{"id":472,"date":"2006-03-10T01:05:56","date_gmt":"2006-03-10T05:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/03\/10\/things-to-listen-to\/"},"modified":"2006-03-10T01:22:10","modified_gmt":"2006-03-10T05:22:10","slug":"things-to-listen-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/10\/things-to-listen-to\/","title":{"rendered":"Things to listen to"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not music this time, but a bunch of things you can slap in your MP3 player and use to fill up some dead time. I&#8217;m going to assume you know what a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Podcast\">podcast<\/a> is, and have software to harvest them. (I use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dopplerradio.net\/\">Doppler<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear: both;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/divider.gif\" alt=\"divider\" title=\"divider\" class=\"centered\" height=\"20\" width=\"253\"\/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2006\/03\/courtneybrown.jpg\" width=\"126\" height=\"155\" alt=\"Professor Courtney Brown\" title=\"Professor Courtney Brown\" class=\"alignleft\"\/>Let&#8217;s start with academics. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.courtneybrown.com\/\">Professor Courtney Brown<\/a>, of the Political Science department at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.emory.edu\/\">Emory University<\/a> in Georgia is running <a href=\"http:\/\/www.courtneybrown.com\/classes\/podcasts.html\">podcasts<\/a> of a couple of his current classes: <strong>Science Fiction and Politics<\/strong> and <strong>Modeling Social Phemonema<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>The reading list for the first one (<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Foundation_Series\">Foundation<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Brave_New_World\">Brave New World<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness\">Left Hand of Darkness<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Uplift_War\">The Uplift War<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Darwin%27s_Radio\">Darwin&#8217;s Radio<\/a>, &#8230;) seems appealing, and it&#8217;s interesting to see them in the context of political science, BUT it doesn&#8217;t take much listening before you remember how frustrating it was to be in a class with other students who <em>just don&#8217;t get it<\/em>. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Also, the marking scheme of the class may amuse you.<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t got around to the second class yet.<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear: both;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/divider.gif\" alt=\"divider\" title=\"divider\" class=\"centered\" height=\"20\" width=\"253\"\/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2006\/03\/uc-seal.png\" width=\"200\" height=\"199\" alt=\"UC Seal\" title=\"UC Seal\" class=\"alignright\"\/>Still on the academic theme, there&#8217;s a lot more university course podcast content out there.<\/p>\n<p>Hell, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.berkeley.edu\/\">Berkeley<\/a> has about a trillion <a href=\"http:\/\/mitworld.mit.edu\/act_vfinder.php?mode=bykey&#038;VCat=13&#038;x=21&#038;y=7&#038;VHost=\">lecture podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m particulatly interested in:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Existentialism in Literature and Film (<a href=\"http:\/\/webcast.berkeley.edu\/courses\/rss\/archive.php?seriesid=1906978306\">feed<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present (<a href=\"http:\/\/webcast.berkeley.edu\/courses\/rss\/archive.php?seriesid=1906978305\">feed<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>Structural Aspects of Biomaterials (<a href=\"http:\/\/webcast.berkeley.edu\/courses\/rss\/archive.php?seriesid=1906978263\">feed<\/a>)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Just because I have to spend an hour a day in the car on the day care roundtrip, doesn&#8217;t mean I have to lose that time&#8211;I could be learning, and maybe Sarah will pick something up too.<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear: both;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/divider.gif\" alt=\"divider\" title=\"divider\" class=\"centered\" height=\"20\" width=\"253\"\/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2006\/03\/mit-seal.gif\" width=\"200\" height=\"200\" alt=\"MIT Seal\" title=\"MIT Seal\" class=\"alignleft\"\/>While not technically &#8220;things to listen to&#8221;, we can stick with the academic thing for a moment and highlight the many, MANY lectures available for download from <a href=\"http:\/\/mitworld.mit.edu\/\">MITWorld<\/a> (there are 313 items available at the time I&#8217;m writing this).