The library has no external dependencies, and all the glyphs, scores, beams, ties, etc. are positioned and rendered entirely in JavaScript.

via 0xFE – 11111110b – 0376 – 254 b9#9: Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas.

From Aaron Wagner RT @newsycombinator

via Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com.

via For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path – NYTimes.com.

The over-arching question: are digital books as good or better than physical books at protecting you and your rights as a reader?

via Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

via Weird, Rare Clouds and the Physics Behind Them | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Full-length version

The comments suggest that the instruments are “real” and the music is actually played on it.

Entertaining. Not all commercials are obnoxious.

via What’s A “Spooey”? A Field Guide To Freeway Interchanges, Part 1 » INFRASTRUCTURIST.

Nine years ago, Mr. Ellison sued Internet service providers for failing to stop a user from posting four of his stories to an online newsgroup. Since settling that suit, he has pursued more than 240 people who have posted his work to the Internet without permission. “If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump,” he said.

via With E-Readers Comes Wider Piracy of Books – NYTimes.com:

Whenever I hear Harlan Ellison’s name I see Hunter Thompson’s image. What’s up with that?

The title of the article when you read it is Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web.

The title of the web page is With E-Readers Comes Wider Piracy of Books

In either case, I have a problem with the headline implications. People who shell out the money for an e-reader are unlikely to be “avoiding the cost” of buying electronic editions.

Petty theft? Probably. Piracy (for a profit)? Unlikely.

What really annoys me is the blurb from the email news from the NY Times

E-reader technology is making it easier to obtain and distribute copyrighted material on the Web for free.

Uncut “Essential for all fans of stately ambience”

Product Description The first album for 4AD from this Icelandic composer is an expanded version of a performance piece originally written for the dancer and choreographer Erna Omarsdottir, and which has been performed in more than 40 European cities. This new incarnation was scored for a 60-piece string orchestra and the four original movements were joined by a completely new finale. The final mix incorporates electronics and vintage reel-to-reel recordings of the IBM 1401 mainframe computer which inspired the piece in the first place.

Amazon.com: IBM 1401, A User’s Manual: Johann Johannsson, Mario Klemens, City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Erna Órnarsdóttir: Music

 

1. Client asks who designed your website.

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : 20 signs you don’t want that web design project.

Most of us are, by now, familiar with the maps the TV channels and web sites use to show the results of the presidential election:

Election maps.

With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won’t save it.

Blu-ray is dead – heckuva job, Sony! | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com.

The Pulse smartpen captures handwriting and simultaneously records audio and synchronizes it to the writing, so users never miss a word. Pulse is available in two models. Priced at $149, the 1GB model provides storage for over 100 hours of recorded audio. At $199, the 2GB model doubles the storage capacity and provides more flexibility for downloading future applications. In addition to the Pulse smartpen, consumers may also buy Livescribe dot paper and the latest accessories, such as the Premium Leather Case $24.95, 2-Pack of Journals $24.95, 4-Pack of College-Ruled Notebooks $19.95 or 5-Pack of Ink Cartridges $5.95. The Pulse smartpen, dot paper and accessories are also available for purchase at www.livescribe.com. Livescribe :: Press Center.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.

(Via Strange Maps.)

Found this while I was reading about Bill Evans. Sometimes the radio works best ;-)

The MP3 128K stream is tastier than the 64K.

There are a number of “stations” – Smooth, Dinner, Vocal. If you sign up to be a member of All About Jazz you get to download the tune of the day as well.

So, to the listening library I was dispatched. It felt like a punishment even before I clamped on those thumbscrews-for-the-ears they called “headphones” and popped in a tape of Sunday at The Village Vanguard. (Isn’t there a part in all of us that rebels at unsolicited recommendations? Don’t you hate it when somebody gushes, “This is the awesomest, ever. You’ll love it.”) Village Vanguard, I thought, what’s that, some medieval theatre-in-the-round? The way my teacher described it, the experience I was about to receive would be pianistic heaven on earth, Mount Olympus on the 88’s, and god himself would vibe me from those solid grooves. Bill Evans was at that time the summation of everything that was ever worthwhile doing with a piano or a piano trio. Forget Monk – not really a piano player; didn’t he write some quirky tunes? – forget Hines and Tatum – hopelessly old-fashioned, heavy-handed stuff – who? Cecil Taylor? Get out of my sight, infidel.

Bill Evans – The Vanguard Sessions – 1961 – quoted on the last page of this month’s Jazziz Magazine.

I have a “fair bit” of Bill Evans in the collection. Turns out that I have 2 copies (not identical) of the Vanguard sessions – “Bill Evans Trio: Sunday At The Village Vanguard” and “Complete Riverside Recordings (Disc 7)”. They are not identical, but appear to be the same sessions. The former is engineered a bit differently.

I wonder what’s different in the latest “Bill Evans: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings 1961″ collection? The reviews and description at Amazon illumimnate.

X

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information–too often leaving users with “Where am I?” puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.

The review is a video. 56MB download, so be patient. Go ahead and read the excerpts from the book while the video is loading.

“Spatial Imperialism”!

Steve Martin – watch the video

In general, however, a comedian in shackles for indecent language, or a singer’s arrest for obscene gestures, thrilled the growing underground audience. Silliness was just not appropriate for hip culture. It was this circumstance that set the stage for my success eight years later.

NEW YORK—Despite heaping lavish praise on the HBO crime drama The Wire, television critics across the country admitted Monday that not one of them has ever sat down to watch an entire episode of the show.

In those dark days, the people writing the web copy weren’t actually writers: They were secretaries, product engineers, and—horrors!—designers; more often than not, the content was thrown together as an afterthought by someone who didn’t know a semicolon from a hole in the ground. Web writing was simply painful to read. Not only were the pages not designed for reading, the content itself wasn’t worth reading. As a result, writers and designers cultivated impatient, lazy readers, and this in turn bred the advice to skip the art of writing altogether and merely summarize.

Hey! Chris! Go read this!