Live from Austin!

About 7 or 8 years ago I ripped all our CDs to MP3 and stuck all the music on a house media server.

I used what was, at the time, a good MP3 encoder: LAME, with the --r3mix preset that had been tweaked by the members of an online forum for MP3 enthusiasts.

MP3 encoder quality has made some strong progress since then, and disk space has become even less of an issue. Accordingly, I’m re-encoding my favorite stuff using the latest copy of LAME and --preset standard --vbr-new. Even on my office Cambridge Soundworks speakers, the difference is noticeable. I figure this will be the last time I do this, in a couple of years I’ll just rip everything lossless.

iTunes also got much better at encoding with version 7. So if you ripped your favorite album to MP3 some years ago, it might be worth re-doing it and giving yourself a free audio upgrade.

(To my ears, LAME encodings still sound better than iTunes, but iTunes 7 is way better than earlier versions. That said, there’s a free friendly Mac audio ripper/encoder front end called Max that will call LAME for the encoding.)

"The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers." — Ron Paul.

"The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries. [...] The U.S. Constitution established a Republic rooted in Biblical law, administered by representatives who are Constitutionally elected by the citizens." — "Constitution" Party platform.

During the 1990s, UK TV series Spitting Image included a song "Thank You Tory Voters", listing disasters caused by the Conservative government. One memorable line was "Voting Tory’s like a fart, no-one admits they’ve done it".

This was the point at which opinion pollsters noticed something interesting: Conservatives would routinely lose in every opinion poll, and then win the election. Studies were carried out, and it turned out that a surprisingly large number of people were so embarrassed by their support for the Tories that they would routinely tell opinion pollsters one thing, and then vote differently in the privacy of the voting booth.

People are starting to ask whether something similar might be happening in the US Democratic voter base. Here, it’s known as The Bradley Effect. And it’s real:

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.

[...]

Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

Emphasis mine.

So a third of Democratic voters are racists. Imagine what the statistics for Republicans must look like.

The survey team also used Implicit Association Testing:

The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.

From: Joe Biden
To: Barack Obama
Subject: Changes to your positions on key issues

I’ve been taking a look at your web site. There are some changes you need to make if we’re ever going to win this thing.

• Get rid of as many mentions of science as you can. That stuff scares the right-wing Christians.
• Remove the paragraph about surveillance being conducted under the rule of law. It just looks embarrassing after your FISA vote.
• Get rid of the stuff about providing opportunities for minorities to own TV and radio stations, or you’ll never get an interview on FOX.
• Remove the talk of parental controls and filtering tools. Parents don’t want to be responsible for their children’s upbringing.
• Get rid of the stuff about open government. A live feed of our meetings where we make important decisions? Are you nuts?
• Get rid of the stuff about redefining broadband to be over 200kbps. The telecoms industry doesn’t want to roll out the fiber we paid them for.
• Get rid of the paragraph about community use of the wireless spectrum, or the corporate radio stations will bury you.
• Pull all the stuff about immigration reform. Immigrants can’t vote.
• Remove the stuff about better enforcement of antitrust law.

Thanks in advance for your speedy compliance.

Joe

Ten books on my bookshelf which almost certainly aren’t on yours.

