June 29, 2006
Pitchfork presents...
Brillant video on page 10 ....
Village People: Sex Over The Phone. Why wasn't this song as popular as YMCA??????
June 28, 2006
June 27, 2006
Underworld
So I'm not a big fan of web-based music downloading. iTunes is a butt munch. I like the feel of a rock hard CD against my fingers. Call me old fashoned. Butt.... Underworld is apparently releasing a series of download only musical experiences(?). I just dowloaded "i'm a big sister, and i'm a girl, and i'm a princess, and this is my horse". Its a little ambient in tone. If anyone wants it I'll find a way to get it to you so you won't have to pay the conversion rate from Pounds to US.
June 26, 2006
Drink what you like
SOMETIMES YOU have to hand it to the French. Insular, smug, and
culturally arrogant they may often be; but they also don't go in
for guff about any attack on traditional values being tantamount
to fomenting class warfare.
The most recent assault on a sacred French cow emerged against
the unlikely background of a doctoral dissertation entitled
"Taste: A Study in the Representation of Chemical Substances in
the Arena of Consciousness." Not, ordinarily, a subject to
engage the deeper passions, but the author, Frđ_ric Brochet, was
concerned not with taste in general but with taste as applied to
the evaluation and appreciation of wine.
Brochet employed three distinct methodologies: computerized
textual analysis of over 100,000 expert tasting notes (including
9,000 by American wine guru Robert M. Parker Jr.); comparison of
ratings by expert tasters in totally blind and open tastings of
the same wines; and real-time functional magnetic imaging of the
brains of tasters in the act of tasting.
After appropriate statistical massaging, Brochet's results prove
that a lot of what wine connoisseurs say about wine is humbug: A
side-by-side chart of best-to-worst rankings of 18 wines by a
roster of experienced tasters showed about as much consistency
as a table of random numbers.
To collect his own tasting data, Brochet played a couple pretty
dirty tricks on his volunteers. In one tasting, he served a
white wine and elicited all the usual descriptions: "fresh, dry,
honeyed, lively." Later he served the same wine dyed red: Out
came the red terms: "intense, spicy, supple, deep." In another
test, he submitted a mid-range Bordeaux in two different
bottles, one labeled as a cheap table wine, the other bearing a
grand cru etiquette: Guess which one was "woody, complex, and
round" and which was "short, light, and faulty"?
If Brochet had kept his findings in dissertation form, all might
yet have been well in the land of fine vines. But he cheekily
submitted it to AcadôŽe Amorim, a Portuguese wine-cork-making
firm which gives an annual prize to scholars its selection
committee feels have made the greatest contribution to the
science of wine. The grand prize for 2001 went to "a study of
genetic polymorphism in the cultivated vine (Vitis vinifera L.)
by means of microsatellite markers." But Brochet's little
bombshell took runner-up position, and la merde promptly hit le
ventilateur.
The press, predictably, has had a field day. "Drinkers have long
suspected it, but now French researchers have finally proved
it," burbled the London Times' Adam Sage from Paris; "wine
'experts' know no more than the rest of us." The same paper's
Kate Muir was even tarter in an item in her Diary column:
"Following rigorous textual analysis of the Hachette, Parker,
and Gault Millau wine guides, Brochet has concluded that their
comments are 'baloney.' For this he gets a doctorate."
Delightful as it is to catch masters of wine as red in the face
as the (dyed) wine in their glasses, Brochet's study aims to go
beyond mere pantsing of poseurs. In the introduction to his
prizewinning paper, he writes: "Tasting is [a form of]
representation. Indeed, when our brain performs the task of
'recognizing' or 'comprehending,' it is manipulating
representations. In reality, the taste of wine is a perceptual
representation, because it manifests an interaction between
consciousness and reality."
OK, maybe you had to be thereˇŞor, better, read the whole essay,
which is available on the AcadôŽe Amorim Web site
(www.academie-amorim.com). What Brochet's study demonstrates is
that science has so far illuminated little about how our brains
turn experience into knowledge, and that if we're not careful,
attentive, and ever suspicious of our certainties, the evidence
of our senses can't begin to compete with the expectations
planted in our conscious minds (often, without our noticing it,
by others).
It's much the same lesson taught by UW psych prof Elizabeth
Loftus' studies of how "eyewitnesses" can remember events they
never saw: Words and concepts and expectations trump perception
every time; and among the senses themselves, the eyes have it
all over smell, taste, and touch.
Touch? You bet; almost all red wines have some tannins in them,
extracted from the grape skins during fermentation along with
the pigments that make them red in the first place. Tannins feel
"rough" on the tongue. You'd think that anybody, let alone a
veteran wine taster, would notice the absence of such a basic
sensory datum.
And in fact, a small percentage of drinkers do. "About 2 to 3
percent of people detect the white wine flavor," Brochet told an
interviewer last month, "but invariably they have little
experience with wine culture. . . . Connoisseurs, . . . the more
training they have, the more mistakes they make." Words to live
byˇŞand not just when drinking wine.
Roger Downey's science column appears every other week.
June 23, 2006
Slow News Day
Why is this coming from London? Have we already died and no one told us?
Southern San Andreas fault waiting to explode
Expert believes Los Angeles area at risk for massive earthquake
Updated: 11:07 a.m. MT June 21, 2006
LONDON - The southern end of the San Andreas fault near Los Angeles, which has been still for more than two centuries, is under immense stress and could produce a massive earthquake at any moment, a scientist said Wednesday.
