There’s an excellent letter to the editor on CNET about the state of the music industry (seen here). There are a few inaccuracies — major labels pay major radio station groups to play certain songs? I don’t think it’s quite that blatant — but on the whole it’s sound.
Every music industry person at USC that I’ve talked to thinks that the major labels won’t die. They’ll go away for a little while maybe, but they’ll reform. This seems probable, unfortunately.
I should mention, while we’re on the subject, that I think Apple’s music store is great. There are only two things keeping it from being perfect:
First. If I’m going to pay for them, I need lossless copies of the songs. CD-quality. Not MP3s, not AACs. Lossless, perfect. This is supposed to be a replacement for buying the songs at a store.
Second. If I buy an entire album online, then I get all the songs, and I pay just a bit less than I would in a store to buy the album and rip it myself. How about once I buy every track from an album, you ship me the actual physical item for another $3? There’s something to be said for liner notes, cover art, and the permanence of a physical medium.
And by the way. My show on KSCR, Netcast, will start up again this Wednesday. I’m on the air 8-10pm PST. I play only music that you can find online for free, legally, and I tell you where to get it. #
Well, the second version of the redesign is going a little better. I think the site will be white again, after all. It will be called .plan.
School started again on Wednesday. I have psychology 100 and a class on the broadway musical. So much for engineering! Psychology is kind of fun, because it’s all LAS people in there, and we’re talking about very basic science stuff right now so that we can actually speak intelligently for the rest of the semester. Today we went over - among other things - the difference between an independent and dependent variable. I remember learning that in the seventh grade in science class. I also remember that we learned about the Bohr model of the atom, and how correct it was. Ha. Anyway, I remember it because I made a mnemonic to remember which is X and which is Y (independent is a longer word, and the segments of the letter X stacked end-on-end would be slightly longer than the same configuration of the letter Y).
Anyway, it’s fun because the professor realizes that I’m falling asleep. There’s only about 18 of us in the class. So every once in a while he’ll slip in a phrase like grand unified theory or neural computational unit, and I’ll snap up. Then I realize he’s just toying with me, and I smile, and go back to reading the book.
I will shortly change my major to computer science, and I will add neuroscience whenever it hits the catalogue. It occurs to me that graduating from USC with a dual degree and a minor in four years is pretty impressive. It doesn’t seem like that much, but I guess I’ll be whistling differently when I’m deep in the trenches of, oh, cell biology and physiology.
I got another hard drive a few days ago. 200 GB more. Now I have 0.3 TB total. Ripping all the CDs that I didn’t have space for before…
Moving into my new apartment soon. I’m going to paint my room, and I have a lot of cool ideas for furniture. I must also figure out how to cheaply get my drumset from point A to point california.
Wrist hurts. #
Tried redesigning this site tonight. It turned out all black and gray, washed out, depressed.
I have a tendency to focus narrowly on one thing in my life. It’s good when I need to get work done, but it’s hard when it’s not something academic or predictable. One little thing goes wrong, and I get really depressed. I lose sight of everything else.
It’s not like I forget about the other things. I consider myself one of the more balanced people I know, as egocentric as that may be. I’m always thinking about the big picture. It’s just that the one thing seems so much more important than the other things… It seems that way even when I think it through and analyze it. Contradiction.
My life lately is an exercise in patience. Guess I’ll keep waiting.
There’s some more to say about school and stuff, maybe later I guess. Don’t care anymore. Wanna curl up and disappear for a few days. #
Colin Fahey has posted a useful introduction to artificial neural networks, featuring some public-domain code and examples. #
I’ve got IV-V cadences for sale here folks, half off for a limited time… #
Recent work in the neurosciences involves advanced machine intelligence; it is a complex science, comprising fields in biology, computer science, electrical engineering, and psychology. The focus of this science is the exploitation of the quickly blurring boundary between man and machine. Although no one doubts that technology will continue to change the way we live, I believe that advances in neuroscience and the accelerating pace of computer development will combine to fundamentally alter the way we define life.
Popular technologist Ray Kurzweil writes that ?the primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are.? How will we get there? Kurzweil suggests that the path to creating non-biological human-level intelligence is to reverse engineer the human brain using our advancing medical technologies, and duplicate its organizational system in silicon hardware and software. Although anatomists familiar with the great complexity of the brain take pains to repeat the mantra of easier-said-than-done, I think that progress in this area will continue to accelerate much like the exponential advances in computing hardware.
The medical rewards from better neural prostheses are numerous, but my interests as a computer engineer lie in creating spiritual and intelligent computers, and giving humans the some of the algorithmic processing power so easily enabled in silicon. Like other controversial technologies of the past and present ? looms, nuclear weapons, human cloning, etc. ? machine intelligence is a science with its detractors who call for relinquishment. Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy argues that we should stop intelligence development before we are ?shocked by the consequences of our inventions.? I argue that this is impossible. Someone will continue to develop these technologies, whether the development is approved by our society or not. I would prefer that our society enables an open, informed discussion of these issues. #
is when you’ve been working on a marimba solo for 5 months and you finally play it all the way through without stopping. #
