TTBrown

What Would YOU Do...

...if you had $200K to spend on a vacation?

Richard Branson has partially moved on from inner space travel to the final frontier. The founder of Virgin Airlines and Galactic calls 2008 the “Year of the Spaceship.” His White Knight mothership and spacecrafts were unveiled in Mojave, Ca. The project took about 4 years to complete and will house rich tourists. Designed by Burt Rutan, the project already has involved more than 250 budding astronauts that paid $200,000.00 or gave deposits to be the first to blast off for only 5 minutes about 62 miles above the planet.

New Forum: "Soundtrack"

Over this past weekend, a couple of forum members mentioned a couple of songs whose lyrics seem pertinent to the stories being told and the themes being conveyed here.  Some one suggest that we start keeping track of these tunes, that they might someday be part of the soundtrack of the movie that is sure to find its way to the bijou after the book is published.

So I have created a new forum just for the purpose of discussing "The Soundtrack of the Parallel Universe."  It is an open forum, and the way it's set up, every song idea or suggestion can have its own thread within the forum.

I have to be out of town again the next few days (going down to Dallas to catch up with Ann and see her father), so perhaps this new forum will give you all something to play with while I'm "AFK."

Not that I'm ever really very far from "K"...

-PS

Back In The Saddle

Just in case anybody is wondering.... my hard drive was restored on Monday, but it did take ALL day.  I'm finally getting back to the task at hand now.  It feels like I've lost a whole week.  Wait a second... Thursday to Wednesday.. yup, pretty much a week.  So where were we....

Oh yes, looking for a hole in "conventional electrical theory" big enough to drive a time machine through.

The Music of T. Townsend Brown

... as produced by rocks and coconuts, at a gathering last month of artists the "Mind Meld Audiovisual Retreat" New England:

Last month, I was lucky enough to head to a gathering of music and visual artists at the studio of artist Duncan Laurie in Jamestown, Rhode Island, accompanied by performances in Providence and Boston. Among the cast: Richard Devine, Josh Kay (Phoenicia/Schematic), Steve Nalepa, Todd Thille (Synesthete), Vidvox’s David Lublin, Josh Randall (Robotkid/Harmonix), Aerostatic, Brian Kane (former Emergency Broadcast Network), and Ooah (Glitch Mob).

And then there were the rocks and coconuts. Duncan Laurie and electrical engineer Gordon Salisbury have been sonifying natural signal sources, hooking up vintage radionics equipment and connecting rocks and bananas and such to signals. Richard and Josh brought along part of their formidable collection of modular equipment, and a great crackling, screaming analog racket resulted.

...Based on precedents set by Cleve Backster and T. Townsend Brown, plants and rocks are fitted with electrodes or have copper leads affixed to them. Small voltages present are picked up with a variety of test equipment, including Wheatstone bridges, rate of change convertors, EKGs, and the IBVA brainwave monitor. The resulting data streams are converted to MIDI and used to drive Ableton Live.

Much of our discussion in the forums of late has revolved around the vagaries of "proof." Perhaps we're looking in all the wrong places...

Laptop Probs for the 4th of July

Happy Independence Day, everybody.

Today, I am compelled to observe the occasion by being independent of my laptop computer.

The laptop -- in this case a less than one year old MacBook, crashed yesterday, and has been diagnosed with a defunct hard drive. That's the bad news. The good news is I think everything on it is well backed up, and except for a few e-mail messages I think I will be able to restore all my apps and files once I decide the best approach to replacing the hard drive (see my blog post re: my run-in with the "Genius Bar" at the Apple Store yesterday.

So, while I don't have the laptop at my disposal as usual, I do have my desktop, and I'll be monitoring the forums that way over the weekend.

On an unrelated note, I will also mention that Ann is in Texas at the moment. Her father is in the hospital again, we're waiting for a prognosis, but the outlook at the moment is... well, grim.

So, thinks are a tad dodgy here this 4th of July weekend.

--PS