Via the sprawling internet tentacles of@howthebodyworks ( no, really – subscribe to his delicious bookmark feed a while..), comes this great reminder of … well… actually, let’s not spoil it for you. Except to say it does involve eminent scientist Stephen Hawking, which reminded me of this MC Hawking interview from back in 2002, and that I’ve been meaning to mention I’ve been copying across ye olde octapod.org/jeanpoole articles to skynoise. Will list a few fave older pieces later, in the meantime, check the archives link on the side.

MC Hawking nabbed his 15 mb of net fame back in the day with ‘e=mc squared’, ‘fuck the creationists’, and other rap classics ( all available on mp3).

Q: What’s your next book or current research about?
A: I am currently trying to determine whether or not “Hammer Time” is relative.

Q: What do you think of the growing popularity of gangsta physics?
A: Yo, rap is all about dropping science. It was only a matter of time before rap and science converged.

Q: Got any lines / rhymes on artificial intelligence? (and when do u predict it?)
A: As far as predicting A.I. is concerned, I got no fucking idea; I’m a theoretical astrophysicist, not a fucking computer scientist. However, if that piece of shit movie Spielberg just put out is any indication, I’d say don’t hold your damn breath.

full MC Hawking interview here..

“I would go mad if I lived in the rainforest,” he laughs. “I like what human beings do, I’m fascinated by them, and if you want to know any of those things, a big city is the place.”

Is there anybody alive who has had first hand experience of as many species as the narrator of BBC nature documentaries across the last six decades? Maybe this makes him a prime candidate for alien abduction, but even at the ripe age of 83, he continues to expand his knowledge of nature, and ours in the process. Most recent doco? ‘Life in Cold Blood’, about ’solar-powered reptiles and amphibians’. Currently working on? A one-off documentary about evolution, other narration and radio work, serving on the boards of several wildlife organisations, making International news about population issues, and just last week, providing news commentary on the finding of the ‘missing link’. Ready for a nap yet?

Missing Links, Or Actually : Transitional Fossils
Rather than ‘missing link’, scientists prefer the term ‘transitional fossils’, to describe the fossilized remains of intermediary forms of life that illustrate an evolutionary transition. But if Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is to be believed, argue the Creationists, why haven’t we found a fossil record of a species that is somewhere in between today’s higher primates ( humans, monkeys and apes ) and more distant relatives? Last week at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a fossil with that potential was unveiled. The scientists responsible argue the skeleton ( nicknamed ‘Ida’) wasn’t merely a lemur, but a new species, with some closer resemblances to ourselves. Dr Jens Franzen described Ida as “like the Eighth Wonder of the World”, because of the extraordinary completeness of the skeleton. The full verdict is out just yet, but naturally, there is already a David Attenborough narrated BBC programme about it. Sayeth Dave : “the “little creature is going to show us our connection with all the rest of the mammals. The link they would have said until now is missing … it is no longer missing,” he said.

Ida Vs The Creationists
Hard to imagine writing hate-mail to the curious brained David Attenborough, he with the ever-infectious popping from behind bushes kinda joyous way of explaining some obscure facet of nature. His lack of crediting God in his documentaries however, has inspired creationists to write and tell him to ‘burn in hell’. Famously he responded on a BBC interview by saying how he always remembers a little child in East Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way. “I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator,” Attenborough said.

The Breeders
1950s, When David Attenborough started making TV? 3 billion people.
At Time of Writing? 6,836,787,487 people.
2050? An estimated 9.1 billion people

The latest of many organisations Sir David has thrown his weight behind, The Optimum Population Trust believes that Earth may not be able to support more than half its present numbers before the end of this century, and that the UK’s long-term sustainable population level may be lower than 30 million ( currently 61 ). “For the past 20 years I’ve never had any doubt that the source of the Earth’s ills is overpopulation. I can’t go on saying this sort of thing and then fail to put my head above the parapet…. If we don’t find a solution to our population problems, nature will. Other horrible factors will come along and fix it, like mass starvation.”

Last word? His astonishing list of documentaries speaks for itself.

Flippin Chips
CHIPFLIP is a new blog by Swedish 8-bit wunder-kid, Goto80 ( also “Extraboy, Susanne, 4D-Man, Skrubier, or other even sillier names”), where he aims to collect and discuss things regarding chip music and 8-bit art for an MA degree. “It’s about low tech visual and sonic creativity, not nostalgia.” In other words, lotsa links and projects to explore, downloads to be had, things to read. Which you’d expect from one of the boys behind the 365 songs project.

