There is no hope

If you want proof that consumer culture has completely taken over humanity's common sense, check this out.

Ratatatatatat

Ratatat released LP3, their third album yesterday. It's very clearly Ratatat, in that it is electronic music with heavily processed guitars playing awesome harmonized riffs, backed by beats that are alternatingly rocking, dance-y, downtempo and glitchy noise. However, LP3 expands the Ratatat formula a bit by incorporating some more overt world music sounds and more varied production styles than their last two albums. There are fairly prominent tabla beats, exotic sounding string instruments, and even something that sounds an awful lot like a cuíca, which is the coolest novelty instrument of all time. As usual, there's a lot of stylistic variation from song to song. On the whole, the album is great, but there are a few inconsistent tracks that lack the punchiness of some of the better ones.

Here are a few of my favourites. "Shiller" opens the album with an awesome hypnotic harpsichord riff, and eventually adds more layers of synthy swoops and an epic guitar line, but never adds drums. "Shempi" is one of the most classically Ratatat tracks on the new album, and has this great synth lead that kicks in around the 1:00 mark that makes me want to nod my head in a very energetic fashion. "Mumtaz Khan" has some great percussion and an absolutely killer guitar line at 1:25.

Ratatat - Shiller
Ratatat - Shempi
Ratatat - Mumtaz Khan

Large Hadron Collider

The first beam to be injected into the Large Hadron Collider is going to get fired up pretty soon, and there's been a lot of speculation about what will happen when two proton streams crash into each other at 99.9999982% of the speed of light (roughly 299,792 km/s). The scientists in charge are hoping to detect evidence of the Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle thought to play a role in giving things mass. More worrisome types have speculated about the creation of tiny black holes (which might collapse and explode, taking the earth with it) or strangelets (packets of "strange matter" that may have the ability to convert normal matter into more strange matter, in a chain reaction that could turn the Earth into a small, hot lump of strange matter called a Quark Star).

Either way, something cool will probably happen, and you can count down the days until you potentially turn into a small, hot lump of strangelets here.

La Lune, ou Le Soleil?

Check this out. The best part is when he polls the audience.



In his defence, it is a pretty esoteric fact.

Dragonforce

Dragonforce has a new album coming out. I'm guessing it's gonna have some fast songs, and maybe a guitar solo. My favourite part about Dragonforce is always their album and song titles, and this album does not disappoint: Ultra Beatdown. YEAH.

Some selected track titles include "Heartbreak Armageddon", "A Flame for Freedom", "The Fire Still Burns", and "Inside the Winter Storm".

I wonder if I could get a job writing a Dragonforce album worth of song titles... I think I'd be pretty good at it. Check it out:

Track 1 - Eternal Vigilance of the Flame
Track 2 - Hurricane of Swords
Track 3 - Iron Fist of Destiny
Track 4 - Knights of the Fire
Track 5 - Face Punch
Track 6 - Beneath the Blackened Sky
Track 7 - Wield the Burning Sword of Fate... and also Fire

Dragonforce, I am free to start writing immediately.

Import Genius

I've had to set the blog aside for the last few weeks to work on my thesis, and all signs point to another month or two of intense academic discomfort before I get it all polished off and ready to sit, unopened, on a bookshelf for the next 50-100 years. However, I'll still post the occasional diversion on here when I find interesting stuff.

Example: Import Genius. This website (featured on the Freakonomics blog a few days ago) makes use of the public nature of customs reporting forms (and the awesome power of freedom of information requests) to publish a constant, real-time report on the contents of every single container arriving in the United States. The ticker (at the bottom of the page) is endlessly fascinating. 22,000 USB keys, 1000 bottles of sodium stannate, 128 televisions, 2600 "elegant wall clocks". The sheer volume of stuff constantly streaming across the world's oceans is pretty mind-blowing.

Ice on Mars

This is pretty cool. NASA, if you're reading this, I can clear my schedule and be ready for astronaut training as early as next Wednesday.