I nailed a lovely hosting package as recommended by GingerPixel

so I have plenty of space to host tracks without fear of going over my bandwidth, so the music blog section will be the place to go to pick up some hot tracks.

For now, bye bye, and see you on the other side.

This is not music for everyone, but it sends shivers down the spines of others. I am one of those others.

This is a trailer from a DVD the band are releasing on my birthday this year, a documentary about their tour of Iceland in Summer ’06. It is called Heima, which means “at home”. The cinematography, or the taste that we are given, seems not to disappoint. This could be a DVD to treasure.

OiNK’s departure has galvanized my desire to bring music to my blog. I’ve been djing a bit recently, and what I enjoy most about that is playing new tracks for people, my own special picks. There is some incredible music being made now, in all genres, so much of which goes unnoticed, not least by myself. But I make an effort to keep listening. Anyway, now I present to you, dear reader, the opening track: Maps, from the wonderous ADA, a synth princess from Frankfurt. Give this a listen, it really is enchanting.

Maps – ADA (Micheal Mayer and Tobias Thomas Mix)

For those who never knew the pleasures of the pink wonderland that was oink, it was, undoubtedly, the greatest thing since sliced Napster. As Tina Turner said of the site, it was “simply the best”. She went on to say that she preferred it to any of it’s alternatives. *cough*

Hugely picky about the quality and tagging of the uploads, Oink brought music downloading out of the complete mess that so many of you know well from the likes of limewire. What were sometimes referred to as harsh ratio rules kept everyone uploading, desperate to try to keep to a 1:1 download to upload ratio. Those who were banned were not allowed back in. Your account was deactivated if you were inactive for over 30 days. Unless you were a power user+, like me . Never, on oink, never would you download a mislabeled track, one that popped or clicked at all, and as as comment on Digg read “Oink was one of those places where if you couldn’t find something in a search, it probably didn’t exist in the first place”. The number one rule on the site was that you must have a cute avatar. There were threads for people to query whether their avatar was cute enough. OiNK rocked.

I had been a member for over 2 years, from back in the days when there were less than 30,000 members. In the last year the site grew tremendously, up to about 180,000 members, and became far more high profile than it had been before. There were over 60 prerelease album leaks this year alone, and that was quite likely what brought the authorities knocking on the door. Or kicking it in rather.

The homepage has now been replaced with a non-pink scaremongering page. “A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users”. Ohh. Scary. I will literally punch the entire prosecution team in the face if I get brought to court. Anyway, it’s not going to happen. Don’t be put off by this fellow music communists. You don’t need justification to listen to music. I’ve got plenty though. I personally download music because I disagree with the invasion of Iraq. That’s for the American labels. As for the English labels, let me just say this. 800 years.

I’m not going to launch into the issues of intellectual copyright in the 21st century, but me just say, nobody on OiNK actually stole anything. They just listened to sequences of ones and zeros that just happened to resemble (accidentally) the series of of ones and zeros that record labels were selling in the shops. That’s all.

011000110101010101. There. That’s my number, I copyright it. Enjoy it? I thought so. If anyone else uses it, or in fact just looks at it without paying me my dues, I will sue them. You got a sample there, but if you save that number, my lawyers will come knocking. I have your IP. I’m serious. Otherwise you’re stealing my genius. a wah wah wah. If you want to buy the number to look at in your own time it is 20 euro please. Oh I forgot to mention, I conceptualized the number, wrote it down and made it everything it is, but still I’m only getting about 15 percent of the profits, the rest goes to the number label I’m with. There’s no good reason for that, of course, other than feeding the bureaucrats, but theres no way around it in this industry. That price, by the way, will never go down, even when the recording (..) costs and marketing are long paid for. Hell, it won’t even change a penny when I die. And if it becomes a classic, they will start jacking the price up, like The White Album.

But enough ridiculousness. What is interesting me is where the 180,000 strong Oink community are going to move to. Although most BT users would be members of multiple trackers, while oink was around it was really all you needed. Now that it’s not, I wonder where everyone will go. As much as everyone keeps saying “there’ll be plenty more popping up”, I’d say it will be quite a while before such an organised tracker shows its head.

Jeremy Banks, head of the IFPI, stated that Oink was a highly lucrative business (NEVER did oink request money from it’s members, and it hardly gave any advantages to the few who decided to donate to keep the servers running) and generally painted OiNK as the SS. “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure” he said.

That’s exactly what it was, Jeremy, you pansy.

I found so many bands, fell in love with new artists, discovered genres I would have never gotten into, and overall listened to more music than I would ever have been able to afford without it. My dad used OiNK. That’s how great it was.

I almost feel like a friend has died.

