I don't often say this, but fuck this video.

If you're 25, the end of your life is an abstraction and the whole "there's time to change things!" is a nice balm. When you're 55, your death isn't an abstraction, it's a fact of life that dominates more and more of what remaining time you have left. The awareness of impending mortality is insidious once you're passed 50. It creeps into every part of your life and every decision you make.

Let me teach you one of those amazing words the Germans come up with for describing various forms of existential agony: weltschmerz. Loosely, this is a form of sadness when one realizes what is versus what could have been. This is the compound interest of regrets and choices not made, or made poorly. Not only does weltschmerz grow with each year, its very presence amplifies itself because the more you know what could have been, the more you see what the cost of that absence is. Then, if that's not evil enough, that knowledge focuses the mind on the time remaining and how little you can do to negate the harm done, which then re-amplifies the weltschmerz.

You can slap whatever Hallmark bullshit you need on this to get through the day, but weltscmerz never goes away. It's always there. It's there at 3:00am when you wake up in a silent house and look at everything around you as consolation prizes for races not won. It's there when you see your friends succeeding in a million different ways that you didn't. It's there when you look at 6 million lines of text you wrote and realize you're not going to be Hemingway after all.

So fuck this video. I don't need a cutesy animated memento mori, I've already got a wall clock in my death row cell.

Here endth the rant.

(Nick Drake nailed weltschmerz perfectly in "When The Day Is Done". Here's the video to that song:

https://youtu.be/Y2jxjv0HkwM)

For those curious: it's from an opera by Giuseppi Verdi

La Traviata

It's in Act 1: 'Libiamo ne' lieti calici' (Alfredo, Violetta, Chorus) (Libiamo ne' lieti calici)

The song is a brindisi, a lively song that encourages the drinking of wine or other alcoholic beverages. The duet is performed in the first act of the opera, during a late-night party at Violetta Valéry's house. It is sung by Violetta and Alfredo Germont, a young man who is in love with her. Alfredo is convinced by his friend Gastone and by Violetta to show off his voice. He begins this drinking song, later joined by Violetta and the rest of the company.
The piece is written in B-flat major, its time signature is 3/8, and the tempo is marked Allegretto, dotted quarter note.

The 3/8 time signature is why you hear (or see in your mind's eye?) a waltz going on.

Oh, and on looking up: Drakes Supermarket is in Australia !

*promote

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I was with him for the first part.
And it's not that I can't take him seriously because of his hair - I found it very distracting to take singing critique from a Bieber look-alike...
He lost me when he says, "Even though your favorite artists probably cheats a bit in the studio, try to remember that tracks that you love by them might not have existed without this technology speeding up their workflow."

First, I think people like T-pain, Kanye, and Drake are most of what is wrong with the music industry today. So they definitely are NOT my favorite artists. Honestly, I refuse to call them artists. Artists hone their skills through tireless hours, years and dedication. Something these people don't do. (Hence the need for Autotune)

His point is exactly the point. Without Auto-tune, we wouldn't have these songs because they are utter garbage. It's Auto-tune that is the star, not the personas "behind the curtain."

And also, there is no fast track to learning skills. Yes, as he states, "speeding up their workflow" is just that. Workflow. This means it helps them produce tons of this crap without ever improving their skills, because they don't need to. They just need to rapidly produce song after song, while waiting for the one that is the most catchy to stick in people's minds. Then the conglomerate of industry leaches will pick it it up in hopes they all generate a few bucks from it. Meaning, they get radio play for producing crap song, after crap song.

Sorry to rant here, but pick up an instrument, learn to play. Learn how to sing, learn to hit a note. Entrance us with your skills and abilities. Seduce us with abilities that impress us. Gain our respect with your talents.

The guy in this video is just as fake as a Bieber look-alike, and while he starts to point out that they are3 cheating, he ends by enabling them showing us how great Lois's recorded voice sounds like once Frankensteined. This is not okay.

Note: I'm posting this comment to the YouTube video as well

It's still better than Drake's "Hotline"

also, anyone interested, look up Drake's equation.

Some great points here.

I think it should be obvious that our assumptions about the frequency of intelligent space faring life in this region of space at this particular Eon are way off. Hence no signals and no first contact. The Drake equation is full of shit, so there is no Fermi Paradox.

That's a pretty poor conclusion. I would have thrown in two other points:

1. If we hit the jackpot, we only got one spin so we've never known anything else. Given how vast the universe is with respect to space and time, is it so hard to believe that there are other dimensions so unknown and vast that of course there will be a universe that supports its own continued existence, and life? I would loosely liken it to the Drake Equation, which relies on huge numbers to demonstrate that even extremely improbable things are plausible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

2. I prefer to think that these constants are actually our own invention. We invented all numbers, units, and sciences to explain how we see things behave, but because of that we have to adjust our equations to fit the way the universe behaves. That implies that these constants are not adjustable, because they are not real in the first place -- they're just more imaginary ideas of our own invention.

The solar flares are very cool. I suggest watching in HD and full screen for maximum awesomeness.

