J Larsen

I voted for the last option - and it wasn't tongue in cheek! We have constant fireworks being set off by kids on the sidewalk from early June through the end of July. We're not just talking firecrackers here (although they do get a few million of those) - they also get these big rockets that go about ten stories in the air and make large, colorful and loud explosions. It's more than just a noise issue for me - I really worry about the safety of those things, both in terms of setting a roof on fire and also in terms of walking around the neighborhood at night. Those things do go astray at times. Oh, the machine gun bit. We had a drug bust in the building next door to us a couple of July 4s ago. One of the people they were trying to arrest ran up on to the top of the building with a large automatic gun and started shooting. As best I could tell he was just shooting up into the air, but I wasn't exactly going out of my way to get a good look. And this was when I had a swanky apartment in a doorman building by Central Park. Go figure. EDIT - If M1000s are those things that do nothing but make an incredibly loud BOOM, we have those in spades. I suffered tinitus for about a month after having one of those detonate within a few feet of me with no warning a few years ago. That was one of those instances that lends credibility to the claim that capital punishment is a deterent to violent crime.

Like JSngry, my first thought was Mos Def for Miles. Think of the scene in Miles' autobiography where he sharing the backseat of a cab with a fried-chicken smacking Charlie Parker and Parker's girlfriend (if you read the book, you know what I mean). I associate Snoop Dogg with Charlie Parker in that equation, and the slightly more reserved Mos Def as the grossed out Miles Davis. For the record, I consider Snoop to be a decent actor and a hugely talented musician. I'm dumbfounded by some of the neg. comments here. The Chronic and Doggystyle are landmarks. I consider Mos Def to be a decent-ish rapper and a hugely talented actor who has only begun to scratch the surface of his potential.

My cat always tries to drink the water I'm soaking my feet in. He also laps up any water that doesn't go down the shower drain, as well as any condensation on the windows. I've gotten him to drink "normal" water a little more by buying him a flowing water fountain, but he still seems to like foraging for it. He's quite the hunter, that might be part of it. I've seen him catch flies out of mid-air, mice (I'm meticulously clean, but my neighbors aren't and hence I get the occasional rodent), and even a pigeon that made the mistake of slipping in my apartment just before I put in a window screen. You could do an episode of Wild Kingdom of Animals in my NYC apartment.

Sorry, Chuck - the mastering job wasn't the problem with that record...

Moscow, because I believe it is furthest from Manhattan. Sorry, I just really don't want the Olympics here.

I should be more clear, just so you don't get yourself in trouble one day. Most of the stars you can see with the naked eye, especially near an urban area, are nearby enough that they are still alive. In particular, essentially everything you can see in the Milky Way is still alive, as the MW is "only" about 100,000 ly across (at least the main disc - the football-shaped outer region, known as the "halo" is much, much larger but also much less densely populated, and mostly consists of relatively small, hard-to-see stars). Pretty much the same goes for Andromeda and the Meglianic Clouds, the later of which are two nearby "baby" galaxies. But the majority of galaxies that you can see with a good telescope are far enough away that they could be completely dead by now.

My understanding is that it is a mix of new and old. At least I think that's what I read at Pitchfork.

You can change that "some" to "most", depending on how good of a telescope you have.

I think they've hardly changed a bit. In fact, I think it's better than their last album (if you count Horrible Truth as an album), and certainly better than those Taang outtake compilations. It's no Vs., but that's just a ridiculous standard to hold anything up to. One neg. thing I'll say (and it really isn't their fault) is that I got the SACD, and I have to say I can hardly hear a damn bit of difference. Now it will be interesting to see how their fellow Bostonians (and followers, in some sense) the Pixies have held up. Somehow I'm far less optimistic about that reunion.

