Animusic - Resonant Chamber

Hable Con Ella / Caetano Veloso / Cucurrucucu Paloma

Great movie, great scene.

Flaming Lips Concert

Flaming Lips Concert, originally uploaded by brownbeatle.

This past weekend was the Spring Weekend at Brown University, with the Flaming Lips putting on a nice show with a lot of balloons everywhere...

Here is a set of photos I've taken from yesterday.

I've also put up a short video of the concert on youtube.

Banned UN Speech:

Sign-up at www.unwatch.org -- UN Watc... Sign-up at www.unwatch.org -- UN Watch exposes the monumental hypocrisies, terrible lies and moral inversions of the new and supposedly reformed UN Human Rights Council. Millions of victims and 191 countries ignored. Darfur atrocities outright denied. Self-proclaimed defenders of Palestinian rights -- Assad, Ahamadinejad, Khaddafi and UN expert John Dugard -- care only about scapegoating Israel. Council President Luis de Alba of Mexico responds with unprecedented announcement that he rejects the speech as "inadmissible" -- and issues a ban on any speech that similarly criticizes the council or its member states. NGO community is shocked at denial of free speech and open debate.
Support UN Watch: visit www.unwatch.org

The Simpsons Evolution Intro

Reamonn Supergirl

Great song - I tried to find a decent live version but this should do it as well.

Anti-war protest walk at NY

Parade 2, originally uploaded by brownbeatle.

I bumped into this protest walk yesterday in NY. I really like this picture, not only because I've taken it.

I think the location was Lexington and 42nd, Manhattan, NY.

AMV Alan Parsons Project - I Robot

Great song by Alan Parsons Project, with some wonderful video that reminds me of the cartoons back in the 80's.

More on the future of internet radio...

This issue is absolutely serious. It really hurts when the so called democratic environments like the US Congress (which by the way claims that it is a government unit of the people) decide in favor of the corporations who rely on unbelievable lobbying power.

To learn more about the issue, here is an informative blog post.

Here is the directory of the Congressional Representatives by zip-code. If these matters are any kind of interest to you, please send them a fax or a letter, you can find examples at another post on the issue by Tim Westergen the owner of Pandora.

"RIAA's new royalty rates will kill online radio!!

The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has recently released a revised fee schedule for internet radio. Left unchanged, these rates will end internet radio, period. The RIAA has effectively convinced this federal committee to establish rates that make online radio a non-viable business.

It's an utterly ridiculous ruling that renders any form of internet radio non-economic. We are continuing in the belief that sanity will return as everyone involved, including the 50 million avid online radio listeners, realize just how outrageous this is.

You can probably tell by this post..."

Zoob Tube and Save Our Internet Radio

A few weeks ago, I found about this cool feature for listeners of RadioParadise, it's called ZoobTube. From the creators words:

"Thanks for checking out the Radio Paradise ZoobTube. It's one of my new digital creations that harvests and combines some of the amazing art (and sometimes dreck) that's out there in cyber space. It grabs the artist and title of the most most recent song played on Radio Paradise and then uses those as keywords to search both Flickr and You Tube for photo and video content. It's interesting on it's own but even cooler when you watch while listening to RP."

Speaking of RadioParadise, because of some legal issues and the royalty rates for internet radios, it seems that the future of internet radio is in serious trouble. To learn more and to contribute to the discussions visit this site.

