Year: 2004

COLLECTIVE BRAINPOWER REQUEST: Blogging Music

Got a collective brainpower request for y’all, folks!

Here’s what I want to do: I want to write about particular pieces of music on the blog here and have links that legally allow me to share the music I’m talking about with the reader. I have no interest in posting illegal files. I’m not looking to have folks download the file and keep a copy, just the ability to let them listen to it. In fact, I’d encourage them to buy it via a link to one of the major music purchase places online. Also, I’d like them to be able to hear the whole piece rather than just a 30 second clip from Amazon or Wal-Mart (as I’ve done before).

Oh, and I prefer not to have to buy a lot of special junk to do this (though I wouldn’t mind paying a mostest amount).

I know that there are ways to do things somewhat similar to what I have in mind, but nothing that is quite what I’m looking for.

Do any of y’all have thoughts?

Much obliged!

What On Earth Is This?

Cartogram2004

(Click to enlarge.)

Is it a map of subspace domains?

A multi-dimensional fractal designed to hack the Borg Collective?

Personally, it looks like an echocardiogram of someone’s heart that exploded.

But it isn’t a cardiogram of any kind. It’s a cartogram of the U.S. presidential vote with the counties resized based on population and tinted by how many red and blue votes they had in them.

SOURCE.

Third Party Blips

Down yonder I linked to a page describing various third party candidates in the presidential election. I hadn’t heard of all these folks, but I kept an eye on how they did. Turns out that they made less of an impact (particularly Nader) than many expected.

THE TOP THREE THIRD PARTIES DIDN’T MANAGE TO NET A PERCENTILE OF THE VOTE BETWEEN THEM.

Here’s C-SPAN’s state-by-state breakdown of how they did.

And here’s a Wikipedia summary of the popular vote (click to enlarge):

Presidential_vote

What I’d really like to see is a breakdown of the 56,964 people in the "Others" category. I heard such a list a number of elections ago, and when you’re getting down to characters like Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse getting a few votes each, you’re in some pretty funny territory. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find such a list for this election. May not have been compiled yet.

Looking at these figures, it’s interesting how poorly Nader did. He had been polling well above the .43% he got. Perhaps in the heat of election day a bunch of Nader supporters decided to flip to Kerry. Or perhaps the GOTV (get out the vote) efforts of Bush and Kerry simply overwhelmed Nader. As it was, he got barely more votes than Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate (who presumably would generally hurt Bush the way Nader would generally hurt Kerry). Nader probably would have done better if he had been on the ballot in more places. Note that he was only on the ballot in 34 states plus DC. This was in significant measure due to the Kerry campaign’s efforts to suppress his efforts to be listed on the ballot.

So, the third parties didn’t make much of an impression this time.

Oh, well, better luck next time, guys!

(Makes me want to hum an old Frank Sinatra song, sung here by DS9’s Vic Fontane [WMP];  Lyrics; BUY JIMMY [Vic Fontane] DARREN’S ALBUM)

MSM Still Doesn't Get It

The mainstream media (MSM) still doesn’t understand that it is facing an evolutionary change as large (for itself) as the one that separated the mammals from the dinosaurs.

This New York Times story discusses rumors that spread rapidly via the blogosphere that Bush had stolen the election–rumors that were swiftly shot down by others in the blogosphere.

Ever since the debacle of the CBS forged documents scandal, MSM commentators have been yawlping about the absence of "checks and balances" (i.e., fact checkers) in the blogosphere. What they fail to realize, as many bloggers have pointed out, is that the blogosphere itself provides checks and balances. If a blogger (at least one who is seriously enough engaged in political discussion to achieve prominence) makes a mistake of fact, he will quickly be informed of the fact by others in the blogosphere and, if he wishes to retain his reputation (unlike CBS), he will quickly make a correction or at least stop pushing a crazy theory.

The blogosphere thus has what the MSM does not–a set of real-time cross-examiners among its peers who are devoted to shooting down theories that limp when it comes to factual matters. It ignores what these cross-examiners say at its peril. The MSM has not yet realized that it is at this point.

What all this means is that the advent of the blogosphere has made more information available to real-time cross-examination, with a resulting shortening of the time it takes to shoot down erroneous ideas that otherwise would circulate through the press.

It is a Darwinian process.

The MSM doesn’t realize that the mammals are about to gobble up the corpses of the final dinosaurs.

GET THE STORY (NYT-noid REGISTRATION WARNING!).

MSM Still Doesn’t Get It

The mainstream media (MSM) still doesn’t understand that it is facing an evolutionary change as large (for itself) as the one that separated the mammals from the dinosaurs.

This New York Times story discusses rumors that spread rapidly via the blogosphere that Bush had stolen the election–rumors that were swiftly shot down by others in the blogosphere.

