Haha, a bit of a drive yea.
Synthesizers and guitars, mostly.
Death Grips - Hip hop/punk/noise
Bizarre, aggressive, and ridiculously creative music. I'm fascinated by musicians that manage to be simultaneously reckless and focused, though I should expect nothing less from any project that includes the drummer from Hella.
Songs: Hunger Games, Takyon Full Albums: Exmilitary, The Money Store, No Love Deep Web
Lola y Manuel - Flamenco
A husband and wife songwriting duo from mid-70's Spain. Arab-influenced singing, technically spectacular guitar, and quite progressive compositions that expand, rather than abandon the traditional flamenco forms. PM me for a copy of their first album, it's nearly impossible to find these days and is soul splittingly beautiful.
Songs: Sangre Gitana y Mora, Nuevo Dia
Great idea, I'm going to join you. Nothing of value will be lost.
March 26th: Reddit crashes as we open infinitely many new tabs in a fit of Burroughs-tier depravity.
Went cold turkey on caffeine a couple weeks ago after sustaining a 3-6 cup daily intake for months. Been feeling unmotivated, taking the occasional mid-day nap, and having unpleasant thoughts along the lines of 'where's my god damn coffee' when urges went unfulfilled. The first 3 days were lazy, headache-clouded, and unproductive.
After that, though, I started to notice that I felt like working on projects in the afternoon and evening. It's a minor change in mood that's led to a major change in behavior, at least in the short term. Worth the costs, even if only for a brief change of pace.
I'm working on an algorithmic music system. The (likely unachievable) goal is to make a generative clone of my own creative process. It's a kind of catharsis, bringing every unspeakable intuition bubbling up to the surface to be translated into a hierarchy of computational processes. Lots of trial and error, red herrings, and accidental success. My short-term goal is to be able to co-perform with it live in an entirely improvised manner, maybe by the end of 2013.
The current focus is 'groove', and it's been a nightmare trying to find a common thread between dissimilar patterns that sound good. If anyone know of any good papers on the subject, please share! I'm just going to throw some boltzmann machines at the problem before moving on to something else.
Other than that, just some Coursera classes, finalizing a DIY 16 bit MIDI->CV DAC, and transcribing a really good flamenco record.
As an American male who went to work the day after breaking his collar bone, I can testify that without a doubt, my rugged outward appearance would get thrown aside if proper health care and sick time were available to me. Scamming an x-ray by using a fake name at the hospital and carefully rationing what little methadone I could buy from local junkies, while Cowboy As Hell, is a pretty awful way to get by. I'd much rather be at home in bed mending then lifting boxes of apples with one arm and ensuring that my bones set at an odd angle.
I think that if European style health care was available here that we'd adapt pretty quickly, rugged independence be damned.
Different audience, different language. I'm just impressed that a NY Op-Ed actually contained these sentences:
My case for these conclusions relies on three main observations. The first is that our own intelligence is an evolved biological solution to a kind of optimization problem, operating under very tight constraints of time, energy, raw materials, historical starting point and no doubt many other factors. [...] Second, this biological endowment, such as it is, has been essentially constant, for many thousands of years. It is a kind of fixed point in the landscape, a mountain peak on which we have all lived for hundreds of generations. [...] my third observation – we face the prospect that designed nonbiological technologies, operating under entirely different constraints in many respects, may soon do the kinds of things that our brain does, but very much faster, and very much better, in whatever dimensions of improvement may turn out to be available.
That's a very gentile nudge toward a radical shift in how intelligence is generally thought of. Simple analogies and simple terminology (except for 'optimization problem', which I think could be understood from the context) for people reading the paper over a bowl of cereal.
Not in the slightest. DH does a good job of providing you with the things that he later asks you to use.
Has this study been corroborated? 13 years should be enough time for a modest amount of supporting evidence to become known.