Am I turning metal? I used to hate songs played by long haired guys barking aimlessly on a heavy and repeating guitar riff. But I really enjoy listening to Sonata Arctica. Maybe because they're Finnish? :) I am developing a taste for Finnish music, apparently.

Anyway, here is a live performance of the song Broken, which I like best so far. I did look for an official video on this song, but drowned in home made crap videos. I did find official videos for other songs, but the band seemed even less charismatic in those, trying to seem really upset and managing to look like a shampoo commercial.



Another song of theirs I like is Replica.

I've accidentally stumbled upon a very interesting video of a science conference about sleep. Called "Sleep, Waking and Arousal" it details a very interesting compendium of information about sleep in humans, mammals, other vertebrates and even fruit flies. I am posting the link here, but what is even more interesting is that it is part of something called the "The University of California Television" that has its own web site with a lot of (presumably) interesting videos.

Sleep, Waking and Arousal
The University of California Television

Here is a song that I found most interesting and I am referring here to the high pitched piano with the distort guitar in the background. The video isn't that exceptional, but watchable. I am trying to imagine a scene of emotional destruction in a movie that would have the particular instrumental part as a soundtrack.



If you want to see the live performance, click here.

This is a funny little story about a bunch of low end kids finding a way of letting everyone build whatever electronic device they want for almost free. The lead character is a broker, getting more and more terrified about how this simple thing destroys markets and the capitalist economy. In the end, he is to be replaced by electronic neural networks that perform flawlessly.

It seems Peter Hamilton has some issues with capitalism as there are always some characters criticising it in his books. However, in this particular story, the ending can be only one, where humans are completely replaced by the low cost electronics. It does not destroy communism, it replaces humanity.

My guess is that this is bound to happen sooner or later. Already software glitches are more frequent than hardware ones. When is someone going to realize that we, humans, have the worst hardware possible, even by biological standards. And we're only getting fatter, slower and less efficient by the day. Would I mind being replaced by a race of star faring robotic human replicas? No way.

I've just finished reading the book and, while it was the usual easy read, it wasn't as much fun as I expected it to be. The two deaths in the book that were announced so dramatically are actually four, but none of the people that have actually mattered in the story. Their deaths are also irrelevant to the plot.

You see, the entire attraction of Harry Potter, for me, was the many possibilities opened by the magical universe in the books. But really, after the first and second book, there was no novelty, only the drama of Voldemort and the condescending moral crap that was always thrown in the face of the curious reader, the kind of reader that goes "what if..." whenever a new spell is described or some principle of magic is explained.

Bottom line: Harry and the kids wonder in fear and confusion the whole book, only to discover that it all was some kind of master plan and to luckily (or randomly) escape death. The passion killer ending chapter, where Harry is a father of three is not that great either.

I will be watching the 5th Potter movie someday soon, but I believe I will do it for the special effects only. Come to think of it, I can hardly remember what happened in book 5 anyway. Just as the books, only the first two films are worth anything.

No comments, just watch.

This Hamilton guy is a serious writer, dude! Just having finished the first volume of this story, Pandora's Star, I was blogging desperately about how the scifi writer manages a huge book, with many characters and with colliding story arches. Now, I have finished the second and last part, Judas Unchained, which I personally think is not so good as the first, but still a damn solid scifi.

I did find myself feeling a bit of pleasure seeing how the author fails to escape cliche in the end of the story and the story lines just become accelerated and the actors predictable. But after writing this humongous book, I guess the inner emotions could not be stilled anymore and the ending had to lose some cohesion.

Bottom line: a very good book, one that shows how stories should be written: with a considerate, serious, prolonged effort to give the tale logic as well as create emotion in the soul of the reader. I would have gone for a different ending, but hey, I don't write anymore, I have no right to complain!

The historical figure most associated with Dracula, the Wallachian prince Vlad Tepes, had this castle, called Poenari, near Curtea de Arges, and the way to get to it is to climb a 1400 steps stair. Apparently, the Step-Master is also a Romanian invention.

