soapbox

Obviously, there’s no way I’m second-guessing my vote for Obama, but a couple of recent appointments are a little concerning. First, naming former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary is alarming because, put bluntly, ethanol is stupid! Using high-quality farmland to grow corn for fuel is both ethically dubious and essentially carbon neutral. Maybe it helps replace a little bit of Middle-Eastern oil, but for the amount of money it will involve, we could do a lot more.

Secondly, appointing the RIAA’s attack dog as the #3 man at the Justice Department? worrisome: he went out of his way to recruit the RIAA as a very lucrative client: his law firm bills some partners’ time at a princely $1,000 an hour.

(i also like this and http://drnealwinslow.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/riaa.gif)

  

This, of course, is where AAS meetings get interesting.

Andrea and I gathered together a random group of people, including one girl who I’m pretty sure was the tallest woman at the conference. (Note: still not taller than me, although astronomers have a very very strange height distribution. It’s like being in the Netherlands.) Dinner was tasty, but nothing to write much about, just a faux-Irish American place. My general plan was to create some new friends so I’d have someone to talk to at the party rather than being bored and alone.

Then Andrea bailed on me.

And the tall girl asked if they were going to card at the door since she was only 20. (Note: YIKES!)

So, that left two people from UC Davis and one of my friends from NMSU that I was going to meet up with.

Yadda yadda yadda, people going to hotels to change, things taking longer than expected, we get to the party… the drink special is a Galileo and seems to have no redeeming characteristics other than being strong. I decide to start my drinking slightly later. Since we were late, that puts me a good three drinks behind everyone else.

The good stuff starts below.
(more…)

  

So I know that last week I posted on how I prefer buying CDs to mp3s b/c of music quality issues, and I do stand by that, but this morning I present to you a great way to waste 5 minutes on really, really low-quality, midi-style music… and yet, it’s pretty impressive.

In honor of Brian:

But these (Beach Boys, Joan Jett/The Arrows), are also worth a look. In particular, Bohemian Rhapsody must have been a lot of work if the guy didn’t write script to do it.

  

I’ll preface this by saying that the HP touch-screen ads look pretty sweet, and I actually had a brief moment of “I WANT!” … No need for a mouse, you just reach up and grab stuff on the screen, move it where you want, etc… what’s better than that? Well, nothing, at least for the first minute or two – after a little while though your arms are going to get tired and you’ll be frustrated by the slowness of the 1-to-1 movement ratio (as compared to the acceleration algorithm of a mouse/touchpad/trackball).

If you don’t believe me, use FluidTunes for 10 minutes and see how that goes. I’d put this in the category of “really cool but not like I’d use it every day” – you use your Mac’s iSight camera to detect hand gestures you make in front of it and flip/swipe through your iTunes library. Once you’ve selected a song or album (in Cover Flow mode), you then swipe at a ‘button’ to play a selected album. The program shows what you look like on your camera behind your album covers, so you can center your hand over buttons to press them – while looking pretty goofy to the outside observer.

  

I don’t buy much from the iTunes store.  Sure I grab my fair share of podcasts and I try to remember to get the free music every Tuesday (now we’re into Christmas tunes, btw), but I’ve probably purchased a total of ~ 10 songs.

That said, I think that this site is pretty cool, letting you search for an album/artist/song and then listing the prices at iTunes, Amazon, and Wal-mart.  Simple, but useful, and the search also returns direct purchase links to the respective sites (and for iTunes it indicates if the song is available in the DRM-free iTunes Plus format).  It’s fun to type semi-obscure stuff in and see who has it/doesn’t.  The Hot Deals tab is pretty self-explanatory, indicating special deals, but it also lists (only one of?) the iTunes free songs of the week.

So, if that’s your thing, enjoy.  [snob] Me I’ll still buy those archaic things with holes in the middle of them – some vinyl, some smaller and shinier – because 128 kbps sounds kinda crappy on a good system/without background noise. [/snob]

  

Inspired by the release of the mythical G’n'R album, Chinese Democracy, PoptartsSuckToasted has put together a list of top-10 of “long-awaited” albums, ones for which

we had to wait a long time for, but were also wholly worth the wait once we finally got to hear them. When you really think about it there aren’t too many of these. Sure there are a lot of bands that had huge gaps between good albums, but very few went on long hiatuses and managed to crawl their way back into the music listening consciousness.

I might quibble with a couple and suggest a couple others, but in general it’s a well-reasoned list – and you get free music downloads so why not check it out while waiting for tomorrow’s iTunes Free Music Tuesday?

  

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I have always wanted to do a better job of music labeling and tagging, but with a many-gig library it’s just too daunting… maybe if I had another summer of being an REU student at a linear accelerator it might get done, but that’s about it. But I do enjoy my “4- or 5-star music” playlist, and it would be nice if magically all my songs could be rated. I’m sure that it’s an applescript waiting to be written, but I’m lazy, so instead I did a google and found AutoRate. This little app is assigns each song in your library a rating R given by:
R = 100 (
where is the main play frequency, is standard deviations, S is the number of skips per month, and is the skip penalty coefficient.

In practice, however, this results in many of my favorite songs receiving ratings in the 0.5 to 1.5 stars range, I think as a result of excessively punishing ’skips’ ( too large, I think the program defaults to . So, back to Applescript I suppose. The question really is what algorithm to use? The older and simpler iRate just used something along the lines of (play count/days in library) * user rating, but I also don’t want to overly penalize those gems that I’ve had forever. Any suggestions on a formula to use?