Ever since the debacle of the CBS forged documents scandal, MSM commentators have been yawlping about the absence of "checks and balances" (i.e., fact checkers) in the blogosphere. What they fail to realize, as many bloggers have pointed out, is that the blogosphere itself provides checks and balances. If a blogger (at least one who is seriously enough engaged in political discussion to achieve prominence) makes a mistake of fact, he will quickly be informed of the fact by others in the blogosphere and, if he wishes to retain his reputation (unlike CBS), he will quickly make a correction or at least stop pushing a crazy theory.

The blogosphere thus has what the MSM does not–a set of real-time cross-examiners among its peers who are devoted to shooting down theories that limp when it comes to factual matters. It ignores what these cross-examiners say at its peril. The MSM has not yet realized that it is at this point.

What all this means is that the advent of the blogosphere has made more information available to real-time cross-examination, with a resulting shortening of the time it takes to shoot down erroneous ideas that otherwise would circulate through the press.

It is a Darwinian process.

The MSM doesn’t realize that the mammals are about to gobble up the corpses of the final dinosaurs.

GET THE STORY (NYT-noid REGISTRATION WARNING!).

EARTH TO LUCAS: "Less Is More"

I really want to like the new Star Wars films. And I do, but not near as much as I’d like to like them. The second of the new films was, in fact, much better than the first, but the flaws in the films are all too obvious to me. (The flaws in the original trilogy are also obvious.)

One major flaw in the current trilogy is that there is no equivalent to Han Solo. Han was an irreverent, skeptical, selfish smart-aleck whose presence helped keep the first trilogy from bogging down with everybody on screen taking the Jedi so seriously and going around acting so grave and noble. Subtract a Han figure from the first trilogy and everybody ends up taking themselves waaay too seriously.

Lucas has said that the new trilogy is much more like what he envisioned the first trilogy, but he didn’t have the tech (or the money) to make it the way he saw it.

Not everything Lucas says in this regard is true. He makes it sound as if the story of all six movies was clear in his mind when he made the first, and that patently isn’t true–at least if you read the original scripts (also available in an easier-to-use book form). Lucas had all kinds of stuff in the originals that indicate his vision of the story changed in midstream–repeatedly. Yet the original series ended up clicking in a way no previous movie trilogy had.

Despite the alterations to the plot, I think that Lucas is telling the truth when he says he originally imagined a much more lush, detail-rich universe for the original trilogy, yet for budgetary (and non-budgetary) reasons, he ended up cutting it way back.

As the years have passed, he has now begun adding back the missing detail, in the "Special Edition" of the original films that was released in theaters, in the Extra-Special Super Chocolate Fudgy Edition that has now been released on DVD, and most notably in the films of the current trilogy.

As he’s added more detail, fans of the original series have been complaining, and loudly.

There are some circumstances in which adding detail hurts a work of art, situations in which less is more.

That’s the message fans of the original Star Wars movies have been sending to Lucas, but he doesn’t seem to have gotten the message.

HERE’S ONE OF THE MOST INSIGHTFUL ANALYSES OF THE PROBLEM THAT I’VE READ.

EARTH TO LUCAS: “Less Is More”

I really want to like the new Star Wars films. And I do, but not near as much as I’d like to like them. The second of the new films was, in fact, much better than the first, but the flaws in the films are all too obvious to me. (The flaws in the original trilogy are also obvious.)

One major flaw in the current trilogy is that there is no equivalent to Han Solo. Han was an irreverent, skeptical, selfish smart-aleck whose presence helped keep the first trilogy from bogging down with everybody on screen taking the Jedi so seriously and going around acting so grave and noble. Subtract a Han figure from the first trilogy and everybody ends up taking themselves waaay too seriously.

Lucas has said that the new trilogy is much more like what he envisioned the first trilogy, but he didn’t have the tech (or the money) to make it the way he saw it.

Not everything Lucas says in this regard is true. He makes it sound as if the story of all six movies was clear in his mind when he made the first, and that patently isn’t true–at least if you read the original scripts (also available in an easier-to-use book form). Lucas had all kinds of stuff in the originals that indicate his vision of the story changed in midstream–repeatedly. Yet the original series ended up clicking in a way no previous movie trilogy had.

Despite the alterations to the plot, I think that Lucas is telling the truth when he says he originally imagined a much more lush, detail-rich universe for the original trilogy, yet for budgetary (and non-budgetary) reasons, he ended up cutting it way back.

As the years have passed, he has now begun adding back the missing detail, in the "Special Edition" of the original films that was released in theaters, in the Extra-Special Super Chocolate Fudgy Edition that has now been released on DVD, and most notably in the films of the current trilogy.

As he’s added more detail, fans of the original series have been complaining, and loudly.

There are some circumstances in which adding detail hurts a work of art, situations in which less is more.

That’s the message fans of the original Star Wars movies have been sending to Lucas, but he doesn’t seem to have gotten the message.

HERE’S ONE OF THE MOST INSIGHTFUL ANALYSES OF THE PROBLEM THAT I’VE READ.