I’ve been listening to Pandora for a while now. It builds “stations” for you to listen to based on your favorite types of music. Start simple by entering an artist or a song that you like. Pandora plays music that is similar to your choice. As the songs play, guide Pandora by giving the music a thumbs-up or -down.
Pandora is driven by The Music Genome Project which categorizes music not just by genre, but by techical attributes such as “harmony and rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony.” Like a radio station, you don’t get to pick what song plays next, but the more feedback you give to Pandora, the more your station(s) play what you like.
Pandora is a great way to discover new music. I’ve discovered many artists and bought (yes, for real $$) their music to add to my collection. You might think the music labels would be eager to see Pandora (and others like it) succeed. On the contrary, the Copyright Royalty Board, backed by the RIAA is raising the royalties on Internet music stations like Pandora. This year, Pandora will pay 70% of it’s revenue in music royalties. Higher rates can have no effect but putting Internet radio out of business. Traditional broadcast radio (owned by corporations with huge lobbying budgets) pay NO royalties; XM and Sirius pay about 2% of their revenue to royalties.
Check Pandora out. If you like it, write your representatives in Washington and tell them that you want to save Internet radio. Representative Howard L. Berman, a Democrat from California, is attempting to work up a deal between Pandora and SoundExchange, the organization that represents artists and labels, but so far there is no movement on the issue.
‘Major discovery’ from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution
Scientists mimic essence of plants’ energy storage system
Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today’s announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.
I was just invited to check out SlideRocket, a new online presentation tool. Goes way beyond PowerPoint or KeyNote. You can even embed presentations into your blog!
An old Italian man lived alone in the country. He wanted to dig his tomato garden, but it was very hard work as the ground was hard. His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison.
The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament:
Dear Vincent,
I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won’t be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. If you were here, my troubles would be over. I know you would dig the plot for me.
Love, Dad.
A few days later, he received a letter from his son.
Dear Dad,
Don’t dig up that garden. That’s where I buried the BODIES.
Love, Vinnie.
At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day the old man received another letter from his son.
Dear Dad,
Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That’s the best I could do under the circumstances.
There are many reasons for the popularity of paranormal beliefs in the United States today, including:
the irresponsibility of the mass media, who exploit the public taste for nonsense,
the irrationality of the American world-view, which supports such unsupportable claims as life after death and the efficacy of the polygraph, and
the ineffectiveness of public education, which generally fails to teach students the essential skills of critical thinking.
As a college professor, I am especially concerned with this third problem. Most of the freshman and sophomore students in my classes simply do not know how to draw reasonable conclusions from the evidence. At most, they’ve been taught in high school what to think; few of them know how to think.
Part of the problem is that a lot of people didn’t pay attention in their high-school science classes — they never learned what a scientific theory is. Read how Brian Denning explains the concept of a theory from his Skeptoid essays and podcast:
Evolution is just a theory, not a fact. [argues the creationist] This is an easily digestible sound bite intended to show that evolution is just an unproven hypothesis, like any other, and thus should not be taught in schools as if it were fact. Actually, evolution is both a theory and a fact. A fact is something we observe in the world, and a theory is our best explanation for it. Stephen Jay Gould famously addressed this argument by pointing out that the fact of gravity is that things fall, and our theory of gravity began with Isaac Newton and was later replaced by Einstein’s improved theory. The current state of our theory to explain gravity does not affect the fact that things fall. Similarly, Darwin’s original theory of evolution was highly incomplete and had plenty of errors. Today’s theory is still incomplete but it’s a thousand times better than it was in Darwin’s day. But the state of our explanation does not affect the observed fact that species evolve over time.
The fact that you’re confronting this column on a web site devoted to space science and astronomy makes you roughly as rare as technetium. Despite the fact that astronomy is one of the two most popular science subjects in American schools (the other is biology), it’s really not that popular. Read the rest of this entry »
Assessing and reacting to risk is one of the most important things a living creature has to deal with, and there’s a very primitive part of the brain that has that job. It’s the amygdala, and it sits right above the brainstem, in what’s called the medial temporal lobe. The amygdala is responsible for processing base emotions that come from sensory inputs, like anger, avoidance, defensiveness and fear. It’s an old part of the brain, and seems to have originated in early fishes.
This article in the NY Times is a great summary of issues that face the Internet world.
Q: Considering the carelessness with which the government (state and federal) and commercial enterprises treat our confidential information, is it essentially a waste of effort for us as individuals to worry about securing our data?
