Ambient Irony

Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

Monday, October 11

What's That Tune?

It's Music for a Found Harmonium by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

It plays during the Basel section of the BBC's The Story of Maths, about the Bernoulli family. I knew it, but couldn't place it, and it's been driving me mad for several minutes.

If you're not familiar with the piece, it's this:

(I think the producer of the series is a Penguin Cafe Orchestra fan; now that I've placed the Harmonium piece, I'm pretty sure their Perpetuum Mobile was in there too.)

Update: Just purchased Preludes, Airs & Yodels, their compilation album, on iTunes. That cost me 98Â¢; the rest was covered by the gift card I got for participating in an Adobe survey last year. Yeah, I haven't been buying much music of late. That $30 iTunes gift card has lasted me through two years of random episodes of Name That Tune!

Though actually I have still to purchase In C.

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Thursday, October 07

I Spy With My Little Eye, Something Beginning With P... And Ending With Arity

Even through Paypal an AUD now buys more than 0.95 USD. And that's after the dip a couple of days ago when our Reserve Bank decided not to increase interest rates.

When you switch back and forth between the US and AU business press, things start to get a bit surrreal. From today's Sydney Morning Herald:

''Jobs creation is far stronger than expected,'' said Macquarie economist Ben Dinte. ''The RBA is definitely wary of labour shortages developing in the economy.''

From Yahoo! Finance:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Private employers unexpectedly cut 39,000 jobs in September after an upwardly revised gain of 10,000 in August, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.
The August figure was originally reported as a loss of 10,000.

The Australian dollar hasn't been at parity with the US dollar since it was floated in 1983.

This makes buying goodies online really cheap, except if you want to get Civ 5 on Steam, who are being dickheads and charging Australians 60% more than anyone else.

(I just picked up the Icewind Dale bundle on GOG - IWD 1 plus Heart of Winter and Trials of the Luremaster for $10.)

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Wednesday, October 06

That's No Moon...

http://ai.mee.nu/images/enceladus_afterburner.jpg

Okay, yeah, it's a moon. But look at it go!

(via Phil Plait)

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Tuesday, October 05

Pixy's Laws Of Not Making A Fool Of Yourself On The Internet

1. Anyone who styles himself the "Grand ArchDruid" or suchlike is not to be considered a reliable source of information on any subject. Except maybe roleplaying games. No, on second thought, not even that.

2. If you are predicting that an event will happen next year, that other people have been predicting will happen within the next n years for the past 2n years - whether it be artificial intelligence, sustained fusion reactions, the collapse of civilisation or the second coming of Joseph Smith - you might want to reconsider your assumptions.

3. Look it up on Wikipedia first, then post. Or, if you are extremely lazy, post first, then edit the outraged corrections from your readers back into the original article and delete their comments. Beware of archive.org and feed readers.

4. When all else fails, post Youtube videos of baby monkeys riding baby pigs or cute girls dancing in unusual locations and pretend the argument never happened.

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