One of my brothers is a musician who runs a recording studio, and recently he told me that a friend of his recorded an album (is that still the right term?) at a well-known studio in Los Angeles. His friend doesn’t have a record deal or anything — he just rented the studio time to cut the record.

Here’s the interesting part: the guy’s backing band consisted of Jim Keltner, Leland Sklar, and a couple of other guys who names I didn’t recognize but who my brother assured me are similarly big time. OK, that’s not really the interesting part: the interesting part is that, according to my brother’s friend, you can currently hire superstar session men like Keltner and Sklar for $500 per day to make your self-financed record. In other words, you can basically get Eric Clapton’s or Jackson Browne’s former backing band to be your backing band on your record for around $2000, total, if you’re willing to do it in a day.

Sounds like a fun DIY version of the Rock And Roll Fantasy Camp thing.

That other theme was just not for me.

BBC sayeth:

One of the brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston bombings was in possession of right-wing American literature in the run-up to the attack, BBC Panorama has learnt.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev subscribed to publications espousing white supremacy and government conspiracy theories.

...

The programme discovered that Tamerlan Tsarnaev possessed articles which argued that both 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were government conspiracies.

Another in his possession was about "the rape of our gun rights".

Reading material he had about white supremacy commented that "Hitler had a point".

Tamerlan Tsarnaev also had literature which explored what motivated mass killings and noted how the perpetrators murdered and maimed calmly.

There was also material about US drones killing civilians, and about the plight of those still imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.

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Hasselhoff [No, not that one. This one is the singer for the Bloodhound Gang] has publicly apologized, adding that the passing of items of all kinds through his pants is a band tradition, but Russia's top law enforcement agency is still considering pressing charges.

hah.

Let's try this theme for a while. See how it goes.

I like links on the sidebar better than links all at the bottom. But, I'll see if I can get used to it.

Bureaucratic Procedures

How long would it take to teleport a person?

Researchers James Nelms, Declan Roberts, Suzanne Thomas and David Starkey started out by calculating how much data it would take to represent a human being. They went with 10 billion bits, the amount of data encoded by DNA base pairs in the human genome.

Then they calculated how much information would have to be fed into the human brain to restore the traveler's pre-teleportation mental state. That inflated the total to a truly astronomical number: 2.6 tredicillion bits, or 2.6 x 10^42 in scientific notation.

The time required to transmit that data depends on how much bandwidth you have. If you're using the 30 GHz microwave band that's standard for satellite communications, it'd take 4.85 quadrillion years (4.85 x 10^15 years). That's about 350,000 times longer than the universe's current estimated age of 13.8 billion years.

That's a long time.

Rap Lyrics As Confession

Stoli : But We're Not Russian!!