This week’s candy from the sensorium.  I love it when I read really worthy (evocative, new learning)  weekly bests like katexic, Thought Shrapnel, Hack Education, and MediaShift Daily Must Reads among others.

Music I’m Listening To —

WMMT and WFMU.  We just bought an Amazon Echo after much thought and careful consideration.  What jazzes me about it is how it can call up TuneIn or IHeartRadio stations at will.  One of my first great Internet joys has always been radio.  I love it.  I worked at radio stations as a reporter for one of the great unknown radio stations in the world when I first moved to the southcentral Kentucky, WLOC.  Sadly,….no more, but  I still get a thrill from scanning the dial when I make crosscountry road trips.  The Echo lets me relive that same sense of freedom.

WMMT is mountain radio from Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY.  The Eastern Kentucky yawp  alone is enough to give any ex pat Kentuckian a killing case of homesickness. And the music! Eclectic, deeply mountain, local and beyond.  Listened to some killer Japanese bluegrass the other day.

WFMU is the longest running freeform radio format in the country. My wife and listened to Hearty White deliver one of the funniest Christmas riffs since Jean Shepherd ruled the airwaves.  One of my former students, Cheyenne Hohmann,  does a podcast and is uber ringleader at the Free Music Archive which has a show on WFMU, “Gray Area by Jason Sigal”.

I heard the two best new Christmas songs ever this year via the Echo.  I don’t even like holiday music and these were simply grand.

Here is a live version of “A Dollar Short of Christmas”

And LCD Soundsystem’s first song since they broke up.  Warning:  Very dark. The bells at the end will ‘sleigh’ you.

Article I’m Jonesin’ On —

This is an article from 2011 that I ran across in the New Yorker: “The Possibilian: What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain.”  Here is the penultimate paragraph in the article that defines what Eagleman means by ‘possibilianism”

Eagleman was brought up as a secular Jew and became an atheist in his teens. Lately, though, he’d taken to calling himself a Possibilian—a denomination of his own invention. Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, he told me. From the unfathomed complexity of brain tissue—“essentially an alien computational material”—to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said. “And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.” Why not revel in the alternatives? Why not imagine ourselves, as he did in “Sum,” as bits of networked hardware in a cosmic program, or as particles of some celestial organism, or any of a thousand other possibilities, and then test those ideas against the available evidence? “Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time,” he said. “As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”

Amen.

Book/Story I’m Living With -_

I love this story:  a man gets imprisoned for his blogging opinions. He spends eight years in jail with not Internet access.  When he is released, he discovers the world has changed since 2008–and he is not happy about it.

This is a true story. It happened to Iranian ‘blogfather’ Hossein Derakhshan.  His Guardian article, “Iran’s blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web”, describes what it is like to be cut off from the Internet time.  He is not happy.  If you want to prove him right, don’t go to the article.  Here are some highlights and a couple of quotes to give you the spice with which he writes.

• Reading on the Internet has changed.
• No one reads blog posts anymore.
• The hyperlink is no longer royalty, “devalued, almost made obsolete.”.  Long live apps. Long may they rule.
• Links are now the same as photos or text.  Unless somebody ‘gazes’ at them, they are less than nothing.
• Apps gaze inward and because they are so insular they are blind to web pages outside of the app.
• We are more apt to be controlled by this than any other system.  

Tools I’m Messing With —

I am having fun with Legend, an iOS and Android app that lets you play with kinetic type.  I love it even though I know I am limited by the templates provided, I am still happy with it because it lowers the barrier to playing with kinetic typography and allows me to see the rhetorical effects of using these digital objects in blog posts and other digital objects. I am trying to understand this tool in terms of Jenkins, Ito and boyd’s definition of participatory culture and will be creating a short zeega to demonstrate this with gifs created using Legend. Until then here is my first gif defining participatory culture with Legend.

Quotes to Die For —

Here is an extended quote for David Eagleman’s collection of variations on the theme of an afterlife.  (Actually, it is a complete story from it.)

Sum: Circle of Friends

What I’m buying —

I listen to lots of audiobooks.  Right now it’s all about The Five Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward Burger and Michael Starbird.  Two mathematicians.  Very lucid.  But that is not why I am writing this. Because I do listen to a lot of audio material, I run through earbuds like water. I have despaired of ever having a reliable, comfortable, tough earbud that was worth listening to both music and spoken word.  Until now.  I have found it: the Panasonic RPTCM125K Headphones. Here is a review.  

Of all the qualities I demand,  the most important for me is comfortable fit. These Panasonics  are by a factor of ten, easier on the ear canal than any other ear bud I have ever used.  And the sound quality is superb.  And they cost $10. And they are occasionally on sale. And they have a mic in them.  I own no stock in Panasonic. I don’t even like Panasonic stuff, but for these I make an exception.  I have a couple of spares (I still wear them out) just in case.