Sean’s Mental Walkabout

Web 2.Rockstar: The robotic tale of Jonathon Coulton: Page 1
Susan and I went to Coulton’s show in NYC a few months ago, and it was hands down the best show I’d ever been to. Goes to show that there is a way to make a living under creative commons.

Overturning Copernicus, eliminating dark energy
A new model that eliminates dark energy from the universe equations. Plus, I like how the article ends…

“In addition to the concepts put forth, this paper illustrates nicely how science works. Pseudoscience often argues that controversial or contrarian papers and ideas never get published, suggesting that the “establishment” won’t listen to new ideas. But this paper puts forth a completely novel idea, and in the process overturns a long held philosophical pillar of astronomy, and yet it is set to be published in one of the top-tier physics journals.

The main idea put forth here is vastly different from the generally-held consensus of how the universe works; however, as in all of science, every idea is tentative. Future surveys of supernovae may tell us whether or not we are special in relation to the rest of the universe.”

Popularity: 4% [?]

Radio Paradise played this late this afternoon, and I was hooked.  You can even see it in clamation glory on youtube:

Cows With Guns (music by Dana Lyons, www.cowswithguns.com)

Popularity: 10% [?]

One of the constant tensions that exist is the new media age is between preservation of culture and copyrights. Personally this doesn’t get summed up any better for me than the fact that Schickele Mix is now lost to us.

Peter Schickele produced 175 episodes of a radio show that explored concepts in music in a very accessible way. I heard it by accident on our local NPR station 7 years ago, and fell in love with it. This was already during one of it’s many encores, as new shows had stopped being produced the last 90s. Even though I possess no real musical talent (or perhaps because of that), the show was facinating, and taught me incredible amounts about music. I only wished it was still running somewhere.

Because the show was about music, it played full length songs. The royalty rates for those on broadcast radio were something that was payable at the time, but those rates are substantially higher for online distribution. Hence, there are no archives, and a big piece of culture, one that could get people really excited about music, is now unpublishable due to copyright.

When I was in college, I was always fascinated by the fact that all that still remained of Ancient Greek Theater were 40 some odd plays. How could culture like that get lost? In a digital age it seems incredible that it would be possible to loose important parts of our culture.

Popularity: 24% [?]

For those that don’t know Jonathan Coulton (the man that brought use Code Monkey, Re: Your Brains, and The Portal Song) wrote a quite awesome song by that name. Listen to it here, though I’ll warn you it’s probably not safe for work.

You’ve been warned.

Popularity: 53% [?]