Breaking News: Higgs Bison Detected

Nerd Metal Show on KUCI 88.9 FM (UC Irvine Radio)

It's actually called Nerd Metal. I mean how can it not be great just from that name. Saturdays 8-10pm on KUCI 88.9 FM. Last night they had some interviews with Orange County metal bands Cerebellion and Sorizon, along with playing some Devin Townsend, Synchestra, and other firm meaty chunks. Here's the show's website.

Finally, Chemistry from Vesta

No data released yet but we know they're working on it. This is geochemistry they're looking at with a gamma and neutron instrument. Interesting, now that we know the temperature and sunlight is right at the poles for at least solid water to exist. Why interesting? If there are intelligent aliens, there are von Neumann probes. If there are von Neumann probes, they're probably already here in the solar system. If they're here, they're most likely to be on lower gravity bodies, like asteroids.


Temperature map of Vesta's surface. NASA / GSFC / UMBC

Look for Dust: Singularities and the Great Silence

Assumption: if such a thing as the technological singularity is inevitable, then any tool-using intelligence should follow the same pattern, if at different rates based on their own biology. (Admittedly in this the Singulatarians, often accused of preparing for the nerd Rapture, sound a bit more like Marxists than Harold Camping.)


Image NASA/JPL-Caltech

If the Singularity is coming in our near future, then we should expect it's already happened multiple times around our own galaxy. If Singulatarian arguments are to be taken seriously in their strongest form, and events post-singularity are in principle unpredictable to us as we are presently constructed, then those alien singularities could look like anything, including nothing. This would explain the Great Silence, but it would be an unsatisfying explanation: "something happens to everyone that turns them into something we wouldn't understand even if we were looking right at it". It's been supposed that post-Singularity intelligences would want to deconstruct large bodies (like planets) to allow more particle interactions and increase computational abilities. Therefore we might look for strangely dusty systems, like 59 LY-away Eta Corvi, which is not by any stretch a still-forming system but has two belts of dust: a Kuiper Belt analog, and a warm dust belt within 3.5 AU that should disappear within 20 million years - and the age of this F-class star system is about 1.5 billion. More mundane mechanisms have been advanced (here in the Astrophysical Journal) to explain the persistence of the inner dust belt, which is chemically very interesting - but again, in the strongest interpretation of the Singularity, there's no point in trying to guess what any anomaly is, because we couldn't understand it.

A better alternative is to assume that we just don't know what we're listening for (yet, but that eventually we might), or that the absence of electromagnetic signals detectable at Earth doesn't mean no intelligence, or that we haven't looked in the right places, which especially applies to the search for von Neumann probes, which may seek out material agglomerations in low gravity (comets and asteroids). An artifact may be worth many signals.

This Might Be Too Intense

You think you like heavy? You think you like extreme? I don't think you're ready for this. Don't blame me for the severe brain damage that will result from your weakness.

Chinese Metal Is Here to Save/Destroy Us

Seriously. Driving back up to San Francisco over the New Year I asked my handy co-pilot to do a little Spotify searching while I was driving to see if there are any solid Chinese metal bands. And you know how that goes: typically it's novel to find a band or two from a non-traditional metal country, but they're unimaginative, badly produced, and don't introduce any local elements.

But that's not what you should expect to find in a country with a three-millennium history of music, a population twice the size of the U.S. and Europe put together, and plenty of things to be pissed off about. The Chinese metal scene is fucking amazing, it preserves and extends the best of metal, and how it hasn't so far penetrated the rest of the world more is beyond me. (Here is a Youtube channel for Chinese metal, and another one; also a Chinese metal wiki and here's a blog; as Mirai Kawashima of Sigh says, help spread the plague of Eastern terror.) Sure, many of the bands are technically outstanding versions of metal sub-genres, including those which Western bands seem to have abandoned, but some of them bring in an East Asian melodic sensibility, and some traditional elements like the erhu and throat-singing in more than just a "look, non-traditional instruments" sense. (Of course Taiwan's Chthonic has used erhus for a while.)

