This is not cool. Security companies that allow their employees to murder civilians should have each and every employee of the company tried for Crimes Against Humanity. The entire Scottish and Irish communities should find and punish these vile examples of human filth.

The traffic in Vietnam is insane. Every street from the airport to the city has so much traffic you can hardly believe it.

If the French truly “official[ly] den[y] that ethnicity can have any legitimate place in public life” then they should be lauded for their efforts. In a surprising bit of French success, they have managed to assimilate millions of foreigners without the need for Affirmative Action to which we Americans hold so dear. Unfortunately something is going wrong with French assimilation currently.

Considering the billions of dollars we dump into our airlines and highways, why do we shy away from funding Amtrak? This is just one absurd example of the conservative’s misdirection; a clear example of why we need competition of ideas in our federal government.

There is a documentary downloadable on the web revolving around America’s use of White Phosphorus in Fallujah. Slate posts a summary of the debate online: should this be upsetting? Is White Phosphorus a chemical weapon? Technorati has more from the blogosphere.

I for one know nothing about white phosphorus. Apparently it burns people without burning clothing or hair. While I am unsure of the authority, I think that watching the video is a valuable thing to do.

Work is so much better when it comes equipped with a sound track!
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Americans collectively owe over $27,000 per person. We should start paying this off now.

When I took a music appreciation class in college, my professor asked an intriguing question: what defines the line between sound and music? The noise a waterfall makes is just sound, but Enigma makes music.

Can we create a definition of music that is broad enough to include: not only the works of Beethoven, but also that of Dune, Metallica and John Cage; and still remain meaningful enough to exlude the sounds of nature? I think we can.

The key distinction between music and sound is that music is designed to change and effect us. While the rustling leaves, chirping birds and swaying trees that make up the sounds of a forest may strongly affect us, they exist in their own right; we are merely there to share in the experience. Music is not simply something we can experience: music needs us to. From the first time someone banged a club on a rock, music existed to fill the ears of another person (even if those ears belong to the same person as the one making it).

The class of sounds humans make by accident–crashing pots for instance–are little different from the noises birds makes. One could argue that the banging, sawing sounds of carpenters make music… They would be right. We talk of getting into the “rhythm” of work for a reason. Often, once we become good at a skill we learn and create emotional attachments around the different audible patterns. This is called optimization–emotional attachment is the key ingredient to human memory. People who can memorize long sequences of numbers do so because each number means something to them: 1941 is the year Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; 2001 is the space odyssey; 911 is the World Trade Center; 7337 is the goal of every hacker… Anyone who sees those high-level concepts will have a far easier time remembering 194120019117337 than the rest of us. When we learn to feel the rhythm of typing we, in effect, have optimized ourselves to remember–and reproduce–the same sequence of sound patterns because we like them. Our work becomes substantially easier in the process.

So humanity–or sentience–is the key ingredient to music, but this is not its defining factor. All music is on some level orchestrated (or organized) by humans, but not all human noises are music. Drums make music; a waitress dropping her dishes in a restaurant does not. Rap is music; talking to your friends is not. Can we create a definition of music inclusive enough to include the works of Enimem and a toddler’s experimentation with his mothers pots without forcing ourselves to accept a professor’s lecture and the murmur of a crowded bus as musical as well? I think we can.

The difference is in the mode of communication. When we listen to the safety instructions of the flight crew on an aeroplane, the crew wants to communicate emotionless, logical ideas. Tribal beats and trance are the exact opposite and communicate almost entirely on the emotional level. Music defines all the class of communication to humans through a predominately emotional mode.

Music communicates with our emotional intelligence. Music is most interested in telling us how to feel. We hear a happy, bouncy, uplifting beat because the music is telling us to want to jump up and hug someone. Eminem is not just telling us his life is hard; he wants to share his pain with us–filling our brains and blood with the same chemical signals he had–and drag us around in our common state.

Of course communication is not binary; it need not be only emotional or informative. Rap is far more informative than techno. Dave Matthews Band puts far more logical meaning into their music than Astral Projection. People get accostomed to one mode or the other and complain that all electronic music sounds the same when Dune and Prodigy are as different as feelings of bliss and rage. I have the opposite problem and find alternative music incredibly boring and repetitive since every song uses one of the same five notes over one of two chords for a five minute interval. I understand nothing anyone says in music–perhaps why I find international music so interesting.

Things we generally think of as speaking have different levels of music. Clearly Martin Luther King has substantially more music in his speeches than Bill Gates. History may have been different if Hitler could only communicate as much feeling as George W. Bush. Other examples: Two people can use the exact same words to say completely different things because they are applying different emotional flavors to the same logical meanings; Scientific communication is far more logical than religious, which is why it is far harder to use “endoplasmic reticulum” sarcastically than “righteous”.

So the next time you are doing something musical or verbal, try and think of what you want your listener to hear: both logically and emotionally.

Inspired by the Euphoria of listening to streams of Digitally Imported.

Al-Qaeda believes it will control significant portions of Afghanistan and Iraq by next year. Then it will no longer be have to be embarassed about not having a state to wage Jihad from.

Significant parts of Afghanistan? I think Bush is more likely to apologize about Iraq.

Lian Hearn, in Across the Nightingale Floor: Tales of the Otori, captures so much of the core of Japanese life. Feuding families; Nature worship; minimalism; subtle manipulative strings attached to favors–it is all there. Hearn says so much about Japan–and brings it so alive–with so few words.

Enough good words about this book cannot be spoken. Suffice to say I started it at 9pm and finished at 2am.