on language

i think words suck. so listening to me describe words' failings, while using words - makes no sense. i suggest you turn away.

i visualize words as posts, sunk in concrete, arrayed along a rolling field (e.g. a microsoft wallpaper), with very specific meaning associated to each post based upon their location.

the problem is the location of the the posts seem arbitrary - they are in weird locations (actually the locations/meanings are tied to culture - but culture is arbitrary); while the distance between the posts is often much too far to allow much finesse or elegance of expression.

i much prefer music / sound to convey subtlety of meaning - and i much prefer a mathematical equation / formula for efficiency of communication.

not long ago, my wife was speaking arabic in the kitchen, to herself - but for my benefit, while she was washing sweet potatoes. she said the arabic word for sweet potato - and then said literally it means "honey potato". i thought - wow, what rich meaning there - what an amazing new way of looking at a sweet potato.

as i discover arabic - i'm learning that very few arabic posts are co-located with an english post. and, that a new language - which requires looking at things from a new perspective - serves the same purpose as art, is as valuable as art, and enriches life experience just like art.

i think if we each spoke 10 or 20 languages - and could mix and match at will - i might not find words as inadequate as i do.

greed in the music industry

if ever redundancies were present in just five words - "greed in the music industry" would rate among the worst offenders.

last friday we had some of our friends over for dinner - folks I first partied with at their flat in Cairo and road tripped with to Sharm - and, I again had a chance to do the mac/technology-vulcan-mind-meld with my buddy Jeson. He gave me the heads up about a number of things that solve problems we have; including secure notepad widget, cool stuff from rogue amoeba, an easy network backup utility, and the fact that you can apparently plug external (e.g. firewire) USB2 hard drives directly into an airport express (in addition to printers) - which then automatically mount as a network hard drive any time you are on your network.

he also turned me on to the beauties of genetic algorithms to create dynamic customizable playlists in internet radio... i.e. pandora. just this week i started listening at work... and it's been nearly magical. type in BT - and all kinds of non-BT stuff that, I find I am digging - but wouldn't necessarily have discovered on my own - are floating to the surface. I see that I need to be checking out William Orbit... probably no surprise there - besides the fact that I am a huge fan of "ray of light" - clearly, however, I need to start the music library on growth hormones again.

then - i pop over to pandora's blog - and see the writing is already on the wall for internet radio... with the war coming from the guys who stand to gain the most from pandora's brilliant take at it.

amazon's long tail and the ability to buy the song of your choice instead of the whole album on iTunes have created the brightest hope for music as well as the industry - yet these bozo's keep thinking they benefit by telling us what to listen to (via universal FM radio programming in the US) and whenever they can constrict our exposure to new, other and different music.

bastards.