Mike Ferner writes: Has This Country Gone Completely Insane?
This afternoon, drinking a cup of coffee while sitting in the Jesse Brown V.A. Medical Center on Chicago’s south side, a Veterans Administration cop walked up to me and said, “OK, you’ve had your 15 minutes, it’s time to go.”
“Huh?”, I asked intelligently, not quite sure what he was talking about.
“You can’t be in here protesting,” officer Adkins said, pointing to my Veterans For Peace shirt.
“Well, I’m not protesting, I’m having a cup of coffee,” I returned, thinking that logic would convince Adkins to go back to his earlier duties of guarding against serious terrorists.
Flipping his badge open, he said, “No, not with that shirt. You’re protesting and you have to go.” Read on …
July 3rd, 2006
As always, I’m interested in the issue of perception and how subjective it is. The McCollough Effect is at first glance *no pun intended* a simple ghostly after-image optical illusion: Stare at two colored gridded squares for a few minutes, and then at some non-colored squares. The non-colored gridded squares will now be surrounded by hazes of those two colors. The crazy thing is that supposedly the effect of staring at these squares for a few minutes can last for hours, even through sleep! And according to the site, coffee and your level of extroversion can also amplify the effect! I say, wtf! Just goes to show how our perception of reality is so easily skewed. I’m going to leave those squares visible on my monitor all day and see how screwed up I can make myself. *grin*
July 3rd, 2006
Nick Southall has an excellent (though quite long) article called Imperfect Sound Forever in Stylus Magazine which covers the trend of the music industry to over-compress music that is being released these days. What this technically means is that the tunes we listen to these days have much less dynamic range between the quiet bits and louds bits. One of the main factors for this is that these overly compressed, or ‘hot’ tracks stand out compared to other tracks that are less compressed. This sells records. This consistently loud (or ‘hot’) barrage of sound throughout the music we are exposed to makes us less likely to really listen carefully - almost as if the music were produced to overcome the background sounds that are almost assumed in our day and age - the drone of the car engine, the noises on the sidewalk, the hum of the office copier. The article covers the topic from a variety of angles - technological, societal, personal. A fascinating read - I even read the followup as well as a piece on the music oversaturation we encounter these days as downloading music gets so easy and our hard disks are filled with thousands of hours worth of music. What does that mean for that one excellent song? For the music I produce?
July 3rd, 2006
I’m not sure what to make of the Jack dude from the Jack in the Box ad campaign having his own myspace page. Oh wait, I know. It means myspace is now so painfully obvious as a marketing strategy tool that even the big corporations have glommed onto it. *barf*
July 3rd, 2006
This External Hard Drive from Western Digital has a pretty cool feature - it has a very nice looking gauge on the front that indicates the used/available capacity at a glance. This is a such a simple and useful thing that it’s amazing it isn’t a standard feature for drives. I’ve seen it done on a USB Flash drive, but not a HD. At 1/2 a terrabyte, this puppy sure packs alot of storage, but comes with a corresponding price tag….
July 3rd, 2006