Musings, Nits, and Praises

In nearly every article I've read regarding Steven Page's arrest for cocaine possession the reporters have noted how surprising the arrest was given the band's seemingly squeaky clean image and their "goofy" or "feel good" music.

Obviously these writers aren't familar with much of Barenaked Ladies' catalogue.

Shortly after I started this blog, I wrote a short series called "Time-Defining Music" in which I highlighted the impact particular albums made on me at various points in my life. BNL's Born on a Pirate Ship was the first album I wrote about http://jmiddlekauff.blogspot.com/2006/02/time-defining-music.html.

Part of what has always drawn me to that record is the sad tenor of many of the songs. Perhaps that speaks to my own melancholic disposition.

This evening I came across this July 18th article by Chris Snethen in the Portland Tribune entitled "The Eternal Sadness of Steven Page" http://thevig.portlandtribune.com/2008/07/18/the-eternal-sadness-of-steven-page/

Snethen, who like Page has had struggles with mental health, offers a poignant assessment of Page's arrest as seen through the lens of the emotional and pyschological turmoil he has revealed in his songwriting.

Whether you're a BNL fan or not, Snethen's article is worth reading.

Brave New World meets the Six Million Dollar Man:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/15/bio.tech/index.html

Here's a salient excerpt:

Now, Kurzweil is predicting the arrival of something called the Singularity, which he defines in his book on the subject as "the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots."

"There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality," he writes. Singularity will approach at an accelerating rate as human-created technologies become exponentially smaller and increasingly powerful and as fields such as biology and medicine are understood more and more in terms of information processes that can be simulated with computers."

By the 2030s, Kurzweil said, humans will become more non-biological than biological, capable of uploading our minds onto the Internet, living in various virtual worlds and even avoiding aging and evading death.
In the 2040s, Kurzweil predicts that non-biological intelligence will be billions of times better than the biological intelligence humans have today, possibly rendering our present brains obsolete.

"Our brains are a million times slower than electronics," Kurzweil said. "We will increasingly become software entities if you go out enough decades."

A good laugh from The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/no_values_voters_looking_to