Fail to Reject

Since yesterday I accidentally did a post for music, today will be a computer application. Like anyone reads these anyways... I want to recommend another neat Firefox extension called Html Validator . This one is great for web developers, because it adds a really easy interface to validate your html. For every page you visit, the extension will check that page against the w3c standards. A little icon in the right bottom corner of the browser will let you know if there are any warnings or errors. If you view the source of the page, it shows all the errors, highlighted in the source, when you click on an error message, it takes you to that location in the source and highlights it for you. There is also a little help window about that error, and lots of other features I haven't begun to use yet. But I think this is a dang awesome extension.

In music, there is Serialism. Read about it in Wikipedia , and the music chamber . I wrote a serialist piece once, it was fun. I would love to do it again. If you want to hear my serialist piece, bug me.

Dear Readers, I do believe that you will be greatly interested in this article appearing in The Guardian titled " Don't Dumb Me Down ". It discusses science in the media. The author presents a paper on research he has conducted with some ideas on why science in the media is so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong. He breaks the stories down into three categories: Wacky stories, scare stories, and "breakthrough" stories, and discusses each type. From the article: "Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence." The only weird thing about th...

Open music record label named Magnatune (www.magnatune.com) . They call it try before you buy, you can listen to the full albums online of many artists released on this label. They cover a wide span of genres like classical, electronica, jazz, metal, rock, world, etc. Pretty neat stuff, if you ask me.

I am a big fan of winamp, but sometimes I want something smaller and simple: musikCube . musikCube is an open source audio player for windows. Features include: * very low memory footprint * clean and intuitive user interface * blazing fast navigation * fully drag and drop compatible * powerful batch tagging * an integrated cross fader * an integrated cd ripper I like the fact that it is just simple. I also like the dynamic playlists, based on tags and other song meta data. (last played, recently added, etc), and you can make your own spiffy dynamic playlists. I also like how you set up the folders where you store your music, and then anytime you add new songs to your hard drive, you just hit synchronise and it updates the library with the new songs. It also has global access keys, so you can make it go to the next song, play, pause, etc while using another application, so you don't need to divert your focus to the player to take care of things like ...

This website will tell: http://www.die.net/moon/

This week I saw the movie "Primer", which is an independent film that was shown at the Sundance festival in 2004. It was created by Shane Carruth. It is a science fiction film with a theme of time travel. I really liked it and there are a number of reasons: 1) The writer tried very hard to make the scientific conversations actually real, they are talking about real technology, etc. This is great because a lot of the time I am bugged immensely while watching movies with computers and technology and everything is horribly simplified (and wrong) for the average movie consumer. It is refreshing that someone took care in making a movie that isn't blatantly wrong in its scientific aspects. 2) Although the movie is slow, and this is a complaint by most people, I liked the pace. I like other movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Andromeda Strain . 3) The movie is pretty complicated and I didn't understand it all after a first viewing. This is great, because I like...

For some reason, I have had this song in my head all morning, so I had better share it with you. It is a song by Kai Esbensen that he wrote for Bullet Lodge , the Minneapolis chapter of the Immersion Composition Society. It is science-y.