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Can you kill JFK? My latest Slate gaming column
For hundreds of years, composers have argued over what’s the best way to represent music on the page, and many have experimented with weird new modes of notation. But until I read a piece this week in the New York Times about the avante-garde performer Margaret Leng Tan, I’d never heard of George Crumb. Crumb is famous for drawing his scores in hallucinogenic shapes evocative of the mood he’s trying to set, such as the spiral-shaped score for “Spiral Galaxy: Aquarius”, pictured above. I wish more of his scores were online — they’re quite trippy to look at.
Music is, when you think about it, one of the strangest challenges in the field of information representation. Acoustic instruments can do all manner of subtle things: How do you accurately score the bend and vibrato of some of the notes in a B.B. King solo? DJing presents even more challenges: One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen is the booklet on how to musically score a sequence of scratches on a record — the “Turntablist Transcription Method” produced in 2000 by a trio of DJs. (You can download the entire thing here in PDF form.)
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
» see all of my photos on Flickr
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A long German word for "noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history"
