One of the worrying aspects (seemingly largely overlooked by Joe Public) to come out of the Angelina Jolie story is that the BRCA gene she possesses, the one that means breast cancer is such a risk, is patented by a US company. This means said company have exclusive rights to tests for that gene, and charge obscene amounts for the test, which is potentially life-saving.
Yale partners with Coursera to offer Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
Provost Benjamin Polak has announced a partnership with Coursera, the creation of a standing committee of online education, and the appointment of Professor Craig Wright to the newly created position of Academic Director of Online Education.
Get the full details of Yale’s new online learning initiatives →
Thinking I might go to Yale now.
Took this on my run into work this morning. Here’s what this spot looks like on Google Street View.
In a computer, everything is recallable all the time, but life is a succession of events that only happen once.
If you overesteem great men, people become powerless.
It’s really hard to say. The whole starting point of that record was to somehow question the magical powers of recorded audio at a time when pop music is mostly recorded on laptops with a small microphone and a pair of headphones in airport lounges and hotel rooms. We’re not really part of that generation. We’re part of the previous generation, where a studio was a collection of hardware and electronic components assembled in a discreet way to try to create a unique global system in a home environment; somehow a distinctive system.
The idea was really having this desire for live drums, as well as questioning, really, why and what is the magic in samples? Why for the last 20 years have producers and musicians been extracting these little snippets of audio from vinyl records? What kind of magic did it contain? Because harmonically the samples are just an F minor or a G flat, something not so special. It occurred to us it’s probably a collection of so many different parameters; of amazing performances, the studio, the place it was recorded, the performers, the craft, the hardware, recording engineers, mixing engineers, the whole production process of these records that took a lot of effort and time to make back then. It was not an easy task, but took a certain craftsmanship somehow cultivated at the time.
We started to say, “OK, let’s see from a production standpoint, also in terms of performance, whether we could create records that embed this level of production and craftsmanship, and see whether the culture would allow for records like this to be produced. ”So it’s true that we decided to try to recreate these circumstances and really select a team of firsthand actors in witness of that golden age, that era and in the same time go back to the places where that magic had happened. We really think, we feel the walls can speak, and at the same time there’s really this idea that these are magical places.
This reminds me of how Portishead pressed their own vinyl just to be able to scratch and sample themselves.
It also sheds light on the name, Random Access Memories. They’ve made an album explicitly to be referenced (sampled) in the future.
I'm Jed Sundwall. This is my blog, which you can follow on Tumblr or via RSS. You can talk to me on Twitter.
