Lobster in a Bucket

Song of the Moment

This was the song that I headed to school with today. It's a good one for where life is at right now.

The band is Hold Steady the song is Stuck Between Stations

Chair

If I could chose, I'd put it in my apartment.

From Revival Architectural Antiques in Chicago

One-Percent of Americans are in Jail

This Washington Post article gives all the details, but the essential fact is that the 1% number is just a step on an upward slope that we've been on since the 90s, and the general percentage hides the fact that much more than one percent of african americans are in jail.

While I think it is an accepted fact that keeping people in jail keeps crime down, the effect is not that big, and there are better programs to deal with these folks. The prospect of our prison population continuing to inch upwards (we already have the highest percentage in the world) is a little ominous.

My Guitar Hero

So I played Guitar Hero for the first time Thursday night. I found it immensely enjoyable. Being an ex-video game geek, I am by nature suspicious of all games, because I suspect they could rob me of my time, dignity, and self-esteem. But this game provided a genuinely special twist.

I will probably never be able to rip out Weezer's "Say it Ain't So" with a band, screaming fans, and bright lights. But doing that on the playstation with a fake guitar in hand, I got about as close as I can hope to be. I got 100% of the solo right. Bangin!

But the really fascinating thing to me is that Guitar Hero came out of a project from the MIT media lab that focused on finding ways for non-musicians to make music. The head of the project gave a talk at TED today about what he's doing. Read more here.

Some More Videos I've Loved

After Dissing Gnarls, I thought I'd put a few videos today that I found and loved.

Britt Daniels is too cool. I don't know what his ceiling is, but it could maybe be higher.

The other is a La Blogotheque video of Vampire Weekend. La Blogotheque pulls these things off to varying degrees of success. Some sounds are just not best out in the open air, but this video is choice.

Run

New Gnarls Barkley video is out for the single, "Run". I think the album is set to drop in a few months, but for now, we can only try to dance to this song, appropriately titled, that clocks in at about 135 bpm. Much too fast, I think to do much. Gnarls has given the world the Crazy-St. Elsewhere-Gone Daddy Gone-Smiley Faces song arc, which is maybe the best four consecutive songs for dancing ever. Right now I'm just hoping that not all of the new tracks are as jacked up as this one.

I'd Rather Be in Monterey

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference is an annual confluence of some exceptionally original thinkers, giving talks around a theme that means a lot. Last years, theme was Africa. This year is focusing on the Big Questions. I've enjoyed the live-blogging from Ethan Zuckerman and the folks at Boing Boing. The talks range from the reality of evil, to the meaning of beauty. The talks will be posted on the site in video soon I imagine.

Is the Beat Too Much?

Big Mistake

I'd never heard of Tim Fite before, but his new single, Big Mistake is vintage Aaron Mesh, circa 2003.

Spaces

Dwell Magazine has a nice feature on their website where people can put up their apartment projects, yard projects, and any sort of home-decor-quality-of-life-upgrade projects. It seems to be an ongoing thing.

Studying the Right Way

This is my home for the next two weeks. No TV. No Internet. Just a lot of books, a couple cats, and some plants best left in the Mediterranean. I've been getting some good work done here.

The Greenest Newspaper

I've often assumed that I was saving a bunch of trees and keeping my carbon footprint down by using online versions of newspapers and almost anything else I could get my hands on. On the flip side, some environmental contrarians have argued that e-versions of print sources actually cause more harm than the original.

This surprised me a lot. But the article is a little short on persuasive reasoning. The main grist for the argument is that the servers used to run the paper use a lot of electricity in a year, and that electricity requires fuel that inevitably adds CO2 to the atmosphere. On the flip side even though newspaper print requires a lot of trees to be cut down, the trees themselves retain a lot of their carbon becasue the newsprint is either recycled or buried at a landfill. Eventually, it just becomes a fossil fuel. This assumes that the amount of newsprint used to start barbeque fires is negligible.

More pointedly. It doesn't take into account the power needed to run printing presses in a year, or the amount of people who use the servers to get their online NYTimes in comparison to the print version, or the amount of waste in harvested trees for newsprint.

The Bible and Al

This tidy little NYT profile about a guy walking the length of the Americas with a donkey presents this little nugget of Christian Reformed goodness. When asked what he had been currently reading Jonathan Bonham replied succinctly, "The Bible...and some Plantinga."

I Feel it All

The above title shares itself with my favorite song from Feists last album. On a record of gems, it still gets me the most excited. Here is Britt Daniels' (frontman from Spoon) remix of the track. It's good, in the sharp classy way that almost all Spoon songs arrive. I think that Spoon is probably just a more modern incarnation of the Beatles, but I'm alright with that, because the Beatles were a pretty good thing the first time around.

