My friend in New Zealand called the other day, and the first thing he asked: “What’s going on over there?”  Good question, and part of what he was talking about was our inability to do anyhing meaningful about gun violence, despite the huge amount of publicity that has accompanied evens in the last couple of years: mass shootings, police shootings of black men, “terrorist” attacks …

The NPR show “On the Media” had at this question this week, and pieced together a series of separate ideas into a coherent story that persuasively lays out why things are the way they are, and how they might be changed.  One of those radio shows that has you sitting in your car after you arrive where you’re going.

I think it partly answers my New Zealand friends’ incredulous questions.

Common Sense – On The Media.

Years ago, I wrote a piece called “Lurch” (actually, I got as far as implementing a study for the piece).  In it, a DSP chip runs self-modifying code starting from whatever’s in the contents of it’s memory in a sandbox, provided with an external audio input (hooked to an AM radio) and an internal one (hooked to a simple sinewave oscillator).  It evolves according to a “goodness” measure provided by a MIDI continuous controller value.  A performer sits and drives a mod wheel up and down in response to how well (s)he likes what the hardware is spitting out.

In performance, it usually starts with no audio out, then manages to spit out a few clicks, and, encouraged by the performer, maybe manages to output a munged version of the input signals over time.  There’s a recording of one performance here which amazingly spat out the internal oscillator signal practically from the start.

Anyway: I ran into this on CDM today, and it reminded me of this.  A performer/builder constructing sound from scratch; the tension of the performance has to do with whether or not the performer will be able to coax out the sound on the fly by constructing the hardware.  She’s going for a known result, unlike Lurch which always comes up with something different (when it works at all – early versions blew up the DSP chip in a literal quick puff of smoke by generating illegal instructions).

I still remember one of the responses to the recorded performance: someone wasn’t allowed to play it on the family’s new CD player, because the Dad thought it’d blow up the speakers.  Rock’n’roll!

20 oscillators in 20 minutes is action sports, comic gold – cdm createdigitalmusic.

Now for something a little lighter:

Poll: 30% of GOP voters support bombing Agrabah, the city from Aladdin

via Poll: 30% of GOP voters support bombing Agrabah, the city from Aladdin | US news | The Guardian.

95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue – The New York Times.

I started out thinking that Mr Trump was funny, and pointed out by example how US presidential politics has become a spectator sport like the NFL or reality TV.

Now I’m realizing who he reminds me of: Benito Mussolini.  I know what’s good for you, everyone’s an enemy, we can solve all our problems through force, … all with the non-threatening somewhat jokey bombast that’s associated with the Donald.  Then I remembered reports of people in the 20’s and 30’s who thought Mussolini was a joke, too.

Whitechapel Gallery is putting up an exhibit by Luke Fowler about historical back-waters in computer-based composition and performance, and I was asked to send a variety of materials for inclusion (along with Rosenboom, Polansky, Burk, et al).  A request that precipitated lots of scurrying around in old storage units and filing cabinets, and brought back some nice memories.  Flattered to be included.  If anyone’s in London Nov 2015-Feb 2016, go check it out and let me know what it looks like …

New Zealand is going through a rebranding exercise. Just like W1A, episode 3 season 1, 8:45 in (wish there was a URL for that)

UNHCR – Fiftieth Anniversary of the Hungarian uprising and refugee crisis.

I was watching the BBC last night, seeing video of bedraggled families being escorted under guard from a Budapest train they’d been told was heading to the Austrian border, and couldn’t help flashing back to stories my Dad tells of having almost the same experience.

My father and his family were some of the 200,000 people who escaped on foot through mid-Winter snow across the border from Hungary to Austria after the revolution of 1956.  The big difference is that, literally within days, a pragmatic and humane response had been organized to accommodate them, and within weeks they were airlifted out of Europe to all parts of the world; in the case of my Dad’s family, to New Zealand, a country they hadn’t even heard of before escaping to Austria.  And that’s how I came to be.

According to the article above, the entire response was initiated and organized by a very few people in positions of authority in Austria making it up as they went, but today we can’t seem to organize a similar response using this already-existing template anywhere in Europe.  What have we forgotten?

How Tesla Will Change The World – Wait But Why.

Wait But Why is an interesting site, the fruit of Tim Urban’s drive to understand and “unfuzz” the arguments around the big discussions going on.  Turns out Elon Musk reads it, and wanted Urban to unfuzz the arguments around what he was doing.

This article is about electric cars: why we’re where we are, why they’re important, how Tesla is forcing the issue and why it needs to be forced.  Long, but worthwhile, read.  The guy writes with a sense of humour, too 🙂

A bit of truth.

As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.

From “One Startup’s Stuggle to Survive the Silicon Valley”, Wired magazine, http://www.wired.com/2014/04/no-exit/

Timeline Photos – Occupy Democrats | Facebook.

The quote works equally well if you replace the word “America” with “Australia”.  This is how we feel about Australians.  Hmm.  Wonder if Trump has any Oz in his bloodline?  He certainly behaves that way.  Maybe his Mum was Australian?  Where’s the outrage?  I’m starting a birther movement to force Trump to produce his birth certificate.