<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/mitworld.mit.edu\/video_index.php\">video finder<\/a> helps you quickly find items. As you can guess from the name, they are videos rather than audio contents&#8211;although there is an &#8216;audio stream only&#8217; option. And what&#8217;s worse they are in Real format (curse it&#8217;s name). Hence they aren&#8217;t really &#8220;things to listen to&#8221; unless you know how to capture the streams, and (in the case of the video streams) strip out the audio, and then convert it to a more useful format. (I may still write that up someday&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s just a couple of examples of what&#8217;s there:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/mitworld.mit.edu\/video\/316\/\">Can a New Theory of the Neocortex Lead to Truly Intelligent Machines?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Talk about intelligent designs: Jeff Hawkins says he\u2019s mapped out the way the human brain works, and has begun to fashion thinking machines to emulate the process. It comes down to Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM). Basically, he says, our brains take sensory inputs from the world and build a set of beliefs around the causes of those inputs. \u201cDiscovering causes is the pinnacle of what brains do,\u201d says Hawkins. But getting good at this kind of \u201cfancy pattern recognition\u201d is something developing humans seem to do effortlessly, and computers only with immense labor. Learning to differentiate a cat and a dog, for instance, doesn\u2019t come naturally to a computer. Hawkins layers his machine brains with nodes that make inferences about outside sensory data, and then pass these hunches on up a hierarchy of nodes until a consensus &#8212; a belief &#8212; evolves about the source of the data. The use of \u201cbelief propagation techniques\u201d, says Hawkins, enables an entire system to reach the best overall consensus swiftly. As the thinking machine develops common representations of objects or ideas, it can generalize about new data coming at it, and learn to attend only to information that matters.<\/p>\n<p>When Hawkins presented an HTM vision system with primitive line drawings of a helicopter and a mug, the system learned to identify them, even when their orientations changed dramatically, and when the lines were blurred. But the program also correctly rejected chopped-up versions of the same drawings as nonsense. \u201cStable beliefs at the top lead to changing predictions and behavior at the bottom,\u201d says Hawkins. Where does this lead? Possibly to \u201cmachines that are much smarter than humans,\u201d says Hawkins, computers whose abilities extend beyond sense biology and provide a means to expand such complex fields as weather, cosmology and genetics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>and<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/mitworld.mit.edu\/video\/324\/\">The Six Webs, 10 Years On<\/a><\/p>\n<p>t\u2019s a good thing that a decade ago, some engineers at Sun Microsystems became dissatisfied with the limitations of the desktop PC and with kludgy TV remote controls. Their frustrations, according to Bill Joy, led to technology breakthroughs we count on today\u2014and will likely in years to come. Joy and his colleagues grasped early on the impact the Internet would have on both computing and entertainment. Back in the 90s, they decided to play out how technologies imbedded in daily life would evolve under the influence of the internet. They envisioned the \u201cfar\u201d web, as defined by the typical TV viewer experience; the \u201cnear\u201d web, or desktop computing; the \u201chere\u201d web, or mobile devices with personal information one carried all the time; the \u201cweird\u201d web, characterized by voice recognition systems; the \u201cB2B\u201d web of business computers dealing exclusively with each other; and the \u201cD2D\u201d web, of intelligent buildings and cities. (Sun\u2019s programming language Java was a deliberate attempt at a platform for all six webs.)<\/p>\n<p>Joy sees the six webs as a great organizing principle for understanding how the internet will continue to change. He believes the \u201chere\u201d web will figure most prominently in our lives, with its \u201cnomadic idea that instead of being tethered to an office, we carry around things of most interest to us.\u201d He notes the increasing \u201ccleavage between entertainment authored for the \u2018here\u2019 and \u2018far\u2019 webs.\u201d The latter is dominated by such corporate interests as game companies intent on copy protection and rights management, while the \u201cmore anarchic world\u201d of the internet leads to more interesting content, such as personal publishing, housed best on the \u201chere\u201d web. Says Joy, \u201cDoing things with people you know through a small screen makes enormous sense.