Hollywood loves Democrats. “For years, Hollywood has poured money into the Democrats’ campaign coffers and been rewarded with indispensable assistance on the industry’s crusade of the moment – squelching new technologies that allow the dissemination of digital content in ways Hollywood can’t control. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, this eagerness to support Hollywood’s technophobia is easy to understand. Payback has come in the form of several bills designed to clamp down on the free exchange of copyrighted music and movies, which entertainment companies deem the greatest threat to their future well-being…”
Tag: 02.03
Leonardo Interactive
Leonardo da Vinci was one of the great minds in history. The Metropolitan Museum has developed a special interactive feature designed to complement the exhibit: an online tour (really an overview) of the show’s eight galleries. This allows us to follow the stages in the development of Leonardo’s mind through 34 representative drawings. Each of these can be enlarged several times thanks to a zoom feature.
The Sony Conundrum
Sony used to be an innovator. It invented the Walkman. “What’s changed since the original Walkman debuted is that Sony became the only conglomerate to be in both consumer electronics and entertainment. As a result, it’s conflicted: Sony’s electronics side needs to let customers move files around effortlessly, but its entertainment side wants to build in restraints, because it sees every customer as a potential thief. The company’s internal divisions reflect those in the marketplace, where entertainment executives have declared war on consumers over file-sharing. But Sony’s position is unique. It can settle the fight and flourish, or do nothing and be hobbled.”
Connecting Up Study About Who We Are
“Do we want the center of culture to be based on a closed system, a process of text in/text out, and no empirical contact with the real world? One can only marvel at, for example, art critics who know nothing about visual perception; ‘social constructionist’ literary critics uninterested in the human universals documented by anthropologists; opponents of genetically modified foods, additives, and pesticide residues who are ignorant of genetics and evolutionary biology. A realistic biology of the mind, advances in physics, information technology, genetics, neurobiology, engineering, the chemistry of materials—all are challenging basic assumptions of who and what we are, of what it means to be human. The arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture.”
Philosophically Thinking…
Are there ny common traits or beliefs that define philosophers? Do they share beliefs or proclivities or personality types? The Philosopher’s Magazine took a survey and discovered a group of philosophiles who thought they ought to find more ways of contributing to the world…
Missing (Seeing) What’s Right In Front Of You
“How can we look directly at things and not see them? The answer is that your brain perceives the world through what amounts to a mental ‘soda straw.’ When it aims that straw at one thing, all other objects—even those within your direct field of vision—recede into the background. Cognitive psychologists call this phenomenon selective attention, a neural process by which the ‘volume knob’ on one set of sensory inputs is turned up at the same time the intensity settings of all other stimuli are turned down.”
Hot Pictures – Photography makes Its Move
Photography is not only what Richard Woodward of the New York Times last year called the ‘New New Thing in the art market,’ but it is also, says Peter Galassi, chief photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art, ‘the medium of the moment.’ Despite a slowing economy, auctions continue to see record prices for classic blue-chip images.”
Learning To Improvise
“For almost as long as we’ve had digital computers, enterprising programmers have been trying to teach them how to play music. Perhaps the most challenging remaining hurdle is the spontaneous back-and-forth flow of improvisation. Machines are quick to learn when it comes to rolling out standard chord progressions and following predictable rhythms. But they turn out to be lousy at riffing, precisely because riffing is a much more chaotic sort of pattern, one that relies on intuition more than structure. But as daunting as it sounds, free improv may yet become a part of the computer’s musical repertoire, thanks to sophisticated software programs.”
Opera – MIA On PBS?
Opera is disappearing from American television. “The prospect is not a pretty one for full-length opera on PBS. Shadowed by ever-diminishing ratings, opera telecasts are being chased even from the not-for-profit airwaves. This coming season, the most familiar, and once constant, ‘content providers’ – the Metropolitan and New York City Operas, respectively – find their programming plans in disarray. After twenty-five years of televising three to four operas a year, the Met has only one scheduled for 2002-2003.”
Pop Criticism, Served Fresh Daily
How do you stay fresh if you’re a popular music critic? NYT critic Ben Ratliff says it’s the most difficult thing: “The real challenge of the job – and particularly in writing for a daily – is to keep in motion, always putting more distance between you and what you thought was cool when you were in your early 20s. (You can always admire the old favourites again, but carefully: you must meet them on new ground, as a more developed person.) You have to keep going against assumptions, especially your own. Hipness is a disease, it really is. It freezes thought.”