worship the glitch

grayandgreen: Fot I Hose - Casiokids 70s horns, 70s beats,...

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:52:51 -0400

Fot I Hose - Casiokids

70s horns, 70s beats, electronic instrumentation, lyrics about…nothing? Because there are no words?

You won’t miss them, I promise.

sexmusic: take on me // a.c. newman [aha cover] download:

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:49:43 -0400

sexmusic:

take on me // a.c. newman [aha cover]

download:

Viva Voce - Alive With Pleasure from The Heat Can Melt Your...

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:13:42 -0400

Viva Voce - Alive With Pleasure

from The Heat Can Melt Your Brain

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-3-14)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:21:04 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-3-14):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

"So what is Obama going to do about it? His administration has asked for $450 million from Congress..."

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:34:19 -0400

“So what is Obama going to do about it? His administration has asked for $450 million from Congress to bolster Mexico’s security and counternarcotics forces with new equipment, including helicopters and surveillance aircraft, as an extension of George W. Bush’s Merida Initiative. That’s on top of the $700 million Congress allocated for 2008 and 2009. Central America has gotten another couple hundred million. Assistant Secretary of State Arturo Venezuela outlined a number of other related initiatives during his recent congressional testimony. If you ask me, it all seems like doubling down on a failed strategy — a typical example of trying to solve a social and political problem through military and technical means.”

- Meet the new drug war, same as the old drug war | FP Passport

This positively gorgeous star-shaped fort and its associated...

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:18:00 -0400

This positively gorgeous star-shaped fort and its associated village is Bourtange, a Dutch fortification built in the 16th century during the Eighty Years’ War. The fort was decommissioned at one point in 1851, after which the area became a normal town, but a century later the fort was restored to encourage tourists to visit the area. While the fort itself is now a popular museum, the village continues to hold a constant population.

via WebUrbanist

Nice The Who-Madonna mashup from Go Home Productions: Virgin...

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:42:52 -0400

Nice The Who-Madonna mashup from Go Home Productions: Virgin O’Riley

via mashuptown

Coil - Lorca Not Orca from Love’s Secret Domain Acoustic...

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:05:29 -0400

Coil - Lorca Not Orca

from Love’s Secret Domain

Acoustic guitars and vocoders. Yum.

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:56:00 -0400

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.:

tanya77:

britticisms:

I’m still trying to wrap my head around how they got away with these things:

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.” It was defeated on a party-line vote.

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.” “Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

If these people were less organized and more concerned with beard length, we’d call them Taliban.

retrospace: Can you spot the not-so-subtle phallic imagery?

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:10:00 -0400

retrospace:

Can you spot the not-so-subtle phallic imagery?

James Lipton composed the Thundercats theme? Really? (via...

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:51:00 -0400

James Lipton composed the Thundercats theme? Really?

(via warming glow)

APPL buries talent, GOOG promotes it: The importance of public recognition

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:00:51 -0400

doublethink:

A really good friend of mine from college recently left a high-profile position at APPL. As background, this guy has been an APPL fanboy since he was 10; in college, he was the only person using a Mac that I knew of in my entire dorm, and he continues to evangelize APPL to this day. Working at APPL, and with Steve Jobs, was his dream.

After several years at APPL, my friend realized that he wasn’t going to advance any farther, as much as he may have wanted to. He was surrounded by hyper-talented guys in their 40s and 50s who had been with APPL for over a decade, who were instrumental to the operation of the company, and who no one has ever heard of. In prominent meetings, the only people allowed to talk are the high-level executives; none of the front-line PMs or designers get to attach their names to or take responsibility for things like big deals or launches. And now that APPL is sitting on a huge pile of money, when they want to recruit for executive-level positions, they hire from outside rather than promote from within. My friend’s theory is that Steve Jobs intentionally hides his best people so that they don’t get poached, and don’t even get the idea that they could be poached. APPL’s secret is burying its talent so that no one knows who they are and so they don’t get recognized publicly for their contributions, a veritable walled garden for employment like the iPhone is for apps.