MP3 Link
(Via Red Threat)

The Greenest Laptop in the World

The XO laptop has been poo-pood quite a bit along the way for percieved, or expectied shortcomings with the project. Critics said that there was no way a laptop to fit the project's specs could be made for $100. Others said that the poorest children in the world needed basic health and nutrition services before they needed spiffy computers. And even if they got these computers, how would these kids be able to do anything with them in the first place? Others just seemed offended by the lofty idealism. But even if any, or all of these criticisms are accurate, as this address shows, the process of making this laptop has blown-up the traditional standards we used for evaluating "green" laptops. The XO laptop is way, way, greener than anything else.

Ultimate Field

One of the perks of being at Notre Dame, where football is a way of life, is that I can play ultimate year-round on this indoor field. You can find me here on Thursday, at lunch time, throwing myself on the rubberized astroturf.

House-Sitting

I am house-sitting for a professor starting today, and following over the next two weeks. Internet access, and blogging, will consequently not be as constant, but hopefully work will.

The Saddest Music in the World

So for the past week on Ebay a music collector is attempting to liquidate his music collection. He has some health problems that I guess are adding up. This type of event happens all the time. A collector, when faced with a life-changing crisis, has to foist his hobby for the sake of life. But this situation is a bit extreme. A collector in Pittsburgh has accumulated 3 million lps and 300,000 cds. It takes up 15,000 square feet. He claims that he has virtually all of the published, recorded music of the twentieth-century West, in one format or another. And he's selling it all on Ebay. Starting bid, 3 million dollars. So far no takers.

The seller is selling the collection as an archive for recorded music. And I think his description seems fair. But the truth is that archives, whenever possible, are digitizing their collections under the expectation that digital copies will be more useful, and hopefully as reliable as hard/analog copies. Consequently, it doesn't make a lot of sense for an archive to buy this guys magnum opus.

So sadly, that leaves him at the mercy of the type of vinyl collector that High Fidelity gets a lot of mileage out of. Witness the tragedy writ large in the questions section, hungry collectors salivating over their original, not re-released underlined Frank Zappa albums.

Staircase Zen

This site makes me want a staircase in my one-floor apartment.

Lessig Endorses Obama

Lawrence Lessig is a leading thinker on issues of intellectual property and the ethical implications of contemporary technology. Here is his (long) endorsement of Obama.

Tea

So I'm a really big fan of Etsy, an online DIY marketplace for wonderful things. It manages to put style and creativity in reach of almost anyone. But Etsy is becoming more than just screen-printed american apparel shirts, and repurposed jumpers. One of my favorite new sellers is TeaNoir. She sells really nice loose-leaf teas in quality, quantities and prices that exceed most coffee shops. Check her out.

Carrel 1.5

So another perk of my current lifestyle is that I get an "office." This office consists of a built-in desk and built-in metal shelf in a room off of the ninth floor in the stacks that could easily be mistaken for a closet. The powers that be refer to it as a carrel. Which I guess is about accurate. As the picture below says, it's an oppressively ugly space.

But today I took an important step in prettifying this little space that is mine for the next 5-1 million years. See below:

I've got a couple ideas of what the next step will be, but I will appreciate any added suggestions.

Rob Bell on Prayer

21st Century CS Lewis?

While mainly being a puff piece to promote a new book, this Newseek article brings up a couple good points about Redeemer Presbyterian's pastor Tim Keller.

1) Redeemer has been an exemplar of church planting. Considering it's been around less than 20 years, the fact that dozens of churches have been planted out of Redeemer is amazing. Rather than being built on the quality of Tim Keller's preaching, this suggests a real movement of people.

2) Keller is idiosyncratic and orthodox.

3) Newsweek notes that this is Keller's first book. After thousands of sermons, his first book. Newsweek points out that his new book evokes Lewis and Mere Christianity. While I think Keller has immense value as an apologist of Christianity, I also wonder if Tim Keller the author will have the same positive effect on Redeemer's church planting movement that Keller the preacher does.

When Tim Keller preaches a excellent sermon, and it's heard by 5,000 people plus however many thousand eventually hear an MP3, the Redeemer brand is getting a little shot in the arm, because that sermon, that beautiful monologue happened because that church met to worship God. Without the church, there is no sermon.

On the other hand, the brand connection between a book and Redeemer is not as obvious. Redeemer could cease to exist tomorrow and Keller could continue to write books, and people could read them. Any success that Keller's new book meets will not necessarily help Redeemer the movement. Readers will associate the book with the man. Keller could very well become more of a leader, a sage of the intellectually vibrant portion of American Christianity. While this is no bad thing, Keller has done a wonderful job of not making Redeemer's movement about his persona, and it would be a little sad to see that change.

