Category Pointers

Brett Garsed – Dark Matter (2011)

Brett Garsed - Dark MatterIt's nine years since Brett Garsed's last solo album, Big Sky. And while his output has more or less declined in volume this past decade, his latest album, Dark Matter is a great example of contemporary Rock Fusion, along the lines of Big Sky as well as many of his numerous appearances and collaborations. Although I only got the album a few hours ago, I have found it to be particularly interesting in that it literally 'fuses' (pun intended!) several familiar --- at least to me --- related styles: Vintage Satch, Liquid Tension Experiment, touches of Holdsworth, Fripp, Metheny and Shawn Lane. The tracks are more upbeat and energetic than those found in Big Sky; jazzier at times, heavier in others, with a distinct bent on fusion. I particularly enjoyed Avoid the Void, Dark Matter and Enigma, although I cannot say that any of the other tracks were disappointing. Dark Matter may be an interesting album, yet it is somewhat typical of the genre, which has been largely stagnant for years. It may lack the exceptional feel one finds at times in Big Sky --- there are no tracks like Trinity or Drowning, for example --- but includes many tracks with more uplifting, polished and --- I might argue --- technical deliveries of interesting compositions and improvisations that lean heavily on Garsed's signature technique and sound. For those enjoying rock fusion, progressive rock and virtuoso guitar instrumentals this is definitely an album worth getting and listening to. Those more familiar with Garsed's competence and compositional skills (and more demanding of their music) may have expected a bit more.

Willingly At the Forefront or Perpetual Testing Ground?

Mark Mazower is perhaps one of the most prominent historians of his generation, one that I respect and whose works I've have studied extensively over the past decade. This is his latest article on the NY Times and a good read; it may not be comprehensive --- as no newspaper article could ever be --- it may skim over a two thousand year period, in the process making an impossibly romantic, and if it weren't for its author I'd dare call it naive, argument: that Greece has repeatedly throughout its history had a leading role in shaping world events by being a forerunner of (r)evolution. The argument is romantic and flattering, but it's also flawed. It purposefully ignores that Greece has long lost its position as an enviable country (if it ever really had one) and nation, that it encompasses a society, a state and (a modern) culture admired by very few people that can discern between Classical Greece and Modern Greece. It hides the fact that since the founding of the modern Hellenic state in 1830, it is seldom Greece (the state) or its people that have chosen to shape the world, as Mazower puts it, but rather the world that has repeatedly coerced, if not forced, it to partake in its experiments, a guinea pig of sorts, the testing ground for change; whether for the imposition of western european monarchy on newly constituted nation-states in the 19th century, the fight against the Axis, the field testing of napalm in the 1940s, or the slow dismantling of the post-WWII status quo in Europe and the West that's happening now. In that respect, Mazower's article is unfounded and misleading; it makes the same mistake so many western historians, philhellenes and intellectuals have made over the past two hundred years: it flatters an intellectually, politically and economically corrupt state and an ignorant yet proud people by ignoring the very causes of their predicament, viewing the world through the stained rose tinted glasses of its long and glorious history and a form of nationalism, irrational as it always is. And that is the last thing that Greece needs, right now and --- arguably --- has ever needed.

Unbiased.

Recent developments on physically accurate, unbiased raytracers --- and more to the point, GPU powered raytracers that provide near real-time, interactive manipulation of fully textured and shaded models and environment --- promise an unmatched workflow that makes the creation of super-realistic images and animations very easy. I won't write much about the technologies behind them, but I think the video below is a great example of some of the things that become possible for a single person using commodity technology and hardware --- in this case Blender and Octane Render (one such raytracer), especially given how much of the lighting setup and performance trickery, that would otherwise be absolutely necessary, are 'handled for free' by the renderer.

A PC Emulator in Javascript.

You read this right: this is a 'full-fledged' PC emulator written in pure Javascript. It can boot linux. Amazing stuff, let's hope we get 'readable' source code sometime soon.

Javaless Guardian

Guardian.co.uk is switching from Java to Scala. I'm surprised it took so long and that other Java shops are not following en masse --- it could be because of how different and esoteric Scala can be, especially to Java programmers. The linked infoQ article contains an interesting discussion with the Guardian folks. Programming enterprise web applications (or anything, for that matter) in Java is painful for anyone mature enough to have experienced the wealth and breadth of tools out there, given how primitive, verbose and unproductive it is, and how much it caters for the lowest common denominator of a programmer. That's not to say that Scala is the best choice for everyone, let alone those not starting from scratch, but given the Guardian's existing infrastructure and systems, I guess that it's the best choice they could've made.

Back to the future.

I'm lost for words. This is unbelievably cool: recreating the same photographs, with the same people, twenty+ years later. Check it out.

That Jetson's-style robot…

Nope, this post is not about robots or cartoons, but about the absurdity of dealing with a tel-co in the States (it's the same if not worse here). Few things are more universal than corporate idiocy and incompetence of the highest level, it seems and Steven's writing is hilarious. =)

Divergent Thinking

With the occasion of the University of Cambridge planning to raise the tuition fees to home/EU students to £9K/year, and the increasingly flawed, purely economics-based view of education, here's another one of the RSAnimate sketches, based on a lecture by (Sir) Ken Robinson.

Google Art Project

Amazing work by Google, I hope it expands to other great museums all over the globe.

Fingers & Maschine = Groovy.

If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I would've never have believed this came from a human messing with a pad. What you can't see from this video is the volume pedal that Haynes typically uses, which takes dynamics to another level, nevertheless this is insanely good.