“Within the music industry it is widely believed that much of the physical infrastructure of music – compact discs, automobile cassette-tape players, shopping-mall megastores – is rapidly being replaced by the Internet and a new generation of devices with no moving parts. By 2003, according to the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Investment Research Group, listeners will rarely if ever drive to Tower Records for their music. Instead they will tap into a vast cloud of music on the Net. This heavenly jukebox, as it is sometimes called, will hold the contents of every record store in the world, all of it instantly accessible from any desktop.” – The Atlantic
Tag: 08.00
HOW JAZZ SURVIVED APARTHEID
“Jazz was the culture of the anti-apartheid struggle: in the popular mind, the black jazz scene of the 1950s–the era before Sharpeville and before the ANC was forced underground or into exile–was imprinted with a special verve and style; a lost golden age.” – Prospect Magazine
SURVIVING CULTURE
Do cultures have an inherent right to survive? “There is no great moral distinction, such rhetoric seems to suggest, between allowing a culture to assimilate into the wider surrounding society and actually going out and killing its members en masse. If we take these arguments at face value, cultural survival is something very close to a moral absolute; to refuse to endorse it is to sign up on the side of cultural atrocity and numbing global conformity.” – Civilization 08/00
WHO, THEN, WILL LEAD US?
“No longer do our poets, both musical and otherwise, define society; instead, they reflect it. Some of the most significant philosophers of our time have provided nothing more than political fuel, and fashion designers have been left with the sole responsibility of directing the masses. We can hardly claim to perpetuate the age-old search for nobility. Knowledge is no longer a reward in itself, and a good number of us believe Socrates to simply be a character in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” – *spark-online 08/00
HOW DO THEY DO THAT?
At its top, the Tower of Pisa is 15 feet out of alignment with the bottom, in danger of tipping over. But the lean is being painstakingly corrected. It’s “a delicate operation in which dirt is being extracted through thin drill pipes— the geotechnical equivalent of laboratory pipettes— from under the north, upstream side of the tower foundations, allowing it to settle toward the upright direction. The rate of soil extraction amounts to just a few dozen shovelfuls a day; anything faster might jolt the tower over the brink.” – Discover Magazine
STORE THIS HERE
“Think about it – every time you see a web page that’s using a piece of clip art with a dog looking surprised, there are anywhere from six to a thousand other web sites using the exact same image, all stored in different places. This is what my Information Mechanics professor used to call a ‘waste of space’.” That’s why I invented a program for the Library of Congress to erase duplicate information. – *spark-online 08/00
STORE THIS HERE
“Think about it – every time you see a web page that’s using a piece of clip art with a dog looking surprised, there are anywhere from six to a thousand other web sites using the exact same image, all stored in different places. This is what my Information Mechanics professor used to call a ‘waste of space’.” That’s why I invented a program for the Library of Congress to erase duplicate information. – *spark-online 08/00
GET THE PICTURE?
Think digital cameras are going to take over the art of photography? Not hardly. “Even a $10 single-use camera offers 10 times better resolution than today’s $1,000 digital.” Now a French chemist “has developed a new method of ‘doping’ film emulsions that promises to make them five times better at capturing light. ‘If it can be widely applied, it will certainly be one of the greatest inventions in photography in the last 60 years.’ “ – Discover Magazine
FIVE-STAR HOTEL, FIVE-STAR ART
It’s so hard to find a hotel with really good art in it anymore…if only the inn at Murecina, a little south of Pompeii, were an operating hotel/spa – as it was in A.D. 79 – instead of of an archaeological dig site, it would surely be booked year-round. Archaeologists first discovered the inn in 1959, and found several delicate frescoes that had been preserved when the explosion from Mount Vesuvius buried the building in ash. Since then the scientists have unearthed a reclining river god holding a cornucopia, a winged Minerva, and an image in miniature of an elegant maritime villa. – Archaeology