Where's the mouse?

Throw the book at these motherfuckers

No further comment necessary.

Holy shit

We're tanking.

Monster gets owned

I love this letter. I don't need any RCA cables but I may need to buy some from Blue Jean cable anyway.

Nerds Win!

This article clearly is comparing different species, rather than individuals within the same species. Of course, that won't stop us over here at The Nerd Show from feeling a little smug.

First time ever

Underestimating the intelligence of the American public doesn't pay off.

NYT Article.

Now listening to: "Antique Glow" by Kelley Stoltz

So, L and I went to go see The Dirtbombs, Dirty Little Heaters and Kelley Stoltz at the Local 506 the week before last. I'd never heard of Kelley Stoltz before, but I ended up being more or less won over by the end of the set. More or less pop music with nice full, interesting arrangements. I wasn't sure if I really needed the record or not, but figured, what the hell, if I'm going to buy it, might as well buy it from the band, so I get the latest record, Circular Sounds, which features cover art highly reminiscent of Captain Beefheart's Safe as Milk album, and the record before that, Antique Glow.

Circular Sounds is alright. It pretty much is what their live show sounds like these days--I like it but I don't know if I'll be compelled to listen to it over and over again. Antique Glow, on the other hand has turned out to be surprisingly great--a nice swampy, folky, hippy freak out thing. I'm really digging it. Liner notes say it was recorded on a Tascam 388, which is probably partly responsible for it sounding so warm and nice.

That's all.

The Clean Energy Scam

This is dead serious here folks. My friend Jeff, an EPA scientist, really wants for you to read and understand this article. The importance of understanding this cannot be overemphasized.

Drink your nuts!

File this one under stuff that everyone probably already knew except for me. Turns out cola drinks are (or used to be) flavored with kola, hence the name. I'd been wondering what that flavor was.

Free Lunch

Got this one from the boss. Considering we've been able to make free energy since 2002, I'm not sure why we don't all have MEGS.

Cool simulation

This movie from this page is pretty cool. Try making it full screen and covering one eye while watching it. Your brain, without the second eye, is no longer using binocular vision for 3d and is relying on other queues instead, which makes the movie seem to have a lot of real 3 dimensional depth. You can literally see into it.

And speaking of particle simulators, this one is pretty fun.

Barking up the Wrong Tree

Barking up the wrong tree. An interesting expression, really. Nice use of canine imagery. The idiomatic meaning, of course, that one mistakenly believes the source of and solution to a problem lie in one sphere, when, in fact, the cause and solution lie in a different sphere entirely. You won't find the answer because you are looking in the wrong place.

The thing is, have you ever seen a dog bark up a tree before? What if you are barking up the right tree? The location of that squirrel, or pussy cat, or other object of canine fancy has been correctly identified. That pussy cat is up that tree. Yet, all of the barking in the world, is not going to capture that pussy cat, or squirrel, or bird, whatever the hell it is. It would seem that the success rate for barking up any tree is incredibly low, regardless of the wrongness or rightness of said tree. Arguably, barking up a tree isn't really the correct approach in the first place.

Hmmm.

Two Faced Baby Worshiped as God

At least we have an ally

We're all sadly aware of how woefully ignorant Americans are about geography, history and world affairs. Studies are published frequently which cite the alarming statistics. Well, it turns out that our brothers and sisters across the pond are not necessarily any more clever. British teens were quizzed and a fifth of them believed that, among other things, Winston Churchill was a fictional character! Also, over half believed that Sherlock Holmes was real. At least we don't have to feel so lonely over here.

Early American scat

Actually, a different kind of scat.

Acknowledged

Yep.

Ha!

This is an old post, but I'd never seen it before. The only real upshot, though, seems to be now Gitmo detainees just don't get tried at all, now that secret military tribunals have been declared illegal. Got habeas corpus?

Jesusonic

So yesterday during my, uhmm, lunch break, I read the coding documentation for Jesusonic, a dynamically compiled audio plugin architecture that is integrated with Reaper. This seriously put my geek jones into high gear.

So last night after bowling I came home, whipped out a text editor, and got to hacking. I didn't come up with anything that hadn't been done before, or, to be honest, wasn't already included with Reaper, but it was very cool to be able to make a code change, hit recompile in Reaper, and hear the results immediately. Really, really cool. And in 30 minutes I had written three plugins. Granted, incredibly basic ones, that do things other plugins already do, but ones that I will use nonetheless. And it was a great, fun, little exercise.

The msdecode and msencode plugins are related to mid-side matrixing--something I do on nearly every session now, as mid-side has become my stereo microphone configuration of choice in the last couple of years.

I do have a couple of ideas for some things that are a bit more original, but first I need to wrap my brain around FFTs before I can do anything with them.