Author: dave-o

Meat vs. Machine

Nature can best a drone…

…and a dude with a rudimentary medieval weapon can best a drone…

..and then this super-genius has to fuck it all up: 

(Doesn’t help that the fucking thing sounds like a billion mosquitos all crying out for vengeance.)

Thanks, buddy; our fate as biological batteries for a reality-bending one world robo-overlord is basically sealed.

I Love This . . . [UPDATE!!!]

. . . but it literally goes 30 seconds too long.  Also, she really should be smoking an e-cigarette, right?

UPDATE: My lovely wife points out that, given the content of the smoker’s NDE, we are perhaps meant to understand that she has in fact been sent to Purgatory, Hell, or a non-Xtian vision of the afterlife(!!!)

Mind—blow!

Holy Shit! You Will Not Believe Weezer’s Creative Process

Artists: Even if you are lukewarm on Weezer, this interview with Rivers Cuomo (the band’s frontman) is so worth your time.  I’ve got more than a little experience with collaboration, creativity under duress, constrained writing techniques, and Oulipo-like methods, and yet I’ve never come across a process like this, which is at once ornately technical (spreadsheets, demo files, something akin to A/B testing) and is so meticulous in the interest of harnessing randomness and stripping context and formal planning out of the creative process.

Weezerians: To those who dig Weezer already, know this: The stories in their songs are not stories they wrote, but stories you wrote in response to the fragments they gathered and the formulae they use to collect and organize those fragments.

Public Service Announcement: Song Exploder is consistently awesome (for example, it introduced my 9yo to Iggy Pop and made him an instant fan).  So worth subscribing and supporting.

Seeing Sound: Couscous, Steel Cafe Tables, String Instruments, Math

Note that the different Chladni (say “clad-knee”) Figures he generates corresponds to different pitches (i..e, frequencies) and timbres (think “flavors of sound”), and that he does this by creating a node (which is technically any point in a wave where it crosses zero, and literally the places where a vibrating thing—like a guitar or cello string—is not moving).

All of which is neat, but mostly I just posted it because it looks hella sweeeeet!

360º Views from the Surface of Mars(!!!)

These are fun on your computer, and absolutely immersively astounding on your phone/tablet. The future is here, but unevenly distributed—with some portions dune-buggying around Mars, picking at rocks and wrecking up the joint.

Consider this your daily reminder that, in contrast to how things were when I was a kid, Mars is now populated—and it’s ruled by robots!

NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover at Namib Dune (360 view) – YouTube

(props to Terence Hawkins for just messaging me about a typo; that cat writes good books)

Josh Burker’s Scratchbox Turntable

Josh Burker—an early reviewer of my latest DIY book, Junkyard Jam Band—didn’t just build a sweet-ass Scratchbox (although he did do that)

Josh went one better and adapted it to a hella rad turntable interface.

Oh.

My.

Daaaaaaaamn!

I love this sooooo much! Check it out:

Wanna build your own Scratchbox (or Scratchbox-inspired awesomeness)? Check out my full illustrated Scratchbox build instructions on the MAKE magazine website.

For a brief history of the credit card magstripe that makes this all possible, check out the first bit of this Planet Money podcast: Episode 695: Put A Chip On It : Planet Money : NPR:

(thx Josh!)

Showed my 9yo the ROGUE ONE trailer….

… He asked, “Why are all the new Star Wars about girls?” I pointed out that the first six weren’t. It was immediately clear to him that it made little sense for 3/4 of the stories to almost exclusively focus on 1/2 the population. This caused him 0 misery or cognitive dissonance. He said, “Oh, yeah,” and moved on with his life.

DEAR MEN OLD ENOUGH TO VOTE, DRINK, AND OWN GUNS: Please take a cue from your young sons—or brush up on your math—and chill the fuck out.

Thank you; that is all.