Analog by Night

When will I stop analyzing this?

My impression is that they like musicians who are really more literary than musical. As in, they want a person to get up there with either an acoustic or dissonant electric and read a flat journal about being an undersexed INTP teenager. The story has to VASTLY outstrip what’s going on musically. The flatter, simpler and moderately melodic the better. Bring the vocals forward and play your 3 chords fast like this: strum-strum-strum-strumma-strum-strum. Then pile on the tweestruments, for everyone of your 20 friends with an undersized sweater and bad bowl cut.

MOST importantly your story needs to be: suburban, non-moralistic, moderately detailed, between two people (one of which is really the ideal of the person, not the person).

It’s amazing how many variations there are to Love Will Tear Us Apart. Much like the Amen break, apparently you can build two or three decades worth of rock on a single instance of music. Amazing.

Make’s me think this is going to be interesting. At least The Daily Show will be good.

Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

To Find You

I took my myself to the cafe,
Along the sidewalk, like a submarine with periscope peeking.
Into some wild world full of burning bushes, lapels and miles.
I darted and dove, shimmied to starboard.

Two red leaves blown from a fall maple,
Wet with word, press themselves to my outstretched hand.
Each corner licks a direction, quartering your heart.
I yielded and yearn, stolen and harbored.

I draw my prize down here,
To see what we are made of.
Maybe two compliments, maybe two query–yes, two other.
I am holding and hope, our life unarmored.

I’ve passed my cafe and make for home.
The way rounds rock marches, skips on lights and windows.
Each leaf’s inch is a promise, is a notion, and are our mystery.
I am found with a kiss, my love, my ardor.

Garrison: We just lost the initiative.

Here’s a very nice looking, informative and simple poster explaining the state of UX. It includes titles and what they mean, cities for work, salaries and more. It’s from a Venture Beat article titled A guide to user experience job salaries, skills and hot hiring locations. Fucking mouthful, that one.

Turns out the writer, Brian Wallace is working out of Louisville, KY! Kick-ass Kentuckian. Click the image to see a fullsize version.

“More, I fear, there is a flaccidity and casualness of style that has come from writing habits born out of e-mail and social media.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8c60799c-24e2-11e0-895d-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1C01tymmn

I definitely didn’t come to your website for ads. Don’t make me wait for the content because you’re having trouble connecting to your ad-server.

It’s about 5% likely that I came to your website to study the chrome. So don’t make me wait for your fancy Flash, or JQuery chrome to load.

I came for the content. You’ve got 10 seconds to get me that content, or I’m out.

Content is king.

You better hope you deliver a damn good service because my reptile brain takes a vote in the first 10-20 seconds. Site good? Site bad? And I have to use my long-term memory to overcome that emotional record each time I think about going back to your site.

So. Give me my damn content, and then, once you’ve earned my favor: “Site good!” then you can spend the capital you’ve just earned, by serving me ads, and chrome, and links and social and all the other crap that helps you and not me.

Brilliant caption (sorta)

That picture, sourced from this Defense Industry Daily extract, is presumably a Trident II D5 nuclear tipped submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM). The caption is immediately accessible given our popular imagination of how missiles work, and would imply that this nuke is catastrophically out of control. It may be. It’s really no big deal though. The big deal would be pre-mature detonation, ostensibly irradiating a patch of ocean, rocking the hull of the sub, and giving away intelligence info to anyone with sufficient monitoring equipment. Even if it was to hit the water, it’s not likely to have gone nuclear. There is a bittersweet but lengthy record of nuclear bombs being dropped on American soil without the ensuing detonation, including this juicy tidbit from 1961:

On Tuesday, 24 January 1961, at about 12:30 a.m., two hydrogen bombs fell to earth near the tiny farming village of Faro, NC.

Obviously, neither bomb yielded its awful potential, or the world would today be mourning an infamous catastrophe. The two model MARK 39 devices came down when the B-52 bomber in which they were riding suffered structural failure and disintegrated in mid-air 12 miles north of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, NC. The plane exploded as it fell. Five crewmen parachuted to earth safely. Three died — two who went down with the doomed bomber, and one who was found two miles from the crash site hanging by his parachute in a tree, his neck broken. The H-bombs jettisoned as the plane descended, one bomb parachuting to earth intact, the other striking a farmer’s field at high speed — “probably mach 1″ (about 760 miles per hour) speculates one retired Air Force Colonel. – Full Article

Back to the story. There is also the probability that the Trident II D5, which is burning solid rocket fuel, is performing a sort of spin maneuver in order to burn off excess fuel. Why would it do that? So that it doesn’t travel as far. It’s technique I learned about while reading Jeffery Lewis’ post about Bulavas.

If you remember, there was an incident of a spiraling missile over Norway last year. It provided a couple days worth of media frenzy, and was addressed technically by one of my favorite blogs, ArmsControlWonk.com in this post. Lewis even reminds his readers that people thought it might be a UFO. I guess for most it remains a UFO, as few of them are likely to know what kind of missile it REALLY was.

I wonder if the arc of that spiral is too tight to suggest the fuel-burning technique, and do indicate an out-of-control nuke, but I’m not technically aware enough to know.

Still, the calm pith of the caption made me grin.