So long OiNK. We’ll miss you

Like that? Well here’s another one, this time Hard Gay in action on a Japanese cookery show, in which he uses his hip thrusting ability to classic effect. Rather than say anymore, I’ll ask you simply to watch, and imagine the reaction if TV3 made a show like this in Ireland. I doubt the Eircom infrastructure could handle traffic on Joe Duffy’s phoneline. Hilarious.

The jet powered down the runway, and flew 1300 kilometres to Moscow, travelling at a crusing speed of about 560mph, and Andrei, on the ride of his life, was subject to temperatures of -50 Degrees Celcius. Two hours later the 737 touched down in Moscow, and Andrei collapsed on the tarmac. His arms and legs were so severely frozen that emergency workers were at first unable to remove his clothes and shoes. Doctors say it is nothing short of a miracle that he survived the flight. He is now being treated in hospital for his severe frostbite.

Despite the outlandishness of the story, Russian officials have confirmed it.

To quote a comedy legend:

Fuuuuuuckiiiiiiiiin Elllllllll

1. I thought it was going to rain, and

 2. I dont really have a big enough bag to fit that fat thing in. SLRs are a pain in the ass sometimes, particularly when you want to bring your camera just to take a photo here or there.

The effort required in bringing to photo opportunity ratio has been small over the last few days. Yes. Thats it. So I’ll have to wait until I move up here [Oct 6th] before I bring the camera with me to lectures. Its a pity, I know. Woe is me, etc…What that means for you, my legions of readers, is that you will have to wait a little before you can visually experience the NUIM campus, but I will make do with the tools to hand, which are letters arranged in pre specified, and [hopefully] coherant orders. Words! Yes, thats it.

In other, not remotely related news, Ellen Allien’s The Other Side – Berlin album is my cafe internet blog listening music of choice this week. Subtle, brooding and almost always engrossing, I cannot say how much I am currently enjoying the album. I picked up Orchestra of Bubbles yesterday [her work with Apparat], and on first listening it seems very promising. I do quite love this new breed of minimal [though, in some sense, maximal] electronica. I didn’t really start the blog to write about music, but random reviews are inevitable, so be warned. Particularly epileptics, if one of your triggers is an album review you disagree with. 

I must run now, in search of a lecture hall. Will post soon.

 My problem is this, if you have a penchant for following the half baked logic that is at the heart of the common conspiracy, it never ends. Nothing is real.

• There was no Apollo 11 moon landing.
• The Jews run the planet
• Humanity is actually under the control of shape-shifting alien reptiles, who require periodic ingestion of human blood to maintain their human appearance.
• Paul McCartney died in a car crash in late 1966, and was replaced by a lookalike prior to the recording of St Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band

and the current favorite: 

• The attacks of 9/11 were masterminded from start to finish by the Bush administration, desperate for a reason to finish the first Gulf War.

 Where can you go with this view of the world? Not very far. By definition, a good conspiracy theory has very little factual basis, because lots of things have been covered up and the evidence has been destroyed. That’s good for the theorists, because it gives them total creative control over their fantasies, and they can liven up the story without anyone demanding explanation. The best theories even have a certain poetry to them, a symmetry that somehow unloads some manner of meaning onto an event. Like for example the idea that the Titanic was built, celebrated and deliberately sunk as an elaborate demonstration of the truth of Robert Burns’ famed line:

The sad truth is that this theory is correct. 

Who was behind this calamitous re-enactment of poetic truth is known only to the perpetrators, who covered their tracks with exquisite care. That said, it has come to light in recent years to a few inquisitive minds that it was in fact The International Association of Poetic Scholars that was behind this dreadful act, who, coming into a century of declining interest in poetry, faced losing their prized careers. In an act of desperation, they moved to orchestrate one of the first major disasters of the 20th century.

One of the members, now only known as Morris, as an old man decided to take the cruise and die as a martyr to his cause. He is rumoured to have asked his companions as he boarded the towering vessel;

“What would you think if this was really happening?”

It seems, in this way, that we still cannot in any way replicate a human, or even ever understand the deep seated mystery of consciousness. That remains the realm of the philosophers and armchair theorizing. Neurologists collaborate on huge projects to emulate cognitive ability in robots, and hope in that way to be given some insight into their own heads. The major problem with robots, the unmoveable tree trunk on the road, is that they don’t appear to experience what they are doing. We give them digital brains but they can’t dream. They have cameras, but they can’t “see”. As we would all probably agree, what it means to exist to a human is not simply function. It is to appreciate, to ponder, to experience the signals from our sensory organs and put the contextualize them, to give them meaning. It is as if there is some Theatre, hidden somewhere within the head where there is some tiny man (our soul perhaps; the “homunculus”) observing all the sensory data projected on a screen, making decisions and sending out commands. That obscure image has been dubbed the Cartesian Theatre and it is the remnants of Descartes concept of Dualism. This concept has now been disregarded by most neuroscientists, but it is no easy task putting to bed a concept whose partnering statement; Cogito Ergo Sum is the very foundation of modern Western philosophy.