Sample post?
“8-bit noise music is not very common, which means that good 8-bit noise music doesn’t really have best of compilations (yet!). Maybe .. the certain particularities with a genre that make it so good, are quite tricky to reproduce with an old soundchip. Here are a few examples of 8-bit noise music I appreciate, and if you have more suggestions feel free to leave a harsh / random comment with maximum content. I must have left out a lot of gems, right?” (( post goes on to list extensive links ))

The sidebar sections are especially interesting, featuring extended sections on – plagiarism where artists have heavily sampled videogame use without acknowledging ( or paying ) the original artists, – timeline of chipmusic from 1951 ( in Sydney!) to today, – a how to section for emulating commodore 64’s with today’s machines, – and an exploration of chipmusic as medium, form and culture.

More Feathers in Your Life
Stunning sculptural feathery works, from the Frozen Mammoth.

Travel Bug vs Swine Flu?
The 1918 Pandemic flu, now that was big, carving a fair chunk out of the global population, right at the tail of world war one as well. AIDS? Also declared a pandemic. As of 2007, lived with by 33 million people worldwide and having killed 2.1 million. Swine flu? So far around 1000 people have been identified as infected, a much smaller number killed by it. Worryingly, it especially threatens the artistic population – as people cling to their bunkers with stocks of baked beans, travel prices inevitably come down, inevitably luring starving artists to other pastures, great for cross cultural dialogue an fertilisation, but maybe removing artists from the gene pool in a cruel twist on the viral media they hope to create. In other words : lots of my friends seem to be travelling to lots of far-flung places at the moment.

Hungry Like A Domesticated Wolf
Or How to Get Rid of Stuff : A guide to downsizing your belongings by Bruce Sterling. I first read this in 2008, but I found it in the back of my internet lounge again recently, and it jumped out more on a second browsing. Lots of fun in there, and extensions of these ideas :

- As long as I’ve got broadband, I’m perfectly at ease with the fact that my position on the planet’s surface is arbitrary.
- You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.
- The things that you use every day should be the best-designed things you can get.
- Sell – even give away– anything you never use.

Which maybe vindicates a recent decision to spend a fair bit of money getting my bicycle fixed, and upgraded in various ways at the same time. In other news, The Human Powered Cycle crew who did the job are starting up a cafe on 562 High st, Thornbury beside their shop, hopefully featuring muscly thighed boys and girls pedalling under desks to provide banana smoothies, grind coffee beans and the like.

Netlabel of the week? Acroplane, with free downloads including Mad EP’s ‘Twenty Four Breakbeats’, a composition project that started off to compose a breakbeat in every major and minor key. ( via Lucy Benson, who has a new blog )

Have been helping with a design course recently, and amongst other insights, it’s been interesting to see where ecology and design processes have been intersecting of late.

Biomimicry
Beyond just using natural materials to solve a design problem, advocates of biomimicry endeavour to learn how natural solutions and adaptations work, and think about how these processes could be applied to various design challenges. Some examples of this in action can be found at The Biomimicry Institute, who say “after 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.”

Kingfisher Efficiency
The Shinkansen Bullet Train of the West Japan Railway Company is the fastest train in the world, traveling 200 miles per hour. The problem? Noise. Air pressure changes produced large thunder claps every time the train emerged from a tunnel, causing residents one-quarter a mile away to complain. Modeling the front-end of the train after the beak of kingfishers, which dive from the air into bodies of water with very little splash to catch fish, resulted not only in a quieter train, but 15% less electricity use even while the train travels 10% faster.

Lotus Plant Cleaners
Lotus leaves are water repellent because the myriad crevices of its microscopically rough leaf surface trap a maze of air upon which water droplets float, so that the slightest breeze or tilt in the leaf causes balls of water to roll cleanly off, taking attached dirt particles with them. And so, microscopically rough surface additives have been introduced into a new generation of paint, glass, and fabric finishes, greatly reducing the need for chemical or laborious cleaning.

Humpback Whale Wind Power
The humpback whale’s surprising dexterity is due mainly to its flippers, which have large, irregular looking bumps called tubercules across their leading edges, which allows humpbacks to keep their “grip” on the water at sharper angles and turn tighter corners, even at low speeds. Wind tunnel tests have demonstrated the aerodynamic improvements tubercules make, and a company called WhalePower is applying these lessons to the design of wind turbines to increase their efficiency, while this natural technology also has enormous potential to improve the safety and performance of airplanes, fans, and more.

Inspiration of course also lies on the microscopic and chemical level, with many newly engineered materials mimicking the structure of natural materials. One holy grail in the field seems to be the relative strength of a spider web – apparently if a human sized spider was to make a web ( yet one which could fold up into the size of a tea chest – this would be strong enough to catch a jumbo jet at landing speed.