Mccain on Torture

One of the reasons that I haven't been able to completely close the door on voting for Mccain this coming year is that Mccain has attacked the post-9/11 use of torture tenaciously. As a Christian, who wants to make voting decisions that reflect my faith, the issue of torture stands out. Unlike abortion, or other "moral" issues in our public discourse, our next president will undoubtedly determine whether or not the United States sanctions torture to achieve our ends. I think it really important that I not vote for an advocate of torture. This pretty much disqualified me from voting for the other serious Republican candidates: Romney and Giuliani, who both approved of water-boarding.

This article gave me a bit of pause about Mccain though. The article goes into detail, but the main point is that Mccain is alright with some deprivation interrogation techniques: but he doesn't think spelling out which ones is important, the Bush administration and individual organizations, like the CIA, can decide which are ok. This strikes me as naive at best. I'd really like Mccain make clear what is and isn't okay, and what sort of standard he'll mandate in his administration.

Something I Like

Thanks to Ryan for picking out this mother load of distraction. The site is called Stuff White People Like. It's comedy.

My personal favorite comes from entry #61 Bicycles.

But not all white people love bicycles in the same way, there is much diversity. First up, we have the younger urban white folks who absolutely love their fixed gear bicycles. These are seen all over college towns, Silverlake in LA, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, Queen West in Toronto, and Victoria, British Columbia. Fixed gear bicycles meet a lot of requirements for white person acceptance. They can be made from older (i.e. vintage) bicycles, thus allowing the rider to have a unique bike that is unlikely to be ridden by anyone else in town. They are also easily customizable with expensive things Aerospoke rims, Phil Wood Hubs, and Nitto Parts. The combination of rare bicycles and expensive parts makes it easy for white people to judge other white people on the quality and originality of their bicycles. This is important in determining if someone is or isn’t cooler than you.

So true.

Myriad Harbour

While I'm not sure what a close reading would get us, I like this video for a number of reasons.

1) Effective use of 70s animation style

2) Making curly black hair cool and not sleazy

3) Psychedelia goes well with anthemic chorus

Enjoy

Bagpipe Editorial

Emily Belz wrote a great, or, as my cousin Michael termed it "bangin" editorial about the crisis of over-management up at Covenant. I think she is exactly right. Higher education grows out of a certain amount of disorder. It is a republic of letters, and constituent members need a certain amount of room to grow. Growth is messy. The kind of over-management that Emily talks about keeps colleges from being what they should be.

Early Bird Special

Notre Dame has a very enlightened cafeteria policy. The dining hall is open all day. And you pay a certain price to go in based on the time of day. For most traditional meal times the price is more money than I want to pay. But there is a sweet spot.

From in the mid morning, until 10:59, the cost is only $5.19. This small price gets you into a cafeteria stocked not just with danishes and fruits. But pretty much all the lunch/hot food you can imagine. Shown here is my first round of what my small little grad school group calls the Early Bird Special, or EBS for short.

Hummus, Pita, Veggie Soup, Iced Green Tea and water make a good appetizer. I usually follow it up with made to order ginger/soy stir fry. Followed by fruit, coffee, or whatever else I still have room for. (I shoot to not eat again that day.) Today I took a slight diversion into some pesto/mushroom pizza. It tasted like a layer of paper had been stuck in between the pesto and the cheese. Not a good sensation.

Facebook Forever

This New York Times article points out another recent problem users have been having with Facebook. Although Facebook has come out and explained it, after users delete their accounts on Facebook, Facebook continues to keep an archival copy of your information. They claim that this is so if you decide to come back, all your information can be right there. What Facebook hasn't admitted is that it is continuing to use your information for demographic data to sell to advertisers. The article says more.

But the basic issue is that most of us, really don't like the fact that Facebook is keeping all of our phone numbers, emails, wall posts, picture tags etc long after we say that we don't want any of those things to exist.

I believe that Facebook is an extremely important internet application. Maybe the most important since Google. But the dedication to profit over users privacy is beginning to be a trend, a worrisome trend.

In the Keeping with the Season

While for most of my colleagues here at Notre Dame, this is the season of Lent. For most of the rest of America, this week is all about Valentines day. Here are some good words about that day.

Enjoy

What to Make of This?

Compare

With

But the point here, beyond that artists like Democrats, is valid. Is most of America willing to listen to a guy as old, dour, and hard as McCain? In comparison to the message that Obama brings?

This is why I'm glad I get paid to read books

Most days I get up and make a simple decision. What do I want to read today? Being in a such a place is a privilege. I don't have to think how am I going to feed myself, or get through my 90 minute commute, or juggle all my domestic responsibilities. I have to choose what to read.

Being in this position is especially driven home on a day like today. Right now it is 3 degrees outside. After church I didn't have to think about anything besides being in my home and reading. This is a gift.