Tag Archives: web

Choral Internet Radio?

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Since I’ve all but abandoned choral singing this year in favor of writing my thesis (and boy does it bum me out), I’m at least trying to get more new old music in my ears. I tend to forget the iPod at home so I’ve turned to internet radio. For a while I was listening to KALX, but it’s not conducive to writing. For a while I was hooked on SomaFM, but no station there is quite what I want to listen to, ever. Then I turned to KKJZ in Long Beach for my jazz fix. I highly recommend it. Anuraag seems to be good for Indian classical music, but there must be other ones out there.

Now I’m itching for some good old vocal polyphony. Chant will do in a pinch. I came across this Choral Treasure station which is ok, but are there alternatives. Perhaps this is something Choralista should be able to tell me about, hmmmm?

[UPDATE: I can’t complain about any radio station that plays the whole Missa Papae Marcelli, so I hope I don’t sound like I’m dissatisfied with Choral Treasure…]

furoshiki madness!

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Via Lifehacker, I learned about Furoshiki, a traditional Japanese cloth wrapping. You’re less likely to get paper cuts than with origami, but you still get the fun schematic diagrams.
Apparently the Japanese Environment minister (they have an environment minister? Is that essentially the Dept. of the Interior?) wants to promote the use of them. Although you can buy them from vendors, it’s the sort of thing that screams “DIY.”

The Phrontistery

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Via the NPL mailing list, I learned of The Phrontistery, a collection of “lost words” which are non-spelling-variant, non-regional Modern English words with entries in the OED that do not (obviously) appear elsewhere on the web. There are some great words in there — I highly recommend them the next time you need to fulfill your hemerine serving of traboccant verbiage.

(I hope blogging with these words doesn’t remove them from the list!)

Update: Missing E (for Erin) added in title.

2007 SFIAAFF

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The The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is going on right now. I’ve seen two films, which is likely my quota given my workload, but there are a bunch that I want to see.

In Between Days is the story of an alienated Korean-Canadian girl, Aimee, who lives with her single mother in a desolate and snowy Toronto. The film follows her trying to deal with her feelings for her friend Tran, her absent father, and the trials of being in a foreign country. Although it seems to be causing a lot of waves, I felt like the pacing was a bit slow for my taste. Perhaps that was because I was hungry though. This film is a must-see if you are interested in the psychology of assimilation and alienation in Asian youth (Yeti, I am looking at you).

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, an anime, is an adaptation of a young-adult novel about a high school senior who discovers she has the power to jump back in time. Hilarity ensues as she avoids awkward and embarassing situations by haveing do-overs, but she soon discovers that changing some events for the better can have undesired consequences (a typical trope in time-travel stories). This was a touching film, but I felt it sort of left the rails near the ending by introducing a rather improbable plot twist. Anime has a tendency to do this, however, so I lumped it in with the other oddities of Japanese narrative.

SFIAAFF Trailer is very addictive for some reason. The lyrics make no sense at all:

Come with me and we will paint the town together
With our brand new brush made out of patent leather.
We’ll go dancing after we have sandwiches.
Then we’ll fly away…
Through the air with a grizzly bear,
We can make a cake out of snow
But first we need to get on with our show!

Part of it must the calliope circus music, but really, it’s just pure silliness.

I(c,g) and the inner life of a cell

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I went to a talk yesterday by Chris Wiggins on gene networks, signal processing, and information. I found it a bit unfortunate that he used the phrase “the mutual information between chemistry and genetics” and wrote up I(c,g) on the board. I eventually figured out what he meant, but it immediately brought to mind the famous “Information Theory, Photosynthesis, and Religion” editorial by Elias in the IT Transactions.

Although I had to duck out of the talk early, at the beginning we got to see the Inner Life Of A Cell video, which is amazing. There are versions with narration from the Harvard multimedia website. I know this has been around a while, but I hadn’t seen it yet. It’s definitely worth a look.