A fun jungle track with DTMFs...

Deee-Lite: Call Me (Method One Remix) - YouTube

The postwar history of musical genres and fads has a generational character - each generation creates new musical genres in the course of defining its own identity, and often these genres react to and challenge the fashions of the preceding generation. After the intensity and shock factor of GenX music in the early 90's it was reasonable to look forward and ask - how could the next generation ever hope to offend these ears. I think the answer has become clear.

Many GenX commentators lament that there are no new musical genres - declaring grunge rock and gangster rap to be the last major musical movements. This is hardly correct. Jungle, Drum and Bass, Post-rock, and Dubstep are all threads that started after those movements.

Age has a tendency to make you more aware of the derivative nature of art forms. Baby Boomers may have looked at Nirvana and observed that Neil Young was doing the same stuff in the late 1970's, and Cobain probably would have agreed with them.

However, there is some truth to the fact that current music styles are less distinct from what people were listening to 15 years ago and most popular music does not fit into a new genre or sound that was created recently. What is the "problem" with these kids today?

GenXers were very concerned with labels - they did not listen to music so much as they wore it, and listening to a particular kind of music often meant dressing a particular way, acting a particular way, and hanging out with a particular crowd. Therefore, it was particularly important to GenXers to draw clear distinctions between different musical genres and eras because they were associated with particular identity groups.

Current musical trends have found a way to subvert that desire by moving beyond labels. Current popular "alternative" music is a mix-mash of different styles and influences from different eras that cannot be clearly distinguished. It seems best represented by the YouTube mashups that were popular a few years ago. A concrete collective move in a particular direction, which GenXers seem to desire, would invite labeling - something millennials seem to reject.

Nothing is more objectionable to GenX ears than music which is detached from its "proper" sociocultural pigeon hole - or music that truly doesn't have a sociocultural pigeon hole and cannot be placed into one.

Its important to view the generational dialog over musical genres through the prism of technological change. The importance of pop music to our culture is a product of the technological context of the 1970's and earlier, when high fidelity stereo systems were the most mature form of home entertainment. You had 8 TV channels. No VCR. No video games. Coming home and putting on that Zeppelin album was one of the greatest home entertainment experiences you could have.

In the early 1990's, popular music was dominated by the radio. 20-30 channels in a particular metropolitan area devoted to part... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

Decryption disclosure - its complicated:

Nothing in the record illustrates that the Government knew with reasonable particularity that Doe was even capable of accessing the encrypted portions of the drives. . . .

Indeed this seems entirely in line with previous decisions compelling production of true copies where the fact of decryption is a foregone conclusion …

The Volokh Conspiracy » Eleventh Circuit Finds Fifth Amendment Right Against Self Incrimination Protects Against Being Forced to Decrypt Hard Drive Contents

American voter participation is terrible, and has been for half a century. Recent laws rolling back voting rights haven’t made things any better. Our Executive Director Jacob Soboroff teamed up with Participant Media’s TakePart.com and hit the road to track down 2012 GOP presidential candidates Romney, Gingrich and Santorum to ask them how they’d protect your right to vote. Watch Jacob’s journey in this short film, then join our movement by signing our petition to move Election Day to the weekend so more people can vote.

Why Tuesday?

Stanford's Arvind Narayanan describes a paper he co-authored on stylometry that has been accepted for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2012. In On the Feasibility of Internet-Scale Author Identification (PDF) Narayanan and co-authors show that they can use stylometry to improve the reliability of de-anonymizing blog posts drawn from a large and diverse data-set, using a method that scales well. However, the experimental set was not "adversarial" -- that is, the authors took no countermeasures to disguise their authorship. It would be interesting to see how the approach described in the paper performs against texts that are deliberately anonymized, with and without computer assistance. The summary cites another paper by someone who found that even unaided efforts to disguise one's style makes stylometric analysis much less effective.

Scalable stylometry: can we de-anonymize the Internet by analyzing writing style? - Boing Boing

Scientists had assumed that the Moon was all done with tectonic activity, because the youngest geological markers on the surface were thought to be about a billion years old.

"It was a big surprise when I spotted graben in the far side highlands," said co-author Mark Robinson, principal investigator of LROC.

"It's exciting when you discover something totally unexpected and only about half the lunar surface has been imaged in high resolution. There is much more of the Moon to be explored."

CRACK made by quakes FOUND ON THE MOON • The Register

DNA sequencing is becoming both faster and cheaper. Now, it is also becoming tinier.

A British company said on Friday that by the end of the year it would begin selling a disposable gene sequencing device that is the size of a USB memory stick and plugs into a laptop computer to deliver its results.

The device, expected to cost less than $900, could allow small sequencing jobs to be done by researchers who cannot afford the $50,000 to $750,000 needed to buy a sequencing machine. null

Oxford Nanopore Unveils Tiny DNA Sequencing Device - NYTimes.com

Scientists have developed and tested a "DNA robot" that delivers payloads such as drug molecules to specific cells.

The container was made using a method called "DNA origami", in which long DNA chains are folded in a prescribed way.

BBC News - 'DNA robot' targets cancer cells

I am particularly fond of this comment that I posted to the BoingBoing thread.

I think they could effectively prevent US advertisers from doing business with foreign infringing sites and that would significantly reduce the economic incentive to run a big media host (which is an expensive to do), but that sort of solution requires reasonable due process with a third party decision maker and not the BS process that SOPA described.

The Copyright Power is not willing to take that and run with it - they want more. It's a pretty stupid game they are playing - they have managed to infuriate every objective person on the planet, and they have tarred every idea that they have with the black mark of having been associated with a radical power grab, and for what? They could be busy killing the business model of pirate sites right now if they'd been reasonable about it, but instead they are busy writing nutjob opeds for the New York Times accusing everyone on the Internet of being liars and criminals.

This is democracy. Its complicated. If your job is to get legislation passed and you can't do it because you are too stupid and radical to listen to the other side's expert witnesses and come to a reasonable compromise, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Oh my God, entertainment industry people are still pitching for SOPA - Boing Boing

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me.

No fucking shit sherlock.

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did - Forbes