the music of the dark ages?

Posted on Wednesday, 2002 June 26 by Anton

Udhay Shankar sent me this link: Black Sabbath songs covered by medieval music band Rondellus. Yow! Have you heard this?

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the fragile infrastructure

Posted on Tuesday, 2002 June 25 by Anton

BART was stuck for about half an hour this morning when its master computer crashed. If the crash were unrecoverable, I wonder how long they’d have waited before cobbling up a way to run a limited schedule by hand (or, alternatively, laying on some busses). Has it always depended on computers, for thirty years?

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whiz, pop

Posted on Monday, 2002 June 24 by Anton

Someone’s having fun a little early: I just heard the unique sound of a display rocket.

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subconscious perception

Posted on Sunday, 2002 June 23 by Anton

Holding the cat, I looked in the mirror and was startled. Fluffie’s face is asymmetrical, but I couldn’t have told you which side has this or that feature. (Can you say without looking which was Moshe Dayan’s good eye?) And yet her mirror image was strikingly strange.

I’ve had similar experiences a few times before: seeing my face without glasses or beard; seeing my father in person for the first time in a couple of years. At such moments I see – briefly – what the face ‘really’ looks like, before the reality fades into the familiar symbol. Such abstraction is necessary, of course, but I wonder whether there might be some benefit to lifting the veil more often.

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good news, bad news

Posted on Sunday, 2002 June 23 by Anton

Eugene Volokh relayed a funny newspaper clipping. To save time downloading the image, here is the text:

The first divorce directly related to the September 11th terrorist attacks has been filed in New York. It appears a guy with an office on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Centre spent the morning at his girlfriend’s apartment with his phone turned off. He wasn’t watching TV either. When he turned his phone back on at about 11am, it rang immediately. It was his hysterical wife, “Are you OK? Where are you?” He said, “What do you mean? I’m in my office of course!”

(Thanks to Paul Hsieh for the link.)
Later: snopes has doubts.

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wonders of the past and future

Posted on Saturday, 2002 June 22 by Anton

I was reading The Spike by Damien Broderick (I’m up to the part about the complexity of controlling zillions of nanomachines) and a fellow passenger asked what it’s about. People are paid to summarize books better than I can, so I passed it over so she could read the covers. She asked whether the tone is alarmist (no, but it is cautious) and then said, “You know, they had that same technology in Atlantis. It’s not the first time around.”

Later she asked, “What technology do you think they used to build the Pyramids?” “Ramps and rollers.” “And how do you explain the fact that they had electricity?” (I confess I haven’t felt any need to do so.) She told me that an Egyptian archaeologist – not English or German, she emphasized – has found ‘electrical’ wires and what appears to be a lighting filament in Tutankhamn’s tomb. Wonders never cease — and it would seem they have no beginning either.

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33 1/3 turns of phrase

Posted on Saturday, 2002 June 22 by Anton

I was prompted by a post to alt.peeves to seek confirmation of my brilliant originality by websearching for phrases that I had jotted down as clever. In light of this research, the name of my band will be “A Wellmeaning Oaf”, and our first album will be “Return to Porlock”. (I am particularly disappointed in “Usual Suspicions” and “Red Weather”.)

In the process I found this essay by one Sarah David about enjoying the B-52’s. Whom, in turn, I didn’t expect to see dominating the search results so thoroughly (are there no webpages about bombers?). I can take only so much of the B-52’s at one sitting (about as much as Devo) but I love the counterpoint of “52 Girls”.

Another essay using that same phrase is this one about bad fight scenes in fiction.

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