are social networks the end of privacy?

read the article here. (from scientific american)

“Bacon.”

just when i thought corporate america couldn’t be more strange or offensive, along came this new ad campaign from wendy’s to remind me of how absurd things are. my favorite thing about it is their bizarre technique of making their food look very, very disgusting. enjoy!

in case you’re curious, here’s what it looks like before the wendy’s box pops up.

for a really intelligent video about how consuming bacon (and all meat) contributes to global warming, check this out. its a lecture (by ny times food critic mark bittman), that is much more engrossing than it sounds.

the enter sign

david byrne, can you please stop being so awesome?

falling in love with talking heads isn’t enough. this year david byrne has blown my mind with his amazing playing the building exhibit, the fantastic new album he did with brian eno, and now this:

so now byrne has taken art, cycling, and his obsession with functionality to create these amazing bike racks throughout nyc. each one comments on the neighborhood its contained in.

byrne, please take a momentary break from your awesomeness so the rest of us can catch up with what you’re doing.

the sun emits audio

toward the final stages of mixing the enter sign it still didn’t feel ‘done’ for some reason. the main thing was the ending felt too abrupt.

since the album is about going blind from ’sunlight’ i was curious if there was any audio the sun emitted that i could use. it didn’t take long to be led to this haunting sample from the university of sydney. go to this page to hear some really really really trippy things.

why haven’t i seen this yet?

it took me forever to find this, but here’s some leaked footage for the right now “troubled” where the wild things are, directed by spike jonze.

high speed camera

thanks to sam for showing me this incredibly tripped out video:

the long now

man, after hearing the great bryne/eno track they just released, i started reading a bunch of eno’s philosophies and came upon this really cool website and idea. before i post it, let me just point out that talking heads is one of my favorite bands of all time and this new byrne/eno collab is extremely exciting to me.

anyway, here’s an excerpt from longnow.org

“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist Daniel Hillis:

“When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.”

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.

Hillis, who developed the ‘massive parallel’ architecture of the current generation of supercomputers, devised the mechanical design of the Clock and is now building the second prototype (the first prototype is on display in London at the Science Museum). The Clock’s works consist of a binary digital-mechanical system which is so accurate and revolutionary that we have patented several of its elements. (With 32 bits of accuracy it has precision equal to one day in 20,000 years, and it self-corrects by ‘phase-locking’ to the noon Sun.) For the way the eventual Clock is experienced (its size, structure, etc.), we expect to keep proliferating design ideas for a while. In 01999 Long Now purchased part of a mountain in eastern Nevada whose high white limestone cliffs may make an ideal site for the ultimate 10,000-year Clock. In the meantime Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose continue to experiment with ever-larger prototype Clocks.

Long Now added a “Library” dimension with the realization of the need for content to go along with the long-term context provided by the Clock - a library of the deep future, for the deep future. In a sense every library is part of the 10,000-year Library, so Long Now is developing tools (such as the Rosetta Disk, The Long Viewer the Long Server) that may provide inspiration and utility to the whole community of librarians and archivists. The Long Bets project - whose purpose is improving the quality of long-term thinking by making predictions accountable - is also Library-related.

The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time.”

The Enter Sign

for the last couple months, i’ve been making my first full length lp, and second release as happy prescriptions. its called ‘the enter sign.’ i’ve spent over a month on the mix-down which has taught me a 2240 lbs and given me good ideas on to how to record the next album. anyway, this project is close to the (quotes) finish line and i’m very excited to get it out to you! here’s what the artwork looks like:

the art was made my emma sparber who i’m very indebted to for. (what kind of expensive alcohol do you like, emma?)

the cd is 7 songs, 40 minutes, and more abrasive than previous stuff i’ve done. aside from the normal shoegazy sounds i try to go for, i was listening to lots of post punk and psych rock, esp portland psych rock. the main influences on this album were liars, psychic ills, brian jonestown massacre, upsidedown, and PiL. but really, i was listening to dozens of bands for inspiration, and i’m indebted to them all (what’s your favorite type of wine, david byrne?)

the lyrics revolve around a man who goes blind from looking into the sun. the sun itself is some sort of strange amalgam of religion, media, radio waves, sex, and drugs.

i’ll let you know when its available. should be soon!!

xo.