Month: March 2003

There are so many books, movies and CDs out there that it’s impossible to sample everything you might be interested in. I found a pretty cool site called Gnod that makes it a little easier to narrow the field.

In a nutshell, it surveys what people like, and then it tries to assemble lists of what you might like based on the preferences that other people have cited. It’s similar to Amazon (and they appear to have some sort of unholy alliance with the weasels at Amazon), but this is much cooler. I really like the graphical representation that it produces to show you the relation of other works to the one you cited. Here’s an example of three that it created for me, based on the item that I told it I like:

Movie

Night of the Living Dead

Band

Jane’s Addiction

Writer

Irvine Welsh

It’s not completely accurate, but it’s a pretty cool toy. It also came up with a few suggestions that I’ll check out.

Rolling Stone has a great piece on the 30th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, complete with continued animosity between David Gilmour and Roger Waters, an interview with Alan Parsons and a rambling 1971 discussion with madcap Syd Barrett, including a quote from one of his songs, “Wolfpack”, that seems somehow oddly strangely appropriate while dogwoods bloom in Knoxville and bombs burst in Baghdad.

Mild the reflecting electricity eyes

Moaned Magnesium proverbs and sobs.

Imagine being able to direct sound like a laser beam. You walk past a Coke machine, and hear ice plunking into a fizzing glass. Like a voice in your head. From a source beamed directly at you. It apparently works up to 450 feet with no loss of volume or quantity, and it has the potential to make conventional speakers obsolete. With stuff like this, we wouldn’t need to invade countries that irk us. We could just beam Great White or REO Speedwagon at their leaders until they either do what we want or turn into quivering blobs of Jello. Very cool …

Make sure to read the entire story. The guy who invented this is fascinating and has a great track record.