Archive for 2016
June 24, 2016
21ST CENTURY CRIME: Florida man brags about burglary on Facebook, lands him in jail.
Of course it was Florida Man.
DEATH OF A NARRATIVE: FBI Finds No Evidence Orlando Shooter had Gay Lovers.
Gosh – whatever could the terrorist’s motivation have been?
INEVITABLE: Why an E.U. without Britain is bad news for the fight against climate change, warns the Washington Post.
Perhaps the Post should start small: convince Jeff Bezos that Amazon and its global network of Raiders of the Lost Ark-sized fulfillment warehouses, air-conditioned server farms the size of small third nations, and the fleet of planes and trucks employed by FedEx and UPS to deliver its merchandise are causing global warming on a massive scale, and that Bezos should close up shop for the sake of Gaia. Then get back to us on the climate change dangers of Brexit.
On the other-hand, this headline is a reminder that Post elitists are equal-opportunity transatlantic oikophobes: “‘White Trash’ — a cultural and political history of an American underclass.”
As John Schindler tweets, “Got no idea why working class whites think our elites [and] MSM view them with hatred [and] contempt.”
WELL, BRING ON THE REMAINING 24%: Paul Allen’s Massive Space Project Is 76% Done.
BREXIT: WHY ARE LIBERALS SO HATEFUL? “The Left in the U.K. isn’t exactly like the Left in America, but its hateful nature is familiar,” Paul Mirengoff writes at Power Line, quoting crazed lefty “Remain” supporters hysterically chanting “scum, scum, scum” to likely future prime minister Boris Johnson this morning as he was leaving his house with police protection. “Brexit supporters displayed nothing like Remain’s venom. Take, for instance, Elizabeth Hurley:”
Well, if I had any doubts about supporting Brexit before, I’d say that settles them…
On a more serious note, it’s worth adding that Brexit wasn’t a right versus left phenomenon; as Jeff of Ace of Spades’ Decision Desk tweets, “Real story of #Brexit on electoral level is complete revolt of working-class Labour voters v. EU. Leave won MASSIVELY in Labour heartlands,” adding, “Birmingham? Tyneside? Hartlepool? Sunderland? PRACTICALLY ALL OF WALES? Working-class Brits rejected Labour “remain” argument wholesale” and that “Leave” won “literally every single region of England and Wales w/lone exception of London. Even super-solid Labour Northeast.”
RACISM IS EVERYWHERE: A-Fib Is More Dangerous for Blacks Than Whites.
The rate of atrial fibrillation was higher among whites than blacks, and both white and black people with A-fib had increased risks of stroke, heart failure and coronary heart disease. Those with A-fib also had an increased risk of dying from these and other causes.
But even though rates of A-fib were higher in whites than blacks, the actual effect of A-fib led to much higher rates of disease in blacks than in whites. Compared with white people with A-fib, blacks with the condition were more than twice as likely to have a stroke, 42 percent more likely to go into heart failure, 76 percent more likely to have coronary heart disease, and nearly twice as likely to die prematurely.
It’s important to treat A-Fib regardless of your race. Don’t delay.
WE WERE TALKING ABOUT THIS IN MY LAW, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR A DECADE AGO, AND NOW IT’S REAL: Brain Scanning Just Got Very Good—and Very Unsettling. “The HCP project has also moved brain scanning into the realm of the feature film Minority Report by showing that a person’s brain activity is as unique as a fingerprint and that it can be used to identify a person with 99 percent accuracy. HCP data has also enabled researchers to use a brain scan to predict how a person will perform on an intelligence test and during a memory or reading task. ‘This may be a bit scary,’ admitted Roderic Pettigrew, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, during introductory remarks at the symposium.”
They’ll soon be able to tell if you know things without even asking you.
AND THIS WEEK, THE ROLE OF PAULINE KAEL WILL BE PLAYED BY…Well, lots of lefty pundits on both sides of the Atlantic. But this tweet by Young Ezra Klein sums it up nicely:
As Noah Pollak tweets, “Liberal self-ghettoization leads to befuddlement and disappointment” — and with everyone on the left defriending, unfollowing and generally freezing out anyone who dare holds differing opinions from yours, the end result is “An entire generation of Pauline Kaels,” as one of Pollak’s followers adds.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL! Video: ‘Spaced out’ dog stumbles and stares into space after eating MAGIC MUSHROOMS as worried owner looks on.
It’s doggy equivalent of the viral video of the groggy kid returning from the dentist, and even funnier. Roxy’s owner “claims the dog appeared to be ‘enjoying the experience’, adding that the vet explained many dogs actually go looking for the intoxicating fungus. Thankfully, Roxy had no medical problems and was back to playing as normal once the high wore off.”
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Navy Testing New Super Power Laser Weapon.