Now, enter Shakey the robot. Developed at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California in the late 1960′s, Shakey is perhaps my favorite robot. Wait, scrap that. He is my favorite robot. He didn’t do anything particularly well, and wasn’t a particularly realistic simulation of human pyschology, but he illustrated shortcomings in how we percieve our thoughts in a way that no human could do before him.

Shakey was a box on wheels with a television eye, and instead of carrying his brain around with him, he was linked to it by radio. He lived in a brightly lit room and never ventured outdoors. His flatmates were a ramp, a few boxes, and few platforms and a pyramid, all brightly coloured to make vision easier for Shakey. You could communicate with Shakey by typing messages at a terminal beside his computer brain in a severly restricted vocabulary of semi-english. “Push the box off the platform” would send Shakey out, finding a box on a platform, locating a ramp, pushing the ramp into position, rolling up onto the platform and pushing the box off. Now how did Shakey achieve this? Did he too have, inside him, a tiny man watching a screen and controlling his motorized wheels? Such would be one way of looking at it, though if that was the case, I would imagine Shakeys’ programmers would be more infamous than they are now. In actuality what Shakey was using was a clever system of telling the different objects apart, which you could watch happening on a monitor in another room. A single grainy frame would appear on the monitor, an image of a box, say. The image would then be sharpened and modified in various ways, and then, though a feat of calculation, the boundries of the box would be outlined in white, and the whole image would be transformed into a line drawing. Shakey would then identify each vertex of the line drawing and determine, what was the shape of the object he was facing. If for example, he was facing the box diagonally, and he labeled the top corner facing him a Y, he would know he had a box, as from no angle would a pyramid present a Y vertex. What may have struck the observer as, as they watched on the monitor the image being sketched out, was that Shakey wasn’t looking at it. In fact, Shakey wasn’t looking at any monitors. Whose purpose did the monitor serve then? Only the observer. Whats more, the monitor could be turned off or unplugged without any detriment to Shakey’s abilities. What relation then, did the events they were watching on the monitor bear to the events going on inside Shakey?

Shakey, taking a single frame, would transform the image of a box into a sequence of 1′s and 0′s, 1 representing white and 0 representing dark. Using a set of mathmatical tools, he could then look for the reoccurance of light turning to dark or visa versa over the sequence of numbers and then from that determine a line, or outline of the box. He could then reorganise in his head the data into what we might like to refer to as an image, but in reality was nothing of the sort. This is, of course, an oversimplification, but here is a rough sketch of what Shakey was “thinking”

000000000000000111111111111111
000000000000000111111111111111
000000000000000111111111111111
000000000000000111111111111111
000000000000000111111111111111
^ a vertical line

What is interesting is that each of the processes Shakey went to to come to his conclusion is that each of the processes is, in itself, stupid and mechanical. That is, no part of the computer has to understand what it is doing and why, and there is no mystery about how each of the processes is mechanically done. Nevertheless, the clever organisation of this stupid processes takes the place of an observer telling Shakey what to do. Put the whole system then in a black box, whose whole purpose is then to tell Shakey what he needs to know. Initially, we might be inclined to think that the only way to achieve this would be to put a little man in the black box, watching a screen. But now we can see that this homunculus, with his limited job, can in fact be replaced by a machine. This is Shakey’s gift to us, a simple demonstration that we must put our old spiritualized concepts to bed, and once we do, theres no real reason that we wont’ be able to finally figure all this conciousness business out.

As for photos, I splashed out on a Canon 400D in the last year, so I can in some way prove my attendance to the college, so as to rule out the possibility that I am just vicariously learning through writing a blog on a degree.

Given the looks I get when I gleefully inform friends of my degree of choice, I feel I should explain. As defined by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity:

“Biotechnology means any technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific use.”

As the definition hints,  Biotech is a seriously wide reaching area,  affecting  all facets of life, from the foods you eat to  immune system catalysts prescibed to  should you be unfortunate enough as to have to undergo chemotherapy. As wiki states :

Biotechnology combines disciplines like genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, embryology and cell biology, which are in turn linked to practical disciplines like chemical engineering, information technology, and robotics.

To say I’m looking forward to the degree is an understatement. The closest thing I have to a dogma, I suppose, is Vorsprung Durch Technik. That’s me, and I hope I can push things a little forward myself once I’m armed with the knowledge neccesary.

That’s it. Mission statement accomplished. Will write soon.