February 9, 2012
Malcolm McLaren (1946 – 2010) was an English performer, impresario, self-publicist and manager of the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls. As a solo artist, McLaren had an innovative career that helped introduce hip hop to the United Kingdom.
About his contribution to music, McLaren has said about himself: ‘I have been called many things: a charlatan, a con man, or, most flatteringly, the culprit responsible for turning British popular culture into nothing more than a cheap marketing gimmick. This is my chance to prove that these accusations are true.’
read more »
Posted in Art, Money, World |
Leave a Comment »
February 9, 2012
‘Home Taping Is Killing Music‘ was the slogan of a 1980s anti-copyright infringement campaign by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), a British music industry trade group. With the rise in cassette recorder popularity, the BPI feared that people being able to record music from the radio onto cassettes would cause a decline in record sales. The logo, consisting of a Jolly Roger formed from the silhouette of a Compact Cassette, also included the words ‘And It’s Illegal.’ Similar rhetoric has continued; in 1982 Jack Valenti famously compared the VCR and its anticipated effect on the movie industry to the Boston Strangler, and in 2005 Mitch Bainwol of the RIAA claimed that CD burning is hurting music sales.
The slogan was often parodied, one example being the addendum ‘and it’s about time too!,’ used by Dutch anarcho-punk band The Ex. Another example was the early 1980s counter-slogan ‘Home Taping is Skill in Music,’ referring to early mixtapes, a precursor to sampling and remixes. In 1981 the Dead Kennedys printed ‘Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help’ on one side of their EP ‘In God We Trust, Inc.’ An early ‘proponent’ of home taping was Malcolm McLaren who was at the time managing the British band Bow Wow Wow. In 1980 the band released their single ‘C30, C60, C90 Go’ on a cassette that featured a blank other side that the buyer could record their own music on. The band’s record label, EMI, dropped the group shortly afterwards because the single allegedly promoted home taping.
Posted in Money, Politics, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
February 9, 2012
Don’t Copy That Floppy was an anti-copyright infringement campaign run by the Software Publishers Association (SPA) beginning in 1992.
The video for the campaign, starring M. E. Hart as ‘MC Double Def DP,’ was filmed at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. The commercial’s mention of the game ‘Tetris’ is ironic given the original version was copied and smuggled out of the Soviet Union then commercialized without any legal rights or payment to its creators (or to the Soviet Union, which had the copyrights of what its scientist produced).
Posted in Money, Politics, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
February 9, 2012
Dietrich Varez (b. 1939) is an iconoclastic printmaker-painter. His work is among the most widely-recognized of any artist in Hawaii. A long-time resident of the Big Island, he is known primarily for scenes of Hawaiian mythology and of traditional Hawaiian life and stylized designs from nature. The studio where Varez works and lives is in a rural forested area near the small town of Volcano, Hawaii a few miles from the entrance to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
He built the house himself after many years of living in tents or cabins on the land or in the Park. For most of his life there, he and his family have lived a self-sufficient pioneering life. They capture rainwater for their needs, and had no electricity for thirty years. The road to his home has been described as ‘barely passable.’ Varez and his wife rarely leave their homestead, virtually never travelling off-island.
read more »
Posted in Art, Money |
Leave a Comment »
February 8, 2012
The pregap on a Red Book audio CD is the portion of the audio track that precedes ‘index 01’ for a given track in the table of contents (TOC). The pregap (‘index 00’) is typically two seconds long and usually, but not always, contains silence. Popular uses for having the pregap contain audio are live CDs, track interludes, and hidden songs in the pregap of the first track. On certain CDs, such as ‘Think Tank’ by Blur, the pregap contains a hidden track. The track is truly hidden in the sense that most conventional standalone players and software CD players will not see it. Such hidden tracks can be played by playing the first song and ‘rewinding’ (more accurately, seeking in reverse) until the actual start of the whole CD audio track. Not all CD drives can properly extract such hidden tracks. Some drives will report errors when reading these tracks, and some will seem to extract them properly, but the extracted file will contain only silence.
The pregap was used to hide computer data, tricking computers into detecting a data track whereas conventional CD players would continue to see the CD as an audio CD. This method was quickly made obsolete in late 1996 when an update to Windows 95 made the pregap track inaccessible. It is unclear whether or not this change in Microsoft Windows’ behavior was intentional: for instance, it may have been intended to steer developers away from the pregap method and encourage what became the Blue Book specification ‘CD Extra’ format.
Posted in Art, Money, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
February 8, 2012
A micromort is a unit of risk measuring a one-in-a-million probability of death (from micro- and mortality). Micromorts can be used to measure riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus a micromort is the microprobability of death. The micromort concept was introduced by Ronald A. Howard who pioneered the modern practice of decision analysis.
