The Shape of Song
Martin Wattenberg, an artist "whose work centers on the theme of mapping information," has posted a website that "draws musical patterns in the shape of transparent arches." Kind of interesting, but it reminds me of Robert Persig's comment that data without generalizations is just gossip. Wattenberg's maps show the repetitive nature of musical composition without informing us of anything. I look forward to his taking his technique to a deeper level.
The Shipbreakers
Published in The Atlantic in 2000. What a great piece of writing. Long, but I'd have hung in even longer for anything this masterful.
The Shorter Lord of the Rings
One fan figured it should have taken two minutes, tops.
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The Sky is Falling
Digital Music For the Future says so, asking, "is the record industry ready to face the music?" Interesting essay—and one that says , "the record industry is stuck in a time warp, always several years behind. That would mean 2006 is the new 1999. The Internet boom and music sales have reached their climax, anything is possible, and the digital entertainment world was ready for something to pop."
The Sleeping Sickness
Fans of Sandman will recognize this outbreak as one of the points of departure for the story arc begun in issue #1. What they may not realize is that Neil Gaiman wasn't making up the Sleeping Sickness: there really was an outbreak of Encephalitis lethargica from 1916 through the '20s.
The Slow, Painful Death of Sony Corporation
Dave Taylor has it right, I think. Sony, once the personification of innovation, quality, and vision, now has none of them. That is the beginning of a lingering death.
The Snob Argument—Again
It's time for a new round of "Shakespeare debunking," arguing that the son of an illiterate laborer could never have written works so full of science, history, legal shenanigans, and aristocratic mores—that it must have been a cabal, one that included at least a few nobles.
The Sofa-Moving Constant
"What is the greatest possible area for a sofa S that can be moved around a right-angled corner in a hallway of unit width? It's assumed only that S is a connected region of the plane."
The Song Remains Remarkably Similar
Moistworks looks into some of Led Zep's influences. Jake Holmes' "Dazed and Confused" is a revelation.
The Sound of Silence
"The same acoustic silence, embedded in two different excerpts, can be perceived dramatically differently," writes Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis in an article in the June issue of Music Perception.