The new album Petals On the Path was released today. It’s now available from the LIsteningLounge. I checked and it is available from iTunes and from Amazon. The High Def 24/88.2 files are available from HDTracks.
I added links and previews (low bit-rate and mono) on the webpage for the album. I have mentioned this before, but we put up a special Journal about the process of creating Petals On the Path – with rehearsal recordings and photos.
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The Guardian has a piece on why unlimited mobile plans are being killed by providers everywhere.
Why file-sharing has killed ‘unlimited’ mobile data contracts | guardian.co.uk
So: 200MB average; 97% use less than 500MB. Plus those numbers into a normal distribution calculator and you discover that those 0.1% who are annoying O2 so much consume more than 690MB of data per month. That’s about 23MB per day – roughly a megabyte every single hour. What, you think, are those folks doing? In fact, one network tells me that those people are downloading many gigabytes per month. That’s quite hard to do on a smartphone.
Hm, what could they be doing…
So those wary folk – put by one network as numbering “in the few hundreds” out of millions – have signed up on “unlimited” plans, taken the SIM out of the phone, and then use it in a 3G dongle to download stuff. Because it’s unlimited, they can get what they want. And as they don’t mind how quickly it arrives, the speed isn’t a particular issue; they’re just after volume. O2 says that 0.1% of its smartphone users – that’s about 2,000 people – are consuming 36% of its data. Other networks indicate the same.
It seems that file-sharing is almost a religion for some, or maybe more like a cult… must.download.music.and.film.for.free… even if it takes days to download anything sizable via cellphone!
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This looks like a very interesting book: Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. The Guardian has an interview with the author:
My bright idea: Guy Deutscher | Science | The Observer
What’s your new book about in a nutshell?It’s about why the world can look different in other languages. I try to explain why in the race to ascribe to our genes all the fundamental aspects of language and thought, the immense power of culture and nurture has been grossly underestimated.
How has it been underestimated?
For example, I argue that the mother tongue has considerable influence on the way we think and perceive the world. But there’s a great deal of historical baggage attached to this question and so most respectable psychologists and linguists won’t touch it with a bargepole.
It’s like being a historian and talking about national character, isn’t it?
Exactly. But I think we are grown up enough now to look at this question in a scientific way.
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Alex Ross on applause:
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Applause: A Rest Is Noise Special Report
To recap: Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, applause between movements and even during movements was the sign of a knowledgeable, appreciative audience, not of an ignorant one. The biographies of major composers are full of happy reports of what would now be seen as wildly inappropriate applause. Mozart’s famous letter to his father in 1778:
Read on here and here is a link to a PDF of his lecture at the Royal Philharmonic Society in London.
Read it following David Byrne’s talk at TED regarding music vis-à-vis architecture for a complete meal.
_Through the Language Glass_ does indeed look interesting. I will definitely put that one on my wish list.
It seems fait accompli that it will be labeled “racist” or “wrong headed” or simply “misguided” by Pinker or Chomsky, or one of their minions.