Adam Keys is Thinking

Gorillaz, Demon Days - this one holds up, still a solid album.

News to me, Moby has been making extended ambient tracks in some manner of partnership with the Calm app. They make good “I need to focus and get stuff done” music, but aren’t particularly high energy, if that’s your thing. Says Moby, “my suggestion is to not approach this as music, but to approach it as a sleep aid or tool”. Okay!

I would like to some day learn enough piano to play and sing the songs of the original Van Halen line-up, e.g. “Panama”, “Hot for Teacher”, “Beautiful Girls”, and “Unchained”. My theory here is, the original Van Halen is very Vaudeville, except louder and more late-seventies. Corollary: played literally and with a little bit of a vaudevillian spin, they’d work perfectly. Case in point: “Ice Cream Man”.

Somehow, I’ve never mentioned Soulection Radio. It’s equal parts new R&B/hip-hop, classic soul, and a lot of sample culture. It’s one of the best things going on Apple Music, Spotify, and Soundcloud.

They’re on our phones, in our voicemails. Computers or sometimes even humans calling in massive volumes, funneling people into bad purchases. Questionable insurance at best, outright fraud at worst. Sometimes, depending on the state you live in, politics!

There’s no reason to pick up on an unknown number in 2019, or even 2009. For many of us, Dunbar’s number for phone calls is in the low single digits. Outside those few numbers, why answer an even remotely questionable number, ever?

If you squint right, robocalls appear they were  designed for the technological landscape of 1995, of Friends and cordless, landline phones. Robocalls,  could have made sense in 1995. You get a call, it’s Friday, there are no repeats of your favorite show on, you’re a bit bored. Sure, maybe you’ll pick up. Or in 1992, when receiving a phone call was not only a big, exciting deal!, but also a social imperative. You can’t just let the answering machine pick up? It could be…someone. Probably a human!

Sadly, the technological landscape I just described is exactly folks who aren’t “technology natives”. I suspect that’s largely who Robocalls prey on: the bored and lonely, those who grew up before the pace of technological evolution surged and haven’t developed a layered defense to those who would prey on them.

Space isn’t a dead-end, it’s just taking us longer to figure out than our earliest trajectory. The New Yorker has a great look at The Race to Develop the Moon for industrial purposes:

Lunar construction projects now look feasible. “Down the hall, we have a telerobotics lab,” Burns said. “You could print components of habitats, of telescopes. You use the lunar regolith”—the dust of the moon—“as your printing material. You could print the wrench you need to fix something.” Fifteen years ago, the moon was believed to be a dry rock; now we know that there’s water there. Both private industry and national agencies regard the mining of water and precious materials as something that’s not too far off.

Only twelve people have walked on the moon, all of them between the summer of 1969 and Christmas, 1972. All the moonwalkers were men, all were American, all but one were Boy Scouts, and almost all listened to country-and-Western music on their way to the moon; they earned eight dollars a day, minus a fee for a bed on the spacecraft.

Buzz Aldrin had hoped, and briefly expected, that it would be he, and not Neil Armstrong, who would take the first human step on the moon. The astronaut Michael Collins, who manned the control module that orbited the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin walked below, has said of Aldrin that he “resents not being first on the moon more than he appreciates being second.” On the moon, Armstrong took photos of Aldrin posing, but Aldrin took none of Armstrong doing the same. One of the few photos that shows Neil Armstrong on the moon was taken by Armstrong himself—of his reflection in Aldrin’s helmet, as Aldrin salutes the flag. We are petty and misbehave on Earth; we will be petty and misbehave in space.

​Futurism isn’t dead, it’s just not all around us like Tomorrowland promised.

Into the Great Wide Open strikes me as a singular album. Perhaps it’s not even the best Tom Petty album, but it stands out from the rest in some kind of way.

Maybe it’s nostalgia? It’s the first Petty album I bought.

Maybe it’s humble? None of the songs are flashy, sitting right on the fence between songwriting and rock ‘n roll.

Maybe it’s the lyrics? I’ve listened to this album a lot, so I’ve actually heard the lyrics and they’re the right balance between clever and storytelling, for me.

Maybe it’s Jeff Lynne? Love that guy’s production work. Great touch.

It’s not too long, it’s not too short. All the moving parts do their job without getting showy. Perhaps, it’s just more than the sum of its parts.

A thing I want to try is coding offline, per se. Without a functional computer (like a tablet). Think first. Outline and sketch a solution. Maybe pseudocode it up. Then fill it in and make it work once a “real” computer is available.

Related: think first, outline/sketch a solution, only use the computer once I’m ready to build.

Related related: what if frameworks like Rails, Django, etc. are scaffolds that we attach boilerplate-ish behavior to while we’re trying to figure what a program really wants to be? How many essay-sized programs are hiding in novel or encyclopedia-sized systems?

Basically: I want to code without computers more often, and discover more program designs that are lurking within the design of a framework.

It used to be that all the programmers were ladies. Arguably, they were higher skilled programmers since they didn’t have little luxuries like text editors, REPLs, and online communities to problem solve with! Things were different back then, and they could be better again - The Secret History of Women in Coding - The New York Times

I finally looked into The Pudding and came upon many a delightful visual essay: Rappers, sorted by the size of their vocabulary and The Structure of Stand-Up Comedy on the cycles in Ali Wong’s famous set.

A list of non-hacks, mostly about sleep, that might help you feel better. 7 Biohacks That Actually Work - The Atlantic

A bit dismal: Dictators have reemerged as the greatest threat to the liberal democratic world - The Washington Post. Improvements to liberalism that could counter said rise of dictators and nationalism: The Economist at 175 - Liberalism.

The degree to which the tradecraft of national intelligence agencies are applied in the private sector continually appalls me. But apparently its part of the game for at least one activist investor. Paul Singer, Doomsday Investor | The New Yorker I think probably we’re doing capitalism wrong at this point?

On James Cameron. A man creatively possessed, but a crude man at a best.Man of Extremes | The New Yorker

Javier Grillo-Marxuach (LOST and a bunch of other stuff) on running a television show, but absolutely applicable to any creative leadership discipline.

On Barry, the loveliness, and apparently the sadness that is Bill Hader. Bill Hader Kills | The New Yorker