Kakistocracy By Proxy

I just spent way too much time read­ing in bed about myco­tec­ture.  Yes, archi­tec­ture con­sist­ing of hard­ened fungi.  Cur­rently, it is in a very exper­i­men­tal stage (and by exper­i­men­tal, I mean exper­i­men­tal “art”, namely the project of one Philip Ross which you can read about here) but I could see some com­pa­nies like Dow (DOW) or Mon­santo (MON) being all over this if it proves to be promising.

I have a minor obses­sion with Kim Jong Il.  Not in that “thrill run­ning up my leg” sort of way that Chris Matthews feels about Obama, let me be clear: the man is a psy­chopath and the sooner he is danc­ing with the Reaper, the bet­ter.  Still, out of the long line of extreme left wing dic­ta­tors that the 20th cen­tury has given us, the Dear Leader has always been my favorite.  I’m not sure if is the pom­padour or just that the vile lit­tle man oozes sadism but Kim Jong Il truly keeps his dragon style iller than most so need­less to say: I was pretty stoked with I heard that North Korea had devel­oped its own oper­at­ing sys­tem based on the Linux Ker­nel “Red Star”.  This seemed right in line to me with Kim’s com­pletely delu­sional para­noid world­view.  Appar­ently con­cerned with the national secu­rity threat of using an American-made oper­at­ing sys­tem, the North Korean gov­ern­ment has har­nessed the Open Source Linux Ker­nel and devel­oped their own OS named “Red Star”.  I imme­di­ately jumped on the inter­net look­ing for a cracked ver­sion of the OS to stick on one of my spare Linux boxes.  I didn’t think it would be easy to find but noth­ing is ever “easy” and any­thing dig­i­tal is some­where on the inter­net if you know where to look but after a cou­ple of hours of search­ing, I came up with a big fat goose egg.  Luck­ily, I found the next best thing: Russ­ian stu­dent Mikhail bought a copy of the OS while at the Russ­ian embassy in North Korea and did a nice review for every­one (in Eng­lish no less) on this Russ­ian tech website.

The amaz­ing thing about this par­tic­u­lar build is many of the key com­po­nents in your typ­i­cal Linux build have been built from the ground up by North Korean pro­gram­mers (antivirus, fire­wall) and they reverse-engineered the Fire­fox web browser and renamed it “My Coun­try”.  I won­der how long it took our NSA guys to secure a copy and start tear­ing the OS apart?

Any­one that counts them­selves among at least my acquain­tances in any capac­ity prob­a­bly knows that I have been strug­gling with a vinyl record addic­tion for the bet­ter part of two decades now.  Luck­ily, I have been in an anti-materialism  phase over the last year (in prac­tice I mean, not as a phi­los­o­phy) which has resulted in an almost Stal­in­is­tic purge of my house­hold pos­ses­sions.  My vinyl col­lec­tion has largely escaped unscathed but I’m slowly work­ing my way up to it.  Suf­fice it to say, an appear­ance on an episode of Horders does not appear to be in my future any time soon.

Only my col­leagues in the aca­d­e­mic realm, how­ever, prob­a­bly know of my love for data visu­al­iza­tion.  I love to parse huge reams of data down into eas­ily digestible charts and graphs (the more inter­ac­tive the bet­ter).  In short, I’m the guy that you hate to see com­ing with a Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion.  My need to use tech­nol­ogy in an applied way to the social sci­ence of Polit­i­cal Analy­sis has resulted in my the­sis tak­ing six months longer than it should have (more on that later…)  Well, I’ve found a kin­dred spirit in Roland Loesslein, a stu­dent at Uni­ver­sity of Applied Sci­ences in Aus­burg Germany.

His grad­u­ate project is pretty amaz­ing.  He has embed­ded RFID chips on a series of vinyl records con­tain­ing the orig­i­nal com­po­si­tion by a par­tic­u­lar artist.  Then when the record is placed on his turn-table the RFID card com­mu­ni­cates to bring up a dis­play of the artists who have sam­pled the work which allows the user to choose to hear either the orig­i­nal work or the sam­pled piece.

Check out the video here.

This is the future of dig­i­tal DJ turntab­list pro­grams such as Ser­ato.  Imag­ine the meld­ing of Ser­ato with the dig­i­tal tag­ging abil­ity of an app like Shazam.  The DJ would covert her vinyl to a dig­i­tal for­mat from the orig­i­nal vinyl into a pro­gram like Ser­ato which would then access an online data­base of songs that use that sam­ples.  The sam­ple con­nec­tions would be made through an audiophile-supplied tag by the DJ’s them­selves.  The image could be dis­played like a pie graph with the “pie” being the vinyl record itself and the sizes of the pie slices would be the pop­u­lar­ity of that par­tic­u­lar sam­ple or per­haps even the length of the sam­ple or the pop­u­lar­ity of the sam­pled song as played by other DJs in the net­work.  This would pro­vide DJs an organic lit­mus test for what songs are “hot” in their par­tic­u­lar region or amongst DJs that play set-lists sim­i­lar to your own.  What about a three-way part­ner­ship between Apple’s Genius appli­ca­tion, Ser­ato, and Shazam?  Now that would be some­thing to see…

In the mean­time though, check out the film above on Loesslein’s project.  Per­haps it is a first step to some­thing that much cooler in the future (and the tip­ping point when I can finally start to sell off my vinyl collection).