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Thursday, July 17, 2003

Does "history" pay taxes? 9:55:42 PM    comment []

Timothy Noah, writing at Slate, however, thinks Wolfowitz can be safely eliminated from the list of suspects: One likely suspect must immediately be crossed off the list: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. On Good Morning, America, Durbin said: [T]here was this negotiation between the White House and the CIA about just how far you could go and be close to the truth, and unfortunately those sixteen words were included in the most important speech the president delivers in any given year. Wolfowitz doesn't work at the White House. He works at the Pentagon. So Wolfowitz can't be PB. Cutting to the chase: That leaves only one really logical candidate. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, is probably best-known to the public as the Bush official whose former representation of fugitive metals trader Marc Rich caused momentary embarrassment when the departing President Clinton pardoned Rich, provoking an uproar. Stay tuned for more developments in the search for the mystery ventriloquist who made The President appear to lie! 8:15:34 PM    comment []

A few more details about BBCL-4016-2, these concerning the remastering: The Remastering Renovating a historical sound recording, like restoring a painting, is a highly delicate process. The recording must be digitalized and tonally refurbished to conform to today's audio standards, preserving its original character and the performing artists' intentions without any distortion Guided by these principles, the recordings in the series "BBC Legends" have been meticulously prepared, using the most modern available technology from Junger Sonic Solutions, Spectral Design and others. A wealth of nuance and a dynamic range faithful to the original have been re-created with remastering containing superior 20- to 24-bit resolution. 7:20:40 PM    comment []

When they start appealing to historians, you know they're in deep shit! Maybe it's because someone told him “you better sound real good, or you’re history!” and the idea kinda stuck. For certain, he wouldn’t advise his own children to pursue a degree in history, music, literature, or any other of those liberal arts dead ends. Shoot, over here, even a lot of gifted MBAs are out walking the streets, computer scientists too – because the Wall Street and tech booms are already history. So is the budget surplus. Remember 3% unemployment? That’s in the history book too. So many career choices, so few careers. Still, demand in the military is so high that a lot of people who only took it up part time have now found an unexpected career in it - so maybe things are looking up! Sign up now - you too can be a part of history! 6:39:12 PM    comment []

EXCLUSIVE! Wolfowitz committee instructed White House to use Iraq/uranium reference in State of the Union speech By Jason Leopold Online Journal Assistant Editor WASHINGTON, July 16, 2003—A Pentagon committee led by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, advised George W. Bush to include a reference in his January State of the Union address about Iraq trying to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger to bolster the case for war in Iraq, despite the fact that the CIA warned Wolfowitz's committee that the information was unreliable, according to a CIA intelligence official and four members of the Senate's intelligence committee who have been investigating the issue. (I thought so!) 5:56:39 PM    comment []

Missa Dilemnis   Apocryphally, the idea of 74-minutes CDs came from Beethoven’s 9th, long enough to contain the whole enchilada without troublesome disk swapping. Over at snopes.com, however, the status of this urban legend is still “Undetermined“. I guess that means I can still believe it if I want to.   The Missa Solemnis is not as fortunate, which causes a dilemma for me. Here are the movement lengths:   I.          Kyrie                  10:14 II.         Gloria                 16:49 III.         Credo                17:58 IV.        Sanctus             17:35 V.         Agnus Dei          16:55   If you are fast with numbers, you’ll notice immediately that the total time is 79:34. Consequently, there will have to be at least one CD change during the Missa. The BBC Legends CD puts the Kyrie at the end of the first CD, after the Cherubini, Mozart, and Beethoven’s 7th. I don’t want to listen to those pieces during my Missa immersion. The alternative is to cue the Kyrie, listen meditatively, then get up and swap to the second CD with the remaining 4 movements.   This is no good. One alternative is to hook up my changer, but that’s a real hassle. What I plan to do, therefore, is to copy the Missa to an 80-minute CDR. At first glance, that seems like the perfect solution, but a closer glance at the total playing time of the second CD, 69:51, reveals that there is important interstitial silence between the movement. Adding 10:14 (plus a couple seconds silence) takes it over the 80-minute limit, though just barely.   Ah, but my Ahead Nero software has an “overburn” feature! At the risk of damaging my CD burner, I can add up to a couple of minutes to the tracks. There’s a problem with that too, however. While I’ve done this before with the burner, I  haven’t tested my new multiplayer with overburned CDs. It may not play at all, or worse, it may hang up and loop just as the Agnus Dei is ending – that would be a genuine bummer, a bad way to end a hedonistic experience. Since this is supposed to be a “first listen” experience, I can’t test the CD (although I guess I could turn off the volume).   The evil part of my mind has an elegant solution, which I will probably employ. If you are a purist, especially in matters Toscanini, stop reading now. My Cool Edit 2000 software has a really nifty feature, one that I’ve used before to sync audio on AVI and MPEG videos. Sometimes the audio gets slowly out of sync, so that it leads or lags the video. By the end of the file, it can be off by several seconds and as bad as a dubbed kung fu flick. What you do is strip the audio, look at its Properties, and do the same for the video. Then you can “shrink” or “stretch” the audio track to make it equal in duration to the video – a big plus is that you can do this without altering the pitch!   That’s what I’ll do with the Missa. I’ll shrink it by 1% and leave the pitch intact. That will make it about 48 seconds shorter, enough to fit tightly on an 80-minute CD. It will also make it 1% faster. That’s the part that would offend a purist. I’ll take a guilty pleasure in it, but not so much as to blight the meditation – or maybe I’ll meditate on the subtle difference between M.M = 76 and M.M = 76.76. 5:31:59 PM    comment []

Adult Siamese twins place faith in Singapore doctors Singapore doctors are conducting detailed tests before deciding whether to attempt an operation to separate a pair of adult Siamese twins joined at the head. The leaders of the western world, both expressing hope and confidence, flew to Singapore after hearing of the successful surgery performed by the same medical team on two Nepalese babies who were separated in a 97-hour operation. If the operation goes ahead, surgeons will have to separate two individually functioning brains encased within a single bony structure in the head. 6:06:50 AM    comment []