But to start from the beginning: my wife was terribly upset by the 40+ Celsius temperatures in Bucharest. That after telling me so many times that she likes it when it's warm. Now 40C... that's warm for you. But no, she really would have liked to exit the city (for the first time in our new Mitsubishi Colt car) and go to the seaside. The sea being that wet big thing where dirty sweaty people go to dive in while other sweaty dirty people are either stealing their money from the wallets on the beach or stealing their money by selling overpriced bottom of the barrel products and services. Oh, and there is sand there.

So I've convinced her to go to the mountains. Me, in my typical optimism, thinking "the mountains" would be a nice little cool resort like Busteni or Sinaia or Predeal, where climbing the mountain is synonymous with walking the mountain. But no, she wanted Poenari, Dracula's bloody castle.

So we've spent 4 hours getting there, the Colt performed admirably and the air conditioning system made my day. Then I was informed that seeing the castle involved the inhuman endeavour of walking The Stairs to Hell. Well, I ride a bike, 1400 steps is like... 100 floors in a bloc of flats. How hard can that be?

After 15 minutes of pure agony while my body was producing my own private sea water version and trying to reach the top by filling the mountain valley and floating me up, we reached the castle. Which is a damn ruin of a castle, with no people getting you water or food or anything. There was one guy, though, who was kind enough to charge us for the privilege to see the castle and had his own private stash of aspirin to counteract the thermal shock of going from a 19C air conditioned car to a 35C stair climb.

Vlad Tepes Dracula has had his revenge and keeps on having it. Somewhere in his grave, the body of this usually negative person must be grinning.

A Perfect Circle has the same lead man as Tool, James Maynard. As far as I see they do really nice lyrics and music. Personally I preferred the cover of John Lennon's song Imagine, but I couldn't find the video for it in all the anime+9/11+Iraq war home made video crap that clogs YouTube.

Check out Judith, which was inspired by the illness of the singer's mother, paralysed in bed, but still praying and thanking Christ. Although if you want to see anything and witness Maynard's weirdness, check out this video of a live TV appearance.

A while ago I was recommending you the female vocalist band theStart. They have released another album, entitled Ciao, Baby. Go to their mySpace page to listen to four of the ten tracks on the album or buy the tracks directly, 1$ each.


It seems to me that the band is moving away from rock and going towards electro-pop, which would suck, but the songs are still nice.

I've first noticed her while she was playing with Sneaker Pimps, making the soundtrack for The Saint (Val Kilmer version). She looked so interesting with her vibrato voice, weird teeth and Asian features. I've even downloaded the whole Sneaker Pimps discografy before I found out that she was with Sneaker Pimps only briefly.

Now I was listening to the remix version of Linkin Park's My December featuring Kelli Ali and I recognized the voice immediately, even if she was singing faintly in the background. So I thought I would share her with you. Below is the video I think makes her look best, even if you can find a lot of videos with her playing live either as herself , either with TigerMouth or with Japanese bands Buck-Tick or Dropz. Also some links to her site and the Wikipedia entry.

SNEAKER PIMPS - 6 UNDERGROUND

[youtube:2eBZqmL8ehg]

Official web site with texts written by Kelli herself
Main Myspace site
Another MySpace site
Wikipedia entry

I've accidentally stumbled upon the concept of Text Readability while I was searching some books on Amazon. They have this feature to show you how easy it is to read by the use of some automated indexing and analysis methods. I've researched a little and I came up with this collection of links:

SMOG (Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook) estimates the years of education needed to understand a text. As input data it uses the number of polysyllables (words with 3 or more syllables) and number of sentences. Note: if your text needs a PhD to read it doesn't mean it's smart, but that it is difficult.

Flesch-Kincaid Readability Tests - the Reading Ease and Grade Level tests. They both use as input values the number of words, sentences and syllables.

Automated Readability Index - also tries to determine the years of US education needed to understand a text. It uses as input values characters/word and words/sentence.

Fry Readability Formula - it is a graphical method of determining the education level needed to understand a text. It computes the number of sentences and syllables over a hundred words and the values are plotted onto a graph.

