Modern Day Typographer - Elle Cordova
Elle Cordova
The world of typography is full of crazy people. Fortunately they are mostly harmless. I just use the default font except when I am writing code, then I use Courier, which seems to be only fixed pitch font that is generally available. I've never heard of Consolas.
A Decembrist refers to one of the liberal Russian noblemen and military officers who led an unsuccessful uprising against Emperor Nicholas I in December 1825. Inspired by Enlightenment ideals and Western European reforms, these revolutionaries sought to abolish serfdom and establish a constitutional government in Russia.
The term has expanded over time into a metaphor for someone willing to sacrifice personal comfort, privilege, or status for a greater political or social cause.
The 1825 Uprising Following the sudden death of Tsar Alexander I, there was a confusing succession crisis. Taking advantage of the chaos, a group of about 3,000 officers and soldiers gathered in Senate Square in St. Petersburg on December 26, 1825. They refused to swear allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I, and instead called for the accession of his brother Constantine and the creation of a constitution.The rebellion was quickly suppressed by forces loyal to the Tsar. In the aftermath, the leaders were executed and hundreds of other conspirators were imprisoned or exiled to the harsh climates of Siberia.
Historical Impact Despite its failure, the revolt became a foundational myth in Russian history. The martyred Decembrists became a powerful source of inspiration for succeeding generations of Russian dissidents and revolutionaries throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Cultural References The name has since been adopted by modern entities, most notably the indie folk band The Decemberists. Frontman Colin Meloy chose the name to draw on both the historical drama of the 1825 uprising and the general melancholy associated with the month of December.
Did The Decemberists sing any songs about Russia? Yes, they did:
Yes, The Decemberists sing the song "When the War Came" (from their 2006 album The Crane Wife), which is explicitly set in Russia. The song tells the true story of the agricultural scientists and botanists at the Vavilov Institute in Leningrad during World War II. To protect a massive, priceless seed bank from being eaten by the starving, besieged population, the scientists made a pact to guard the seeds and tragically starved to death in the process.
I really like the horns that play early on then again at the 4 minute mark.
I'm thinking that everything we have built are all devices to expand the reach of the most savage animals on the planet. Humans, shoot, all living things are almost infinitely complex. No matter how much we have learned about the human body, we have only scratched the surface. Everything we have figured out is like a cheat code to get us past some obstacle. Someday, maybe, we will understand it all, but I suspect it will be more than one person can comprehend. We might need a hive mind to be able to really understand it all. Some people might be okay with being a member of hive mind, but I suspect most people won't be. Or maybe I overestimate the desire for independent thought.
I've been hearing the argument about capitalism versus socialism since forever. It occurs to me that the big problem with capitalism is that it makes no provision for anyone but the winners. As we develop new technologies, all those who learned a trade under the old ways will find themselves out of a job. Some of the new kids will learn the new ways and be incorporated into the capitalist hive, but because they are more productive, the hive won't need as many of them, so all the excluded are going to be pushed out to the edges. Problem lately is that productivity has been improving faster so we have new waves of technology constantly rolling over the landscape. These wave went from 10,000 years (think fire and ax) to 1,000 years (stone buildings) to 100 years (sailing ships) to ten years (rockets and satellites) to one year (smart phones) to monthly (I can barely keep up) to daily (I'm swamped) to hourly (we're all swept away).
All this talk getting rid of billionaires isn't helping. Take a billion dollars from one person and distribute it to ten million people and each person gets $100, which might buy a tank of gas and, if you're lucky, a six pack of beer. And a week later, where are you? Howling for another billionaire. You would need 50 billionaires to get everyone $100 a week for a year. That ain't gonna work.
We've seen that welfare doesn't really work. Giving money to the poor has just given us a permanent underclass. The biggest problem is that it is very difficult to organize a group of people into a productive operation. The problem is not that we have a shortage of organizers. We have plenty of organizers doing non-productive things, like running scam calling centers, or defrauding the government. To build a productive organization you need an idea that is a least plausible, and someone who is willing to take the gamble that it will pay off. It might work out and it might not, but someone has to be willing to try.
But all this fussing about jobs and housing and war is just avoiding the elephant in the room - the umpteen zillion old folks on social security and Medicare. All I can see is that inflation is going to continue to increase. I suspect it might be ten years before the rate starts going up monthly. About then the rate will start going up exponentially and within months we'll be using trillion dollar bank notes to buy groceries. That's when people will start using the Chinese Yen or Crypto-bit strings.
