The Road to Hell is Paved by Chet Raymo

If aliens from outer space visited this planet they would quickly decide that the ruling beings have four wheels; certainly, the two-legged creatures seem eager to sacrifice to the automobile their time, fortune, and quality of life. Add a lane, pave it over, build a strip mall. If there is a shred of natural beauty left, erase it. All hail to the automobile! The automobile rules.

The automobile is here to stay, of course, and properly so, but we are not required to love it, or sacrifice everything to it. Every acre of asphalt is one less natural place to love. A house with a three-car garage is unlikely to become a home. The number of miles on the odometer is a pretty good measure of how far we have gone from where we belong. If we had been wiser, we would have created a culture that emphasized place rather than mobility, nature rather than asphalt, public rather than personal transport. We chose not to and we are poorer for it.

The Revenge of the Intuitive by Brian Eno

The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates "more options" with "greater freedom." Designers struggle endlessly with a problem that is almost nonexistent for users: "How do we pack the maximum number of options into the minimum space and price?" In my experience, the instruments and tools that endure (because they are loved by their users) have limited options.

Software options proliferate extremely easily, too easily in fact, because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment. With tools, we crave intimacy. This appetite for emotional resonance explains why users - when given a choice - prefer deep rapport over endless options. You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits it keeps becoming something else.

This one's for all those Powerball freaks waiting in line out there: Lottery winners often wind up wishing they hadn't been lucky.

The Atlantic has an interesting article on Waldorf schools. I'll definitely look into these when I have children.

I just added a simple commenting system to my music page, using dotcomments. I encourage everyone to please give feedback. I mean, I throw this music out there in the void, and I have no idea what people think of it. Do you like it, dislike it, love it, hate it, find it boring, interesting? When do you like to listen to it? Where do you play it? How often do you listen to it? How does it make you feel? Does it inspire you in any way? ANY kind of feedback, reviews, comments are welcome. Thanks!

Public Service Announcement:

Do you realize just how much sugar is in your drink? There is more sugar in a can of Coke than a Snickers bar, 4 Hershey's Bars, or 10 (!) Reece's peanut butter cups. It's liquid candy! Here are the stats:

Mountain Dew----46.5g/can
Coca-Cola-------40.5g/can
M&M's-----------31g/pack
Snickers Bar----30g/bar
Hershey Bar-----10g/bar
Reece's Cup-----4g/piece

I Am As I Am And You Are As You Are by Subcomandante Marcos

I just uploaded a brand new track for your listening pleasure: Bulb. Written, produced, and recorded by me. :) Enjoy!

Ok, the BillCam is no longer in full effect. I know, it was short lived, but it just made me feel wierd. I don't like being constantly watched. Perhaps it shall return some day...

Free Time! Ludicity and the Anti-work Ethic by Laura Martz (via)

Play is thought of as the opposite of "work." Yet under the existing order play is officially allowed only children and the workers of play-as-spectacle, which is not play. It is reified through the professionalization of select people as "athletes," "artists" or "entertainers." These physical, creative activities are reserved for "professionals," who must sell the product of their "play" as spectacle. As observed by the Bureau of Control (pamphleteers from Houston, Texas), in the realm of "art" behavior is tolerated that would not be in the "real world." Play in the "working world" is diverted, channeled off as "art," contained as decadent behavior in the mainstream of life. Children are punished in school for playing except at scheduled break time, as training for the radical split between what one is ordered to do and what one might like to do.

Furthermore, to play professionally today and live off it, one must be able to command a mass audience and license the spectacle-commodity to a hierarchy of managers and owners, each of whom creams off an ascending percentage of profit from the "work" (for that is what this "play" has been converted or inverted into). "Performance" is now also always subject to endless monitoring and control by the professional judges and censors.

Recommended free legal mp3 of the day: No Emphasis by Jet Jaguar.

The BillCam is in full effect. Now you can watch me sit on my arse all day and stare at a screen! Don't expect it to update during non-working hours (EST). Thanks to Matt for coding the auto-refresh window (in about 30 seconds flat).

New Aphex Twin track: 54 Cymru Beats.

...and now for Matt's version of the story. He's definitely the story-teller of the group. This one is much more interesting and dramatic.

He's Not Hairy, He's My Brother

With some people still upset over Darwin's theory, which suggests that apes are our grandparents, along comes an even more unsettling view: we are just another breed of ape. In the great pyramid of nature, according to this view, one little group of siblings is isolated at the top, separated by a huge biological gap from lower beings. These emperors of evolution are chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos and (are we forgetting one?) humans.