Cradle to Cradle
Biomimicry folk are also keen observers of the lack of waste in natural systems – in a working ecology, all components break-down and form something useful for others. Zooming on this, chemist Michael Braungart and architect William McDonough set about trying to change the way we produce and build. The film Waste=Food documents their inspiring efforts so far ( the hour long video is a heartening watch ). Core idea? “If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), produc­tion and consumption could become beneficial for the planet.” Inspiring to see the extent to which those such as Nike, Ford and other giant textile companies are keen to integrate these ideas where possible.

And a final eco-design shout-out to sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, whose Viridian Manifesto argues eco-design needs to be glamorous to succeed in winning people over. In relation to the cradle to cradle idea, and the consideration of the whole life cycle of a product, he is also famous for suggesting the idea of ‘SPIMES’ ( objects that can be tracked over space / time, a lot like RFID tags.. ), and what these kinds of tech advancements might mean for sustainable processes.

Amazingly, the world’s population has grown by 500 million people since I reviewed Ableton Live 2 in 2002. And while each year brings a new version, it’s surely getting harder for Ableton(.com) to convince all these people that Live comes from the future, like it seemed to back at the start of the 21st century. Nowadays people just expect to be able to ‘extract grooves’, ‘deep freeze tracks’, ‘add pseudo warp markers’, and other sci-fi sounding techniques – all of which should work in real-time thanks. So whats’s a software company to do? Sometimes you just need to consolidate, and 2009 seems to be one of those years, Live 8 delivering a range of incremental adjustments, a couple of new effects here, a couple of new workflow enhancements there. The calm before the storm perhaps, when the release of ‘Max for Live’ takes us back to the dizzying multi-dimensional future ( Max for Live = full Max/MSP/Jitter functionality inside Ableton Live – including video synthesis and animation via Jitter objects ). Where were we?

Ableton Live 8
So what stands out as new?

I like the simple addition of Looper, a new audio effect modelled on people you’ve seen in a pub pressing their foot on a pedal, while they’ve layered beatboxing, violins, weird noises, singing and the like into a buzzing swarm of sound ( and if you’re needing a foot pedal for this, try a $10 DIY one).

There is a new warping engine which now allows a more intuitive manipulation of time markers, and adds a new complex warp mode, plus you can slice audio files to MIDI tracks based on transients. Also baked? A new groove functionality which allows subtle or extreme control timing controls on a per clip basis, including the sci-fi option of being able to extract grooves ( which get stored in a ‘groove pool’ for application onto other songs later ).

Being able to create crossfades between adjacent clips in arrangement view? That’s a win. Or a little victory at least.

Session view tracks can be easily grouped together, to allow easier control of many at once.

The interface comes with a zoom option – allowing nice customisation to suit the current screen being worked on, and preferred number of tracks visible.

Operator has a new waveform editor – draw your own waveforms, and there’s a new Vocoder.

Supports ogg vorbis and flac file formats now* ( for those seeking better sounding, less license restrictive formats than mp3 )(*at least it’s the first I’ve noticed that support)

The browser tab previews samples nicely now – showing a waveform for them, allowing them to be scrubbed, and giving the option of them playing back at native tempo, or matching the current tempo of the session being played.

Instruments and FX can now be copied and pasted with standard clipboard commands. ( That won’t excite the 500 million digital natives too much )

And supposedly all computing happens in the cloud these days, so it shouldn’t be no surprise that Live 8 comes with an option to upload your current set and media files to your area at the ableton mainframe, with options for sharing this publically or storing for private use.

What You’ll Need :
Cash - Ableton Live 8 (Download) EUR 349/USD 449
Australian Pricing : Ableton Live 8 RRP $999.99 Ableton Live 8 Suite RRP $1399.99
Enquires: ableton@musiclink.com.au Australian dealer listings

Machines – Mac: 1.25 GHz G4/G5 or faster (Intel Mac recommended), 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended), Mac OS X 10.4.11 (10.5 or later recommended), DVD-ROM drive. Or Windows: 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 or Celeron compatible CPU or faster (multicore CPU recommended), 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended), Windows XP or Windows Vista, Windows compatible sound card (ASIO driver support recommended), DVD-ROM drive, QuickTime recommended

Verdict
Another fine release from Team Ableton. While there’ve been some grumblings online about the mac version of Live 8, it has worked flawlessly for me ( albeit without pushing it in multi-dimensional hell for leather ways ), and others have reported it feeling much snappier. With the upcoming Ableton + Akai hardware controller, and the release of Max for Live, the refinements continued with Live 8 further solidify their key position in real-time performance software.

( And going back in time : reviews of Ableton Live 7 / 6 / 4 / 2 )