Maybe we've crossed up signals a bit. I absolutely believe that the universe is teaming with life. The evidence for microbal life on Mars is encouraging. I strongly suspect that we will find life in the oceans of Europa or Callisto (why we've chosen to go to Titan first is well beyond my capacity for understanding - nothing NASA ever does makes sense to me, but I won't start that rant again). I would guess that most main sequence stars give energy to some simple form of life on orbiting satellites. If I *had* to make a bet, I'd say that as many as 1/100,000 stars, at some point in their history, played host to some level of intelligent life. All of our observations demonsterate that atomic building blocks are uniformly distributed in space (via supernovae), and we find amino acids in meteorites all the time, so I very strongly suspect that aminos form quite readily, which strongly suggests that life should be unformly distributed among main sequence stars. On the other hand, I really think that the 1/100,000 guess is really quite generous. For one thing, Venus and Earth are, in many ways, extremely similar planets (compare their sizes and orbit radii), but one plays host to a rich array of intellegent and semi-intellegent life, whereas the other has a surface pressure of 100 atm and is subject to frequent sulpheric acid rainstorms. This tells me that you need a very special, hence rare, combination of variables for a rich array of life to develop (and it's only from a rich array of life that intellegent life can develop). Furthermore, we got really lucky here on earth when the asteroid killed of the dinosaurs. If that hadn't happened, mammals never would have had the chance to evolve much. Who knows how many civilizations didn't develop because they *didn't* get their asteroid? I continue to maintain that the best we can ever hope for is to pick up radio signals from advanced civilizations (and we can be pretty sure that they use radio or microwave frequencies for their communications devices - other bands are subject to too much ambient noise or are harmful to DNA). The distances we're talking about are simply too vast for direct contact to be feasible. If 1/100,000 stars at some point played host to life, and the average civilization survives a million years (being really generous), that means that 1/100,000*1000000*(1/13,700,000,000) stars *currently* host intellegent life, which means about 1 in a billion. This doesn't sound like a promising figure, but actually it means that there are trillions of intellegent civilizations in the universe. (Again, I think I've been overly generous in all of my estimates.) But this estimate also says that the nearest civilization to us is probably at least 1,000 light years away. And even if you insist on believing that speed-of-light travel is possible, I can guarantee you that faster-than-speed-of-light travel isn't - and even if you don't want to believe that, I can at least guarantee you that you would not like the consequences of a universe in which it was possible. As for life forms in the unobservable universe - we'll never know about them. If we could learn about them, even in principle, it wouldn't be unobservable anymore! That's not just a linguistic trick I pulled. The point is that nothing can travel faster than light, and if it could, we would have been able to detect the unobservable regions.

One other Howe work not to be missed: "The Sweet Smell of Success". It has a very cool "jazz age" feel and look. Plus, if you get Showtime on Demand, you can watch it for free this week. In fact, that's how I remembered to mention it - I'm firing it up right now.

Howe's most famous work is probably that which he did for the otherwise fairly lousy film Transatlantic. It looks like something Welles would have done, but well before the fact. My favorite movie that he worked on was a very creepy movie called Seconds. Seconds is a grossly overlooked film that, IMO, deserves "classic" status.

James Wong Howe is probably my all-time favorite cinematographer. Anything he worked on is worth watching if you appreciate the art.

I thought that before I started studying to be a physicist, too. But now I know that the closest main sequence star to the sun is Barnard's star, a star very close to the end of its life. (Barnard is a red star, which does not render it a particularly promising candidate for life, but I'll let that go for now). It takes light six years to travel from Barnard's star to the Earth, and light can only travel that fast because it is massless. It is strecthing things a LOT to say that maybe objects as massive as spaceships can, in principle, travel 1% of the speed of light. That would make the journey to Barnard's star and its associated planets (at least one of which has been observed) 600 years. Then you have to assume that your orginal astronauts did not die from exposure to radiation and other energetic particles (which we on Earth are protected from by the ozone layer and the geomagnetic field), and that the DNA of seven or eight generations' worth of astronauts was kept intact well enough against these hazards that they were all able to reproduce successfully. Another possibility that peope bring up is wormholes. These are believed to exist by many, if not most, cosmologists. But there are a couple of facts about wormholes that science fiction writers always ignore: 1) if they exist, wormholes only stay open for about 10^(-36) seconds (that's one billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second), and 2) any information sent through a wormhole is irretrievable. What 2) means is that if you send an ordered assembly of atoms through a wormhole (such as, say, an astronaut), what comes out on the other side is a jumbled mess of particles. If the later argument is wrong, so is the third law of thermodynamics. The third law of thermo is one of the handful of things just about every physicist will insist we absolutely have right. Could I be wrong? Sure, I never said otherwise. But I'd bet it all that I'm not. BTW, here's an interesting and slightly relevant addendum. When, in the news, people speak of "the universe", they normally mean the observable universe. But just about every cosmologist believes that the observable universe is a tiny fraction of the total universe. What is the distinction? Well, I think we all know that the universe is expanding, and that the data overwhelmingly suggest that it has always been expanding (this is another one of those handful of things that just about every physicist will say we absolutely have right). However, stars didn't start forming until 1 million years after the big bang, at the very earliest. When the most distant stars from the present-day Milky Way formed, they were thus extremely far away - so far, in fact, that their light *still* has never reached us. Who knows what's going on in the "unobservable universe"?

