Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

STOP! You’ll poke your eye out!
Please thanks,
Sincerely, Richard James Seymour
Look out, you might lose your id card too, err… what’s that there for again?

Riff on that peoples.

And you get seven years bad luck. A lot a kids learned that that I know.

I knew this global joke had a punchline. Thanks to near dr. CZ for this one. Sheer entertainment.

MIDI_Scrapyard_Challenge_Workshop.JPG

Originally uploaded by mark allen.

I have been so “all talk” lately that I’m beginning to tire out, or perhaps it was the other reasoning around. Here’s to what to some degree started all of this out of the box thinking. 3 wise folks who decided to share some of their riches (which were really just trash) with ~10-15 people who thought it would be neat to try something new. The photo here sums up the event better than words. Ask questions.

Thanks to Mark for uploading such a nice shot on flickr. A sight (I mean site!!) somewhat dedicated to the original thought that, from enough angles, someone’s bound to catch what’s really goin’ on.

I still haven’t uploaded my shots, waiting… biding my time… till I well hell, I’ll put ‘em up now.

Please take a moment to read the definition of the word rote. It exists as both a beautiful word and a great way to learn.

Here lies an elegantly written reasoning behind when and where to use rote learning. Well not that elegantly written, in that it seems to never argue for a case where one could actually use the power of rote learning for one’s own personal benefit. Like learning to hammer nails, shoot staples, etc. etc. it looks easy, because it is… but it isn’t when you first try now is it.

Props to Jan for making me think about this as we fixed the acoustical damping properties at Jan’s very scientifically (German/Spanish/American (thx Josh, I barely know yah)) engineered recording studio. Very important to take the Fourier transform of the entire sound spectrum of the drum kit (including cymbals) into account when you start damping, so make sure you work out the math first. Please, we don’t want anyone out there getting seriously hurt making or recording music. Trust us we’re scientists.

I want to thank Interweb pioneer (who hosts on revver, who I think I will host with soon too… met someone that works there, and they seem good, youtube is nice too (abc vs cbs vs nbc all over again?)) ze frank for some of the chutzpah required to put my ugly mug online. And Roboppy for always being pretty cool to peeps online included jaded ones like me and reintroducing me to ze’s site.

Anyway, here goes nothing. Thanks too to apple for making it too easy to do such fun stuff (my own energy was added somewhere in the mix…) but the choppers are already circling the city in that way they do, so that’s my cue to sleeeep!

Some people have found the stream of consciousness nature of the following too abrupt and hard to follow. Here it is abridged into two sentences: “I believe testing children for drugs in high school is akin to labelling them for their genetics or heredity and then systematically picking them out of the system like bad apples. As one of these bad apples who made it through, I think that the proposed budget works against helping our children not get into trouble with drugs.” Our federal government would like to budget more money to test students for drug use with no real roadmap for what to do if they test positive, when I believe they should budget more money for helping children who’ve tried drugs try to find out why they did and help them find positive ways to spend their time instead.

The whole rigamarole was inspired by a simple email alerting me to the plan. And I just sort of went off on it. The proposed plan is outlined plainly here.

Read on for the messy version which covers more on why I feel this way.

(more…)

the Zidane a stylish cultural phenomenon. Please play nice kids. :) Remember you’ll be telling your offspring you you did the Zidane. Songs will be written “Let’s Zidane again, like we did last summer” “Who let the Zidane’s out?” All of this with utmost respect to the man, the player, and most importantly someone who doesn’t let you badmouth his mom.

State of the blog. I have some sweet posts on the back burner. A meta review of why the band the studiofix is so good (and guess what, it’s not because they’re a bunch of beautiful young ladies, that’s just a side effect or something.) A full report on the scrapyard challenge I was lucky enough to participate in (w/ photos, or as NYC coolness maestro Trudy calls ‘em, woah-tos). Oh an interview with Trudat’s awesome friend Pei Pei (and her rockin’ partner Gio) who both kick it in a hip hop dance fashion. That should show up in a zine too.

Some sort of report on what the heck I’ve been actually doing at work. And maybe a brief materials science related post, since that’s really what I love. I mean I love making music and listening to music and riding bikes and blah blah, but materials science seriously (to me at least) undergirds just about all of that in fundamental ways. I hope everyone feels that way about what they like to study. Ooops what am I now, a fundamentalist? A materials science fundamentalist… eek!

Bottom line, more sharing, less secrets (except for the confidential stuff) and you know… more fun on the blog.

What is the occasion for this ambitious meta post? Well this blog has officially made a quarter (over it’s entire lifespan, mind you) from that little ad to the right (those ads don’t reflect the anything of this blog, but you know that) and with the help of nearlyfreespeech web hosts, this thing may become somewhat self-sustaining, which was always my plan. Sorry to the ad free blog movement, but magazines like tapeop have shown me that entirely (100%) ad supported mags can be even better than some idealistic hope for adless existence. Heck, sometimes a small business throws up a google ad and maybe it’s something someone actually wants?!

Or you know, I may not post again for 2 weeks… heheheh. Bogged down in some fresh thing.

Man, why is youtube filled with junk like this?

Actually that’s me jammin’ out a bit this morning. Check out some of the super lofi vids of people just jamming out in front of a videocamera. It’s like when I was a kid and just found MTV again (not that my Dad was all that into me watching it) First video I saw… Van Halen … JUMP!

Might as well, huh?