Telescopic Evolution - Waking Life excerpt

"If we're looking at the highlights of human development, you have to look at the evolution of the organism and then at the development of its interaction with the environment. Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life perceived through the hominid coming to the evolution of mankind. Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man. Now, interestingly, what you're looking at here are three strings: biological, anthropological — development of the cities — and cultural, which is human expression.
Now, what you've seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And in addition, if you look at the time scales that are involved here — two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, 100,000 years for mankind as we know it — you're beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then when you get to agricultural, when you get to scientific revolution and industrial revolution, you're looking at 10,000 years, 400 years, 150 years. Uou're seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time. What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it's gonna telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself within our lifetime, within this generation.
The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence. The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism. And you knit the two together with neurobiology. Before on the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, noncompetitive grouping. Okay, independent from the external.
And what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human, okay, with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that's only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until we reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space.
And the manifestations of this neo-human-type evolution, manifestations could be dramatically counter-intuitive. That's the interesting part. The old evolution is cold. It's sterile. It's efficient, okay? And its manifestations of those social adaptations. We're talking about parasitism, dominance, morality, okay? Uh, war, predation, these would be subject to de-emphasis. These will be subject to de-evolution. The new evolutionary paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be the manifestations of the new evolution. And that is what we would hope to see from this. That would be nice."

Ten Years Gone

I haven't been posting for a while and I also haven't been listening to this song for a while. So here you go: Led Zeppelin - Ten Years Gone, the movie is a by a couple of kids...

Pandora's Jar

If you're interested in sharing and finding great music, this past year is probably a glorious one with all the web2.0 stuff going on. There have been many online so called Social Music sites, (with pandora being my favorite). Here is a nice review of the current market leaders.

Speaking of pandora, here is a tool called pandora's jar that enables you to save the streaming songs from pandora to your computer as mp3's. It also connects to last.fm and iTunes for information and album art (optional). Avid listeners would certainly be interested. I couldn't make it work (probably because I have flash player 9) and unfortunately I don't have time right now but I will!

the startup superbowl ad

"WTF??!! (a message from Technorati)" is a delicious superbowl commercial from Technorati that was able to find its way to youtube (unfortunately not the superbowl). It includes a scene from one of my favourite movies.

There are more in here.

TMNT

The teaser:


and the trailer:

Mr. Bean

Can sent me a Mr. Bean video which took me back to my days in high school where substitute teacher for English classes would make us watch this hilarious guy. I just found a better one:



I have no idea if he's still doing his thing but along with Benny Hill, they constitute a group of weird but funny childhood memories for me.

Melvis

Melvis, originally uploaded by brownbeatle.

My current research at grad school is about speech processing and microphone arrays and this is our current solution to a repeatable human talker model.

Melvis = matt + elvis
Matt is the guy who got this thing together and elvis is elvis:) - the name is my professor's invention.

Buying a portable music player...

I think it was my first ever post in this blog that I mentioned about buying a portable music device in the near future. Normally, this is no more complicated than buying a dvd player, camera or a stereo system. Fix a budget with some uncertainty, do a search on existing models, look at the up and coming models, prioritize your needs from the device and buy the best product that matches your needs and price range.

When it comes down to portable music devices, the story is a lot more complicated because of the following three letters: DRM. There are loads of talk, discussion, opposition on DRM which I will not go into (not right now at least) but if you do, this techcrunch post and the subsequent trackbacks and comments are not a bad place to start. Basically the main problem is when buying a portable music player, you not only buy a technical device that plays music in certain digital formats but you also pledge yourself (assuming you do not download illegally and/or your only source of music is not audio cd's where you create your mp3's from) to a specific music purchasing environment (as in ipod/itunes) as long as you keep that player and/or the songs you purchased from that music store. Because of the licensing, say you have an ipod and you bought 500 songs from itunes in a span, if a time comes where you have/want to change your player, you'll have to forget about those 500 songs as well even though you've paid for them. Not even that complicated: If you have an ipod but have a lot music in the regular mp3 format that say you acquired perfectly legally from e-music * and suddenly Apple decides to change the ipod's firmware such that it won't play regular mp3's, again you're practically screwed - you have to give up all your songs from itunes if you want to buy a new ipod. Actually it's not even about the money. For avid and passionate music listeners like me who seriously spend time and energy to find and purchase good music to listen to, it's not a pleasant stance to experience the possibility of losing a large part of the hardly acquired music collection.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that once you make your choice, you're very affected by the current and future decisions of record labels, music stores and the hardware companies and it's important to make an informed and well thought decision. A lot of people don't even think about this issue when buying a player and usually that's my stance as well on a lot of other equipment purchases but finding, acquiring and storing good music that I find is very important for me. In the next post I'll try to explain my current stand and in the coming ones I'll hopefully talk about other alternatives.

