Neil Young made headlines last week when he appeared at the Wall Street Journal’s “D: Dive Into Media” conference and voiced his disapproval of the way music is being heard these days. “We live in a digital age,” Young said, “and unfortunately it’s degrading our music, not improving it.”
Young is deeply dissatisfied with the sound quality of compressed MP3 digital files, which he said carry only five percent of the data from the original vinyl or master recordings. “It’s not that digital is bad or inferior,” he told the Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Peter Kafka. “It’s that the way it’s being used is not sufficient to transfer the depth of the art.”
The full 32-minute interview is now available online, and can be seen above. Throughout the discussion, Young’s commitment to his cause is clear. “My goal,” he said, “is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years.”
Last week, Google hosted a gathering called “Solve for X,” which brought together entrepreneurs, innovators and scientists interested in finding technological solutions to the world’s greatest problems. These solutions weren’t small in scope. No, they were all “moonshots,” ideas that live in the “gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction; they are 10x improvement, not 10%.” And these moonshot ideas were all presented in TED-style talks that now live on the WeSolveForX website and the WeSolveforX YouTube Channel.
Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin kicked off the event and framed the project, paving the way for Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and One Laptop Per Child, to dream big and ask: Can emerging technologies empower children to learn to read on their own? Imagine how that would change the educational problems besetting the developing world? (Watch above.) Or how about this big thought from Adrien Treuille, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon, who imagines a day when knowledge creation won’t be driven by universities and corporations, but rather by loose groups of individuals taking advantage of the internet and big data. That talk appears right below.
Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance — Godfrey Reggio directed the 1982 film, and Philip Glass composed the music. Later, Reggio said that the film is wide open to interpretation, that “the viewer can take for herself what the film means.” “For some people it’s an environmental film, for some people it’s an ode to technology, for some people it’s a piece of shit, for other people it moves them deeply.” And for Wyatt Hodgson, it’s a film worth watching in a compressed, five-minute format, maybe because (as one viewer suggested) it highlights “one of the main dimensions of the film: the breakneck speed of our (crazy) world.”
Hodgson’s version strips out Glass’ original soundtrack, replacing it with music by the Art of Noise. But some crafty individual found a way to reproduce Glass’ composition at 1552% speed. You can listen below.
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It starts with Leonardo da Vinci’s famous sketches of flying machines, then moves to the first hot air balloon launched by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, the gliders created by Sir George Cayley (1804), and the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. These great moments and others all get covered in this Animated History of Aviation, an elegant little film produced by Utah Valley University, a college with a large aviation program of its own. We’ll add it to our collection of Great Science Videos.
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On February 18, 1994, Charles Bukowski had a fax machine installed in his home and immediately sent his first Fax poem to his publisher:
oh, forgive me For Whom the Bell Tolls,
oh, forgive me Man who walked on water,
oh, forgive me little old woman who lived in a shoe,
oh, forgive me the mountain that roared at midnight,
oh, forgive me the dumb sounds of night and day and death,
oh, forgive me the death of the last beautiful panther,
oh, forgive me all the sunken ships and defeated armies,
this is my first FAX POEM.
It’s too late:
I have been
smitten.
Alas this was also Bukowski’s last poem. Just 18 days after Bukowski embraced technology, the poet (once famously called the “laureate of American lowlife” by Pico Iyer) died of leukemia in California. He was 73 years old. According to John Martin at Black Sparrow Press, the Fax poem has never been published or collected in a book. Booktryst has a whole lot more on the story, and we have the singer/songwriter Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski’s poem, The Laughing Heart. You can also listen to three other Bukowski poems (in audio) here on YouTube:
Before Jim Henson joined Sesame Street in 1969, the great puppeteer took on various projects during the 60s, sometimes creating experimental films (for example, the Oscar-nominated short Time Piece), other times producing primers on puppet making, and then pursuing the occasional commercial project — like the one just uncovered by AT&T.
Back in 1963, Henson was asked to create a short film for a Bell Data Communications Seminar held in Chicago. The conference organizers sent a three-page memo to Henson outlining the main themes of the conference — one being the strange and sometimes fraught relationship between man and machine. Henson’s film only runs three minutes, but it gets the message across … and then some.
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Some of the big websites are going black today to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, that has been winding its way through Congress. We’re going to handle things in our own way — by illuminating the matter with a little intelligent media.
Backed by the Motion Picture Association of America, SOPA is designed to debilitate and effectively shut down foreign-based websites that sell pirated movies, music and other goods. That all sounds fine on the face of things. But the legislation, if enacted, would carry with it a series of unexpected consequences that could change the internet as we know it. Among other things, the law could be used to shut down American sites that unwittingly host or link to illegal content — and without giving the sites due process, a real day in court. Big sites like YouTube and Twitter could fall under pressure, and so could countless small sites. Needless to say, that could have a serious chilling effect on the openness of the web and free speech.
To give a quick example: It could conceivably be the case that Stanford might object to my featuring their video above, file a claim, and shut the site down without giving me notice and an opportunity to remove the material (as exists under current law). It’s not likely. But it is possible, and the risk increases with every post we write. If this law passes, the amount of material we could truly safely cover would become ludicrously small, so much so that it wouldn’t be worth running the site and using the web as an educational medium.
The Obama administration has come out against SOPA and PIPA, sidelining the legislation for now. But you can almost guarantee that revisions will be made, and the bills will return soon. So, while other sites go black, we’re going to do what we do best. We’re featuring video of an event held in December by the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (SCIS). What’s Wrong with SOPA brings together a series of informed opponents to SOPA, including Stanford law professors and business leaders within Silicon Valley. (Find their bios below the jump.) Some of the most incisive comments are made by Fred von Lohmann, a Google lawyer, starting at the 19:10 mark.
Note: If you’re looking to understand the debate from the perspective of copyright holders, then we’d recommend you spend time watching, Follow the Money: Who Profits from Piracy?, a video that tracks the theft of one movie, making it a microcosm of a larger problem.
Think of it as the ultimate slow-motion movie camera. Researchers at M.I.T. have developed an imaging system so fast it can trace the motion of pulses of light as they travel through liquids and solids. To put it into perspective, writes John Markoff in The New York Times, “If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years.”
We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize the propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionths of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. Direct recording of reflected or scattered light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that records millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints. Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nanosecond long event.
You can learn more by watching the video above by Melanie Gonick of the M.I.T. News Office, or by visiting the project website.
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