Boing Boing: Symphony for old IBM mainframe
In 1964, an Icelandic IBM 1401 mainframe engineer figured out how to get the machine to emit beautiful, bassy notes, and composed a symphony for it. Now his son is touring the symphony wiht interpretive dance thrown in.
Wikipedia has a nice entry on the IBM 1401, including some details about this musical. 🙂
[tags]Computer Music[/tags]
From Ed Felton’s Freedom to Tinker blog:
Let me say right up front that I have not accepted the Jesus Phone as my personal Lord and Savior.
The rest of what he has to say about the iPhone and its possible impact on the world of cellular phones is pretty good too.
Phew. I was on Ratatouille for almost two years, and today it’s finally in theaters. I wonder if all you crazy people camped out waiting for your chance to buy an iPhone are going to cut into our weekend box office. 🙂
Click here to find out about all the people camping out for the iPhone. Attempts to find people blogging about camping out in line to see Ratatouille have not yielded any results, but reviews have been pretty darned good (94% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) so I hope that some of you will drag your weary bodies and shiny new iPhones to the theater and see it.
[tags]Pixar,Ratatouille,iPhone[/tags]
I hope that the ghost of Chief Justice Earl Warren rises from his grave to haunt the Supreme Court. Prepare to set your clocks back fifty years.
Supreme Court: Schools can’t use race to assign students
To be fair, I haven’t read the actual decision (PDF link). I’ll try to do so tomorrow and have more commentary then.
Addendum: Sigh. The PDF above is 185 pages, and I don’t have the time at the moment to go through it and develop a more informed opinion. I surfed on over to SCOTUSblog, and read some of their commentary. From this post::
One reading of today’s decision in the race cases is that the Supreme Court has outlawed programs that seek to increase racial diversity in the schools. Justice Kennedy’s concurrence does not adopt that view, however. And because his is the fifth vote, it is controlling. The better view, I think, is that the Court today has come close to extending the Grutter model to the lower school context, holding that school districts may account for race as one factor among many in student placement.