An application of micromorts is measuring the value that humans place on risk: for example, one can consider the amount of money one would have to pay a person to get him or her to accept a one-in-a-million chance of death (or conversely the amount that someone might be willing to pay to avoid a one-in-a-million chance of death).
read more »
Posted in Death, Health, Money |
2 Comments »
February 8, 2012
Grigori Perelman (b. 1966) is a Russian mathematician who has made landmark contributions to geometry and topology (the study of geometric deformation). In 1992, Perelman proved the soul conjecture. In 2002, he proved Thurston’s geometrization conjecture. This consequently solved in the affirmative the Poincaré conjecture, posed in 1904, which before its solution was viewed as one of the most important and difficult open problems in topology.
In 2006, Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal, but declined to accept the award or to appear at the congress, stating: ‘I’m not interested in money or fame, I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.’ In 2010, it was announced that he had met the criteria to receive the first Clay Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. He turned down the prize ($1 million), saying that he considers his contribution to proving the Poincaré conjecture to be no greater than that of U.S. mathematician Richard Hamilton.
read more »
Posted in Education, Money, Science |
Leave a Comment »
February 7, 2012
A bible for screenwriters is a reference document used for information on a story’s characters, settings and other elements. Show bibles are commonly used in television series; new writers and freelancers are often referred to it when writing scripts for the show to ensure continuity with previous episodes; they’re also used by individual writers for books and movies to keep track of details.
However, according to writer and producer Jane Espenson, ‘Show bibles … just aren’t as important as you might think to the daily life of the [writing] staff. The truth is that once you’re living inside a show, you’re swimming as fast as you can from one island to the next, and there is neither the time nor the need to record decisions that have been made (these are in the scripts), or that are in the process of being made (these are in the notes taken in the room as the writers work).’
read more »
Posted in Art, Language, Money |
Leave a Comment »
February 6, 2012
False consciousness is the Marxist thesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society are misleading to the proletariat, and to other classes. These processes betray the true relations of forces between those classes, and the real state of affairs regarding the development of pre-socialist society (relative to the secular development of human society in general).
In Marxist theory, false consciousness is essentially a result of ideological control which the proletariat either do not know they are under or which they disregard with a view to their own POUM (probability/possibility of upward mobility). POUM or something like it is required in economics with its presumption of rational agency; otherwise wage laborers would be the conscious supporters of social relations antithetical to their own interests, violating that presumption.
read more »
Posted in Money, Politics |
1 Comment »
February 6, 2012
A sleeper hit refers to a film, book, single, album, TV show, or video game that gains unexpected success or recognition. Sleeper hits often grow in popularity over time. Some sleeper hits achieve unexpected success at the box office immediately upon their initial theatrical release, but this is not typical. Because these films are not expected to do particularly well they often receive little promotion or advertising and take time to register with the public.
Typically the sleeper hit relies instead on positive ‘word of mouth’ as well as the publicity generated by awards and good reviews. Two good examples of these are Mike Judge’s ‘Office Space’ and ‘Idiocracy,’ both of which quickly became cult classics. The movie ‘Caddyshack’ is another good example.
read more »
Posted in Art, Language, Money |
1 Comment »
February 6, 2012
A cult following is a group of fans who are highly dedicated to a specific area of pop culture. A film, book, band, or video game, among other things, will be said to have a cult following when it has a small but very passionate fan base. A common component of cult followings is the emotional attachment fans have with the object of the cult following, often identifying themselves and other fans as members of a community.
Cult followings are also commonly associated with niche markets. Cult media are often associated with underground culture, and are considered too eccentric, bizarre, controversial or anti-establishment to be appreciated by the general public.
read more »
Posted in Art, Language, Money |
Leave a Comment »
February 6, 2012
A cult film, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside the small fanbases; however, there have been exceptions that have managed to gain fame among mainstream audiences. Many cult movies have gone on to transcend their original cult status and have become recognized as classics; others are of the ‘so bad it’s good’ variety and are destined to remain in obscurity.
Cult films often become the source of a thriving, obsessive, and elaborate subculture of fandom, hence the analogy to cults. However, not every film with a devoted fanbase is necessarily a cult film. Usually, cult films have limited but very special, noted appeal. Cult films are often known to be eccentric, often do not follow traditional standards of popular cinema and usually explore topics not considered in any way mainstream—yet there are examples that are relatively normal. Many are often considered controversial because they step outside standard narrative and technical conventions.
read more »
Posted in Art, Language, Money |
1 Comment »
The Daily Omnivore 