"If man is made in God's image," Allan Wilson, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, once said, "then God must be a chimpanzee."

...

"It's actually an injustice to call chimpanzees and orangutans `animals,' " he said. "It puts them in with rabbits and a whole variety of organisms that they are not close to. And it separates them from us, who apart from the hair and certain features of anatomy you'd have a difficult time defining a significant difference."

Like Shylock, these advocates cry, "If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you tickle them, do they not laugh?" Or, as Richard Wrangham, a chimpanzee behavior expert at Harvard University once put it: "Like humans, they laugh, make up after a quarrel, support each other in times of trouble, medicate themselves with chemical and physical remedies, stop each other from eating poisonous foods, collaborate in the hunt, help each other over physical obstacles, raid neighboring groups, lose their tempers, get excited by dramatic weather, invent ways to show off, have family traditions and group traditions, make tools, devise plans, deceive, play tricks, grieve, are cruel and are kind."

The Team Techno site has been updated with an account of our night at Galactique and some great photos.

The Team Techno show at Galactique was a success. We were a little taken aback at the venue when we first arrived. It was probably the most ghetto, underground event I've ever played. We were a little cramped for space, and time. It took us upwards of 45 minutes to set up. (We have 3 computers, 4 keyboards, 2 sound modules, a mixer, and of course a huge rats nest of wires.) So, we only ended up playing for a half hour, and only got to play half of our songs. Despite all this, I think we made quite an impression. We got a great response from the crowd, and Marumari, who was playing after us, told us that he really liked our stuff. When he was done playing, he thanked the crowd, and said, "Give it up for Team Techno for rocking the house!". This is right after his set. I am not making this up. Also we got to chat with him afterwards, and I found out that he lives in Boston. So hopefully, we'll be hanging out, and trying to get a little Boston IDM scene going. So, in the end, it was a great night.

Philip Morris Sees the Light

After decades of sticking their heads in the sand about the hazards of tobacco, Philip Morris has found a new tactic -- promoting the benefits to society of premature deaths from smoking. A study produced for them by Arthur D. Little, one of the "foremost management consulting firms," found the early deaths of smokers has "positive effects" for society that more than counteract the medical costs of treating smoking induced cancer, etc.

This path-breaking research was limited to smoking in Czechoslovakia. It found that in 1999, despite health care costs for dying smokers, the government still had a net gain of $147.1 million from smoking. From these figures, the American Legacy Foundation calculated the Czech government saved $1,227 per dead smoker. That's a pretty good return, as Philip Morris proudly informed government leaders in the Czech Republic.

The Ecology of Magic: An Interview with David Abram

ABRAM: Everything that we speak of as Western civilization we could speak of as alphabetic civilization. We are the culture of the alphabet, and the alphabet itself could be seen as a very potent form of magic. You know, we open up the newspaper in the morning and we focus our eyes on these little inert bits of ink on the page, and we immediately hear voices and we see visions and we experience conversations happening in other places and times. That is magic!

It's outrageous: as soon as we look at these printed letters on the page we see what they say. They speak to us. That is not so different from a Hopi elder stepping out of her pueblo and focusing her eyes on a stone and hearing the stone speak. Or a Lakota man stepping out and seeing a spider crawling up a tree and focusing his eyes on that spider and hearing himself addressed by that spider. We do just the same thing, but we do it with our own written marks on the page. We look at them, and they speak to us. It's an intensely concentrated form of animism. But it's animism nonetheless, as outrageous as a talking stone.

In fact, it's such an intense form of animism that it has effectively eclipsed all of the other forms of animistic participation in which we used to engage -- with leaves, with stones, with winds. But it is still a form of magic.

LONDON: And we do it in our heads, not our bodies. As psychotherapist Marion Woodman says, the modern Westerner as a person who walks around with his head suspended two feet above the rest of his body.

ABRAM: Yes. I don't think there is a way for those who work in service to the earth -- for environmentalists, ecologists -- to really woo our culture back into a reciprocal or sustainable relation with the land until we draw folks back to our senses, because our sensing bodies are our direct contact with the rest of the natural world. It is not by being abstract intellects that we are going to fall in love again with the rest of nature. It's by beginning to honor and value our direct sensory experience: the tastes and smells in the air, the feel of the wind as it caresses the skin, the feel of the ground under our feet as we walk upon it. And how much easier it is to feel that ground if you allow yourself to sense that the ground itself is feeling your steps as you walk upon it.

