randomWalks

As of this writing, an unplayable iTunes Music Store-encoded AAC file of Double Dutch Bus by Devin Vasquez is at auction for $15,099. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this song; have you?

Rebecca has a roundup of red wine recommendations. A bit late, I’d like to share a wine column in today’s Washington Post, “Where Are the New Everyday Reds?” Also of interest may be this list of wine weblogs Dr. Bacchus has collected. My mainstay is the (cheap!) Concha y Toro “Frontera” Cabernet Sauvignon, and I’ve recently been pleased by Bogle’s “Old Vine” Zinfandel as well as Lindemans Bin 45 Cabernet.

I think we’re just going to buy all of our furniture from IKEA. Have you seen the Drömminge sofa/bed?

NYT profile of Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity.

I was thrilled to find this clock for $25. Design Within Reach within reach! I’ve just stumbled across George Nelson, who did some beautiful design.

She thought he was a liar—I think his personality, just standing there with that smirk on his face, and acting like he's this holy Christian, that's what really got her.

iTunes iSbogus

Steve Jobs says the Music Store is “revolutionizing music.” What an impoverished imagination he has. An expensive jukebox and a long-playing walkman aren’t revolutionary. A revolution in music will be when people stop buying music and start living it: when 25 cent donations support more musicians than CDs ever did, when payola’s dead and radio is commercial-free all day long, when every American highschool has a recording studio just cause they’re that cheap to set up. This can all happen right now.

Virginia Cooperative Extension Monthly Gardening Tips: August.

Wired News: Burning Man Never Gets Old

It was just one of those moments when you feel like everything is exactly as it’s supposed to be. You just had to be there. - John Perry Barlow

Modern windows is a new topic of discussion in the dwell forums.

Among the millions put out by the power loss last week were the nearly 600 designers and students attending the Industrial Designers Society of America's annual conference. When the hotel closed on Thursday because emergency generators had shut down, people who head design departments at corporations like I.B.M. and Motorola were put on the street for the night—at the mercy of their own designs, their consciences as professionals and whatever impromptu designing they cared to do.

Dear Nest Products. I'd like to place an order for the Herb chintz fabric.

The Memory Hole: White House Alters Webpages About Iraq Combat. [via BookNotes]

We were all there, for at least half an hour. They knew we were journalists. After they shot Mazen, they aimed their guns at us. I don't think it was accident.

I think I want this one.

The Work of Charles and Ray Eames (Library of Congress Exhibition), via Coudal’s MoOM.

Most folks were good natured, but hot. The breeze over the water seemed to disappear with the electricity. Merchants were selling water at gallons a minute, and at normal prices, too. More than a few people looked like heat stroke candidates: puffy red faces, clothing entirely sweat-soaked, a staggering, erratic walk. I bought two bottles of water, but I looked like I'd been fished out of the East River: covered in sweat, wet clothes, and the marks of pollution from where I'd climbed over barricades and up on bridge partitions to beat the crowds and take pictures.

There's a thing there that's got all the outside and it's got the momentum and it's going to move and it's going to demand certain forms and it's totally not embodied at all. There's no material to it yet and you feel absolutely that you're about to embody that, whatever your material is. I think painters feel that too. I remember Philip Guston talking that way. In fact he and I used to talk about paint and words to the extent that we weren't talking about paint and words anymore, we were talking about art, I mean, making that thing where we use all whatever materials we've been given to make it with. I remember some nights talking with him where we felt like it's absolutely up there somewhere and it's not paint and it's not words.

dwell forums: Why is it that people tend to choose traditional style homes over modern, contemporary homes?

artnet.com: Tripping on the Wall “Since the late 1980s, the New York artist Fred Tomaselli has been celebrated for visionary artworks made of intricately collaged images clipped from magazines and nature guides and also including, somewhat more notoriously, marijuana leaves, pharmaceutical pills and other literally mind-altering substances.”

Do you know who in the Bush administration is an ex-con? Or who never graduated from college? Can you guess the cabinet member who had an oil tanker named after them? Do you know whose nickname is "Scooter" and whose nickname is "Yoda?"

originally posted by beXn

LIFE Interview: Allen Ginsberg

Kerouac was all-American if anything. Neal Cassady was an all American kid, foot warts and all. But it really was Americana and Americanist, something in an older literary tradition that runs through Whitman and William Carlos Williams and Sherwood Anderson. There was that old Americanist tradition of recognition of the land and the people and the gawky awkward beauty of the individual eccentric citizen. Or as Kerouac said, "the old-time honesty of gamblers and straw hats." His 1959 [Playboy, June] article on "The Origins of the Beat Generation," that's his statement on what he intended, a kind of yea-saying Americana which was interpreted as some kind of negative complaining by the middle class who were themselves complaining. So yes, we were, or I was quite aware of the [cultural] impact. But so was Kerouac in "Origins of the Beat Generation" and in The Dharma Bums. He predicts a generation of long-haired kids with rucksacks. He predicts and asks for it.

Random Walk Generator

Humans have seemingly always been fascinated by random phenomena. Randomness is a pervasive component of our everyday lives. It characterizes the patterns of raindrops, shape and location of clouds, traffic on the freeway. It describes the selection of winning numbers in the lottery and day-to-day changes in the weather. The science of chaos says that everything began in pure randomness and will end that way.

The computer provides a means for the systematic extended study of randomness and pseudo-randomness that is impractical using simpler methods such as flipping coins or rolling dice. A graphics-oriented computer and a simple algorithm such as a two-dimensional random walk is ideal for the visual display and exploration of random principles. The random walk decision procedure, like the eight queens and knight's tour problems, predates computers. In one college finite math textbook (Kemeny et. al. , 1962) it is described in the context of an absorbing (i.e. terminating) Markov chain process wherein, at each decision point, only the most recent decision is considered when making the current one. Variations of the random walk method are currently used with computers to simulate systems in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, statistics, marketing, population dynamics, and others. A bit of Internet prowling will unearth information on many current applications. An Alta Vista search on the key "random walk" generated 2988 hits, many of them redundant, but containing at least one hit for most of the current applications of the method. Sourcecode for various implementations is freely available on the net in languages ranging from Java to C to Lisp.

Stereo Images - Time for Space—“Experimenting here with a way to present stereo images on the screen by simply putting the right and left images in an animated gif.” [via MetaFilter]

"If I were to guess the drug trajectory of you and your friends," he says between bites of a burger in a cafe in New York City's East Village, "I'd say it was marijuana, acid, mushrooms, Ecstasy, coke, and/or speed."

Pretty close. Yet this wasn't the trajectory on which my largely middle- and upper-middle-class friends and I envisioned ourselves. Our organizing drug principles were more organic. Pot and 'shrooms were natural. Even acid, though made in a lab, seemed to be more about the mind than the body. We didn't do nasty, "dangerous" drugs like coke or meth or heroin. That shit was evil. Deadly, even. But E was different.