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This is the third in a series of posts about music appreciation. In previous posts, I argued that: Explaining our preferences with ‘taste’ doesn’t help a lot. All it really does is hide their complexities and protect us from the challenge of having to explain ourselves. Preferences are better explained using ‘facets’ of appreciation that… Read More »

Don’t screw up the little things in life – they’re easy to achieve, and failure to do so can be expensive in time, effort, or stress. In life, there’s lots of little things you can easily do that avoid expensive annoyance later on. Take keys, for example: failing to check that you have them when… Read More »

While brain stoming with Julian about the implications of ‘always-on augmented reality’* on human communication, I decided I needed a way of collaboratively drawing mind maps so that we’d have some sort of concrete record of the ideas coming out of our conversation. Normally, I make notes of my own, but they’re hard to share… Read More »

Playing with a new comments plugin called IntenseDebate. Apologies if anything weird starts happening..

I’ve been thinking a lot about music appreciation. It’s much more complicated than I think the words and concepts we use to talk about it really let on, and I think part of the confusion is that it’s not so much that each of us likes different things so much as that each of us… Read More »

Over the last few months, I wrote two letters to NZ members of parliament, one about the proposed review of the science of climate change, the second concerning the s92a amendment to the NZ Copyright Act. On Wednesday, I got responses to both. Here’s my comments: Climate Change The letter concerning climate change was sent… Read More »

Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was particularly awesome. I mean, APOD is usually awesome every day, but yesterday’s was particularly awesome, being a photo of Saturn, showing four of its moons in the foreground, all large enough that you could get some idea of their relative size and, in the case of Titan, colour.… Read More »

Four dudes with electrodes wired to their faces, muscles stimulated in time to music.. Only in Japan..

From Baldassare Castiglione‘s Book of the Courtier. Simply, sprezzaturra is the ability to appear to succeed without effort, to have “an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them” or to appear ‘artfully artless’. It’s the art of appearing extremely capable, of hiding the effort behind one’s actions… Read More »

The other day, I stumbled on a delightful little adventure game called The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge by Jonas Kyratzes and friends. “Delightful” really is the right word, as it suggests something simple and childlike yet elegant and charming. Desert Bridge fits this perfectly, and is surprisingly sophisticated… Read More »