1. "Threaded Interpretive Languages" by Loeliger. Describes how to build FORTH systems. Published by Byte back when FORTH was mainstream. (Why, yes, I am that old.)
2. A.R.T.H.U.R. by Lawrence Lerner. Poetry from an imaginary AI. Much better than RACTER.
3. "The Third Word War: Apostrophe Theory" by Ian Lee. Starts off as a catalog of grocers’ apostropes, mutates into a collection of photographic meta-references and arch puns.
4. "Fortran 5" by Simon Leonard. Three surreal stories by one of the guys behind the bands I Start Counting, Fortran 5, and Komputer.
5. "RCL20". A celebration of 20 years of the Handheld and Portable Computer Club. Contains the story behind the design of a number of classic HP RPN calculators. Gift of the editor.
6. "Zenarchy" by Kerry W. Thornley. One of the authors of Principia Discordia; neopagan, libertarian, friend of Lee Harvey Oswald and allegedly part of the conspiracy to assassinate JFK. This book is his often-overlooked approach to Zen Buddhism. Copies seem to be going for $95 and up on Amazon, but I’m keeping mine.
7. "Zen Without Zen Masters" by Camden Benares. Continues the non-mainstream Western approach to Zen theme. Apparently the author was a friend of Kip Thornley. Like Zenarchy, this book is frequently hilarious, and shouldn’t a true religion be funny?
8. "Think Tank" by Roger Langley. "The Prisoner" fan fiction.
9. "Nineteen Ninety-Four". Novelization of the radio series. Think "1984 meets the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy".
10. "Bad Shave: The Story of Baby Bird So Far". Compilation of articles about lo-fi pop god Stephen Jones, aka Baby Bird, aka Babybird (the band).

Previous entries, withdrawn because they are insufficiently rare:

1. "Twitching and Shattered" by Frank Key. The gentleman is an acquired taste, and this is a taste I acquired back in 1990 or so. His books for children, such as "Derek the Dust Particle", are truly inspired, and recommended if you want your children to grow up to be like me.
2. "Beat Your Relatives To A Bloody Pulp" by Maxim Décharné. A Narrative Concerning the Proper Chastisement of Personages Without Whom &c &c.
3. "Literary Machines" by Ted Nelson. Describes the design of the Xanadu system. Self-published by Ted.
4. Bob Black, "Friendly Fire". Compilation of articles by everyone’s favorite anarchist.

• Sarah Palin can "just put down the BlackBerry and pick up the breast pump".
• John McCain invented the BlackBerry.

• Sarah Palin describes herself as a pit bull with lipstick.
• John McCain described his wife as plastering on the makeup like a trollop.

• John McCain has always been very concerned about ‘pork barrel’ spending.
• Sarah Palin has always been very concerned about obtaining ‘pork barrel’ funds.

• Sarah Palin tried to sell the Alaskan state government’s jet plane at fire sale prices on eBay.
• John McCain’s jet plane set fire to the USS Forrestal.

• Sarah Palin has a disabled son.
• John McCain collected a disability pension as well as his $165,000 a year senate salary.

• Sarah Palin is the youngest governor of Alaska.
• John McCain is older than Alaska.

As far as I know, this is the first time I’ve been to a party that has been mentioned in a newspaper afterwards.

The build-your-own pizza was delicious. I don’t know whether Ecstatic Cuisine have secret ingredients, but throwing everything that sounded good onto the pizza worked very well for me. I was scared that I would discover I had slipped on my weight loss regimen… But no, today the Wii confirmed that I have continued the same downward trend.

The hurricane turned out to be the storm that wasn’t, at least as far as Austin was concerned. It didn’t even rain. In fact, today was duller and windier.

Last night I dreamed that I met Bev Bevan. I tried not to be a fanboy. I mentioned that I really didn’t like "Discovery", except for the final track–which of course is dominated by his drumming. He replied that the album had been a difficult time for the band, and that that one track had been the one where it actually seemed like they were working together again. I wanted to ask about whether he had patched things up with Jeff Lynne, but knew that would be a bad idea. In the end he autographed my copy of "Out of the Blue". And then I woke up.

Back in reality, the dream was obviously the result of my finally buying the remastered limited edition release of "Out of the Blue". I had held off for a long time, because I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the previous CD. Then a 40% off coupon at Border’s tempted me… and I was wrong. The remastered edition is far better than the previous remastering, which was in turn better than the original 2 CD release… which, of course, was better than my vinyl copy.

So yeah, I’ve bought this album four times now. That’s a new personal record, beating the three official releases and one bootleg of New Musik’s "Warp". And apparently there’s a $25 Japanese 2CD release that sounds even better…