Progress Review

I haven't been posting in a week due to some work and non-work related events in my life although I have to admit that all is pretty well. In the mean time here are two interesting photo sets from flickr that might be interesting.

1) Olivia Leigh - Reflections of Oneself
2) Defensor Fortis - ...my operation iraqi freedom...dec 05-jun06...

Enjoy.

Manning Chapel

Manning Chapel, originally uploaded by brownbeatle.

I was introduced the flickr a while ago, though it may be seen as a simple photo sharing service, it contains a lot of inspirational photos. I was around the campus today, exhausted after being on the phone for an hour when I took this picture - it's probably the best I've ever taken so far, with this one and that one being the other candidates. Enjoy!

Not Just Snacks

I just had very good Indian Food at Not Just Snacks - here are some pictures of the food itself.

The Chinatown Bus Experience

It's the year 2007, and judging from it's first 2 days it's promising to be a very busy year for me...

I spent the last couple of days in Washington DC to visit a few "longtimenosee" friends from back home who now live there. My main aim was to get out of Providence for a few days and relax before coming back to work - which worked out. However there's more to it:

Having traveled the road between Istanbul and Izmir for 5 years, I can easily say that I'm accustomed to various levels of travel conditions (which for instance include a 10 year old kid sleeping under my seat), mainly in buses... Therefore when I heard the availability of the Chinatown buses, I did not hesitate to consider them as an option especially when I heard their price.
When I started searching, I sadly found out that there are no direct buses between Washington DC and Providence. The only option is to go to New York and exchange buses there. Finding a bus between NY and DC is very easy, these guys are pretty well organized and you can even buy tickets from the net, though I don't think it's necessary. Here is a good Chinatown Bus search engine. I chose the Eastern Travel bus, costing 20$, for no reason at all and they turned out to be OK.

To get to NY from Providence is tricky though. I was hearing about this large van type of thing that leaves from Thayer St. early in the morning. I did search them on the web but found absolutely nothing about them. Luckily, a friend of mine was traveling to NY the same day and he somehow had the phone number of the driver - this is hardcore even by the Turkish standards. So here I'm unveiling the myth of this bus. It's a large van that leaves from Thayer St. in front of Store 24 at 730 every morning. The destination is 43 Canal St in Manhattan, very close to the East Broadway station where you can take the F train to practically anywhere. As far as I recall, it leaves the same address in Manhattan at 530 every day - although I might need to check that again - to come back to Providence. It costs 15$.

The return trip was a little more tricky. I was tired, I didn't want to travel during the day and I didn't want to exchange buses at night, so I came up with the Bonanza bus which in the website was scheduled as 315 am Mondays and Saturdays. After calling the guys to make sure that it was Monday, my friend took me to the station and boom - no bus. I went to my friends office to look at early morning planes and buses and suddenly found out that there was a bus to NY at 330 am in the morning by Today's Bus. I caught the bus, it was a little more shittier than the Eastern Bus but who cares at that point. I found an unoccupied couple of seats at the back and started to enjoy the ride, sleeping until I woke up to find out that we are in the middle of the highway picking up passengers. At first I thought it was Baltimore but then the lady sitting next to me said that another bus from the same company broke down and they were taking all the passengers in. It was unbelievable. There were around 10 people standing up for the entire journey and because the space between the seats are smaller then the usual (even the lady sitting next to me couldn't fit), I had to lean to my left with my legs on the corridor - magically I still was able to sleep.

In conclusion I still very much recommend the Chinatown Buses over the regular Bonanza bus. They're half the price and except pretty weird situations like my return trip, they're fairly comfortable plus you get to catch a glimpse of Chinatown in the cities you travel.