ihatemusic

short sound clips of each piece up now Jon, why are your recent clips shorter than previous ones, which were ~3+ minutes long? 1:30-2:00 seems way too short to me to give an attractive impression of the pieces (e.g. I listened to the Pisaro/Sugimoto clips, and just didn't think they would help "sel...

Dan Warburton wrote:Fie upon me, I should have known that

Being anal about such things, I'll clarify that the Greek pronunciation of the letter is 'fee'. I don't know what the official Erstwhile pronunciation is, but I'll be sticking with the original in any case.

jon has expressed before on this board that he's never been particularly interested in experimental fiction (isn't that right?-- seriously, correct me if i've misremembered). i would never recommend 'book of the new sun' to him for that reason. I agree with what you wrote about Wolfe, and said some...

I found Egan's Distress the weakest of his novels I've read, though it has its enthusiasts.

Yeah, Banks is a highly reliably entertaining and substantive SF writer.

mudd wrote:we tried to hard, and now they're taking it all away.

What do you mean here?

It's a huge drag. I spent 8.5 years there, it was a major part of my life while I was at Rice.

Some comments on Gene Wolfe. The Book of the New Sun is purely a science fiction work - there are no fantastic elements in it (regarding the SF/F genre division). It bears a (I think deliberate) very casual overall resemblance to a fantasy milieu, but that's as far as such a comparison goes. I don't...

I just got the TP box myself, and haven't rewatched it yet (haven't watched the series in many years), and I don't remember many details about FWWM, but man, I really loved the scene with a bloody Annie appearing in Laura's bed (am I remembering that correctly?). That was a gem of a scene, connectin...

'O' and 'Ö' are two different letters in German, the umlaut is not just an accent mark. 'O E' is an acceptable substitute for non-umlaut-friendly keyboard.s One non-negligible practical issue is online searches: 'brotzmann' will return 'brötzmann', but 'broetzmann' will not. That issue alone swings...

We have been assured all along by the major record companies ever since then that the prices of CDs would fall to a "reasonable" level. I think inflation provides some necessary context to the issue in general. $15 now was $3.70 in 1975. Were many people back then griping about high prices at that ...

bryan wrote: I'll take some ill scientifical RSS news feeds or blogs...

Hard to go wrong here: http://scienceblogs.com/

Lots of cumulative posts, you might want to stick with the 'selected' feed: http://scienceblogs.com/sample/editors-feed.xml

i know you don't like krugman, jon (though of course i have no idea why), but a friend pointed out to me earlier his dismantling of this op-ed: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/file-under-vile/ as far as i can see, his reasoning is pretty airtight. Unsurprisingly, there are counter-argum...

I think that any argument about cost should be tempered by the probable benefits of the proposed changes. Of course that's true - that's the idea behind the exotic :) notion of "cost-benefit analysis". One big problem with the current bill and surrounding politics is more the opposite - that the be...

My son, 3 yrs old at the time, labeled it, when iirc Rowe/Nakamura was on, "elevator music", since it sounded a bit like elevators (of which he's a huge fan). I thought that was hilarious, and as apt as any description. Ever since then, I've used it as such with him consistently, presumably planting...

Out of DMG's latest newsletter about the upcoming Mosaic set: "this set DOES NOT include the Time Zones [1 LP] duet with Richard Teitelbaum [so much for 'complete'], nor the For Two Pianos [1 LP] which is performed by Rzewski and Oppens" Time Zones wasn't Arista specifically (It was Freedom, I thin...

Randy Porter in Oakland released a cd in 1994 called Big Music, Little Musicians as a result of improv classes for elementary students. Don't know how to get a hold of a copy, but you can probably track someone down associated with it (maybe through Dan Plonsey?). I remember it being pretty decent f...

I'll be at the Ottawa show.

Case dismissed! The format has been exonerated. Actually, I kinda think that argument does do that, in that it implies that the sonic compromises are subject to comparative valuation against the gains from degree of portability, and subsequent advantages. And contrary to (implied) claims above, equ...

Salty Swift wrote:What other features of this gadget should I be utilizing

Smart playlists, which could, depending on your listening habits or desires, range from mildly useful to transformative.

the reason this seems like a silly thing to me to bring up in this context (and the earlier context, for different reasons) is that it's quite obvious that every listen by every person will be at least slightly different, but we're talking about the difference between potentially being able to hear...

washline wrote:In other words, something of the order of YouTube vs. HiDef.

A uselessly wild exaggeration. You could test a hundred thousand people, and not one would fail to accurately distinguish a youtube vid vs an HD one. A large majority would probably fail to distinguish a decent mp3 and cd.