New medium, same challenge →

Published August 6  ·  All posts on Aug 6  ·  

The need for such a contest more than 100 years ago is revealing enough, but the reaction of the judges to the prize-winning plan turned out to be even more so — and it says a lot about why business models for audio production and broadcast remain a struggle.

~ Julia Barton from, In 1924, a magazine ran a contest…

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If one squints slightly, it’s all just the same issue: Things consume resources—radio, TV, podcasts, web sites for blogs, social media platforms—and take people’s time to create. It’s not possible for everyone to listen (read, web surf, etc) to everything for free, because reality is real.

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Beach daydreams →

Published August 5  ·  All posts on Aug 5

Watching a fire, too, fills the eyes and releases the imagination to drift.

~ Matt Webb from, Beach daydreams, lost at sea

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For a few years now we’ve had a standing date for camping near a beach at the end of summer. This little collection from Webb touches on some of the why.

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Metalepsis →

Published August 4  ·  All posts on Aug 4

If it’s used in the right way, I love it, of course! I mean, I used to joke that the goal of a filmmaker is to be Fellini-esque, you know, when your name means something in that way? We often say something was a very Fellini-esque experience. So if you say a film is Cronenbergian… I like that. The thing that does bother me a little bit is “body horror,” because I never use that term! It was a young journalist who invented that term and it stuck, it’s out of my hands. But I would never have thought that what I did was body horror.

~ Patrick Heidmann from, David Cronenberg – The Talks

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I recently managed to get caught up on The Hansel and Gretel Code, a podcast from my friend Curtis Cates. (I started years behind, so that I had 42 hour+ episodes to listen to.) It was so worth it. First off, great podcast on a very interesting to me topic. Also, I learned about the concept of metalepsis.

Reading the Wikipedia page doesn’t really do it justice. But listening to Curtis talk about metalepsis, and in particular unpacking all the context around some innocent seeming word or phrase really made it clear. For example, in certain centuries and in certain circles of well read people, “planing the planks of our coffins” isn’t just an interesting phrase… for those certain people it brought to mind a whole other complex social and political issue complete with its own colorful players.

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Some sort of thistle? →

Published August 3  ·  All posts on Aug 3  ·  

There are these quite large, spiny plants along a trail I frequent. Even those of use who are thorny and unfriendly occasionally dress up nice.

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Scattered about →

Published August 2  ·  All posts on Aug 2

Around the U.S., about 90,000 tons of nuclear waste is stored at over 100 sites in 39 states, in a range of different structures and containers.

~ Gerald Frankel from, How and where is nuclear waste stored in the US?

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This is probably silly, but I’ve always imagined that one day we’d master nuclear fusion. (Fission is “splitting” versus fusion which is “combining.” Our currently nuclear generation is a very complex chain reaction of the fission variety.) To run a fusion reactor requires—literally—the temperatures inside the sun. I’d always hoped we’d be able to dump (teeny tiny amounts) of our current nuclear waste into our fusion reactors… we’re everything is stripped apart to protons and electrons. The perfect waste disposal system. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I saw Titans →

Published August 1  ·  All posts on Aug 1

And then the light of an older heaven was in my eyes
and when my vision cleared, I saw Titans.
— Alan Moore

~ Doug Muir from, Occasional paper: The Light of an Older Heaven

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A wonderful quote to open a wonder-filled article.

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Not easy →

Published July 31  ·  All posts on Jul 31  ·  

I don’t often snap photos in ice cream parlors, but when I do it’s because their character is clearly on display.

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Try being useless →

Published July 30  ·  All posts on Jul 30

This is the paradox of our time: the very tools designed to free us from labor are trapping us in an endless cycle of escalating work. As our productivity increases, our standards and expectations rise even faster, creating a psychological Jevons Paradox that threatens to consume our humanity in the pursuit of ever-greater output. We become victims of our own efficiency.

~ Tina He from, Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective

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After I looked up Jevons Paradox, I couldn’t agree more with He’s point. It seems the way to break the paradox is to simply sit in “not doing”— To simply be useless. Perhaps not all of the time, but definitely some of the time.

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Shifting perspective →

Published July 29  ·  All posts on Jul 29  ·  

No one doubts human beings are special—indeed unique. After all, people are (to our knowledge) the only ones pondering evolution, not to mention creating symphonies and skyscrapers. Still, that is not saying much: All species are unique, or else they would not be distinct species in their own right. Each species can do things humans only dream of, whether flying or diving deep under the sea.

~ Alexander Werth from, The Problems of Evolution as a “March of Progress”

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Anthropocentrism is one perspective. There are many others worth considering too because the more one learns, the better one is able to make moral choices.

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Nope. No more of that! →

Published July 28  ·  All posts on Jul 28  ·  

The next day NBC’s president decided to make an exception to the network’s ban on recorded sound in order to interview Morrison and play a portion of the recordings. (Yes, both NBC and CBS banned recorded sound over their air, and would continue to do so for another decade. […] ).

It’s telling that the lesson America’s big radio networks took from this incredible eye-witness recording was simply, “Nope, no more of that!” As sound scholar Michael Biel pointed out, “This is…the first time that a recording was allowed to be broadcast on NBC, and I can count on my fingers the other times that NBC broadcast recordings — knowingly and unknowingly — until the middle of WWII.”

~ Julia Barton from, Hell Yeah: Airships!

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Barton’s Continuous Wave is a must read for anyone interested in audio, radio or podcasting— this article in particular.

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