Performance Anxiety

My friend Mitch has linked to this badly written and poorly informed excuse for a blog and described it as "hilarious" - a dubious honour coming from someone who thought that Anchorman was funny. He did send me this though, and that, my friends is pure, unadulterated hilarity.
Regardless, people actually read his site. Up until now, as far as I am aware, roughly 5 people read this crap. Mitch, Stu, Nick, Foster and the Belgian guy who has an automated search for the word "Leuven", which I keep putting in my posts. That's probably pissing him off.
Anyway, having been linked to, my readership could skyrocket to like 8 or 9. Maybe I should get some ads on this badboy? I could be sitting on a goldmine, although I think it's much more likely that people will just go back to reading Mitch's monthly updates. Still, at least I can keep that Belgian dude coming back.

Leuven Leuven Leuven.

Sarah Palin

I'm not sure exactly what I can possibly add to the hilarity of McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate in the US Presidential elections. So I'll settle for passing on an amusing photochop (it's fake), and a link to an article from the LA Times, that suggests that there is a 1 in 10 chance that McCain will die during his first term (if elected), and slams McCain's decision as cynical and smacking of a lack of respect for the office. For sheer entertainment value though, I wholeheartedly applaud his decision.

Philosophy of beer

We were having some drinks in the study room last week to celebrate Suresh getting the university medal (good work fella), when the subject of beer came up. We get a lot of German practicum students visiting our lab, and we feel that it is necessary to send them home having tried some of our favourite Australian beers. Anita told Matthew (our current token cherman) that Boags Premium was good, then turned to me and said: “Isn’t it?”

Which brings me to the point of this tirade. A good beer, as far as I am concerned, is one you enjoy. I’ll admit that I used to be a beer snob, but you know what? Fuck that noise. Beer is meant to be enjoyable – if you like it, everything else is detail. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be picking Reschs Real over battery acid any time soon, but hell, if you like it, I certainly won’t look down on you for drinking it.

Generally people who drink beer that I wouldn’t put out for a dog can be disliked for much more valid reasons anyway. For example, people who drink Tooheys Extra Dry are generally popped-collar sporting wankers; people who drink XXXX are generally Queenslanders and people who drink MGD are American – all entirely valid reasons for disliking them. However, if they gain enjoyment out of drinking what is, in my opinion, foul swill, then that’s fine by me.

None of this applies to people who drink Carlton Cold though. Those ass-hats should be strung up by their thumbs.

NOMO

NOMO are signed to Ubiquity, who, like English label Tru Thoughts, release absurd amounts of hotness. While browsing the Ubiquity Records MySpace blog I found this delightful little excerpt from an interview and decide to check out NOMO's myspace tunes:

The Ann Arbor, Michigan band Nomo is on the road a lot. This weekend in Minneapolis, next weekend in Madison, Wisconsin, supporting their new album Ghost Rock. For Nomo, touring is no easy feat. There are up to eight musicians and an avalanche of equipment including a bunch of instruments you've never seen before.

John Moe: I was walking around some of your instruments earlier, and I saw something called a "Brainwave Monitor."

Elliot Bergman: Yes, this is one of our most unusual instrument and one of our most dangerous as well. It's some sort of quack medical device, and I found it at a thrift store for a couple dollars. It makes a shrieking sound when you plug it into an amplifier.

It looks like a little guitar pedal, and you can plug in a diode that you would, theoretically, attach to your head and monitor what's happening in your mind. It's slowly transitioning from medical device to musical instrument.

Pitchfork have this to say:

When Nomo put out their first album back in 2004, they were still doing their own take on what was essentially someone else's thing, namely the music of the king of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti. On their second album, 2006's New Tones, they found a sound that was more their own, spiking Afrobeat horn arrangements with an array of homemade, electrified metal instruments. Now, their third album finds the Michigan collective moving further out, establishing itself as a true innovator with a style totally its own. The groove is still at the heart of the band's music, but it's a deeper, stranger pulse than they've worked before, and arrangements have shifted away from Afrobeat crunch to a spacier, more symphonic approach. Call it cosmic funk or electro-jazz or something similar, but you can't call it Afrobeat revivalism anymore.

Apparently they travel in a single van, and packing it is like "tetris with guitar amps". Their sound is on a similar kind of tip to The Heliocentrics - most tasty. Stuff like Flying Lotus doesn't really work for me, but stuff like this, put together by a live band with a shit-ton of instruments, gets the thumbs-up.

