Bookmarks from August 22nd through August 29th 2010
“Not to mention that the undialectical shelving of alt-classical “between” pop music and classical music misses, as I think its leading lights would agree, the point: One respect in which alt-classical music most definitely is contemporary music is that its creators insist on it. Corey Dargel could very easily bill himself as a songwriter, period, [...]
Bookmarks from Saturday June 19th-Friday June 26th
“Riches can be lost, fame can flee, but music — ephemeral as it is, just molecules of air being pushed about — stays with you. It really doesn’t get any better than this.”
link: Renewable Music: No greater pleasure
“You might have thought that with the chief of police and all those command officers present that the operation would have been run more smoothly. If that was indeed your expectation you are not a police officer, certainly not one with the LAPD. Police officers everywhere know, and LAPD officers might know best of all, that the degree of success in any tactical operation is in inverse proportion to the number of command officers present. Seldom has this proven more true than in downtown Los Angeles Thursday evening. I even saw, while running to one trouble spot with my colleagues, an assistant chief who was also running, but in the opposite direction. (It was just as well; he only would have been in the way.)”
link: Pajamas Media » What I Saw at the Lakers Riots
“In my second year I worked as his teaching assistant. CalArts had no grades, but we did have pass, high pass or fail. John’s system was if we went down the roster and could remember the person, we passed them. If we could remember the person and the work, it was a high pass. If we couldn’t remember them, we failed them, but if they came back and argued for another grade, they would pass. It was a brilliant system that could never work today.”
link: John Baldessari’s former students share memories – latimes.com
“I don’t want to be like Henry Moore,” he said, “just making big monuments for public spaces, like the one beside the Met on the piazza over there. Yet I’m currently involved in a piece I didn’t want to do, for a major American orchestra I have a long history with. I wanted to write a string quartet, but this orchestra is having its centenary and they really pleaded. Eventually I had to give in.”
“I have yet to eat at the Kogi truck or any of the “new” catering trucks. I will not dare turn my back on my beloved loncheras, so I haven’t had the opportunity to taste their food, a fusion of Asian and Mexican, enter The Red Hot Kitchen. I never thought that eating a tofu burrito would be so delicious. And the salsa ? Mathematical.”
link: LA Eastside » Red Hot Kitchen
“The main problem is that most of the places in 90042 that are good to watch the deportes, are not the places that are open this early morning. (Oh, the days when Mr. T’s Bowl opened at 6AM and the drinks were correctly priced.) That being said, there are a couple of good places to catch the games with people here.”
Highland Park World Cup Fever « 90042
“One particularly interesting suggestion is to have journals publish lists of rejected papers along with the accepted research. This would act as a sort of public punishment and might encourage scientists to submit their research to appropriate journals on the first try. Another method to decrease the science community’s focus on metrics would be to allow tenure candidates to submit just their top few papers for evaluation. One commentator notes that, unlike in most fields, science output is not directly proportional to effort. Instead of ranking scientists purely on their publication records, credit should be given for all sorts of activities that don’t necessarily come across in traditional metrics. Establishing publicly available datasets, serving on committees, and developing new experimental set-ups should all be taken into account in hiring and tenure decisions. More journals should follow the leads of PLoS ONE and The Journal of Negative Results and begin publishing negative or inconclusive findings.”
link:School Is Turned Around, but Cost Gives Pause – NYTimes.com
“Locke High represents both the opportunities and challenges of the Obama administration’s $3.5 billion effort, financed largely by the economic stimulus bill, to overhaul thousands of the nation’s failing schools.The school has become a mecca for reformers, partly because the Department of Education Web site hails it as an exemplary turnaround effort.But progress is coming at considerable cost: an estimated $15 million over the planned four-year turnaround, largely financed by private foundations. That is more than twice the $6 million in federal turnaround money that the Department of Education has set as a cap for any single school. Skeptics say the Locke experience may be too costly to replicate.”“When people hear we spent $15 million, they say, ‘You’re insane,’ ” said Marco Petruzzi, chief executive of Green Dot Public Schools, the nonprofit charter school group that has remade Locke. “But when you look closely, you see it’s not crazy.”
Quality, not quantity: ending science’s “academic prostitution”
“Then I read it and responded,” said Mrs. Holzer. “Although it had no plot line. That worried me a little. I see now it should have worried me more. Basically ‘Dude’ was everyman. Everyman who loses his innocence and fights to regain it. But ‘Dude’ was also Gerry Ragni’s own life. His memories. Temptations. His fears. His struggle to create. He’s one of 10 children from a poor Italian family in Pittsburgh, you know. When he was 5 years old, he began painting crazy beautiful pictures all over the walls of his family’s house and his parents couldn’t stop him. Even then he believed he was a genius. That belief has made him tireless.“
“The Dude” New York Times Review 10-22-72
Bookmarks for October 12th through October 15th [del.icio.us]
![Bookmarks for October 12th through October 15th [del.icio.us]](http://www.paulbailey.us/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Alpha-Sumo11-150x150.jpg)
Bookmarks from October 12th through October 15th:[del.icio.us]
- Views: Professors Should Embrace Wikipedia – Inside Higher Ed -
“I propose that all academics with research specialties, no matter how arcane (and nothing is too obscure for Wikipedia), enroll as identifiable editors of Wikipedia. We then watch over a few wikipages of our choosing, adding to them when appropriate, stepping in to resolve disputes when we know something useful. We can add new articles on topics which should be covered, and argue that others should be removed or combined. This is not to displace anonymous editors, many of whom possess vast amounts of valuable information and innovative ideas, but to add our authority and hard-won knowledge to this growing universal library”
- Terminal Degree: Is he kidding? -
“My previous employer just blogged about the need for a “health care solution that will enable a healthier place for all of God’s children.” Longtime readers of this blog will get the irony: While I was an adjunct there, I couldn’t get health care through my employer. Maybe that sentence should read “all God’s full-time, tenure-track children.”