#1: Filter (from China, not the 90s American one.) Bands keep saying they're going to record the next Metallica album, because Metallica isn't, but they keep not doing it. I explicitly proposed a bunch of bands getting together to record "the next Metallica album" before, but you can forget about it because Filter has done it. I never knew until now what James Hetfield would sound like if he sang in Mandarin. I love these guys. Someone is finally writing Justice songs again, although there's a healthy dose of Load sensibility too. Here is Filter's No way:



#2: Last Successor is another fantastic band that's described as progressive metal, although they're better described as a very Chinese metalcore band with progressive leanings. And that said, I'll commit sacrilege against John Huntsman's favorite band, Last Successor are a better progressive metal band than Dream Theater. Know why? They don't let their work get bogged down in unexciting, non-metal displays of musicianship, though their chops are clearly there. (Ever miss blistering leads from the old days? Try these guys; their soloist is quite Skolnickian.) They use a lot of keyboards and aren't afraid to put them right in front; despite the keys' prominence, they never lose that drum-plus-rhythm guitar alchemy that metal is about. A good intro is this song from/about World of Warcraft (just "World"):



Abyss also has a lot of nice erhu, as does Release, which takes off right away. If Last Successor has a flaw, it's that in their ballads they veer off a little into schmaltzy East Asian pop land (as in See Jasmine Again), but the same can be said for Western metal ballads wading into sappy lighter-holding territory.


#3: Die from Sorrow is pretty much the Chinese Avenged Sevenfold (which is fine with me). Here's Andromeda:




#4: Hell Savior - Imagine a faster, thrashier Judas Priest with the offspring of Greg Graffin and Axl Rose singing, and somehow working. Here's Guardians of Glave:




#5: M-Survivor - A solid metalcore band like As I Lay Dying. Here's Don't Give Up:




#6: Tiefutu has some nice crunchy bits but you find yourself humming the electronic parts more than anything. (Deceptive, guys. Nice.)




#7: Samans sounds like a more electronic Rammstein. Here's Death March:




#8: S.A.W are the most crunchy bastards ever. Again in the vein of As I Lay Dying, but with some cleaner stops.




#9: Suffocated - aside from the vocals, these guys are the most thrash-like of all the bands I've posted here, and they get right into on this one, When Dreams Entwine:




#10: Ego Fall. I promised you throat-singing and here it is. (Here's some on this blog from before; traditional Western death metal singing is essentially just sloppy vestibular vocal cord vocalization anyway.) Throat-singing is usually done in a tempo and rhythm that has a real gallop to it and this ("Sounding the Horn") is no exception.




#11: Nightmare - Self-destruction




You might also want to check out Dark Haze and From the Red.

Kill All Hipsters: The Obscurometer

Okay, maybe don't kill them, but use an objective measure to scrutinize their claims to liking obscure bands. Put in any band to the obscurometer and get a % obscurity back. If you're registered as a user it can tell you how obscure your tastes are - this is where you send the hipsters to see whose is bigger. If they're cool enough they'll be into Lobster Toilet Death, which is the fifth most obscure. Coldplay, Radiohead and Red Hot Chili Peppers are the least obscure.

Of the Big 4 thrash bands, the obscurity in increasing order was Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer (almost same as Megadeth) and Anthrax. If you want to know the basis for the measurement go to the damn site.

Music Has Something You Can't Measure!

In fact, it's SO immeasurable, even professional violinists can't tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a not-Stradivarius! (That's a nice way of saying THERE ISN'T ONE.) We often, or usually, can't separate our experiences of art and food from what we know about their creators and history, or their context.

Which Kuiper Belt Object Should New Horizons Visit?

After it completes its mission at Pluto, New Horizons is going to head out into the Kuiper Belt, and will visit one or two Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). The Ice Hunters project is one of several at Zooniverse crowdsourcing part of its work - in other words, you can help decide which one it will visit. Yes, the New Horizons has a spectrometer to look at Pluto and KBO atmosphere and surface composition, which is more exciting now that we know there are neat nitriles and hydrocarbons on Pluto, and very interesting if you think we might find organic von Neumann probes on low-gravity high-water bodies in the solar system. Visit the Ice Hunter website to start.

A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox: Masturbation

Yes, basically. UNM evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller worries that our ability to stimulate ourselves with junk food, video games and porn (maybe we should throw cheap credit in there?) will lead to our demise, and whether this hasn't led to similar ends for intelligence elsewhere in the universe. This concern tracks eerily close to a line I extracted from an Vanity Fair article in a post at The Late Enlightenment: "A color-coded map of American personal indebtedness could be laid on top of the Centers for Disease Control's color-coded map that illustrates the fantastic rise in rates of obesity across the United States since 1985 without disturbing the general pattern."

