John's Entertainment Technology Blog
More on Magic and Perception
I just posted a followup from Scientific American to this blog entry.
Barack Can't Use Email?
This has got to be one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. We will finally have a President who uses modern technology, but according to the NY Times he likely won't be able to use it:
For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.
. . .
But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.
For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.
We can secure nuclear launch codes, but not the email of the President of the United States? That is just incredibly stupid. And he hopes to be able to use a computer? Un-fucking believable.
Clowns vs. Mimes
More pics and videos on Laughing Squid, which reports:
A smackdown between mimes and clowns took place Friday at 16th and Valencia at 10pm. It was reported that a clown picked a fight with a mime in front of Kilowatt by smashing a pie in his face. Later the mimes and clowns duked it out in Albion Alley, ala West Side Story. The fight ended when two clowns ganged up on a mime, wiped off his face paint and ‘demimed’ him. The mime, stripped of his powers was carried off by his troupe, screaming in terror.
Back from the Dominican Republic
I took a long weekend mini-vacation with friends to the DR. I had never been there before, and it is a beautiful place and we had a lot of fun...
On the first day alone I saw two rainbows:
A full moon:
And some local wildlife:
NIN in Worcester
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 12:14AM in Interesting Show, Entertainment Technology by John Huntington I went up to Worcester, MA last night to see the Nine Inch Nails (NIN) tour which I've been writing about, and I'm glad I did (Live Daily review of the Worcester show here). Here's a time lapse of about 10 minutes of the show:
My friend Jamie Anderson of Rational Acoustics got in touch with Jamie Pollack, Firehouse's system engineer on the tour and we were able to get in to hear the system during soundcheck, which was great. The PA is an all new L-Acoustics K1 system, which is in its "pilot" phase; the same cabinets were out on Radiohead this summer. I have worked on a lot of big systems, and I have to say I was never really a fan of L-Acoustics' V-DOSC series of speakers. But the K1 is a whole different story, and Jamie and mixer Pete Klepper had the system sounding great!
The V-DOSC, to my ears, had some harsh midrange problems, but in the K1 series they seem to have really cleaned this up and it sounded great. In addition, with the V-DOSC, if you walked through the vertical coverage overlaps of the individual boxes (walking towards or away from the stage, typically) I always heard some nasty phase cancellation. But in the K1, they have also done something to really clean this up, and walking through the boxes on this rig, things sounded very smooth. And the low frequency, especially in this setup, was unbelievable. And the audience agreed--here they are cheering the subwoofers, with an incredible amount of 40 Hz sound (we know it was 40Hz thanks to the SMAART screen, and that sound was too low for my little camera mic to pick up):
The interactive video and lighting was very cool, although apparently the Moment Factory people finished their work on the tour and were not around, and unfortunately given time contraints (the opener's sound check finished as the house was opening) I wasn't able to talk to any of the video people on the tour to get more info. But you can read some details here in my previous entry, and here's some video of some cool parts of the video:
More photos and videos here.