SOUND ON SOUND MAGAZINE REVIEWS CELEMONY MELODYNE 4:
Just occasionally, however, a product comes along that is genuinely revolutionary, and when Celemony first showed me a beta of Melodyne 4, it was immediately obvious that they had come up with something a bit special. A couple of months down the line, it’s ready to be unleashed on the world, and if anything, I’m even more impressed. Without wishing to give too much away now, I think it’s fair to say that this is not your average software update.
The first question on some readers’ lips is likely to be “What happened to Melodyne 3?” The last full release of Melodyne to be reviewed in SOS was Melodyne 2, as long ago as December 2009. This was the release that introduced Celemony’s landmark DNA technology, and it’s a mark of how advanced their algorithms are that, more than six years later, Melodyne is still almost unique in its ability to manipulate individual notes within a polyphonic audio recording after the fact.
* * * * * *
Ever since the launch of the very first version of Melodyne, Celemony have been at pains to present it as more than just a tool for correcting wayward pitching. It does, of course, excel at correcting wayward pitching; but it also lets users explore new creative pathways, working with recorded sound in ways that were never previously possible. Celemony’s data apparently indicates that about 60 percent of existing users employ Melodyne primarily as a corrective tool, with the remaining two–fifths of the user base exploring the creative side of the program. And in Melodyne 4, they’ve added features that will be very interesting to both camps.
It’s truly awesome technology; as I wrote in my review, I found the previous version of Melodyne to be incredibly easy to get started with, and it quickly became indispensable to my music. I used it for pitch correction on vocals (I need all the help I can get!), replacing the odd muffed note in an otherwise usable solo, modifying drum loops, and radical sound-altering “science experiments.” And once my home studio is finished soon in Texas, I will start working with the new version.
But Melodyne does beg the question: music recording technology has never been more powerful. Yet, as this recent Wall Street Journal article on the making of “Strawberry Fields Forever” highlights, the Beatles and George Martin recorded masterpieces on four track analog recorders. As with a movie industry that went from making Casablanca and Citizen Kane in black and white to digital effect-heavy movies featuring cartoon superheros, at what point — if ever — will we once again get a popular music again whose output is equal to the massive amount of technology that goes into it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol0OZ3xzsjs
INTRODUCING THE all-new Amazon Kindle.
2016 IN A SINGLE VIDEO. Watch A Burning House Float Down a Creek in Apocalyptic West Virginia Floods:
#Flood water pushes a burning #home down a creek in #WestVirginia. #wvwx
? Amanda Carper pic.twitter.com/zJSMe95nLk— AMHQ (@AMHQ) June 24, 2016
“As soon as it stops, they’re gonna put Robert Byrd’s name on it,” author Joel Engel adds on Twitter.
CABLE IS THE WORST: Comcast took $1,775 from man, only gave it back after he contacted media.
POST #BREXIT PANIC AT COMMIE CLOTHES RAG ESQUIRE!
WHY BRITAIN WAS RIGHT TO LEAVE: “Absence of legitimacy is the EU’s main feature. Since there is no procedure for the democratic right to throw out the [expletive deleted], the EU has developed into something never seen before in the world, an oligarchy with soft totalitarian symptoms.”
And a how-to guide for the American left.
NBC FREAK-OUT: BREXIT = ‘FEAR, XENOPHOBIA, RACISM,’ ‘THREATENS WESTERN CIVILIZATION:’
Appearing on NBC’s Today, analyst and Daily Beast editor Christopher Dickey launched into a tirade against Britain’s vote to leave the European Union: “…they claim it says, right off the bat, is that they were tired of all the bureaucracy of the European Union, they didn’t want all the constraints, they want their sovereignty. But what this was really about is fear, xenophobia, in some cases, certainly racism.”
How dare everyday British voters upset a “Progressive” Euro-elite that knows best! We’ve seen these sorts of media freakouts when they casually throw the R-word around before, haven’t we? That last sentence quoted by Dickey — “what this was really about is fear, xenophobia, in some cases, certainly racism” — sounds like it was cut and pasted from so many pieces written about American voters in November of 2010, when exasperated American voters returned control of Congress to the GOP after Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid rammed Obamacare through, ignoring the wishes of the majority of Americans.
The ghost of Peter Jennings and his “temper tantrum” in 1994 lives – and hopefully we’ll see plenty more along those lines this November as well.
SHUT UP, RACIST, VOX EXPLAINED: Brexit isn’t about economics. It’s about xenophobia.
Isn’t it always?
IS THERE NOTHING THEY CAN’T DO? How Dunkin’ Donuts changed the dictionary.
QUESTION ASKED: Why Should Axing Due Process Stop With The Second Amendment?
Whether or not it should, it certainly wouldn’t.