song obsessions

song obsession update:

• The Association - Cherish
• The The - This is the Day
• Brian Eno - Baby's On Fire
• Dean Gray - Dr. Who on Holiday
• Annie - Chewing Gum

You can pretty much kill me on that last one, as its pretty much the worst kind of electropop possible. What can I say, it's super catchy, and the video is hot.

Dean Gray is actually a pseudonym for a couple of mashup artists. "Dr. Who on Holiday" is track 2 off of their illicit "American Idiot" mashup "American Edit." In this case, they've mixed Holiday with "Doctorin' the Tardis," itself a mashup of the Doctor Who theme and "Rock and Roll Part 2" by Gary Glitter. That one was done by The Timelords , who were in reality The KLF, in 1988. "Dr. Who on Holiday" however seems to contain a fair amount of the original Glitter track as well. The last 30 seconds or so of the track threaten to be too much, with The Timelords' chanting "Doctor Who, The Tardis" with that noisy guitar playing the melody right on top of them, Gary Glitter yelling "Hey-ey," Doctor Who's radiophonic "ooh-ooh-OOOH" whine, Green Day's drums and on top of it all Billy Joe Armstrong belting out "on holiday" over and over. I think there may even be a little of the other, fairly unintelligible chant from the middle of Doctorin' the Tardis in there somewhere. As if that weren't enough, our friendly remixers put Billy Joe through an effects processor. But somehow it all gels together for one of those really zen mashup moments.

wikipedia meme

picked up this meme from the blog of an old friend who doesn't know that i read it. pretty sure she doesn't know this one exists. one day i will alert her to my presence.

Do a Wikipedia search of your birthdate, minus the year; list three interesting events, three people who were born, and three people who died on that day.

Events:

• 1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turns down the honor. -could that be any more jean-paul satre-y? they're good thinkers you know, the french.
• 1976 - Red Dye No. 4 is banned by the US Food and Drug Administration after it is discovered that it causes tumors in the bladders of dogs. The dye is still used in Canada.
• 1987 - John Coolidge Adams's opera Nixon in China debuts at the Houston Grand Opera in Houston, Texas.

Birthdays:
Many cool people were born on my birthday, but i managed to pick 3.

• 1938 - Derek Jacobi, English actor
• 1938 - Christopher Lloyd, American actor -in my mind, there is no way christopher lloyd was born in 1938. strangely, i have no such prejudice about derek jacobi.
• 1903 - Curly Howard, American actor and comedian (d. 1952)

Oh what the hell, here are some other fun ones: Joan Fontaine, Timothy Leary, Catherine Deneuve, Jeff Goldblum, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (charlie manson devotee who tried to assasinate Gerald Ford), Ichiro, Annette Funicello, Robert Rauschenberg. Oh, and Brian Boitano.

Deaths:
Much more boring. Here are 2 that i've actually heard of...

• 1979 - Nadia Boulanger, French composer and composition teacher (b. 1887)
• 1906 - Paul Cezanne, French painter (b. 1839)
and hey, i'll go with this guy cause his bio is pretty cool
• 1565 - Jean, Vicomte d'Aguisy Grolier de Servieres, French bibliophile (b. 1479)

taking a brief respite from writing up my psychology of music paper. believe it or not, usually i try to produce a well written blog entry unless its a one-liner that i send in via cellphone. this entry however seems to be more of a stream of consciousness how-my-day-went i am a teenage girl blog entry.

Today started out horribly. In my head anyhow. I set my alarm for 8, which is for others i know just a normal time in the morning but consider that i've been going to bed at 6am for the last month or so and I hope you will agree that it is not exactly... agreeable.

I had to get up so early so that I could go to the concert hall where jeff works so that i could pop some balloons. yes, pop some balloons. I was recording impulse responses for an acoustics project. Acoustics is my horrible class this semester. it seems every semester i have one class that is just horribly horrible and destroys my will to live. ah well.

after bringing the equipment i had back to school, i decided i should go to the library. and i did. i was reading this book on auditory scene analysis and everything was horribly horrible again. i am not a violent person but seriously i was ready to destroy this book. Bregman (the author) is not very big on the old academic writing "first you tell them what you're going to say, then you say it, then you tell them what you said" bit. so the book can get a little hard to follow. 40 pages of talk about whether or not there's such a thing as a trajectory grouping and i had no idea WHY he was talking about that.

after i got to a certain point (and after i got to a certain point) i left the library. I went outside. i had a cup of coffee. and then i came back into the library. but before i started again, i did this old concentration/meditation/self-hypnosis thing i used to do before every show. and WOW did it work. my head cleared, i found myself able to focus, and more importantly able to regain focus if i lost it. for the first time in a week i didn't feel on the verge of a nervous breakdown. i took out anotebook, and started going through the chapter, actually taking notes. and now i have pages of notes in front of me which i am transcribing/fleshing out into my paper on schema-based auditory scene analysis.

Meanwhile, I also have to present on this topic tomorrow. And not just my paper: 2 other people's papers as well. It's a "group" presentation given by one person, which is pretty dumb because it's not like you can come up with a presentation as a group. actually the professor used to do group presentations but they were inevitably disastrous. I'm kinda peeved i got stuck with it. my other group members wanted to meet to make the presentation, but other than the general "no exit" quality of making a powerpoint w/ other people, the amount of time it would take me to travel to nyu to meet with them and then go back to queens is about as much time as I plan to spend putting it together. of course, the standards aren't very high. the presentations we've had so far have mostly sucked. actually, i taped myself donig a bit of the talk the other day, and was a bit annoyed because i'm a much better presenter in my head than i actually am.

ugh my computer setup is the worst in the history of the world. the orthopedist doesn't think i have carpal tunnel... yet. "minor nerve irritation." the good part was he has me on 4 aleve a day. yeehaw for drugs. i think i'll take some now.

you know i have tons of work to do if i start writing a blog post with actual substance

let's talk about how.

it's my experience that when i say "how does it work," i mean something completely different from most people. if i ask someone "how does the vcr work," they will show me the remote control, and the various buttons. to change the channel you press this button, etc. the tape goes in here.

excuse me, but that's not how it works, that's how you use it.

i see the same problem on a bunch of wikipedia pages. for example take XMLHTTP. I have no clue, after reading that article, how XMLHTTPRequest works. I know how you use it (via browser scripting languages), what you use it for (to communicate asynchronously between client and server in a web application) and some examples of applications that use it. I even know how some web browsers implement it (IE used to use an ActiveX component).

But I still don't know how it works, and hence, I still don't what it is. "What I cannot create I do not understand" -Richard Feynman.

However, my criticism of Wikipedia here should not be seen as general. There are many articles on technical subjects which are quite excellent.

But to the extent it is a problem, I think that this is a kind of manifestation of the old "computers are scary" syndrome. There definitely seem to be wikipedia editors who are frightened that if they include "technical" details like i am suggesting that the articles would be more like a technical manual and thus these details are not "enyclopedic." I would argue that this is somewhat backwards. Details like the "known problems" section of the XMLHTTP article are far less encyclopedic.

i am now going to take a very foolish stab at reformulating feynman for my self: when you understand how it works, you can understand why you use it that way, and when you understand why you use it that way, you can understand how you use it.