Quartz City

DroneOn has been talking about field recording techniques lately which led to the following links (which I’m putting into The Record here)

Quiet American

Hours and hours of field recordings of everyday life in Vietnam: Folks walking down the street, children leaving school, ambient restaurant noise, etc. Good info on recording tips, gear, and a detailed list of other resources.

Fallt Publishing - Invisible Cities

An art installation that brings together 20 different recordings from 20 different cities.

Phonography.org

Pretty much home base for the avid field recorder. Lots of interesting sounds from all over here.

Technorati is a new ‘blog/Google/Googlejuice/ad infinitum meta-indexer and statistics gatherer. Kinda cool really and I discovered that Mike James was linking to me (hello!).

Long, thoughtful analysis of the new Flaming Lips album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Specifically, who wins the battle?

In 1968, Doug Engelbart at SRI demoed NLS, a computer system the research group had been working on for six years. Engelbart shows off a mouse, hyperlinking, network collaboration, file cut/copy/paste - pretty much everything that we think of as the fundamentals of computer interfacing a full fifteen years before they became commercial. Check out the video of the 1968 demonstration.

Hey, I thought they were supposed to be denying this sort of stuff?

Yesterday at approximately 4 p.m. (EST) North American Aerospace Defense Command received unverified reports of what appeared to be a contrail of unknown origin in the vicinity of the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Initially, it was reported to be heading northwestward toward the United States. Commercial airline pilots later reported the contrail over Florida and later over Indiana. Thereafter, no other sightings were reported.

NORAD scrambled fighter aircraft from several bases in an attempt to intercept and identify the source of the contrail. No visual or confirmed radar contact was made with the source of the contrail. NORAD continues to investigate these reports. NORAD is coordinating with the FAA to determine any further information on the nature of these reports.

Straight off the pages of a Syd Mead or Robert McCall art book, The Moon is the next mega-hotel/casino planned for Las Vegas. Instant 1970s-era retrofuture! Where’s my back issues of Omni Magazine? I am so there.

On the twelfth day of fascism
John Ashcroft gave to me
Twelve digital implants
Eleven years protesting
Ten less amendments
Nine internment camps
Eight surveillance cameras
Seven TIPsters tipping
Six snoops a-sniffing
Five Carnivores
Four airport friskings
Three wiretappings
Two detained Muslims
And a Department of Homeland Security

The new Get Your War On hits another home run.

Insert any and all bug movie cliches here. The photos of this thing are amazing…

A biology professor in northern British Columbia has spotted a clover field crawling with spiders. Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 acres across a field.

“When you see horror movies with spider web festooned from this place to that place and so on, it comes nowhere near approaching what occurred in this field,” Thair told CBC Radio’s As It Happens.

A typical barbwire fence on wood posts surrounded the field about six kilometres east of McBride in the Robson Valley. Thair said it looked like the whole area was covered with an opaque, white plastic grocery store bag.

So did like another one of the Seals open up or something?

Tons of thoughts about the Enoch Root character in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I figured there was something up with Root because of his name: Enoch, a Biblical character that gains some sort of transdimensional Enlightenment. And Root, which is the name of the superuser administrative All Powerful account on *nix systems.

Enoch Root, the shadowy deus-ex-machina/Ascended Master of Neal Stephenson’s brilliant Cryptonomicon is the subject of much debate. Root appears to die midway through the book, in a scene set during WWII, only to reappear in modern times. Inquiring minds want to know: did Stephenson make a boo-boo? Is there more than one Enoch Root? Is he immortal? Here is a great deal of speculation on the subject, from both informed sources and astute guessers:

Here’s my guess: Enoch Root is an alchemist who carries the philosopher’s stone around in a cigar box. He really did die in WWII but was re-vivified by the stone. Consider:

1. Enoch’s age is difficult to discern, and he does not seem to get older.
2. The contents of the cigar box seem to have healing powers.
3. When Detachment 2702 is in Italy, Enoch Root says that he can speak Italian but would sound like a “16th century alchemist” or something similar (don’t have the book in front of me). At first, I assumed that he learned scholarly Italian, but perhaps he was telling the literal truth.
4. The symbol on the cover of Cryptonomicon is one used by alchemists.

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