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Hell, there&#8217;s even <a href=\"http:\/\/mitworld.mit.edu\/act_vfinder.php?mode=bykey&#038;VCat=13&#038;x=21&#038;y=7&#038;VHost=\">a category for people who study management and administration<\/a>. You know, those weird people.<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear: both;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/divider.gif\" alt=\"divider\" title=\"divider\" class=\"centered\" height=\"20\" width=\"253\"\/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2006\/03\/longnow.png\" width=\"257\" height=\"90\" alt=\"Long Now\" title=\"Long Now\" class=\"alignright\"\/>Well, we should have lost most readers by now, so we can leave the academic stuff behind. Well, not too far behind, since the next thing I want to point you at is the quasi-academic <a href=\"http:\/\/www.longnow.org\/projects\/seminars\/\">Long Now Foundation Seminar Series<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This is a project of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.longnow.org\/\">Long Now Foundation<\/a>, which has a stated mission to:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today&#8217;s &#8220;faster\/cheaper&#8221; mind set and promote &#8220;slower\/better&#8221; thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.longnow.org\/shop\/free-downloads\/seminars\/\">more than 20 seminars available for download<\/a>, including these:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bruce_Sterling\">Bruce Sterling<\/a><\/li>\n<li>The Consequences of Human Life Extension, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.agewave.com\/about.shtml\">Ken Dychtwald<\/a><\/li>\n<li>How Societies Fail-And Sometimes Succeed, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jared_Diamond\">Jared Diamond<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All of the seminars are worth a listen&#8211;there&#8217;s a lot there to think about. I wish they would hurry up and put the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Freeman_Dyson\">Freeman<\/a> &#038; <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Esther_Dyson\">Esther Dyson<\/a> one up, though.<\/p>\n<p>Also, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Brian_Eno\">Brian Eno<\/a> is involved with the Foundation, so you&#8217;ve got to figure the incidental music will be interesting.<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear: both;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/divider.gif\" alt=\"divider\" title=\"divider\" class=\"centered\" height=\"20\" width=\"253\"\/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2006\/03\/chomsky_bert.jpg\" width=\"150\" height=\"142\" alt=\"Who's That Behind Chomsky?\" title=\"Who's That Behind Chomsky?\" class=\"alignleft\"\/>Still in the quasi-academic area, my deep respect for <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Noam_Chomsky\">Noam Chomsky<\/a> makes me very happy to have found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chomskytorrents.org\/\">ChomskyTorrents.org<\/a> which has a tonne of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Noam_Chomsky\">Chomsky<\/a> stuff to download (assuming you&#8217;re in the 21st century and understand <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/BitTorrent\">BitTorrent<\/a>) including quite a lot of audio content. There&#8217;s 717 items available at the time I write this.<\/p>\n<p>(I say &#8220;quasi-academic&#8221; here not to take anything away from Chomsky&#8217;s status as the world&#8217;s most cited academic, or to suggest that his work is any less rigourous than any other academics, but just to distinguish Chomsky&#8217;s political work from his work in linguistics.)<\/p>\n<p>Chomsky completely blew my mind in the first year of university when I saw <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0104810\/\">Manufacturing Consent<\/a>, which lead to me reading all of his works (excepting the technical linguistics stuff). I&#8217;ve since seen several other speeches, and have dozens of hours of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alternativetentacles.com\/search.php?search_artist_id=102&#038;search_type=artist&#038;sd=HlHQ@vX0Z6igajAnNkg\">commercial recordings<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alternativeradio.org\/speakers\/CHON.shtml\">Alternative Radio<\/a> recordings, and I&#8217;ve never found any of it any less than fascinating. This massive new source of free material is tremendously exciting to me.