Talks:

Over the last couple of days I have enjoyed these talks.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is funny but I think I would hate to hang out with him. On the other hand i am fairly sure I could go camping with Richard Dawkins.
For some reason this talk is called "an atheist's call to arms". It's actual title is "queerer then we suppose" and is about the ability of our brain to understand things on levels of magnitude on the atomic scale and on the universal scale. It is very nice.



This one is just nice because it is quick and rational.





What I have been interested in is that despite these arguments these ideas still stick around. It is very interesting.

ICANHAZDR.WHO?

Remote Controlled Beetle

I found something strange on Hack a Day this morning.
It is a video of a real live beetle with a microchip attached
to his nerves to make him fly, stop flying, go left, right, up
and down. The first half the video I was excited but the
longer it went on the more sad and weird it was.

Here is the video

Un-canon Canons

I 

have been

 working on trying

 to write canons or rounds*

 that are harmonically complex and  maybe 

that even change key. I got the idea from my faculty

 Arun C. who also suggested I try to make a cannon that changes it's length 

after each repetition. I haven't had much luck with either of these two tasks yet but

 hopefully this weekend I will have something to post. # Give it a try it is real fun to try and figure out.

image credit: tasosk

*row row row your boat

#brian, you know you want to try itdfpo

Nick Cave

I found this guys stuff via http://foundcorn.blogspot.com/ currently titled "Art school".
I really want to put this thing on and run around the house.

you can see some little pictures of his other work here.

Song Writing Project

I am trying to write one song a week, good or bad, and post it. Hopefully they will slowly improve.
Song 1:



The assignment I gave myself for this one was to write a song that is entirely setting.

Five Finger Composition Assignment

Today Arun asked us to make a composition for five fingers. He said the focus of the assignment was not to have the fingers play piano, or tap out a rhythm but rather for us to look at and try and organize five fingers in terms of movements, poses and behaviors aka compose them just as fingers. It can be a little hard to conceptualize but it is actually really fun. Just remember to focus on composing what the fingers are actually doing, not on composing what the result will be. For example don't compose a song of tapping sounds or shadow puppets or movements that will afterwords be placed in front of a guitar or on a piano to play a song.

Here's a video of my take on it. We only had the evening to work on it so don't expect socks to be blown off. I will be seeing about twenty-five other finger compositions tomorrow so maybe I can get a couple more up here to give some idea of what else could be done. If you are going to try it yourself you may not want to watch what I did first.