Do you have a favorite number? It may seem like a weird question to ask, but think about it a minute. Is it any stranger than asking if you have a favorite color? Or favorite food? It may, at first, and I suspect that's because most of us don't live in a culture that attributes the same amount of pleasure to numbers as that which one derives from, say, a big slice of New York-style pepperoni pizza.
Image is (C) Adam Cole/NPR
Recently, at his blog "Krulwich Wonders" Robert Krulwich (who co-hosts Radiolab, one of my favorite public radio shows) wrote about a "unique experiment" thought up by Alex Bellos. Bellos, who Krulwich describes as, "a writer, math enthusiast, and nut," came up with a deceptively simple idea: to ask the public to tell him their favorite number, and list the reasons why. Krulwich's article explains the experiment and talks about some of the responses Bellos has received so far. You can take a look (and if you haven't listened to Radiolab, grab a podcast while you're at it) but my reason for writing here is to talk about my favorite number, 808.
808 is my favorite number, because it's a big, round-y, friendly-looking number. Seriously, take a look at 808. Doesn't it look like a guy giving you a double-thumbs-up? 808 thinks you're doing fine! So positive!
In "1337-speak" 808 would translate to "BOB" which is about as friendly a name as I can think of. Remember the funny little robot in Disney's "The Black Hole?" Guess what his name was? It sure wasn't 37.
Also, there's the Roland TR-808 drum machine, which is super-great and still very popular with musicians. Invite 808 to your next party and get ready to get funky!
I posted a copy of my response on my Google+ page and my friend Brian quickly replied that he too was a fan of 808, citing his own reasons:
Might I add that 808 is also my favorite number! Adding to your reasons, which I agree with, here is another reason you might have forgotten: 808 is the area code of Hawaii. 808 State was also an electronic band that loved that number.
He's right, of course, and there are a host of other reasons we love that number. I'd be interested to know if any other readers out there (hi Mom!) have a favorite number of their own. If not, go out and get one! Think of it as doing your share to make maths a more vital part of our culture.
I'm calling bullshit on this one, just like I did on Day 1 (Your Favorite Song). Just like I don't have a favorite song, I don't have a favorite band. There are bands I'm really into at the moment (e.g Raconteurs & The Mountain Goats), there are bands I haven't listened to in a long time but would leave on if they came up on shuffle (The Welcome Wagon, Violent Femmes) and there are bands I listened to obsessively for a long time, but then stopped for some reason (Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground).
So, what constitutes my favorite band? I have no idea, so I'm gonna bend the rules and do a song from all three categories. Take that!
11a - A Song From a Band You're Really Into Right Now: The Crystal Method, "I Know It's You," from Legion of Boom.
I first started listening to The Crystal Method in 1998, during a month-long stay in Greenville, SC. (That's a story for some other time.) Vegas was in heavy rotation, for a year, especially in the car as it makes excellent driving music. But they fell off my playlist for a few years. A friend recently turned me on to Legion of Boom recently though, and it gets played a good bit on my computer at work. "I Know It's You" is one of my favorite tracks, very much reminiscent of their work on Vegas, and Milla Jovovich's spooky vocals work perfectly with their distorted bassline and drums. I am amazed that track hasn't yet been appropriated for an action-movie chase sequence or television commercial, like pretty much every track on Vegas was.
11b - A Song From A Band I Haven't Listened To In A Long Time But Would Leave On If They Came Up On Shuffle: The Cure, "Pictures of You," from Disintegration.
I guess The Cure might also fall into the category of "bands I listened to obsessively." It's hard to tell, really, because I listened to them a lot mostly because people I was around listened to them a lot. I really do like their music, at least everything up to Disintegration, but they haven't made it onto a playlist in a long time.
"Pictures of You," is probably one of my favorite songs; it has great instrumentation and clean, if mopey, vocals from Robert Smith. The video is only so-so, sadly, but stands out as yet another example of the director doing everything he can to make the band miserable. (This was sort of a theme in their videos. For another example, check out the video for "Close To Me.")
