Something I can never have

Killer interview with Trent Reznor. I can't wait for his 'pay me directly' work to start coming out. Prince has done this for several years online, the Barenaked Ladies are doing it as well. Ani DiFranco, of course. In a different approach Frank Zappa did it for 20+ years and would certainly have embraced digital distribution had he lived long enough.

In fact he predicted both a digital download and a digital subscription model in his 1990 book "The Real Frank Zappa Book".

Of course Trent is more technically savvy than most, suggesting 'you pick the bitrate' and I'm sure multi-format options. BNL are a very close runner up with offering FLAC and even GarageBand format for remixers. Prince has done the least best approach and chosen crippled WMV files that suddenly stop working if you update Windows Media Player or if you don't have an internet connection when you the file decides it needs to be revalidated.

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I need to feel alone amongst the weeds

At our most recent Block Captain meeting there was an elderly gentleman who asked a lot of 'questions'. They weren't actually questions, he just phrased them as questions because he wasn't one of the speakers. He asked about 5-6 totally 'irrelevant' questions of each speaker, dragging the meeting out about an extra 20 minutes. He does this at every meeting. He's a crank who has nothing better to do so he wastes everyone's time with nonsense. I'd hate to be his neighbor. Fortunately he lives on the other side of the neighborhood so I only encounter him at meetings.

One of his more coherent 'questions' was to challenge the city restriction that grass can't be more than 7" by claiming that there was a new federal law that restricted grass height everywhere in the U.S. to 3". The Neighborhood Stabilisation Officer politely deflected his delusional claim and moved on.

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I know I believe in nothing

I posted this comment over at Hanlon's razor, but I thought it worth reposting here. I think he makes excellent points, all of which I grapple with regularly.


I have been going back and forth between identifying as an atheist and an agnostic as years. The hang up for me has been that damned dictionary. I linguistic purist (which I sometimes lean towards) would say that you are only an atheist if you declare that there 100% is no god. And some of the more outspoken atheists promote precisely that perspective.

However, language is a fluid thing. A lot of people who identify as atheist are 'soft' atheists who are sure that there is no god, but aren't so presumptuous as to claim 100% surety. This is a position I've alway associated with agnosticism, and that's why I've normally chosen to identify as agnostic.

A more basic issue is that the average non-skeptic just gives a blank stare when they encounter the phrase "I'm agnostic". They seem to have no idea what that means. Those who are a bit more committed to their religious beliefs and in trying to win converts do tend to see it the way you put it and think it's an opening for them to brainwash someone who has some doubts.

I don't have a good answer, but I've got lots of great questions!

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Tell him to play us a slow song

Imagine my surprise this morning to turn the car on only to hear "Your Love Alone Is Not Enough" off the new Manic Street Preachers album "Send Away the Tigers". I've got the radio tuned to 87.9 so I can listen to my iPod in the car but before the iPod starts broadcasting I hear neighboring stations. 88.1 generally comes in best. Which actually has some really good stuff on it a lot of the time. Half the time I switch over to it rather than listen to whatever podcast I'd queued up.

Turns out I was listening to Cat Pick's 'Emotional Rescue' show. Good stuff. Of course, it's community radio which is why it's worth listening to.

That was a really nice way to start the workday.

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And not leave a footprint

More evidence that the low-carb craze is long term unhealthy.

I've found that scienceblogs.com has replaced most of my other daily geek reading. The quality of content is much much higher than the wild hit or miss (and mostly miss by a huge margin) of aggregators. When a science related article hits Digg or Reddit more often than not it's either some conspiracy theorist blog or a ridiculous pop-science fluff piece from abc or some nonesense like that. Slashdot actually still does a decent job of filtering out the crap articles, but the signal to noise ratio is awful. I gave up on Digg a few months ago, and it looks like the low quality submissions have made their way to Reddit now, which has gone way downhill in the past 6-8 weeks, and so I'm dropping that off my list as well.

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I proceeded to tell him his future, as long as he's hangin around

Someone has finally come up with a compelling claim that may result in winning the $1,000,000.00 JREF prize.

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Politics are death

RampantLion offers this story for your consideration:

Nine years ago at 249 South Main Street a 17 year old decided to strike out on his own. Two years later he found himself 157 miles away from home with only $116 in his pocket. He had no idea that this day, bus 227 would take him in a direction that would change his life forever. After paying the bus fare he found he only had 91 cents left in his pocket. That was OK though, because he had a job interview at 2:16pm. Sixty five minutes later he was outside an 86 story building getting ready to take his life in a new direction. In front of the building was a 197 foot tall sculpture titled "Change". Yes, today was a day of change, this was a good omen. He found some pennies on the ground and picked them up. He remembered the old saying "Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you'll have good luck". Now he had 99 cents in his pocket. He proceeded to the 86th floor of the building. "With so many good omens", he thought to himself, "I am unstoppable!" The interview took 136 minutes, but he did get the job. He was now employee 192 in a start up that was about to take off!

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Mother Nature's Son

Excellent piece on Nature about the mythological autism-vaccine link. The thing that's always struck me as odd about this is that no one with any real medical science background has supported the theory in years. Now I understand why it's lived on, because people who have an agenda unrelated to factual accuracy have pressured the media and politicians to continue to support them.

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I believe in you

So there's a big hubbub going on from conservative christian groups to prevent PBS from airing a well received BBC documentary call A Brief History of Disbelief. They are calling it 'atheist propaganda' and demand that PBS not show it unless they also show a comparable amount of pro-Christian coverage. There are a few problems with this approach.

The first of which is that due to lobbying by the religious right, there is no fairness doctrine in broadcasting anymore. One might consider this an example of 'be careful what you wish for'.

The second of course is that they make clear in their demand that they do not want 'balance' but rather they want preferential treatment. The series is about disbelief in religion, not disbelief in Christianity. The appropriate counter programming would be a series that was pro-religion in general without favoring any particular religion.

It doesn't matter for most people in the midwest or the south, as I'm sure the local PBS affiliates will decline to air it without any pressure being applied. As happened with my local affiliate.

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