Jack’s Old & Busted Blog

This is astounding. A link to a gallery of his work can be found here.

(New Scientist) : The painter is Esref Armagan. And he is here in Boston to see if a peek inside his brain can explain how a man who has never seen can paint pictures that the sighted easily recognise - and even admire. He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he’s never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either. How does he do it?

It’s ‘Frank Zappa Day’ today.

(wikipedia) : “Zappa was from the first interested in sounds for their own sake, which led to his interest in modern composers. His introduction to Stravinsky seems to have been a pivotal musical discovery but he was soon ranging even further afield, musically, in addition to his interests in jazz, doo-wop, R&B, and rock’n'roll. After reading a magazine review panning French avant garde composer Edgard Varese’s dissonant drum piece in “Ionisation” (actually “The Complete Works of Edgard Varese, Volume One”) as ‘a weird jumble of drums and other unpleasant sounds’, the teenage Zappa became convinced that he should seek out Varese’s music.”

Nice discussion of good customer service that covers just about any endeavor.

(www.unixwiz.net) : The single biggest surprise to prospective consultants is when I suggest that their technical skills will not be their biggest asset. Those skills are required, of course, and often help get you in the door, but the long-term customer relationships on which a consultant depends are built on one thing only:
Consulting maxim:
You must give the customer The Warm Fuzzy Feeling™

“Why of course the people don’t want war. . .
That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

- Hermann Goering
N@zi SS Officer, on or about 18 April 1946
Nuremberg War Crimes Trial

Emusic.com now has about 50 Frank Zappa albums for download. At one point in high school, I probably had thirty of these on vinyl, even some of the rare ones. They all got warped into oblivion in the back of a car in college during a move. I eventually replaced about a dozen with CDs years later, only to have them stolen from my truck. Zappa is a musical hero of mine, and I think it’s interesting how his later “modern” electronic material still sounds fresh. That, and “Joe’s Garage Vol. 1,” which is still extremely relevant. Yeah, I’ll probably buy some MP3s, but some hacker will probably raid my hard drive and make off with them.
UPDATE: Good news! The Emusic Zappa MP3s are high-rate VBRs, as opposed to the “OK” 128kbps standard downloads I usually get from this service. Bad news: No Joe’s Garage.

(FT.com): “I wanted to understand why the Japanese are so healthy. The nation has the world’s longest life expectancy of just over 81 for both men and women. Japan also has a low incidence of cardiac related disease compared with other wealthy industrialised countries. There is no child obesity and, apart from the odd sumo wrestler, overweight adults are nowhere to be seen. What is their secret?”

Del.icio.us links are back on the sidebar, thanks largely in part to the CSS stylings of sjarvis. Thanks, Steve!