Thursday, 18 December 2003

Coffee Flavored Breakfast Cereal Musrum writes "Hubbards, the New Zealand based makers of fine breakfast cereals, have launched 'Cafe au Lait', which they describe as "light coffee flavored ... [Slashdot] And for lunch there is a hamburger flavored cereal...then maybe a miso or pasta flavored cereal for dinner....? 7:26:31 PM    comment []; Another China photo.... 7:12:21 PM    comment []; Robot Wrong. "Robot" comes from Karl Capek's play R.U.R. ["Rossum's Universal Robots"] 1928, I think. They've just made a movie of it. Crude socialist allegory where the robots revolt against the management. Hey, I didn't teach drama for years fer nuthin'! - LR • 12/17/03; 11:41:33 AM Thanks. I seem to remember that the word Robot is derived from the word for working in either Polish or Tchek, yes? 6:39:14 AM    comment []; Graffiti Archaeology Eric Rodenbeck and Cassidy Curtis have created a masterful timelapse photographic collage of various San Francisco graffiti sites to show how these urban canvases have changed over the last five years. via [BoingBoing] 6:32:53 AM    comment []; iPods make you sexy and thin Tom Coates' genius iPod syncing idea. Dear Apple: this, please. You're coming up to your front door, you pull the iPod from your pocket, you do the spinning thing until your menu is pointing to sync and then as you are about to enter your house your local copy of iTunes powers up, selects the same song that you're currently listening to, skips forward to the same moment in the track and fades the volume up (at the same time as your iPod gradually fades the volume down) so you can seemlessly remove your headphones without spoiling your auditory experience. Wouldn't that be neat?! Meanwhile eBay Germany is handling the sale of a gold plated iPod. (Shiny meets bling, via iPod hacks), and via iPod Lounge, comes news of the Mp3 Gym. A personal trainer on your iPod. [Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent] This Ben Hammersley is hilarious, and so is the notion of a gold-plated iPod. 6:31:27 AM    comment []; "Hit Song Science" When Norah Jones released her first album, she was a long shot at best. ''Come Away With Me'' was filled with mellow, sultry tunes -- precisely the opposite of the histrionic diva pop crowding the charts. Virtually no one expected Jones to score a major hit. No one, that is, except for a piece of artificial intelligence called Hit Song Science, a program that tries to determine, with mathematical precision, whether a song is going to be a Top 40 hit. When the scientists fed Jones's album into that computer, alarm bells went off: the program predicted that eight tracks would hit the charts. ''We were like, whoa, that's funky,'' says Mike McCready, the C.E.O. of Polyphonic HMI, the Barcelona-based company that developed the software application. [collision detection] I dunno, wouldn't that take all of the fun out of it? Occasionally we get to hear a gem of a song precisely because somebody signed an unusual band to a recording deal in hopes to sell a ton of records and the resulting album is not very popular, but excellent. Now, if Hit Song Science were used, that same band might not get signed in the first place. The beauty of A+R (an old term that means Artist and Repertoire, dating from the days that artists were told what to sing/play) is that the big record companies do not have a clue about creativity and music and what really makes a hit...and the fact that they don't know lets some artists slip in the back door and make wonderful albums. 6:26:00 AM    comment []; Marble Bridge, Emperor's Palace, Beijing 3 5:47:49 AM    comment [];

© Copyright 2003 Ottmar Liebert. Last update: 31.12.03; 8:54:40.