Category: Uncategorized

Remember the Pioneer anomaly? This was the unexplained slow-down of Pioneer 10 (and Ulysses apparently) that was causing folks to conclude there was a trans-Neptunian planet or some sort of unknown electromagnetic effect that we didn’t understand. Turns out the answer is a little more ordinary – the slow down is caused by radiation of waste heat from the spacecraft’s power generators. [via 2012]

Business Week, of all places, has a clear-headed analysis of the dead-end that the music industry has driven itself into. [via Scripting News]

Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is the Mt. Everest of industrial noise records. Other records may be more violent, more atonal, maybe even more noisy, but nothing comes close to the power of MMM’s unstoppable racket and hallucinatory paranoia. Naturally, it’s one of the most polarizing works of art in the world. Genius? Shit? You be the judge.

Naturally, MMM was the subject of many a high school dare for us – how much of it can you listen to before you either smash the record, smash your head, or both? The mere mortals among us dropped out immediately, but a couple of us could last past the initial clatter and settle in to some sort of addled haze through the rest of sides 1 and 2. My stopping point was a couple of minutes into side 3 when some high-frequency combination comes on that makes my head feel like it had been invaded by aphids. We actually did find the legendary 8-track tape version of MMM at a Barstow, California truckstop in 1983, but I don’t know what happened to it.

Remarkably, a German avant-garde group called Zeitkratzer accomplished the impossible by transcribing MMM and scoring it for strings, winds, piano and accordion. Sort of like Bang On A Can‘s take on Music For Airports and In C. Anyway, Zeitkratzer is performing it this weekend with Reed. I wish I was there.

When it was still an independent market before destruction at the hands of the Ralphs supermarket behemoth, Hughes carried some wonderful Armenian flat bread from a local bakery as well as some of the higher-end La Brea Bakery bread. After the takeover of course, the yummy, local breads were tossed out in favor of Ralphs own miserable in-house bakery. Or so I thought…

The entertainment industry isn’t the only hive of scum and villianry. Check out this testimony from a Independent Bakers Association spokesperson on the practice of “slotting fees” — bribes that supermarkets demand from manufacturers who want their products highlighted in the store. Change the name of the products and this testimony is identical to the problems that small records face if they want their releases to be in a decent spot in a record store.

A New England supermarket chain was purchased approximately five years ago by an individual who used the proceeds of slotting fees to cover a portion of the equity for the purchase. A “pay or stay” slotting fee was required for each item in the supermarket

A New York area supermarket chain regularly charges $20,000.00 for each new item introduced by a food manufacturer, as well as “requesting” annual contributions to the purchasing manager’s Christmas party.

A West Coast supermarket chain was solicited and paid a one million dollar fee to change from one food manufacturer’s products to another’s. The justification was cost of computer reprogramming.

[via bOing bOing]

Yet again, the current news reads like the Stark Fist Of Removal… According to Bush Jr., the Sept. 11 attackers got the idea that the United States is weak from watching Jerry Springer.

From the New York Times…

“The real reason conservatives want to drill in ANWR is the same reason they want to keep snowmobiles roaring through Yellowstone: sheer symbolism. Forcing rangers to wear respirators won’t make much difference to snowmobile sales – but it makes the tree-huggers furious, and that’s what’s appealing about it. The same is true about Arctic drilling; as one very moderate environmentalist told me, the reason the Bush administration pursues high-profile anti-environmental policies is not that they please special interests but that they are “red meat for the right.” (The real special-interest payoffs come via less showy policies, like the way the administration is undermining enforcement of the Clean Air Act.)”

[via RRE]

Some folks over on the OmniWeb mailing list were wanting the Omni folks to add a feature to open the current OmniWeb URL in that other browser. Anyway, there’s no need to disturb OW, just add the following script to ScriptMenu.

on run
    tell application "OmniWeb"
        set insertURL to address of browser 1
    end tell
    tell application "Internet Explorer"
        GetURL insertURL
    end tell
end run

Carlyle Group chairman Frank Carlucci sues to censor his name out of biopic of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Congo. Back when he was a CIA agent in Congo in 1960, Carlucci along with the US ambassador to Congo and CIA chief Lawrence Devlin successfully planned the overthrow and assassination of Lumumba and installed dictator Mobutu.

Shit.

One year after the Mir space station power-dived into the Pacific, speculation continues about the exact nature of the microorganisms that chewed up metal and corroded windows. More to the point, could any of the critters have survived re-entry? Nobody knows, and nobody really wants to find out either. The bottom line: partially sterilized spacecraft + a 16 year bath in cosmic radiation = angry bugs

“Throughout Mir’s life in space, the number of microorganisms grew continuously, one generation replacing another every 20-30 minutes. If in 1990 there were registered 94 species, in 2001 they numbered 140. But the real problem was not the species increasing in number but their growing aggressiveness: each new generation seemed to be more ferocious than the last.”