aren't you afraid to come out into the street when the Israelis said there's a curfew?" I ask.If the Israeli people want peace, this is not the way to do it. It's like trying to make muddy water clear by digging out the dirt with a big blunt stick. You may get a few chunks, but ultimately you are just making things worse."I'm not afraid of the Israeli soldiers, even if they have bullets and tanks. I have the strength of my will and if they shoot I don't care because I'll become a martyr," says one boy in reply.
Israel has been battered by a spate of suicide bombings
They jeer at a tank rumbling by in the distance. These are tough refugee kids - maybe future volunteers for suicide bombings.
And that is Israel's nightmare. That is what it is trying so hard to stamp out - but on this street, it is only fuelling defiance.
UPDATE: Mitsu's thoughts on the matter.
Reports from Two Americans in Palestine Under Seige
Last night the Israeli Military tried to kill me.I'm staying in the al azzeh refugee camp, in Bethlehem, along with about twenty other international civilians. We're here to act as human shields, because we've heard an Israeli invasion is imminent. It's 1:30pm right now, on Easter Sunday, and some are expecting the invasion within the next two hours.