Things I'm looking forward to about moving to Boston:

• Working from home.
• Sitting out on the front porch overlooking the city (we are on the third floor, and on a hill).
• Living with new people and making new friends.
• Cable modem.
• No more car insurance.
• Taking the T.
• Being a bike-ride away from Harvard Square.
• Tealuxe.
• Exploring the city.
• Eating at new restaurants.
• Walking in the Fenway, Boston Common and the Public Gardens.
• Going hiking in New England.
• Playing live gigs in the city.
• Grocery shopping at the weekend farmer's market.
• Attending all manner of cultural events (music, theatre, films, lectures, etc).

G-8 the World by George Szamuely

The bullshit-meter almost exploded last week as the self-satisfied leaders of the G-8 countries pontificated about the problem of "global poverty." They had little of interest to say, for very good reason: global poverty exists because the G-8 leaders, and the financial and business elites they represent, want it to exist. The purpose of global poverty is to create a vast pool of cheap labor that the transnational corporations can exploit. Many Asian and African countries, along with those of East and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, compete with one another as to who can provide the cheapest labor. Corporations shut down their plants in the U.S. and Europe and set up shop in some part of the world where they can pay their workers 50 cents an hour. Workers here and in Europe, terrified of being thrown out of work, respond by settling for low pay.

This state of affairs did not come about by accident. Following the end of the Cold War, governments of the West pursued a ruthless campaign to facilitate the work of the corporations. Countries would borrow money from the Western banks. Inevitably, they would get into trouble with repayment whether because of the collapse of prices of primary commodities or the sharp rise in the value of the dollar or the devastation of their currencies following a speculative attack. Then the IMF–effectively a U.S. government agency representing the interests of the West’s bankers and creditors–would offer to lend money, but with "conditionalities." Countries would have to pledge to follow the courses set by the IMF: cuts in public spending, currency devaluation, free trade, price liberalization, deregulation and privatization. Such programs implied wholesale political transformation. What the people themselves wanted was of no importance.

Please Call Me By My True Names by Thich Naht Hanh

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply; I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird with wings still fragile,
   learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
   in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
   of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the
   surface of the river,
and I am the bird, which, when spring comes,
   arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond,
and I am the grass-snake who, approaching
   in silence, feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
   my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant selling deadly weapons to
   Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am member of the Politburo, with plenty
   of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt
   of blood" to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring so warm it makes
   flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills
   all four oceans.

Please call me by my true names, so I can hear
   all my cries and laughs at once,
   so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names, so I can wake
up and so the door of my heart can be left
open, the door of compassion.

your life is your life.
don't let it be clubbed
into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light
but it beats the darkness.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them,
take them.
you can't beat death
but you can beat life,
sometimes.
and the more often
you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous.
the gods wait to delight in you.

The Laughing Heart
Charles Bukowski

(found at dle).

This Saturday, August 11th, my band Team Techno will be playing in Philadelphia at a show called Galactique. The show is from 6pm-1am at Killtime, 3854 Lancaster Ave. Below is the complete lineup:

Room 1:

I've been quite lazy with my posting lately. I've been finding stuff, just haven't felt like posting for some reason. This ought to make up for it:

• Some people ate an insanely huge crab
• Freaky realistic neaderthal child image
• President Bush takes a month long vacation. That's more than twice as long than what the average America gets.
• US Makes Weather Control Powder
• It's raining red in India
• Russian computer programmer thrown in jail for giving talk. Still in jail weeks later
• Canada likely to legalize marijuana soon.
• Interesting global networked aquarium.
• US Role in Indonesian Massacres Revealed in Error
• Neato interactive physics modeling
• Tax rebate not really a rebate
• How Caffeine Created the Modern World
• US used hallucinogenic weapons against Iraq
• Economist article in favor of drug legalization.
• Really good graffiti
• Collapse: Why do civilizations fall?
• Debt to Society: Excellent Mother Jones Expose on the American prison system

MIT's Media Lab is at it again: "Blogdex is a system built to harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source, moving democratic media to the masses. at current, blogdex is focused on the referential information provided by personal content, namely using the timeliness of weblogs to find important and interesting content on the web."

YES! I knew it had to "exist": The Gallery Of "Misused" Quotation Marks.

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