The more general argument that Miller is making is that intelligence is a dead end. Indeed, why do so many seemingly adopt teleological thinking and assume that intelligence is the automatic endpoint of evolution, or at least the best way for replicators to make an impact on the universe? It's kind of strange that seekers of alien life consistently look for intelligence or even "civilization", which may not have any meaning beyond humans. Intelligence is just the most "extreme" form of behavior - and here the term behavior is used in its clearest maning, as biological motors (muscles) moving in response to nervous systems - which in turn are just networks of cells that integrate inputs from pressure, light, and chemical changes external to themselves. Nervous systems respond much more quickly than genes to changes in the environment, because they rely on millisecond-scale changes in ion currents. Of course those networks of ion currents are not perfect modelers of future states, they have weak spots or poor plasticity. They even have analogs of halting states. Therefore, because they change so much more quickly than the genes underlying them, problems in the system can be hugely damaging to those genes, to the point where they all disappear. Organisms profoundly changing their environment in ways that end up killing them is of course the core concern of sustainability advocates and it's happened before, right here on Earth, to the cyanobacteria - even before there was such a thing as behavior.

The Fermi paradox is an ongoing topic here, and other questions include: for Singulatarians, couldn't this be the instrument of the Great Filter, and/or shouldn't we be able to see alien singularities, whether as wave fronts of computronium (or at least von Neumann probes) or at least very strange looking decompiled star systems? Can we in principle even know what to look for? Miller's entry is that the Great Filter need not consist of an intelligence explosion, but rather an intelligence introversion: once a nervous system can game the system - game itself - it's not going to last much longer.

Synesthesia, A God Or An Other (Demo, 2011)

If you want to be an awesome metal band like Seattle's A God Or An Other, first thing is to have a cool album cover. This one is like Dali meets Roberto Matta. I mean you can't go wrong.



But then you have to back it up and actually be awesome, and I quite dig their atmospheric neo-North American black metal thing they have going on. But then you have to have awesome titles too. So these guys have this one (Synesthesia), and also Xibalba*, also Not An Eye Was Left Open to Weep For the Dead.

*Xibalba is also a Pomona band that plays around San Diego, as evidenced here; Facebook them here. Having exhausted the Abrahamic world, metal is quickly consuming the religious mythology of non-Western peoples. Quick! Someone invent a new religion so metal has some new dark iconery to incorporate!

Pluto Probably Filthy with Hydrocarbons and Nitriles

NASA.

An instrument on the Hubble has shown a high UV absorbance on Pluto, which could be explained by hydrocarbons and nitriles. Granted, Pluto is a little past the frost line, but anytime we see more substrates for organic chemistry on solid surfaces in the solar system, this place looks a little friendlier for self-assembling organic replicators like von Neumann probes. More argument for why we should be looking for organic von Neumann probes in our own solar system, on solid low gravity bodies, here.


While we're at it: the dynamics of the Earth-Moon system work out so that at any one time, Earth should have 2 natural satellites: the big werewolf one that we can see, and a small meters-across one that it captures from time to time, then let go. And in fact this works out empirically. This has implications for the natural-seeding method of replicator spread, which I Fermi-problem-calculated out to be about 40 million years riding hyperbolic comets between stars the distance of the Sun and Alpha Centauri. Jupiter no doubt has captured satellites, but do they escape? It would be a good place to look for replicators (maybe better than the asteroid belt) but not good for them to spread from.


And if you're hoping for more islands in the void to serve as reaction vessels for aqueous chemistry, this should make you happy: M-class stars actually have a larger habitable zone than we thought (spectrum and albedo argument).

I Warned You, Cryonicists

...that you would wake up in a hellish, incomprehensible dystopia. (Actually it's not that bad, I just asked why they would wait until after they're dead, if they believe their own claims about future medical technology.)

Well it turns out I was too optimistic, because you cryonicists will be waking up next to Larry King. Orwell's 1984 will seem idyllic in comparison.

Tommy Chong Wants You To Know Something

Although John Cleese is on record saying he hates this movie, I don't know what he's talking about. It's half of Monty Python, plus Cheech and Chong, in the same movie. It's physically impossible for the movie not to be funny.

Highlights:

Heavenly forth!
Corporations should show this for employee motivation.