Meanwhile, we know several mediocre people who work at GOOG who are at the front lines constantly and given tons of responsibility, having their names attached to deals and products, getting in the press, networking like fiends in the industry, etc. Those guys develop public profiles and personas, become known for getting things done, and move on to executive-level positions elsewhere (look, for example, at how AOL is how GOOG 2.0). GOOG is seeding the entire tech industry with ex-Googlers because they have an explicitly flat hierarchy, are open about (almost) everything, and are not afraid of having their people poached. Hell, I think they welcome it because it builds relationships and knowledge across the tech industry that will bear fruit later through partnerships and acquisitions.

In an analogy to technology-centric locales, APPL is Route 128 (in MA, which enforces non-compete agreements) and GOOG is Silicon Valley (in CA, which doesn’t enforce non-compete agreements). Which one will win in the end? I think it’s obvious GOOG will because of the positive network effects of letting its employees flourish, grow, and leave, which just reinforces the desperation behind APPL’s patent lawsuit, and the fact that they’re going to do more desperate things to try to keep GOOG in check.

More to the overall point though, it’s in the best interests of every business, even lawyers, to let their younger people go out there and shine, and build public personas and reputations. If they stay, they become in-house stars and can bring business in on their own; if they leave, they become a source for positive referrals and deal flow in the future. The walled garden approach to employment is tremendously short-sighted and breeds a culture not of innovation or ambition, but of stagnancy and risk-aversion.

Church 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:33:45 -0400

Church

5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Apple’s approach to video embeds on the iPhone is...

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:29:00 -0400

Apple’s approach to video embeds on the iPhone is surprisingly inconsistent. YouTube embeds display a black box with the word “Watch” in the middle. All other iPhone compatible embeds, like the two blip.tv videos seen here, show a big round play button on top of a nice gradient. When you click on a YouTube embed, you’re taken out of the browser and into the YouTube app. When the video ends, you remain in the YouTube app. If you want to return to the page you were browsing, you must exit the YouTube app and relaunch Safari. When you play all other videos, you play in the default iPod video player and immediately return the the page you were on as soon as the video ends.

“I don’t like regulations,” says Amy Alkon, a...

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:49:36 -0400

“I don’t like regulations,” says Amy Alkon, a syndicated advice columnist who blogs daily at AdviceGoddess.com. “I like to shame people into behaving better.”

Reason.tv’s Ted Balaker sat down with Alkon to discuss her new book, I See Rude People: One woman’s battle to beat some manners into impolite society. Alkon explains how she and others mix chutzpah with technology to fight back against the insane drivers, coffee-house yackers, and subway perverts who make our lives miserable.

(via threeframes)

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:23:17 -0400

(via threeframes)

"The Roadmap for America’s Future, which Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — the ranking Republican on the House..."

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:16:41 -0400

“The Roadmap for America’s Future, which Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee — released in late January, calls for radical policy changes that would result in a massive transfer of resources from the broad majority of Americans to the nation’s wealthiest individuals.”

- The Ryan Budget’s Radical Priorities — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Or, as Citizens for Tax Justice puts it:

“It’s difficult to design a tax plan that will lose $2 trillion over a decade even while requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more. But Congressman Paul Ryan has met that daunting challenge. This analysis makes obvious that Congressman Ryan’s budget plan has nothing to do with balancing the budget, but has everything to do with creating a system that takes more from the poor and less from the rich.”

(via shorterexcerpts)

kevin: Today I began offering the drawings on Draw and Color as...

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:15:19 -0400

kevin:

Today I began offering the drawings on Draw and Color as transparent .png files and added Creative Commons licensing to the site. The plan here is to offer something of value to anyone who wishes to use the drawings for any purpose (commercial or otherwise) while continuing to use the project as a simple creative exercise for myself.

It was actually a fun problem solving process to get the recent drawings to work well as transparent files since they’re drawn in charcoal and have sketchy outlines and shading.

Sample .png here

Another audio experiment. This one went from zero to...

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:04:06 -0400

Another audio experiment. This one went from zero to “finished” in roughly an hour. The mix is a bit off, since I mixed it on blown iPhone headphones. It adds character, right? I‘m forcing myself to create music even if i don’t have the time i need to do it right.

numerology2 + korg kp3 + dave smith instruments mopho + roland sh201 + moog midi murf + alesis midiverb 4 + mackie 1202vlz

new tumblr: dAPPer

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:23:00 -0400

new tumblr: dAPPer