11c - A Song From A Band I Listened To Obsessively For A Long Time, But Then Stopped For Some Reason: The Velvet Underground and Nico, "Femme Fatale," from The Velvet Underground and Nico (aka: "the banana album," "peel slowly and see")
My friend AJ introduced me to the Velvet Underground in my Junior year of high school. He loaned me his vinyl copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico and by the time I handed it back a week later I'd already made two cassette copies. (I needed one for home and one to live in the Chevette, you see.) From then until 1995 or so I pretty much listened to anything by The Velvets or Lou Reed that I could get my hands on.
And then, I sort of, stopped. I don't know what happened. I know I started getting back into techno around that time, so that might have had something to do with it. Or maybe it was Lou's later albums that put me off. Whatever the reason, I haven't listened to anything by the Velvets in a long time; the closest I've come, in fact, was a brief stint listening to a cover of that first album by Beck's Record Club - something I blogged about here a while ago.
So, there we are. Another "day" finished in this interminable challenge. Look forward to my next entry, when I'll most likely call bullshit on the topic again and then spend entirely too long writing about it. Excelsior!
I was out driving with the dog the other night, when a story on Public Radio International's excellent program "The World" caught my attention.
Hatsune Miku, a popular Japanese pop music singer, performed in front of a sold-out crowd last weekend at the the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles. The LA show was billed as the first stop on her "Mikunopolis" tour (although I'm having difficulty finding any listings for other concert dates). Last weekend's concert was part of the 2011 Anime Expo, and Expo head Marc Perez had a hand in organizing the show.
Here's the part of the story that caught my cyberpunk's attention: Hatsune Miku is not actually a person; she's a computer program. To be more accurate, she's a voice library application developed by Crypton Future Media for Vocaloid, a voice synthesizer program made by Yamaha.
She's sort of like the different voices you can select for your GPS's turn-by-turn directions mode - except younger, perkier, and with an implausible amount of turquoise hair. Yet the fact that Miku's not an actual flesh-and-blood person doesn't seem to faze her fans, some of whom drove for hours just to see a 3D hologram of her performing "live" on stage.
Dang, man. Every time I forget just how frighteningly prescient William Gibson's novels can be something like this happens. The last time was in the early 2000's, when augmented reality, which he first wrote about in his 1994 novel Virtual Light became the hot new thing.
Now it seems that Rei Toei, the holographic pop star from Gibson's 1996 novel Idoruhas come to life in the person of Hatsune Miku. (Idoru is the follow-up novel to Virtual Light, and the second book of his so-called "Bridge Trilogy.") I can only hope that, like Rei, Miku will go on to build a legion of tween girl followers, marry someone who sort of reminds us of Bono, and have all sorts of crazy adventures.
I am convinced that Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg gets up every morning, swims a few laps in his giant pile of gold coins, eats a hearty breakfast of caviar and hundred-dollar bills, and then starts brainstorming new ways to piss off his users.
Pissing me off today is the arbitrary 420-character limit to status updates. This is not a new thing; some quick research online tells me the limit was imposed sometime in early 2010. I may not have noticed it until now because, like many Facebook users, my status updates are often just short messages to my friends or comments about what goes on in my daily life.
Lately, though, I've been creating longer posts about the music I'm listening to, books & comics I've read, and news articles I find interesting. Creating a thoughtful message about these things, even using all the concise-writing skills I've developed over at Twitter, yields updates that are typically in the 600- to 800-character range, and I'm presented with this stern reminder:
Status updates must be less than 420 characters. You have entered [xxx] characters here. Notes can be much longer. Would you like to edit and post your update as a Note instead?
No, Facebook, I would not like to edit and post my update as a Note. If I wanted to create a note, I would have clicked on my profile link, and then clicked the "notes" link, and then clicked the "write a note" button. You see? If I wanted to write a Note, I would have taken all of those other needless and awkward steps to do just that.
Obviously, Facebook doesn't want its users treating their status updates as in-site blogs. Fair enough. It is, after all, Mark's sandbox; we just gave up most of our privacy to targeted-advertising companies for the privilege of playing in it. But if I'm going to have to take extra steps to create the sort of posts I want, I'll just move that content over here where I can also easily add links, tags, images, and embedded video.
So hello again, old blog, it looks like we'll be spending a lot more time together now.