Also from YT description:

The surface of the sun from October 14th to 30th, 2014, showing sunspot AR 2192, the largest sunspot of the last two solar cycles (22 years). During this time sunspot AR 2191 produced six X-class and four M-class solar flares. The animation shows the sun in the ultraviolet 304 ångström wavelength, and plays at a rate of 52.5 minutes per second. It is composed of more than 17,000 images, 72 GB of data produced by the solar dynamics observatory (http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/) + (http://www.helioviewer.org/). This animation has be rendered in 4K, and resized to the Youtube maximum resolution of 3840×2160. The animation has been rotated 180 degrees so that south is 'up'. The audio is the "heartbeat" of the sun, processed from SOHO HMI data by Alexander G. Kosovichev. Image processing and animation by James Tyrwhitt-Drake.

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If you're still interested in emerging details of the NSA/GCHQ story, keep reading. If not, feel free to delete the comment.

As you might have heard, a parliamentary investigative committee was set up in Germany to shed some light on at least some of the claims made by the press. They don't want to pay too close attention to it, given that our own intelligence services are just as bad, but that's another discussion.

Today, two expert witnesses were supposed to testify, William Binney and Thomas Drake, Everything was to be broadcast, as is custom, but they decided not to broadcast it after all. Given that recent interviews with both Binney and Drake indicated that they were planning to reveal quite a lot about shady cooperation between NSA/GCHQ and our own services, a set of rather embarassing details might have emerged. What a coincidence... [see footnotes]

Additionally, one of our public broadcasters, in cooperation with Jacob Appelbaum, revealed a piece of source code from a selector of XKeyscore. Hardcoded within, for some reason, we find the IPs of all servers running a TOR directory authority, once of them owned and maintained by a German student. So now we have the names of two German citizens under surveillance, and it'll be significantly harder for our Attorney General to find ways not to open up an invenstigation into espionage.

Also part of the revealed code was a confirmation that using TOR gets you labeled as an "extremist" and your ass is now amongst those whose activities will be monitored, constantly. A Google search for it is enough to land on their shit list, same for Tails.

That's the day so far, and it's not even 1pm.

Edit #1: Binney and Drake are considered witnesses, their statements are exempt from broadcast/streaming. Opposition forced a vote on it, government prevailed, no stream available.

Edit #2: I'll provide a summary of the juicy bits once they are done.

Edit #3: Members of the US Congress present, curious to see some (yet unmentioned) names.

Edit #4: Well, 0:20 and they're finally done for the day. Here's a summary of today's session, though the source can sometimes be a bit of a mouthpiece for the government.

If Drake's 'passing' was from a wing suit accident, it is not tragic. Surprised people aren't dying from this all the time.

And here I thought the claims around his four laptops were put to rest in July of last year or, at the very latest, after his meeting with Ray MacGovern, Jesselyn Radack and Thomas Drake in October.

There was nothing of substance on those laptops and to suggest otherwise with any credibility demands extraordinary proof.

Why?

Because of two primary reasons, as far as I am concerned:

- Any of Snowden's claims has yet to proven false. The entire apparatus is trying and they failed miserably so far. Probably because Snowden actually knows what he's talking about, unlike such cranks as Rep. Peter King.

- Snowden spent years working within the intelligence industry (CIA, NSA, private contractors) and he has proven to be careful and meticulous. Unlike the public (or the British MoD), he'd know better than to transport any sensitive information on a device like a laptop or a smartphone. Or an external harddrive. Or a disk. He'd use flash memory, possibly a thumb drive, probably an SD card -- the less embedded controllers a device has, the better. Heavily encrypted, of course, and if anyone doesn't believe that crypto works... tough luck, I'm done trying to convince people otherwise.

So, the only people who received data from him are Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. American journalists reporting on American issues, just like he said.

As for the the revelation of "tons of national secrets and techniques": he has revealed nothing. Let me say that again: Snowden has revealed nothing.

He has empowered members of the press, the fourth estate, to do their bloody jobs and fullfil their role as watchdog over the government, something they failed at miserably in this particular regard. All revelations happen at the discretion of those journalists who are now the sole proprietors of the Snowden-documents.

If, however, you don't subscribe to the notion of a free press as a line of defence against government abuse, then I can't change your mind.

By the way, "putting American lives at risk" should have received a trademark by now, the way it has been waved around to kill uncomfortable conversations. I vividly remember how desperate they were to find proof that the Afghan/Iraqi War Logs and the Gitmo Files were endangering lives. As far as I know, they never found any. And as far as I know, all releases based on Snowden-documents were carefully chosen and redacted where neccessary to protect the identity of human assets. All claims to the contrary need to provide evidence.

But I'm glad to see that the "American industry" has found its way into the argument. At least we don't have to pretend that this is solely about terrorism anymore. Industrial espionage, diplomatic advantages and... keeping your own population in check.

Yay! It's just like the old days.

Oh wait, I forgot. My country has been under full scale surveillance by the US, the British and the French since the late '40s, so it's actually business as usual.

Sure, keep crying wolf but one day you're going to be cornered by a herd of raccoons in your kitchen and Drake won't save you.

By the way, this coupled with the reduction in sys-admins at the NSA might be a reason to prepare some more popcorn.

First General Alexander flat-out lied in front of the NSA's most important hacker convention, then they announced their plans to reduce the tech staff by 90%.

Bad idea to piss off the tech guys if your agency depends on the integrity of its network.

Can't wait for the 30C3. After Binney/Drake held their "Enemies of the State" talk last year, there's bound to be more NSA insider stories this time around -- maybe even Snowden via stream.