tom moody

From the front page of Wikipedia we learned today that

Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 successfully lands the Moon Impact Probe on the lunar south pole.

This is major news. India is now the 4th country to put a spacecraft on the lunar surface (after the Soviet Union, US, and Japan).
Searched the front page of the New York Times online for this story and it's not there. Great paper: the Iraq War, Tom Friedman... Let's repeat: Wikipedia had this story and the Times didn't.

Update: My sources saw this item in one or more of the financial papers and in the science trades. I've seen no mention of it in the NY Times online edition on Nov 14-15 (haven't looked at the print editions for those days). Possibly the Times has a bias against stories that go against the grain of the "American exceptionalism narrative." Anyway, congratulations to India, that's an impressive achievement.

Update 2: On Nov. 16 the Times ran a one-paragraph AP story, dated Nov 14, about the landing. The headline was several stories down in the Science section. Way to cover 'em, Gray Lady!

"Iceworld" [2.2 MB .mp3]

Finished most of this a few days ago but was stuck. Listening to that tracker music for 24 hours provided some ideas for how to resolve it. The gritty quality here is not low sample rate but possibly a blown amp on the Mutator filter distorting an already gnarly stretched-out and gated sample. It needed a pretty, "icy" melody floating on top to pull it together--or almost pull it together; the incongruity is important.

Johnny Sunshine is a regular volunteer singer for SKFTB (Super Karaoke Fun Time Band). A star is born: [YouTube]
(he looks like Val Kilmer and moves like Iggy Pop--psychedelic guitar slides in the break by Otis Ball)
The video features adventurous camera work in an echt-New York metro area setting.

Long but well-told explanation by Michael Lewis of the mass cognitive dissonance that led to the current financial crisis. Lewis wrote the book Liar's Poker, about his experiences as a trader during the '80s financial madness. He thought the insanity had ended but now says current events make that period seem quaint. Junk bond shenanigans again--but this time in connection with even more dubious financial instruments based on home lending. What--house prices wouldn't keep going up forever? Who knew?

[hat tip backspin]

The Senate seems incapable of stripping Joe Lieberman of his Homeland Graft committee chairmanship--this after he actively campaigned against the President-elect and "endorsed and supported every last radical Bush policy to expand executive power and surveillance activities," per Glenn Greenwald.

It's obvious Senate collegiality and bonhomie trumps the popular will regarding this unsavory sociopath. They're all so afraid of Lieberman--he must give them bruising eye contact in person and threaten to get really, really mad.

Update: Senate capitulated to Lieberman's ego and allowed him to stay in his Homeland Graft slot. That's change we can believe in. Yes we can.

Thanks to Travis for recommending Mazemod.

It's mostly tracker-produced music but only the "Chip" category has that "8-Bit sound."
Was pleasantly surprised by the tunes under "Acid" - lots of nice drum and bass and breakbeat stuff with samples* as opposed to square waves, very clean and pure ideas.
It seems to be kids recreating the early '90s (house, 'ardkore rave, early jungle) using software very much at the level of the original gear, but there are surprises--it isn't just nostalgia.
Unfortunately the published playlists are just a small part of the music on the site. You have to page or play through the songs under the categories "Chip," "Bass," and "Acid"; no search function is available and there appear to be hundreds of songs. So if you hear something you like odds are you will never hear it again.

*Disclaimer--Am still getting up to speed on how .mod files work so "samples" is mainly used to distinguish the texture of the sound from raspy videogame blorts--"low res sample data" is probably more accurate. Also, I have no idea when most of the tunes on the mazemod site were actually produced. We discussed at length on my old blog the difference between the tracker scene and old school rave/breakbeat and I still don't entirely understand it.

found on my hard drive--tiny GIFs* from a NetZero-emailed PayPal receipt had their dimensions enlarged and normalized by the Windows XP thumbnailizer

*clockwise: 59 x 29 pixels, 1 x 1 pixels, 2 x 2 pixels, 1 x 1 pixels

Compare the Flux Capacitor Jumpers photos from the noisesource blog to Damon Zucconi's Continous Line Drawings. Aside from the obvious similarities of angular zigs and zags of green light against a black background, what do the pieces say about period assumptions, analog vs digital, science vs art, "visual music," photos vs Flash, bitmaps vs vectors. (Whoops, there's your essay.) Does the Pink Floyd laser show enhance the connections among works?

"Acid Exercise 2" [3.7 MB .mp3]

This is all hardware, live except for mixing two mono channels down to stereo after the recording.
Nerdy backstory: the "synth" is an analog filterbank called the Mutator. It's using the output of one Electribe groovebox, a rhythm-only box, as an "external input" that modulates the bass notes from another box, in real time. The same rhythm is simultaneously playing as pure audio. The external input imprints a rhythmic pattern onto the bubbly bass filtering that is more complex and varied than if it was just the filtering alone (an "auto-wah" envelope filter). The grooveboxes are not synced--three rhythm patterns and three melodic patterns are manually toggled on and off in a staggered, combinatory fashion. It's kind of fun to listen to for all this structural rigor.

...by Joel Holmberg after it found him. Can think of about a dozen abstract artists this would put out of business.

The URL is http://www.schnell-u-sauber.de/ if you are curious about the origin.