Category: Uncategorized

The future begins today, for only $4000 in parts. Part of the much larger Monorail Society web site which is worth investigating. [via Slashdot]

Gilliam’s the man!

“The guys who are shooting films now are technically brilliant. But there’s no content in their films.”

2012 posts several updates on the underwater site off the coast of Cuba.

“Manuel Iturralde, research director of Cuba’s Natural History Museum, has joined Canadian exploration company Advanced Digital Communications (ADC) in efforts to solve the mystery of the smooth, geometrically shaped, granite-like rocks. They are laid out in structures resembling pyramids, roads and other structures at more than 600 meters deep (2,000 feet) in a 20 km-square (7-3/4 mile-square) area.”

[via 2012]

JWZ nicely summarizes the maze of bureaucracy involved to webcast legally.

If you want to do something different than what I described above; for example, if you want to let users choose the songs to download, or you want to archive dj sets, or you want to allow the world at large to collaboratively dj by voting on what song to play next, or anything at all interactive that actually takes advantage of the power of the internet: well… you’re fucked. When you go into that world, you are out of the “compulsory license” territory, and must negotiate with all of the copyright holders individually, which is prohibitively complicated, since there are so many of them.

What’s going on here is that the music industry establishment are absolutely terrified of the internet, and are trying to prevent any kind of progress that might require them to evolve and change their business models to keep up with the times. They are pretty much trying to legislate the internet out of the way, and force things to continue to be done as if early-20th-century technology was still all we have to work with.

And after all is said and done, what happens to your fees? The media conglomerates take your money, keep most of it for themselves, and then divide the rest statistically based on the Billboard charts. That means that no matter what kind of obscure, underground music you played, 3/4ths of the extortion money you paid goes to whichever management company owns N’Sync; and the rest goes to Michael Jackson (since he owns The Beatles’ catalog.) All other artists (including the ones whose music you actually played) get nothing.

[via RRE]

Soviet pulp novels?

The daughter of a Volga fisherman becomes a sniper with a Red partisan detachment. She misses her 41st vicitim (a White officer), then winds up stranded with him on a desert island, where they fall in love. However, the White’s essentially selfish, bourgeois nature becomes apparent and she shoots him, fulfilling her mission and her class destiny. (Sorok-Pervii, 1924)

Rocket-airships, radio-controlled tanks, and Death Rays. Evil Americans try to destroy the socialist paradise of the future, but the Soviets counterattack and win. Remnant capitalists flee to an underground base near Antartica, planning to escape into outer space. Socialism on one planet! (Borba v Efire, 1928)

And this one too

Kinda like this Exploding Dog cartoon…

Folks… Regular updates might be off for awhile because I just tracked down a copy of David Cavanagh’s book on Creation Records which is the funniest, unbelievable, amazing tell-all music industry book I’ve read in recent memory. 200 pages in and I’m only just getting to the first Jesus And Mary Chain album.

Riddle me this Batman… Axel Heilberg Island in Canada is well above the Arctic Circle at 79^o N, uninhabited, and pretty much barren of everything. Everything that is except 45 million year old fossilized redwood trees known as “metasequoias”. The catch is that 45 million years ago when these big trees were alive, Axel Heilberg was still as close to the North Pole as it is today – therefore the metasequoia forest was in darkness for four months out of the year and subject to the sort of conditions completely opposed to what a prehistoric sequoia tree likes. However they figure this out out, the answer is going to be a doozy.

Jahren and co-author Sternberg chemically compared the fossil isotope levels with those found in water in contemporary precipitation patterns over great distances of forested lands in the Amazon. They were able to show that water traveling from near the equator almost due north across the continents to the vicinity of Axel Heilberg would have oxygen and hydrogen isotope signatures that matched those found in the fossils.

While it might seem mind-boggling to have the equator watering the north pole, Jahren notes that other major climatological differences at the time included the lack of a north polar ice cap.

[via 2012]

The current Aquarius Records episode (#13) at Neighborhood Films tells the infamous story of the Thomas Harvey con game.