Stranger Thoughts

If you take a picture of yourself and your camera in a mirror, the camera will always be perfectly level in the image.

If a standard vinyl record has 4 songs on one side and 5 on the other, how many grooves are there? Two. One per side. That groove averages around 500 meters in length on an LP, or one third of a mile.

Instantaneous action-at-a-distance as described by Einstein’s special theory of relativity seems very strange indeed. How can one object affect another with no contact whatsoever? And yet, gravity and magnets do the same.

What is the latency of gravity? Is it instant or speed-of-light?
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OutToPasture.com


Out to Pasture
Originally uploaded by mjipswich

The early days of the Internet were fun. So many new and large businesses popped up, and eventualy popped right back down just as quickly. In a few cases, their venture capital supported loss-leading sales which helped to build my new DVD library. In others, I simply started to move my shopping habits onto the shiny new web. While many of these retailers died a fiery death, luckily online shopping is alive and well in 2007.

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What’s My Blog Rated?

OnePlusYou Quizzes and WidgetsA web site which gives blogs movie ratings, based on language, gave this blog a G rating.

Wow, I try to be careful not to curse for no reason, because I don’t want any search engines or aggregators to filter me, but that’s still a surprise. I could be a Pixar film. I guess I need to kick it up a notch. Or at least, I could.

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Mac Address Book + Sony Ericsson W810i

When I replaced my aging Sony Ericsson T616 with a new W810i, I did so assuming it was fully supported by OS X and Address Book. Apple’s own iSync devices page lists the phone after all. I realized yesterday that this was not true. I could not answer an incoming call by clicking “Answer” on my Mac, even though it was correctly displaying the caller’s information, nor could I dial my phone from the Address Book.

Even worse, I don’t know how many SMS messages I thought I was sending. That is one of the better integration features, not having to thumb type your text messages when you have a nice big QWERTY keyboard sitting right in front of you, attached to your Mac. I promise I’m not just being dense here. Anyone who has used this feature knows that it provides zero feedback after a message is sent, successful or not.

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Brian Eno on ‘Music for Airports’

Brian Eno discusses the reasoning behind his 1977 album, which was decades ahead of its time and fostered ambient music as a viable genre.

Ambient 1: Music for Airports” is now available on iTunes Plus.

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Margaret Wetmore, 1910 – 2007

Margaret Wetmore, 1910 – 2007. Born in Sacramento, CA; passed away peacefully in Fremont, CA. Preceded in death by her husband of 49 years, Lynde Wetmore, and her brother, Carl Hymes. Beloved sister to Teddy Chioino; mother to Susan Pizzi and Sally Miller; grandmother to Jamie, Glenn, Alicia and Stephen. A private family memorial service will be held. In lieu of flowers, please make any donations to the American Heart Association.

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Uncle Fred’s Orient Express

So it’s no mystery now that we are putting the original catalog from Jocelyn Enriquez up on iTunes. While going through the songs, I ran across the old “Uncle Fred’s Orient Express” remix of Big Love, and remembered how much I really liked the mix. And hated it, too.

Uncle Fred was, of course, dance music industry pioneer Fred Held. Around Classified, we called him Uncle Fred because he was one of many mentors to us. One day, Fred told me that he had an idea for a remix involving trains and train sounds, then asked if I could do that. Who was I to say otherwise? Around the same time, I had also planned to do an Erasure styled remix. To those who know Erasure well, that put me in a “black box” of no samples, all synth generated sounds, and no chords. Any harmony had to be temporal, melodic, not static. This seemed like a good fit, besides the sampled train sounds, and the concept was born.

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