Greetings your royal molestation!

Women's rights, here and here and here, and Graham Chapman further encourages good family values here.

You will laugh at this, and it means you're a bad person.

The sad state of the youth of today.

Proper education for the youth of today.

And finally, Msr. Chapman shows how civilized people settle debates.

Two Metal Proposals: New Metallica and AI Metal

1. A group of bands should get together and record the next Metallica album, each contributing one track. (Because Metallica isn't doing it.) Not covers. New songs. Like you think they would've written, say, during the Master or Justice eras. No concerns about originality, because you're intentionally trying to sound like Metallica. Imagine, we'd have Justice part 2! And we'd know a bunch of new bands good enough to create it!

2. Evolutionary metal. There have been a few articles bouncing around about algorithmic music, where simple loops of code produce music. Couldn't someone develop genetic algorithms to automatically create awesome metal? (Another post on AI and metal composition here.)

I'm sorry Dave, that bridge section doesn't crush enough.

Or on the contrary, it would be cool to do something reverse-engineering riffs, to see what the underlying grammar of a metal riff is. In any event, Ville-Matias Heikkila is "trying to crowd-source music discovery" and it's plausible that there will be an end-result similar to the former if there's a separate forum for exclusively metal feedback. Here's an example of his stuff:

Upcoming Metal Shows in San Diego

As a service to the community (so you don't miss cool shows like I just did) check these out. Don't forget to check SDmetal.org.


Please enjoy Symphony X while perusing these events:




Friday 13 January 2012: a total metalfest at Electric Ladyland, with Ruinist, Caymul, Damcyan, The Parlour Shootout, Beheading the King, Thirty30, and Ruinist headlining.

Che Cafe has a bunch of shows coming up, AND they're trying not to close. If ever you buy a ticket and get in there, now's the time.

Wednesday 22 February 2012: Symphony X, Iced Earth and Warbringer at House of Blues San Diego.

Goddammit, the Iron Maidens Were Here

I'm walking down the street in Ocean Beach today with the modern-day Kevorkian, one Dr. Desai MD, PhD whose identity will remain protected, when I see that the all-girl Iron Maiden tribute band the Iron Maidens played a show in San Diego last night. Many Anglo-Saxon terms were used when I realized I'd missed them. I've wanted to see them for a long damn time. Next show is up in Garden Grove on 17 December.

Hari Seldon's Latest Disciple

"While Toynbee was impressing me with the history of civilizations, Isaac Asimov was shaping my view of the future in equally profound ways...For a high school student who loved history, Asimov's most exhilarating invention was the 'psychohistorian' Hari Seldon. The term does not refer to Freudian analysis but to a kind of probabilistic forecasting of the future of whole civilizations. The premise was that, while you cannot predict individual behavior, you can develop a pretty accurate sense of mass behavior. Pollsters and advertisers now make a good living off the same theory."

- Newt Gingrich


From "Newt Gingrich, Galactic Historian" at George Mason University's Heritage News Network. "If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, Newt Gingrich is from the planet Trantor..." Gingrich is not the first person to be inspired by Hari Seldon to do things in the real world; Al Qaeda and Shoko Asahara (sarin-in-the-subway guy) both thought his ideas should be reified as well.

Metallica and Currency Exchange Rates

Very interesting WSJ article about how Metallica's manager Cliff Burnstein partly bases tours on currency trends; a weak dollar is good for American exports, of which Metallica is one. (Thank you Marginal Revolution for the economic angle on metal.) One MR commenter asks if metal is a countercyclical good. The halls of Justice are, indeed, painted green. (ZING-O)

The Fermi Paradox and von Neumann Probes (Again)

Karl Schroeder points to a paper by Keith Wiley about the Fermi paradox and von Neumann probes. He converges on arguments made here, here and elsewhere:

1) that von Neumann probes are a better way to detect alien intelligences than electromagnetic radiation (either signals or detecting large structures)

2) that if self-replicating probes are possible and there are alien intelligences, there should be loads of them in each solar system already. The best feature of the linked paper is that Wiley takes a stab at estimating how many there should be in this solar system.

3) that the universe as we now see it could already have been profoundly influenced by the activity of intelligent entities, but we don't know because it's the only way we've ever seen it and we have dumb-matter (i.e. natural) explanations for everything. Apparently non-testable but still interesting to think about.