I’ve been working on a year-end mix cd. It was a good year in music.
I’ve paired down to 80 tracks. Even with much pruning, it will be a multi-disc endeavor.
Here’s last year’s mix, in two sides:
UPDATE: (02 Jan 2007)
TrackList Side A
00:00 Busdriver- New Aquarium (57sec)
00:57 Bouga Akhenaton - Belsunce breakdown (3min 53sec)
04:50 Tom Waits - Big In Japan (13sec)
05:03 Buck 65 - Devil’s Eyes (2min 48sec)
07:51 Ken Nordine - Nutria (5sec)
07:56 Broken Social Scene - Cause = Time (5min 20sec)
13:16 Constantines - Lizaveta (3min 28sec)
16:44 The New Pornographers - The Bones Of An Idol (2min 43sec)
19:27 Feist - Mushaboom (3min 33sec)
23:00 Spoon - I Summon You (demo) (3min 49 sec)
TrackList Side B
00:00 Cal Tjader - Bye Bye Blues (8sec)
00:08 Stars - Calendar Girl (3min 53sec)
04:01 Spoon - I Turn My Camera On (3min 36sec)
07:37 The New Pornographers - These Are The Fables (3min 20sec)
10:57 Constantines - Soon Enough (3min sec)
14:43 The Books - if not now whenever (3min 20sec)
18:03 My Morning Jacker - Wordless Chorus (3min 59sec)
22:02 Soso - loss (3min 55sec)
25:57 Fermented Reptile - Intro (1min 17sec)
27:14 Buck 65 - Drunk Without Drinking (4min 10sec)
31:24 Camille - 1 2 3 (2min 32sec)
Note: All times are approximations.
I’m hosting these files on DivShare.
Leave a comment if you have problems downloading.

Tomorrow is our winter Solstice (Northern Hemisphere).
Our tribal ancestors feasted on this shortest of days. They gave Thanks before the coming of the famine months.
Another cycle of the Wheel of the Year. You exist. Peace be the journey.
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Erin pointed out this trippy wonder: SomaFM’s Christmas Lounge [Streaming Mp3].
Bertrand Russell, refuting the idea that the burden of proof lies somehow upon the sceptic to disprove the unfalsifiable claims of religion:
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
This, and other philosophical fun can be found in a debate between author Sam Harris and radio-host Dennis Prager titled, Why Are Atheists So Angry?
Related: Richard Dawkins, scientist, author, and campaigning atheist, quotes Bertrand Russell when answering the question: If you died and arrived at the gates of Heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?
“Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.”
Unrelated:
If you read the Da Vinci Code, or closer to home, if you’ve been following the daily Winnipeg Free Press articles on Sacred Geometry in our legislative building, you’ve heard of the number Phi.
Here’s an excerpt from an email I sent a friend today partially explaining the source of my spiritual atheism:
As a geek, math is my bridge to the spiritual. The more one studies math the more one realizes how fuzzy it can get. Take Phi, the golden ratio, that number our artists and builders often incorporate into their works, purposefully or not. It’s found in successive ratios of the Fibonacci sequence 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34… and so on, each number being the sum of the previous two.
1/1 = 1
2/1 = 2
3/2 = 1.5
5/3 = 1.666666666…
8/5 = 1.6
13/8 = 1.625
21/13 = 1.61538…
34/21 = 1.61904…
Here we are converging on a transcendental number, somewhere in the vicinity of 1.61803399… The further we travel along the Fibonacci sequence, the closer the ratios get to Phi. But! We can never reach Phi. Its parent sequence is infinite.
For this reason, Phi is fuzzy. Interestingly, it pops up throughout the natural world; in the arrangement of plant branches; in the veins of leaves and animal blood vessels, in the spirals of sunflower seeds and sea shells, in the population growth of rabbit warrens (the study of which was how the Fibonacci sequence was discovered), and so on…
A DNA molecule measures approximately 34 angstroms long by 21 angstroms wide. We’ve seen those numbers before.
Phi and others like it —ask Jeff about the transcendental number e that pops up everywhere in electrical physics— show us that math is just a human model, a tool we use to anchor reality, a tool with limitations, where certain concepts refused to be nailed down, defined.
And it is here, in the eddies and swirls, on the blurry edge of the model that gives root to all science, where I find my god; a god of interconnection and perfect imprecision; a god like a golden cord tying us all together; a god around which no box can be drawn.
For the musically inclined:
There are 13 notes in the span of any note through its octave.
A scale is comprised of 8 notes, of which the 5th and 3rd notes create the basic foundation of all chords, and are based on whole tone which is 2 steps from the root tone. [via]
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Traffic around here has spiked since Sunday, 7000 visits and counting. The norm for one week is less than 500.
The flock arrived to watch the music video for Gary Jules’ Mad World.
It’s likely that this ad for Gears of War has people searching for the string “the dreams in which I’m dying”, part of the title for my post containing the video.