Is listening to music cognitive or pragmatic?

We are in the process of deconstructing our musical tastes to determine which aspects of our favorite genres are actually musical. As it turns out, lots of nonmusical information clutters our perception of what makes music enjoyable or not.

• "My ex-girlfriend liked the free form jazz stylings of Bruno Mindhorn, so I think he sucks," or
  
• "No TRUE Scotsman would listen to Terminal Margaret!"

However true these sentiments might be, they are in no way related to the arrival of pressure changes at the eardrum and their subsequent transformation into electrochemical signals. We have become a little more able to explore this departure since our experiences at Lakatos' pool party and our weekend at Martha's Vineyard watching Baudrillard and Lyotard deconstruct their favorite episodes of Quincy: Medical Examiner.

For the next couple of assignments, let's be especially aware of the boundary that exists between what we are talking about (e.g. music) and what narrative we use to talk about it (good versus bad, useful versus frivolous, moral versus immoral, structure versus chaos, etc). For a quick glimpse at a narrative-free description of musical genres, check out the Music Genome Project (the guts of the pandora algorithms).

Water on the Moon, Folks.

I don't know if you read that headline completely, because it said that we have found "unambiguous evidence" of water. Where, you ask, having not read the headline? The moon, that's where.

Link

Good Evening Sinners

Generally speaking, I would consider Warren Ellis to be the rabid dog of contemporary literature. He lives entirely by means of red bull, GOOD whisky, cigarettes, and a signed contract from the devil granting him complete immunity from death so long as Ellis doesn't let lucifer's missus know about the mistress he lets dress him up as a piece of asparagus and then trim him in ways that would make bmezine blush (I'm sure Warren tells her anyway, because he's just that kind of bastard). He's made his living, from what I know, mostly as a comics writer with a style that could probably be best described by taking Alan Moore's misanthropy of the 80's, turning it inside out as a hat, dousing it with gasoline, then running screaming naked down the streets of london with it ablaze in a whiskey induced haze that would have made Ernest Hemingway recommend him for rehab - by which I mean he would have called the cops to come restrain him down and put him a way in a padded room until judgement day with priests of all denominations around guarding to make sure that nothing ever came back out.

An early adopter of social media, warren ellis carved a niche among many of us by being out there on a daily basis, emailing, blogging, and now twittering -creating a connection with his audience that many now cite as their reason for psychotic break. Trademark of this was his introduction "Good Morning, sinners." In twitter, he has found some variance, a thing which now proves to be his downfall - the creation of a Warren Ellis simulator that is so spot on people now ask him if he's ever heard of it, or even worse yet, if that's where he gets his insults from. As someone who's been enduring Warren's derogatory remarks about everything for a few years now, I can certainly say that it is truly a third order simulacra. It is mechanical, algorithmic, and reproduces the bile which spews forth from the damnedable man in a way that only serves to infuriate him further. I present it to you now:

http://talklikewarrenellis.com/

We can only hope the apocalypse will come before the website "http://talkliketalklikewarrenellisdotcom.com" is created, otherwise I'm sure the man himself will do much worse.

For other instances of his work you can find him (or some of the things he does) here:

http://www.twitter.com/warrenellis
http://www.warrenellis.com/
http://www.freakangels.com/
http://www.bleedingcool.com/category/do-anything-by-warren-ellis/

Post Script: If anyone is offended by the tone or content above, just know that Warren would have made things much worse.

All your Baudrillard are belong to me

Here is a huge repository of Baudrillard information available to anyone comfortable with time travel.

Poetron, or My robot has more of the mead of poetry in his tiniest servomotor than you do in your wildest imaginings.

My poetry engine, Poetron, takes the ideas we develop in class and applies them to text. Here is an example of his work. After reading it, follow the link above and try out the engine yourself. This piece is a combination of Colonel Kurtz, the Sugar Hill Gang and an underground UK breakbeat pioneer, William Shakespeare.

How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use,
I watched a snail crawl
let's rock, you dont stop
the edge of a straight razor and surviving.
Crawling, slithering, along
to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat
well so far youve heard my voice but i brought two friends along
The Horror.
the edge of a straight razor and surviving.
That’s my dream.

Online Mapping Software

I haven't done much with this software, but it seems straightforward. Since it's online, you do not need to install anything on your machine to use it. Oh, and it exports in html or xml, so you can post any maps you make directly on controlmachine.

http://bubbl.us/

Day Three / Four: Pool Party at Popper's House

We waded into the deep end of the pool at Karl Popper's house. Luckily, Thomas Kuhn was in for the weekend, and he provided a slightly less brutal view of how science progresses. According to Kuhn, fields of study go through several stages:

1. Prescience-Folks working really hard to understand phenomena well enough to begin to propose a tentative suggestion of a solution. Once a set of conceptually linked theories, or paradigm, has its collective phaser set on falsify, the body of work moves to...
   
2. Normal Science-- Scientists go about their daily work of moving the body of knowledge slowly but surely forward. Errors and unexplained results happen and are recorded. They don't cause the disposal of the entire paradigm, since no more successful set of theories exists.
   
3. Eventually, however, enough problems, missteps, and falsified claims accumulate and cause an entire paradigm to be overthrown. This is revolutionary science.

Popper's version of scientific progress looks as tame as a Mayberry Cake raffle for the Daughters of the American Revolution compared to the cataclysmic shifts in power Kuhn described. "Ultimately this view is naive," shouts Lakatos from the diving board. Lakatos took Popper's wel-behaved linear model, folded in Kuhn's Great Battles in Norse Mythology style of progress, and combined the best parts of both.

According to Lakatos, families of conceptually linked scientific theories and methods are linked in a research program. Competing research programs do slow and steady battle every day. After a given research program gains prominence, it may begin to recede (become increasingly complex without contributing more knowledge) and be overtaken by one that is progressive (produces new knowledge). This shift in power between research programs can be considered a revolution, but not a discontinous event. It is instead the result of a long, steady tension between programs.