March 16, 2011
Matmos is an experimental electronic music duo originally from San Francisco but now residing in Baltimore signed to the Matador Records label. M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel are the core members, but they frequently include other artists on their records and in their performances, including J Lesser.
Much of their work could be classified as a pop version of the musique concrète genre (a forbearer of modern electronic music). The name Matmos refers to the seething lake of evil slime beneath the city Sogo in the 1968 film Barbarella.
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March 15, 2011
David Goggins is a Navy SEAL, who served in Afghanistan, and an ultramarathon runner. After several of his friends died in the war, Goggins began long-distance running to raise money. In 2005, Goggins entered the 24 hour race in San Diego and was able to run 100 miles in under 19 hours, despite never having run a marathon before. Since then, Goggins competed in many different long distance running events such as the Las Vegas Marathon and the Badwater 135 miler, where he placed highly.
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March 15, 2011
Cassini–Huygens is a joint NASA/ European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft mission currently studying the planet Saturn and its many natural satellites. The spacecraft consists of two main elements: the NASA-designed and -constructed Cassini orbiter, named for the Italian-French astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, and the ESA-developed Huygens probe, named for the Dutch astronomer, mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens. Cassini is the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter orbit.
The complete spacecraft was launched in 1997 and entered into orbit around Saturn in 2004. Shortly after arrival, the Huygens probe separated from the orbiter and headed for Saturn’s moon Titan. In 2005, it descended into Titan’s atmosphere, and downward to the surface, radioing scientific information back to the Earth by telemetry. This was the first landing in the outer solar system.
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March 14, 2011
The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level. The aim of the project, founded in 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland, is to study the brain’s architectural and functional principles, and is headed by the Institute’s director, Henry Markram. Using an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines’s NEURON software, the simulation does not consist simply of an artificial neural network, but involves a biologically realistic model of neurons.
It is hoped that it will eventually shed light on the nature of consciousness. A longer term goal is to build a detailed, functional simulation of the physiological processes in the human brain: ‘It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,” Markram said at the 2009 TED conference in Oxford. In a BBC World Service interview he said: ‘If we build it correctly it should speak and have an intelligence and behave very much as a human does.’
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March 11, 2011
Kruder & Dorfmeister is an Austrian duo most known for their downtempo-dub remixes of pop, hip-hop and drum and bass songs. Their mixes are usually flavored with sampler-processed vocals, deep bassline dub, trip-hop elements, bossa grooves and smoothly-shaped echoes. Some of their better-known works include ‘High Noon,’ ‘Original Bedroom Rockers’ and remixes of Madonna’s ‘Nothing Really Matters,’ Depeche Mode’s ‘Useless,’ Count Basic’s ‘Speechless’ and Roni Size’s ‘Heroes.’
Many of their remixes are collected on the double album ‘The K & D Sessions.’ Although best known internationally for their remixing work, the duo gained their primary reputation in Europe for their live DJ performances and ‘DJ-Kicks’ album. Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister have their own record studio, G Stone Recordings in Vienna, through which they release many of their own albums.
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March 10, 2011
Giorgio Moroder (b. 1940) is an Italian record producer, songwriter, and performer. His work with synthesizers during the 1970s and 1980s had a significant influence on New Wave, house, and electronic music in general. Particularly well known for his work with Donna Summer during the era of disco, Moroder is the founder of the former Musicland Studios in Munich, which was also used by Led Zeppelin, Queen, and Elton John. In addition to his work with Donna Summer, Moroder also produced a number of electronic disco hits and a score of songs for a variety of others including David Bowie, Irene Cara, and, Blondie.
In 1984, Moroder compiled a new restoration and edit of the famous silent film ‘Metropolis’ and provided a contemporary soundtrack to the film with pop hits from Pat Benatar, Adam Ant, Billy Squier, Loverboy, Bonnie Tyler, and Freddie Mercury. He also integrated the old-fashioned intertitles into the film as subtitles to improve continuity, and he played the film at a rate of 24 frames per second. Since the original speed was unknown this choice was controversial. Known as the ‘Moroder version,’ it sparked debate among film buffs, with outspoken critics and supporters of the film falling into equal camps.
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March 10, 2011
TerraPower is a nuclear reactor design spin-off company investigating a class of nuclear fast reactors called the traveling wave reactor (TWR).
One of TerraPower’s primary investors is Bill Gates. Whereas standard light water reactors such running worldwide use enriched uranium as fuel and need fuel reloads every few years, TWRs, once started, use depleted uranium instead and are considered to be able to operate for up to 100 years without fuel reloading.
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March 9, 2011
Rubber is a 2010 French horror comedy film about a tire that comes to life and kills people with its psychic powers. It was directed and written by Quentin Dupieux (also known as Mr. Oizo). The soundtrack was scored by Justice. The film was screened at the 2010 Cannes film festival where it was not well received.
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March 9, 2011
Javelin is a hip-hop and electro production duo based in Brooklyn, New York City via Providence, RI. Javelin has been known to use colorfully painted boomboxes that hang from the ceiling or stack up on the floor like pyramids. The signal from the show is broadcast via FM transmitter, thereby fostering audience participation (B.Y.O. Boombox) or fueling battery-powered, mobile parties.
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March 9, 2011
Balkan Beat Box is an Israeli musical group founded by ex-Gogol Bordello member Tamir Muskat, Ori Kaplan of Firewater and Big Lazy, and Tomer Yosef. As a musical project they often cooperate with a host of other musicians both in the studio as well as live.
Co-founders Ori Kaplan and Tamir Muskat both met in Brooklyn, New York as teenagers. Both had grown up with music and Kaplan had been a klezmer clarinetist, while Muskat was a drummer in a punk band. They began playing together and had trouble finding a style that they felt represented themselves, so they decided to create one. They established their own unique sound by fusing the musical styles of Mediterranean and Balkan traditions with hip-hop and dancehall beats.
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March 9, 2011
Wendy Carlos (b. 1939) is an American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ Although the first Carlos Moog albums were interpretations of the works of classical composers, she later resumed releasing original compositions.
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March 9, 2011
The Ludovico technique is a fictional drug-assisted aversion therapy from the novel and film ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ It involves the patient being forced to watch violent images for long periods of time, while under the effect of drugs that cause a near death experience. The idea is that if the patient is forced to watch the horribly graphic rapes, assaults and other acts of violence while suffering from the drug effects, the patient will assimilate the sensations and then become incapacitated or very ill either attempting to perform or even just witnessing said acts of violence.
The concept is an artistic semblance of the psychological phenomenon known as classical conditioning which is a form of associative learning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov. The typical procedure for inducing classical conditioning involves presentation of a neutral stimulus along with either the presentation of a positive stimulus or the removal of an aversive stimulus. The neutral stimulus could be any event that does not result in an overt behavioral response from the organism under investigation.
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