Heavy

I love this argument by Avram Grumer that purports to solve the Can God create a rock so large he cannot lift it? paradox. (Summary: Sure he can! Just have him whip up a universe containing nothing but a single unit of molecular carbon, or some other smallest-possible-"rock" of your choice. No matter how you move it around, it will be the gravitationally lowest point in the universe, and therefore unliftable. QED.)

Pandora

I finally got into Pandora Radio because of its free iPhone version. The application isn't flawless - unexpected events make it have a temporary seizure that makes even the phone's hardware controls unresponsive until it times out - but its normal mode is very impressive. You can start listening to music via WiFi, and then wander off into 3G territory, and it doesn't skip a beat. (Literally.) This is the first implementation of portable internet radio I've seen, something I've wanted since using my first iPod for the first time.

(That said, pulling in continuous data via 3G drains the battery like nothing else. But that's just the price of admission, right now.)

And, yes, Pandora itself is rather excellent. I love the idea of musical-classification "genes". Who knew that I was into extensive vamping? I'm using my jmac@jmac.org email address there, if people wish to connect. (Why, of course it has social-network features.)

Headnodic beats

mrmorse pointed to the Pandora FAQ in a comment on my previous post. If you do a text search for "vamp" you'll be at the top of an interesting little glossary of (mainly popular-)music-theory terminology that Pandora uses in its song-taxonomy.

The term "headnodic beats" reminds me of the crowd from this 1970 TV-concert video of a very young Kraftwerk, even though its tempo may be too fast to qualify as such. (I have probably embedded this same video before, but why not do it again. It's fun.)