I find it extraordinarily unlikely that there is (or, at least, has been) no other intelligent life in the universe. I would bet everything I have against long odds that beings of superior intelligence have existed elsewhere. There around a hundred billion trillion stars in the observable universe. It's really hard to believe we're it. Plus, when you look at all the amino acids we find in meteriotes (carbonaceous chondrites, in particular), arguing against ET life almost starts to feel downright silly. I also find it extraordinarily unlikely that instellar travel, or anything even approaching interstellar travel, is even remotely possible. It's not that I think no being is smart enough to achieve it, I simly contend that well-established laws of physics preclude it. So I absolutely do NOT believe that any UFO sightings are ET related.

Thanks wesbed, that's the one. I'm going to hang on to it.

Sorry for the jerkish question, but if I were to put my old BN CD of Black Fire on eBay, would I get a decent price for it? It's one of my favorite discs, but I'm in a bit of a cash squeeze at the moment, and if it's coming back out soon anyway...

I haven't personally experienced the "bronzing" problem, but then again I didn't buy my first CD player until 1996, so I don't have many old cds. I was the only guy in my high school who knew that records were still being made, and the only one who saw any point in buying them. I have, however, seen collections afflicted with bronzing. I had a roommate who lost a chunk of of his Deutsche Gramaphone collection to bronzing, and I've known a few people whose early editions of their Nurse With Wound cds bronzed. The NWW label is aware of the problem and was still offering replacement discs as recently as 2000; a friend had about a half dozen discs replaced with no hassle other than having to ship his ruined ones to London. Millions of discs have been affected by bronzing, but when you consider that there are billions upon billions of discs in the world, the probability of any one disc being affected is small, especially considering that no disc produced more recently than the early 90s should be affected.

Let's see, I work around 60 hrs a week as a financial consultant, I teach two undergrad physics courses at NYU (thank God they just ended) and my PhD dissertation is due in a year. What, me stressed?

First of all, this is not a flat-out disagreement with you, J Larsen. Just pushing the conversation... Brandon - that was an obvious typo - I meant 10 years, hence the bronzing started showing up in the early/mid-90s. My cat likes to sleep on my keyboard, and as I result I have a lot of keys that stick a lot. Sorry for the confusion.

You're right, Johnny. If I recall correctly (and I'm nearly certain that, in this case at least, I do), it is well documented that Doubleday wasn't even in Cooperstown in 1839.

My PhD advisor used to be a senior research scientist in the recordable media division of IBM. I know the following to be true, but I can't give you references right now. In the late eighties, one of the major cd pressing plants used a chemical in the plastic layer that the Aluminum (Al) cd layer is encased in that has a slow reaction with Al. This reaction caused the readable Al layer to become corroded over the course of about 10 [NOTE: typo corrected here to prevent future confusion] years in millions of discs. This is the cause of the "bronzing" problem that you often hear about, and hopefully don't experience. This should, hopefully, affect only discs manufactured in the late 80s through the early 90s. For a limited time I believe the responsible plant offered replacement CDs, but I'm sure the window for that closed a long time ago. Barring chemical reactions between the protective plastic layer and the "read layer", a properly handled cd should last forever. Plastic does not spontaneously decay - this would imply that it is radioactive which it obviously isn't. The same goes for Al. I think that a big part of why discs don't last as long as their owners expect is that they don't realize that the printed side of a cd is at least as fragile as the read side.

Got my very first SACD: Mission of Burma On Off On They sound just like they did 25 years ago, which isn't a bad thing.

PIL - Second Edition (to replace the Metal Box LP I sold) Stooges "Raw Power Genesis Selling England By the Pound Grant Green Goin' West (I have to say this was a bit of a letdown - I overhyped it in my mind) Jimmy Smith Rockin the Boat Duke Pearson Sweet Honey Bee Archie Shepp Cry of My People (REALLY like this one) Cecil Taylor Conquistador (finally have a legit copy of my favorite Cecil!)

I'm considering buying the HK3380 receiver tomorrow for $250. I just want something that will sound half decent and that I can connect to both my turntable and DVD player (most units will handle one or the other, but not both). I'm looking to spend <$300, as this is a temporary solution that I see myself upgrading in a year or so. Anyone know of a better option, or do you think I should jump on this deal?