- Betty Draper Affair Advice: Not That You Asked | Unsolicited Advice -
“Betty. Betty, Betty, Betty. I’m not going to recap your various travails here. I’ll leave that to the experts. But I can give you a few concrete pieces of advice (or plot developments, or whatever) that might exponentially increase your happiness. Ready?”
- The music of Los Angeles on CitySounds.fm -
“DavidDavid Weekend fun: Citysounds 2.0 “Exactly one month ago, we introduced you to Citysounds.fm, a really cool mashup created by Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud during the London Music Hack Day. Citysounds is built on top of the SoundCloud API and makes it easy to browse through SoundCloud tracks from a specific city around the world. Today, Henrik and David inform us about a big update they just launched and let me tell you that it’s pretty exciting. They’ve added a great set of features and we think that the current look & feel is a big improvement. So what’s new? Show more tracks from one city: when selecting a city on the frontpage, you’ll be able to click through to the city overview page where it will show you more tracks from that city:”
- SoundGrid @ mifki -
“SoundGrid aims to be the most advanced matrix sequencer for iPhone / iPod Touch to create stunning audio-visual performances in a moment and wherever you are. It was inspired by famous Yamaha Tenori-On and popular ToneMatrix webapp by André Michelle. Even if you never composed music you will find SoundGrid simple and exciting to play with and will start creating brilliant compositions in minutes with just the tips of your fingers. Then easily share them with other users and in turn browse, download and rate their creations. Or you can record composition to audio file, upload it directly to SoundCloud or export via email. You can even create your own unique ringtones!”
- 10/GUI on Vimeo -
Here it is: my crazy summer project to reinvent desktop human-computer interaction. This video examines the benefits and limitations inherent in current mouse-based and window-oriented interfaces, the problems facing other potential solutions, and visualizes my proposal for a completely new way of interacting with desktop computers.
- TuneGlue° | Relationship Explorer -
very interesting music mapping site based on band in last.fm
- Essay – The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate – NYTimes.com -
“Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather”
- Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » The Spotify Guys
“Spotify employs P2P software, that’s why it’s so damn good. It takes 2-5 seconds to ramp up each and every song, which has reduced bit rate during that window, but usually that’s a relatively dead window and the listener isn’t paying close attention anyway. Yes, there are tricks. Only seventy five percent of the song is downloaded, an algorithm provides the remaining twenty five percent. This is how they all do it, it’s de rigueur. And the files don’t only come from Spotify’s servers, bits and pieces come from other users with the software installed on their computers. Net effect? It feels like you own the track. Usability is equal to iTunes. You can fast forward, rewind, there’s no lag time. Well, that’s a bit different. You see then Spotify depends on the network. Which is why they’ve limited sign-ups in the nations they’ve already launched in. They want the streaming experience to be perfect on your mobile device, after all, you’re depending on it…”
- Acclaimed composer Terry Riley celebrated at Bard — Page 2 — Times Union – Albany NY:3351: -
“Most composers notate a piece to perfection — hoping for a masterpiece, perhaps — and then move on. But Riley is a dabbler. “I’ll present a piece before it’s finished, then it will be different at the next performance,” he says. “Then after 10 years it will take a new shape that I’m happy with and maybe change again after 20 years. It’s because I improvise so much.” …his roots in jazz and Indian ragas should both come through on Saturday. To him, the term improvisation seldom means starting from nothing and just seeing what happen “They’re improvisations but built on existing structures, maybe not chord progressions (as with jazz), but modes and rhythmic cycles and looplike patterns,” Riley explains. “We’ll have a little rehearsal the day before (at Bard), but also a bit of flying by the seat of the pants. I like that and I think these players do, too.”
- THE RESULTS ARE IN (Brown List 2009) -
“Welcome to the official site of the 2009 BROWN LIST, brought to you by the Hollywood Temp Diaries. As you’ve gleaned from my postings and your own experiences, there are a lot of people in Hollywood who are a real pain in the ass. Oddly enough, there are some decent people in this town too (they probably won’t make it too far, but that’s their problem). Anyhoo, I’ve compiled a list of people’s MOST-LIKED and LEAST-LIKED entertainment industry executives in something I’m calling the BROWN LIST. Click on the .pdf below and enjoy the read. Thanks to everyone for participating.”
- Cloud Eye Control joins the traditional and futuristic — latimes.com -
“On the fifth floor of the Los Angeles Theater Center in downtown L.A., the members of Cloud Eye Control are trying to create poetry out of collaborative technology. On one end of the large studio, makeshift tables hold laptops and electronic equipment, with a cluster of musical instruments nearby. The middle of the room is dominated by two free-standing screens… It’s only days away from the debut of the full-length version of “Under Polaris” at REDCAT, and there still are snags to work out, transitions to be smoothed. This performance combines live action, recorded animation, multiple projectors, mobile props, and a five-piece live band, so there’s still much to do. And, in the spirit of what Chi-wang Yang, the director of the group, calls do-it-yourself aesthetics, they somehow pull it all together.”
Bookmarks for 2009-05-03 [del.icio.us]
These are my links for May 3rd: Mixed Messages – “ The revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of chocolate. May their memory live on in your mouth!” Description of an ice cream flavor called Cherry Guevara, named after cult rebel Che Guevara. reblog: David Ocker, Quoted [...]