<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear: both;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/divider.gif\" alt=\"divider\" title=\"divider\" class=\"centered\" height=\"20\" width=\"253\"\/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.marthawells.com\/\"><br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2006\/03\/gatecov1.jpg\" width=\"186\" height=\"275\" alt=\"Recent Work\" title=\"Recent Work\" class=\"alignleft\"\/><\/a>OK, now we&#8217;re out of academics all together.<\/p>\n<p>You remember <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/07\/margo-lanagans-voice\/\">I was surprised<\/a> at <a href=\"http:\/\/amongamidwhile.blogspot.com\/\">Margo Lanagan<\/a>&#8216;s mild accent when I heard her voice on an interview earlier this week?<\/p>\n<p>Well, I got a chance today to listen to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sftulsa.org\/conestoga\/2006\/03\/08\/program-03-martha-wells-interview\/\">a short interview<\/a> with author <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marthawells.com\/\">Martha Wells<\/a>. I was even more surprised to hear Wells&#8217; accent&#8211;I am always shocked when I hear someone speak intelligently in a Texas accent.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been a big fan of Wells&#8217; since I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/exec\/obidos\/redirect?tag=homosum-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26creative=165953%26path=http:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/gp\/redirect.html%253fASIN=0380788144%2526tag=homosum-20%2526lcode=xm2%2526cID=2025%2526ccmID=165953%2526location=\/o\/ASIN\/0380788144%25253FSubscriptionId=1D7RNC9A4DZJNRAARVG2\" title=\"View product details at Amazon\">The Death of the Necromancer<\/a> (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2006\/02\/13\/hey-get-a-cool-book-for-free\/\">see previous comments<\/a>), and I consider her one of the secret treasures of modern fantasy. I&#8217;d be happier if she were less &#8220;secret&#8221; though, since I want to read more of her books.<\/p>\n<p>The interview is quite short and pretty superficial, memorable only for the accent, and for confirming my impression that Wells is would be both a clear thinker and a good speaker.<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear: both;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/divider.gif\" alt=\"divider\" title=\"divider\" class=\"centered\" height=\"20\" width=\"253\"\/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2006\/03\/PhilipDick.jpg\" width=\"200\" height=\"259\" alt=\"Philip K. Dick\" title=\"Philip K. Dick\" class=\"alignright\"\/>So far everything we&#8217;ve discussed has been free, but this last item is really a pointer to stuff you can buy.<\/p>\n<p>See the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sffaudio.com\/\">SFFAudio<\/a> blog <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sffaudio.com\/2006\/02\/few-readers-have-emailed-asking-where.html\">recently had a post<\/a> about how to lay your hands on some esoteric <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Philip_K._Dick\">Philip K. Dick<\/a> audio materials.<\/p>\n<p>I have the <a href=\"http:\/\/web.media.mit.edu\/~tod\/Tod\/valiscd.html\">VALIS Opera<\/a>&#8211;I got it when it came out, I was forever altered by reading <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Philip_K._Dick#VALIS\">VALIS<\/a> at the age of 16 in exactly the right frame of mind&#8211;but the rest of the stuff sounds very interesting to me.<\/p>\n<p>In particular, I really want to hear <strong>Philip K. Dick Telephone Interviews<\/strong>, which they describe as:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The one I reviewed last fall is called Philip K. Dick Telephone Interviews and was conducted by John Bonnstra. This one was thrilling, like you&#8217;d tapped into a conversation between PKD and a big fan. The closest thing to being in the room with the man himself. Definitely a must listen for any fan.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If you want to get that for me, I won&#8217;t complain.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s it for this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">Not music this time, but a bunch of things you can slap in your MP3 player and use to fill up some dead time. I&#8217;m going to assume you know what a podcast is, and have software to harvest them. (I use Doppler.) Let&#8217;s start with academics. Professor Courtney Brown, of the Political Science department at Emory University in Georgia&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/10\/things-to-listen-to\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,12,2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-linkapalooza","category-political","category-technology","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-7C","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}