PlasticBoy

In this recurring feature, we present you with 10 tracks by some of our favorite rising acts.
RHAPSODY Link

The trailer for A Scanner Darkly is online. I try not to get excited about movies before I’ve seen them anymore, in order to avoid setting myself up for disappointment, but it’s hard to resist with this one.

The album of the week is Kings of Leon’s Aha Shake Heartbreak.

I finally got around to reading the Reason interview with Neal Stephenson.

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture. Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we’re coming to the end of one era and about to move into another.

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onegoodmove has the Daily Show bit on bloggers’ role in the Jeff Gannon story. Very funny.

Jason Kottke is quitting his job to blog full-time. He’ll support himself with reader donations. Normally, I’m not very enthusiastic about people trying to make money off of their personal blogs. To be honest, very few blogs seem good enough to be something for which I’d pay money or endure advertising. I’m even iffy about the text ads in the Boing Boing RSS feed. But in the roughly six years that I’ve been reading and writing blogs, kottke.org has been the most consistently interesting personal blog I’ve found, nearly every post is worth reading and pondering. So go start reading and toss Jason a few bucks, you won’t be disappointed.

The man credited with creating “soul jazz” and bringing the organ to jazz died recently.
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The new header image is courtesy of the awesome Kubrickr tool, which lets you search for photos on Flickr and then automagically crops the one you choose for use with the Kubrick WordPress theme.

Ouch, Richard Clarke on Microsoft security: “Given their record in the security area, I don’t know why anybody would buy from them.” Why, indeed?

For $100 you can now buy a tiny digital camera that’s way better (5 megapixels versus 1.2 megapixels) than the one I bought three years ago for $300.

I’ve got three albums for you this week to make up for last weeks absence. Your Rhapsody album is LCD Soundsystem’s eponymous album. We also have They Might Be Giants’ latest kids’ album Here Come the ABC’s, available as DRM-free MP3s at the TMBG store. This one’s not as adult-friendly as TMBGs last kids’ album, No!, but still has a few gems. Finally, I highly recommend the Grammy-winning, web-only Jazz album from Maria Schneider, Concert in the Garden, also available as DRM-free MP3s at two different bitrates.

Amazon has the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trailer. Maybe this movie (or it’s sequels) will finally popularize the origin of the title of this website.

Nat Friedman announced the Hula calendar server project yesterday. Jamie Zawinski has the story of how he helped turn Hula from a stodgy “enterprise groupware” server to a sexy calendar and mail server focused on getting college students laid.

I’ve been reading Home Comforts and the author recommends some books on storage and organization. One of them was out of print but I found a used copy from an Amazon zShop and ordered it. Today I got this hilarious refund notice:

Item: Refund for Storage Made Easy: Great Ideas for Organizing Every Room in Your Home Refund: [$4.63] Reason for refund: Other Memo from seller: Sorry. I simply cannot find the book you ordered?

Well, I guess he either didn’t read the book or it didn’t work very well!