Yuri Fialko, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, Calif., said that given average annual movement rates in other areas of the fault, there could be enough pent-up energy in the southern end to trigger a cataclysmic jolt of up to 32 feet (10 meters).
"The observed strain rates confirm that the southern section of the San Andreas fault may be approaching the end of the interseismic phase of the earthquake cycle," he wrote in the journal Nature.
Story continues below
A sudden lateral movement of 23 to 32 feet (7 to 10 meters) would be among the largest ever recorded.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the earthquake that destroyed San Francisco in 1906 was produced by a sudden movement of the northern end of the fault of up to 21 feet (6.4 meters).
Fialko said there had been no recorded movement at the southern end of the fault — the 800-mile-long (1,280-kilometer-long) geological meeting point of the Pacific and the North American tectonic plates — since the dawn of European settlement in the area.
He said this lack of movement for 250 years correlated with the predicted gaps between major earthquakes at the southern end of the fault of between 200 and 300 years.
Elsewhere on the fault, there were average slippage rates up to a couple of centimeters a year that prevented the build-up of explosive pressure deep underground.
When these became blocked and then suddenly broke free, they produced tremors or earthquakes of varying intensity depending on the movement that had taken place before and the duration of the blockage.
USGS says the most recent major earthquakes in the northern and central zones of the San Andreas fault were in 1857 and 1906.
Three possible explanations
Fialko said there were three possible explanations for the lack of observed movement in the southern section: creepage under the surface that had no external manifestation, a scenario in which the section simply doesn't not move as much as the rest of the section, or a major blockage.
"Except for the first possibility above, the continued quiescence increases the likelihood of a future event," he wrote.
Making calculations based on a wide range of land and satellite observations, he discounted the idea of creepage and warned of impending disaster.
"Regardless of fault geometry and mechanical properties of the ambient crust, results presented in this study lend support to intermediate-term forecasts of a high probability of major earthquakes on the southern SAF system," Fialko said.
Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
June 18, 2006
Go Becky!
Since Becky is probably too shy to post props to herself, I will do it for her. Her work on Yahoo! photos is getting good press all over the web since it just went beta. She has been working on it for more than a year, and trying to fit cool design into a massive organization like yahoo. Here are some links to articles:
All the press is really positive, which is pretty exciting since she has been working in so hard on it for so long. I can't imagine how tough it would be to integrate something so complex together with all the other yahoo stuff - (as you can see I am pretty biased).
What I like the best about the articles is that most of the photos from the screenshots are from becky's own account... like the picture of brett and me clanking massive beers together here:
June 14, 2006
WOW-erer, All In Many Takes!!!!
A si - ocker spot than marks. All practical.
Jer should go back to video games...
Such a fun game for us SoCalers
June 12, 2006
Hang on!!!
Robbie's new toy!
Anyone wanna come visit? We'll go sailing!!
It goes so fast you'll piss yourself!
But that's ok because you ass is hanging over the side anyway!
Here's the specs
Trade in that Parasail, Loren.
June 9, 2006
Cars
Ya'll are going to see my movie right? ...Sweet!!
I heard it was Missy's favorite movie....especially the parts with the bugs.
June 6, 2006
archive.org
Is really creepy. Its a back up of the internet.
Wanna see what Jer's first web page looked like? Go there and type in talbotsite.com
June 5, 2006
June 4, 2006
valley girls
so my coworker had an 80s party last night - complete with "Glamica" an 80s hair coverband" - and we rocked the sh*t out of it, if i do say so myself!
yes lara's wearing fake boobs, yes i'm wearing a fanny pack and yes cara is sporting a leotard.
i'm so impressed with us. for more amazing photos, just put in a request.
June 1, 2006
2004 stolen????
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen/1
Highlights:
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris. On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call. But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls.
In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state, during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections. There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. Blackwell cited an arcane elections regulation to make it harder to register new voters. In a now-infamous decree, Blackwell announced on September 7th -- less than a month before the filing deadline -- that election officials would process registration forms only if they were printed on eighty-pound unwaxed white paper stock, similar to a typical postcard. He further specified that any valid registration cards printed on lesser paper stock that miraculously survived the shredding gauntlet at the post office were not to be processed. With less than a month to go before the election, Bernadette Noe and her board had yet to process 20,000 voter registration cards.(103) Board officials arbitrarily decided that mail-in cards (mostly from the Republican suburbs) would be processed first, while registrations dropped off at the board's office (the fruit of intensive Democratic registration drives in the city) would be processed last.(104) When a grass-roots group called Project Vote delivered a batch of nearly 10,000 cards just before the October 4th deadline, an elections official casually remarked, ''We may not get to them.'' Under the law, would-be voters whose registration is questioned at the polls must be allowed to cast provisional ballots that can be counted after the election if the voter's registration proves valid.
Would-be voters in Dayton and Cincinnati routinely faced waits as long as three hours. Republicans in the state legislature, citing new electronic voting machines that were supposed to speed voting, authorized local election boards to reduce the number of precincts across Ohio, all of them favorable to Democrats, from slashing the number of precincts by at least twenty percent. An analysis by voter advocates found that all but three of the thirty wards with the best voter-to-machine ratios were in Bush strongholds; all but one of the seven with the worst ratios were in Kerry country. white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes.
Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials -- citing the FBI -- declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present. In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning