crucial

Shawty Lo/Timeblind Blend CB exclusive

Dev79, the illustrious playboy of Philly put up a Shawty Lo vs. Timeblind blend (that's would be called a mashup in my "elder speak") on centralbooking's blog. It sounds huge, rocks parties. The track is Strategy Decay, which funnily enough was the one track I would have left off of Ghostification but lots of people (like Rupture) have been working it to good effect.  read full...

Newsflash: Time May Not Exist

Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics.  read full...

Shadetek on BBC - Radio 1 - Mary Anne Hobbs

Shadetek dropped a couple of exclusives by Timeblind on the beeb. link to listen is at the bottom.

Matt from Team Shadetek provides a wicked mix on this week's show. Plus we've got exclusives from DJ Wonder, Aaron Spectre and Nate Mars Vs Nika D.  read full...

The Holy Empire of Timeblind

The Holy Empire of Timeblind is a very large, safe nation, remarkable for its devotion to social welfare. Its compassionate, intelligent population of 157 million enjoy a sensible mix of personal and economic freedoms, while the political process is open and the people's right to vote held sacrosanct.

It is difficult to tell where the omnipresent government stops and the rest of society begins, but it juggles the competing demands of Social Welfare, Education, and Healthcare.  read full...

google maps de is up

Endlich ! For those of us that are always lost.

music is about sub-cultural identity

Music tastes are strongly driven by social factors. Its tribalism, sub-culturalism and identity. A lot of times the sound itself is interpreted differently based on the genre and social affiliation. That's why a synth pad is considered totally cheesy when Kylie uses it, but the same sound in Aphex or Sizzla comes off cool.

It would seem to suggest that last.fm should work well, but for me it just doesn't seem to.  read full...

Technorati Search: du bist deutschland

Congratulations Deutschland ! Apparently the top search on Technorati for a while has been "du bist deutschland". (Which is a feel good PR campaign running here in Germany). More and more people post about it because more and more people read about it being posted about.

Which just goes to show that Technorati is a useless navel staring feedback loop.  read full...

stop reading this

Too much data hinders the ability of intelligence to do efficient pattern matching. Too much information makes you dumber, splits the attention. The web is essentially satanic.

Furthermore, more data can lead to false confidence. The Square-Root Law states that an x-fold increase in the amount of data collected will only lead to a result that is more informed by √x

Conan Doyle in A Study In Scarlet has Sherlock Holmes say:"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.  read full...

merkel vs. schröder wasserschlacht an der oberbaumbrücke

More fun in Berlin. The friedrichshain vs. kreuzberg waterpistol/vegetable battle on the Oberbaum bridge this year is apparently contested. The friedrichshain side pulled some new tactics, namely setting fire to a car (but in a fun way). You can see from the video that they clearly crossed over to x-berg territory.  read full...

top 10 words by genre

Reggae
girl
lover
know
love
IÂ’m
letÂ’s
mi
shout
like
gal


Country
love
IÂ’m
just
donÂ’t
know
like
got
time
heart
go

Newage
adis
go
say
day
night
love
sky
says
ergo
heart


Rap
IÂ’m
like
get
got
donÂ’t
n****
know
s***
ainÂ’t
yo


Rock
IÂ’m
love
donÂ’t
know
just
like
got
youÂ’re
time
oh

Table 1: The ten most frequent non-stop words for selected genres from an online lyrics repository.

rap and rock got serious ego issues.
obviously dancehall failed to get transcribed.

newage has "ergo" in the top 10 !!!  read full...

crying' won't help ya, prayin' won't do ya no good

My friend sean tells me that he played When the Levee Breaks on an American Steel while sitting at the same spot by the river in New Orleans where Memphis Minnie wrought that Led Zeppelin classic.

Live journal blogs from people inside the city:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/katrinacane/friends

I spent a day (hung over actually) reading through all of these.  read full...

Could a hole in space save man from extinction?

You know recently I've been worried that I say too much, try too often to freak people out. At my birthday party the other night, I was explaining to Sasha from hardwax some of the basic useful parts of Buddhist thinking (blah blah here he goes...  read full...

The grand strategy of Al Qaeda

This article (on TigerHawk) is notes posted from a lecture at Princeton by Michael Doran, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, who has thoroughly studied what Al Qaeda actually says and does. Lots of interesting stuff here.

Just as they are writing about Muslim victories a thousand years ago, Al Qaeda's intellectuals consider themselves in the middle of a very long term struggle.  read full...

grime: love/hate

On the street, cell phones enable impromptu rapping, or "spitting," over music played through speaker phones.

Grime is hated and loved. Its basically a super media thing, attractive to people who write about stuff. All these "new" genres are like that (Favela funk, Reggaeton).  read full...

Berlin: me, beer, dogs, techno and now Michael Jackson

So did I mention that I moved to Berlin ? Not really; I've just blogged here and there about cosmic stuff and politics. The big picture stuff. I don't like to blog about my small life, its a bit invasive for me.  read full...

Why Do They Hate Us? Not Because of Iraq - New York Times

This writer states that Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are just convenient causes for the moment and are meant more as a play towards us westerners. None of the terrorists are from any of these countries.

The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations.  read full...

Arabic Assassin : the bag tosser

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Bassam Khalaf was paid to help keep U.S. air travel safe as a baggage screener. His alter ego, the Arabic Assassin, rapped about flying a plane into a building. The Transportation Security Administration could not reconcile the two and fired him last week.

"My name is Bassam, a one-man band, I came from sand, affiliated with the Taliban." Khalaf, a Houston native of Palestinian descent, said the incendiary lyrics about rape, murder and mass attacks were meant only to get attention and help get his first album, "Terror Alert," a distribution deal.  read full...

Bill Moyers on the Servants of the Apocalypse

Millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed—even hastened—as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

The Delusional Is No Longer Marginal
Bill Moyers
December 10, 2004

Writing in Mother Jones recently, Bill McKibben described how the problems we journalists routinely cover—conventional, manageable programs like budget shortfalls and pollution—may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable, unmanageable situations.  read full...

Corporate Metabolism by Paco Xander Nathan

A brief history of Corporations with a humorous analysis of how they perpetuate their existences in the same manner as slime molds, evading human perception by making legal gains at a stride larger than the human life span.

Well worth a read, but in brief:

By 01600, a group of merchants gain the Crown's approval to launch the East India Company....  read full...

Summary Of The World: Googlezon And The Newsmasters EPIC

By the year 2014, what I call newsmasters will be the most sought-after and highly rewarded professional media creators the world has ever seen.

Everyone participates to create a living, breathing mediascape. However, the Press, as you know it, has ceased to exist.  read full...

john kerry swift boat video game

brilliant. a video game that has all the details of the mekong swift boat episode. available oct 8th.

i wonder if they do "george bush gone awol" : do coke, skip your physical, fail to report for duty for 2 years.  read full...

Salon.com report from Iraq : Hell

By invading Iraq George Bush has guaranteed us another 911.

By Phillip Robertson:

In the past year, al-Qaida operatives have found in Iraq a fertile recruiting ground, the best possible training camp for jihad against the West, a destination any angry young man can reach if he has the will and pocket money.  read full...

NYT article about dancehall's intense homophopia

a good article about the "bu'n chi chi man" problem in dancehall lyrics. great riddims, and then always some crap about killing batty boys.

Even as they portray themselves as swaggering ''bad men,'' reggae stars also present themselves as forces for good: folk heroes, social activists, prophets.  read full...

the musical telegraph (1876)

its 2004 and we still have barely any internet-based musical instruments. but back in 1876 one of (the?) first electronic instruments was network based.

silverdollarcircle

dj /rupture turned me on to this excellent grime blog. its one thing to check the records from afar, but being around london and the pirates and the inner crew gossip is a whole 'nother level of entertainment.

grime is getting deliriously silly at the moment: first up, we had roll deep's 'salsa' which i've written about before and is a summer anthem right now.
and now Demon's done a track with a proper early slayer death/thrash metal riff on the rhythm!  read full...

http://mediamatters.org/ tracking conservative misinformation

The republicans depend on the american public being so stupid that they don't even know what the word 'misinformation' is, let alone why it should worry their pretty little heads. And so it goes on and on: just float that bullshit down the media pipe, by the time anybody calls foul the average american has forgotten all about it.  read full...

pictures from RNC - NYC

for those of us who can't be there, pictures by other people, posted at flickr.

they arrested the chalk bike printer guy

A post on an indymedia website says activist Joshua Kinberg -- inventor of a wireless, bike-mounted, dot-matrix printer for spraying protest messages in the street -- was arrested yesterday at the RNC in NYC. story at boingboing

http://www.nyc.indymedia.org/

"The endurance of the protesters is astounding. After a full day of marching and trailing RNC delegates, the 50 or so protesters refuse to allow the RNC delegates to roam the NYC streets unconfronted."
heh heh....

presidential campaign ads remixed

An "influential" Congressional staffer releases an album of presidential campaign ads mixed on amusingly rigid electronic beats under the pseudonym "the integral" to protect his identity.
mp3s, go get em.

Exit strategy: Civil war

Against all odds, a national liberation front is emerging in Iraq. Washington hawks may see it coming, but they certainly don't want it. Many groups in this front have already met in Algiers. The front is opposed to the American occupation and permanent Pentagon military bases; opposed to the privatization and corporate looting of the Iraqi economy; and opposed to the federation of Iraq, ie balkanization.  read full...

download dj Slip's album Remote6277

He's got a track on Jeff Mill's The Exhibitionist CD/DVD, on Richie Hawtin's DE9 and then out comes this outer space twitching grainy slab of funkd techno.