Oh good lord.  Why is that every medium that comes along has to be analyzed in this completely non-productive, irrational way.  Nicholas Carr over at Atlantic Monthly is jumping on the bandwagon of the Google-makes-you-stupid folks.  He starts with something I’ve heard a thousand times anecdotally from others: 

My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

“Oh nooo.  I’ve been using the internet and now I can’t concentrate.”  It’s not the net, it’s you.  Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  The net doesn’t make you unfocused, you do.  I’ve been using the web since it was and although I went through a period where I realized I was just too distributed through various channels, I got ahold of myself and started prioritizing and organizing. I learned to use tabs while browsing.  I got NetNewsWire.  I stopped reading everything right away and started building chronologies of stuff TBR (to be read) on del.icio.us and now Laterloop.

Not only can I still read books, I read books that are longer than human history.  That’s right, I put that link there to distract you!  You can’t resist clicking on it, can you!?  No, because the web and email have made you an unfocused idiot.  The problem here, Carr—the only problem—is that while you are literate, you are not web literate.  It’s changing the way you think because you don’t know how to control it.  It’s no different than television, folks, either you know when to turn it off, or you’re a couch potato.  It ain’t the TV that’s the problem.

To quote Joe Mathlete:

JESUS FUCK STOP IT I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS??? EVERYTHING YOU CREATE IS CANCER AND MADNESS

Ok. Now that that’s out of the way, I will attempt to comment on this article over at Wired about the major label’s new strategy: everybody pays for all the music! That’s right. Now the RIAA has decided that they can make ISPs charge a fee to their customers in exchange for access to “a database of all known music.” Read more…

Google calculator is great fun. One of the things that it does that I have found invaluable is conversions; meaning, you can find the value of a pound in grams simply by typing “1lb in grams.” One that I thought of today, after encountering an article on Wikipedia about Moore’s Law was converting various unit measurements into the width of atoms. In the entry on Moore’s Law it is mentioned that IBM has recently engineered a process for printing circuitry that is only 29.9 nanometers in width. Elsewhere I discovered that an atom is roughly 130 picometers in width. ((Of course, when you get down to this level of specificity, atoms vary greatly in width, but this measure is fine for fun.)) So, if you want to know the width of these IBM printed circuits in atoms, you just type “29.9nm in pm” and you’ll get a result, 29,900, in picometers that you then divide by 130. So the new chip circuitry is roughly 230 atoms across! So how about your finger? Well, mine is roughly 150cm across, which, by my calculations is 1.15384615 × 10¹⁰ atoms across, or about 11 and a half quintillion atoms across. ((Anybody feel free to check my math or disagree with these results!)) And a quintillion in pennies is this much.

I’m not going to say too much about Sony BMG’s unbelievably stupid new business model—I’ll just leave it to Whatever’s excellent fictional focus group. Nuff said.

[Update 1/9]

Just a thought: If record companies are so obsessed with being in the selling-plastic-things business and DRM, why not defer to the USB album? The user doesn’t have to worry about ripping it and making sure all the tracks get named right, there’s ample room for varying album sizes, it’s re-useable, and you can have the music files in a DRM format like Apple’s fairplay AAC that attaches to a particular computer or user account. Maybe this kind of solution is too obvious for Sony. Some music groups have tried it, the White Stripes and the Fratellis among them, though I can’t figure out with what success.

Among other things, the widely talked about independent and variably priced Radiohead release of “In Rainbows” seems to have cracked people’s heads open just a bit more with regards to what is really possible with digital distribution. Moreover, two other developments, though smaller in scale, have also caught my attention: Tunecore and B.R.T.C. Tunecore is a remarkably simple iTunes publishing site; so that even without a label, truly independent musicians can get their work up on iTunes, get their own royalties, and keep their copyrights. This is for musicians what Lulu is for writers; that is to say: DIY. B.R.T.C. (Bum Rush the Charts) is a grassroots movement that is attempting to influence iTunes charts by getting mass numbers of people to buy some particular song. But a neat sidenote (that wasn’t even mentioned in the article I first read) is that the band is giving some of the profits away to charity. Predictably, when asked about the movement:

Don Hogarth, a spokesman for the Canadian Recording Industry Association, points out that MP3 sales only make up about 10 per cent of overall music sales. As such, he says, the “digital market is still a secondary concern” to record labels.

Hey, Mr. Hogarth, here’s a few line from Spoon’s “The Underdog” that you should think about: “You got no time for the messenger / got no regard for the thing that you don’t understand / you got no fear of the underdog / that’s why you will not survive!”