Category Archives: Social Commentary

The Loudness Wars

Are they finally over, thanks to Apple?

I noted in an email to someone the other day that, just as young people have no concept of what quality phone service sounds like, many of them have never heard good music, either, due to the overcompression and crummmy digitalization over the past few decades. I hope that the article is right, and that we can get back to a good listening experience soon.

My Book Interview

It’s available on Youtube now.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here’s one of the brilliant comments over there:

he just sounds like a typical neo con who would prefer to send cheap chinese labor into space rather than waste money on returning white men to their families.
same type who wants more young americans to die for israel.

This is a sign of a broken brain.

BTW, fun fact. That picture of the book? It’s virtual, created by PJTV. It doesn’t yet exist in physical form, but it should next week, and it should look exactly like that.

It’s Not New York City That’s Broken

It’s its new mayor that is.

This is one of the many flaws of human nature that concerned the Founders: the inability to either know history, or learn from it. There’s a young generation that has no idea how bad things were in the days of Dinkins, or what Giuliani (and despite all his nannying, Bloomberg) did for them. Well, as Mencken said, they’re going to get what they want, good and hard.

Hazardous Asteroids

may be more common than we thought:

The scientific orthodoxy said that a Chelyabinsk-size event ought to happen every 140 years or so, but Brown saw several such events in the historical record.

Famously, a large object exploded over the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908. But there have been less-heralded impacts, including one on Aug. 3, 1963, when an asteroid created a powerful airburst off the coast of South Africa.

“Any one of these taken separately I think you can dismiss as a one-off. But now when we look at it as a whole, over a hundred years, we see these large impactors more frequently than we would expect,” said Brown, whose paper appeared in Nature.

But our response, and actions to become a space-faring civilization, remains pathetic.