Gunning fog index - same thing. Uses words/sentence and number of complex words and total words. A complex word is the same thing as a polysyllable, only with a higher readability index :)

Raygor Readability Estimate - looks very similar to the Fry.

Coleman-Liau Index - like the ARI and not the others, it uses characters to compute readability. Uses total number of characters, words and syllables.

Linsear Write - Uses number of simple and complex words and the number of sentences.

Zipf's law - an empirical law (based on observation rather than determined theoretically) it states that the frequency of any word in a natural language text is roughly inversely proportional to it's rank in the frequency table.

But how does that help me?!

Well, there are online tools that do the work for you:
Tests Document Readability And Improve It
Lingua::EN::Fathom Perl CGI
EULA Analyser
Style and Diction
Reproducible Fry Graphs
Readability Studio

This text for example has the following stats:
Gunning Fog index : 12.93
Coleman Liau index : 11.25
Flesh Kincaid Grade level : 11.39
ARI (Automated Readability Index) : 10.21
SMOG : 12.72
Flesch Reading Ease : 44.16

Which means that if you didn't finish high-school, you're pretty much screwed :)

Funny enough, I was considering starting writing again. I even had this story in my head and I was considering the three parts it must have, maybe even three books. But how will I ever write three books, with my notorious impatience and lack of interest for details?

And then I've stumbled upon this book, Pandora's Star. Just the first part of a larger, two books, story, it amounted to 2Mb of text. That's like four slim books or two large ones. The author didn't even bother making the first part stand alone, I mean it is not a book that you can read and know it's over, but it can still be continued. It just stops in mid story and you have to read the other book (Judas Unleashed) to understand anything. So what this actually is... is a single story that has the size of about five normal sized novels.

The plot is also interesting, with many distinct arches that touch occasionally within a coherent world. Placed somewhere in the 24Th century, the human kind has spread to hundreds of worlds using artificial wormholes and has found the secret of rejuvenation. More than this, electronic implants make death obsolete, as anyone can be cloned and their memory restored even if their body is destroyed. So everything is nice and beautiful until they find a Hive-type alien who considers any other species a threat to be eliminated and the peace loving Commonwealth must now do battle with an expanding mind with no conscience, limits or the concept of pain.

I've just started Judas Unleashed, but my reading will probably be slower this time around. A very nice book, a bit humbling for any aspiring writer, it will hopefully end at least as well as it started.

It seems I have been challenged to a blog game that involves following some silly rules and getting out a post. I dutifully did that, that is: answer questions with randomly selected playlist items, and this is the result:
1. How are you feeling today?
Limp Bizkit - Hot Day

2. Will you get far in life?
Theatre of Tragedy - Cassandra

3. How do your friends see you?
AudioVent - The Energy

4. Will you get married?
Guano Apes - Quietly

5. What is your best friend’s theme song?
Sepultura - We who are not like others

6. What is the story of your life?
The Start - Trinity

7. What was high school like?
Savage Garden - I want You

8. How can you get ahead in life?
Ill Nino - Turns to Gray

9. What is the best thing about your friends?
Nigthwish - Two for Tragedy

10.What is in store for this weekend?
Muse - Citizen Erased

11.What song describes you?
3 - Alien Angel

12.To describe your grandparents?
System of a Down - X

13.How is your life going?
Breed - Happy Again

14.What song will they play at your funeral?
Moby - Everytime You Touch Me

15.How does the world see you?
Tsunami Bomb - A Lonely Chord

16.Will you have a happy life?
Red Flags - Crash Course

17.What do your friends really think of you?
System of a Down - Johnny

18.Do people secretly lust after you?
Anouk - R U Kiddin' Me

19. How can I make myself happy?
Muse - Endlessly

20.What should you do with your life?
Black Atmosphere - Muscle in Plastic

Now, the funny thing is that these were really randomly chosen. I had nothing to do with it! And it fits! :D

An American company has developed a microwave system that decomposes hydrocarbon into something resembling the oil it came from. That means it converts plastics of almost any kind and rubber into fuel!

Just read the link: Giant microwave turns plastic back to oil or watch the video below.