Web Comics

If procrastination was a martial art, I would be that Cuban taekwando guy who got banned for kicking the referee in the Olympics. One of the most efficacious ways of wasting truckloads of time is by reading web comics. Here are a few of my favourites:

xkcd - touted as a "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language", it's reasonably nerdy at times and often quite dark.
Cyanide and Happiness - very crude, but also very funny. Pretty hit and miss though.
PhD. Comics - again pretty nerdy, and I don't know how relevant it is if you're smart enough to have chosen a profession that doesn't require you to do post-grad work, but it's pretty much always on the money.
Married to the Sea - very hit and miss. Often quite weird, and probably written by someone who's very stoned all the time.
Achewood - this is the very best webcomic out there. It's genius. It might take a bit of reading to work out what the hell is going on, but it's worth it. The good news is that Wikipedia can help (but Wikipedia always helps, really).

So yeah, wanna kill some time? Get on it.

Magnetic Cows

Anita brought this ridiculous piece of research to my attention. Here is the abstract:

We demonstrate by means of simple, noninvasive methods (analysis of satellite images, field observations, and measuring “deer beds” in snow) that domestic cattle (n = 8,510 in 308 pastures) across the globe, and grazing and resting red and roe deer (n = 2,974 at 241 localities), align their body axes in roughly a north–south direction. Direct observations of roe deer revealed that animals orient their heads northward when grazing or resting. Amazingly, this ubiquitous phenomenon does not seem to have been noticed by herdsmen, ranchers, or hunters. Because wind and light conditions could be excluded as a common denominator determining the body axis orientation, magnetic alignment is the most parsimonious explanation. To test the hypothesis that cattle orient their body axes along the field lines of the Earth's magnetic field, we analyzed the body orientation of cattle from localities with high magnetic declination. Here, magnetic north was a better predictor than geographic north. This study reveals the magnetic alignment in large mammals based on statistically sufficient sample sizes. Our findings open horizons for the study of magnetoreception in general and are of potential significance for applied ethology (husbandry, animal welfare). They challenge neuroscientists and biophysics to explain the proximate mechanisms.

Essentially, they looked at a bunch of Google Earth pictures (no shit) and from this have concluded that large mammals can sense where magnetic north is. No mention is made of the fact that the photos would just about all be taken around mid-day. A number of other potential flaws are pointed out in the comments section of Nature News (which is down atm, so I can't link to it). PNAS is a relatively high impact factor journal - it's reasonably exasperating to see this sort of thing published.

While this paper is meant to be serious, there are a number of interesting papers that take the piss out of the field of Geological Information Systems (GIS) written under the pseudonym "Oleg McNoleg", which are well worth tracking down. I particularly like "The integration of GIS, remote sensing, expert systems and adaptive co-kriging for environmental habitat modeling of the Highland Haggis using object-oriented, fuzzy logic and neural-ntwork techniques". It can be found here, and contains some excellent, if very, very nerdy jokes. It's worth noting that a number of the Oleg McNoleg papers have been published in actual journals, proving that even if GIS is a load of utter rubbish, at least those who use it have a sense of humour.

Choons!

So I haven't posted for a while. Lame. I will try and remedy this, despite the fact that I'm fairly certain no one is reading. If you are, even if it's because your automated search thingy picked up the fact that I used the word "Leuven" in a post, please say hi.

Anyway, I picked up some rad music the other day. The Lions - Jungle Struttin', came out on Ubiquity earlier this year. The band features members of Orgone (who put out must be one of the greatest raw funk records ever last year, also on Ubiquity), Breakestra and others. It also features a guest spot by Alex Desert and Deston Berry of Hepcat on "Ethio-Steppers" - which is awesome. The Lions' music, while very much reggae, is also heavily informed by soul and funk, which is unsurprising given the other bands that these guys play in. Anyway, worth checking out for sure. I also have The new Black Seeds, the latest Upbeats album and Auckland funk band The Hot Grits' album on the way from Amplifier. Along with The Grey Space, the debut album from ridiculously talented Sydney hip hop duo Horrowshow, that I have to review for ITM, I should be sorted for music for a week or two. Maybe

In other news, I went bouldering with Liam, Brendon and Mick last weekend. After a burn at Sandy Bay we headed around to what I like to call the Black Cave in between Forty Baskets Beach and Reef Beach. I got a few shots, and got some positive feedback from Justin Jefferson and Gavin Oliver, both of whom are very talented photographers who regularly contribute to magazines. So yeah, pretty stoked about that. I try not to get too wrapped up in doing the same thing again and again with my photos and I came across an interesting article from the Strobist blog: "Don't let good light ruin a photo". Good stuff.