Bachman Turner Overdrive - You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet 1974 Video Sound HQ
NEA ZIXNH
It's a nice day today, so I've got the windows down in my car, cruising up Highway 217 and this tune comes on the radio. Actually, YouTubeMusic via my smartphone and then through a headphone cable to the radio. So this tune comes on and it's a banger, so I wanna hear it loud. But I've got the windows down. Ever notice that nobody ever drives with the windows down anymore? Anyway, back to the radio. Can the radio handle it? And more importantly, can the speakers? I've dealt with dead speakers before (for example) and I don't want that. Unfortunately the only way to find out if they can take it is to turn up the volume, so I did. All the way to 35. Normally I'll have it around 15 or so when I am driving around in town, 25 MPH or less. On the highway with the windows up I'll turn it up to 20 to 25. This 35 business is uncharted territory, but the radio and the speakers handled it just fine. I think full volume on this radio is 40 or 50. Never tried it.
I think somebody spent a couple of bucks on the sound system before I got the car. The radio is a Kenwood with a detachable faceplate. It has one big knob that, besides turning like a volume control, it also acts like joystick to do I dunno what. I kind of learned a couple of things, but then I started using my smartphone and forgot all about the front panel controls. Now I use the buttons on the steering wheel. On the right side of the wheel I have buttons for the cruise control, which I use the heck out of. The stereo controls are on the left side of wheel. They allow me to changed the volume and channel and also mode. It has five or six modes (USD, CD, Radio, Blank/Inactive?, and Auxiliary, which is the one I use with my smartphone). So I no longer even have to touch the front panel.
I dunno about this tune. It's not pop-rock with snappy lyrics and a cool beat. Atmospheric is what I say now. We shall see. But this story on Willamette Week is why I'm posting the tune:
A cochlear implant has inspired Sean Wolfe to try making music in a new way.
Salvo Beta, the project of Portland electronic musician Sean Wolfe, just put out its first new music in nearly 25 years. And in order to make it, Wolfe had to learn to hear music in a totally new way.
His two remixes of the Chicago band Still Machines’ song “Echoes Within” are directly inspired by his experience with a cochlear implant, or CI—a surgically implanted prosthesis he received in 2024 after losing most of the hearing in his right ear.
“There’s basically a wire with a bunch of electrodes, and each electrode only triggers a certain frequency band,” Wolfe explains. “The in-between sounds are kind of weird.”
In order to achieve the desired effect on the remix, Wolfe manipulated a Moog synth sound through spectral shaping, a production technique that allows producers to alter individual frequencies. The result sounds something like a bell pinging underwater; the post-punk source material is clear, but the music sounds waterlogged.
“One of the things that really kind of shaped how I started making the music is inferring how frequencies can be shifted and perceived by someone like me, who has one of these CIs,” he says.
This story is set in the 1970s, near as I can tell.
I'm gonna give this book a 4. I was gonna give it a solid 3.5, but goodreads doesn't allow half points. First off, I was able to read the whole thing in four days. Given that it often takes me months to get through a book, that's pretty good. Of course, time spent reading the book depends on whether the story gets a hold of me or not. This one has espionage, a doll, a dollop of science, and a heaping spoonful of the KGB (Soviet secret police), so yeah, right up my alley.
The story tells us of Bekuv, a Soviet MASER expert defecting to the USA, his wife and the CIA agents and MI6 agent assigned to pick him up. They pick him up in the Sahara desert, take him to Washington D. C. Talking to Bekuv, our agents start to hone in on a leak somewhere in the US government. Eventually their focus lands on one guy and the whole story explodes. There is a hostage scene at the airport that makes no sense, but then maybe if you are suddenly feeling this extreme pressure, you wouldn't be making any sense either. So maybe realistic. Probably wouldn't be handled like this now, but we've had fifty years of studying hostage situations, so we might do better.
Now we're back in the Sahara desert at a secret Soviet satellite communications station. The Soviets have set up shop in an old fortress with sixty foot walls. Inside the fort are two satellite antennas, each sixty feet in diameter, along with a helicopter. I'm thinking such an establishment would need to be at least 500 feet square. I looked for old fortress and satellite stations and found plenty of old satellite stations and plenty of old forts, so many that I haven't been able sort them all out. Did not find a Russian satellite station set up in an old fort, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.
Both the US and Soviet governments want Bekuv because his knowledge of MASERs, but his interest lies entirely in communicating with alien civilizations. Quasar CTA-102 get mentioned on page 52. Look it up on Wikipedia and we find this line:
"In 1963 Nikolai Kardashev proposed that the then-unidentified radio source could be evidence of a Type II or III extraterrestrial civilization on the Kardashev scale."
I made a map with all the places mentioned in the book, well, at least all of the ones I made note of. The map also has a couple of giant Soviet radio telescopes cause that's what our man Bekuv would have liked to get his hands on.
I don't know why there are two for 2012. Gimme a break, it was 14 years ago. I tried checking to see if all the songs in the lists are also in the blog, but that exhausted my patience very quickly. Might be able to get AI to do it for me, but I'm not sure I want to get that involved.
I probably should put this list in the sidebar, but I haven't made any edits to this blog's layout in a coons age and I don't see me changing my ways any time soon.
Just popped in my head this morning. Used Google song search to track it down. I could remember it perfectly in my head but I could not sing it for shit. Google was still able to sort it out. Weird.
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