The coolest application on the iPhone is Shazam

The concept behind Shazam is simple: whenever you hear a song playing and can't identify it--on the car radio, at a friend's house, at a bar--you activate the Shazam application on your mobile phone. It "listens" to the song for about 30 seconds, then sends a text message to your phone identifying the artist and title. However, closing the loop with an actual purchase was hard--you had to tag the song, then consult a Web site to see your tagged item, then go to another service (such as iTunes) to buy it.

The version of Shazam for the iPhone 2.0 fixes this problem: once you've tagged a song in Shazam, you can launch iTunes directly from that tagged song and buy the song immediately. | CNET |

It was accurately tagging some pretty obscure music playing on KOOP today, even over significant car noise. The interface is good. It's all over the network, so there are no longer any text messages involved. And you can just keep tagging things and review it all later when you aren't driving.

The saddest thing about today...

...is that Tony Snow never fulfilled his lifelong dream of leading his Jethro Tull tribute band to the top of the charts. Or anywhere, really.

Knows who your Loopt friends are, too

Friday dumb game blogging, watch this video while the servers at the iTunes store are busy edition

Notes on Dynagroove

To solve these old an obstinate problems in disc recording, highly ingenious computers -- "electronic brains" -- have been introduced to audio for the first time. These remarkable new electronic devices and processes grew out of an intense research program which produced notable advances in virtually every step in the recording science.

Source: Atkins, Chet. Back cover of Progressive Pickin'. RCA, 1964.

Let's all join hands together

source

Wingnut funtime

Because I was out of icepicks I watched Hardball last night. Tom DeLay was on to argue that:

(1) George Bush has done terrible damage to the GOP brand, so much so that a Democrat is likely to win the White House.

(2) Iran's missile tests show that Iran is determined to continue its nuclear program.

(3) If we don't go to war with Iran, then Iran will eventually acquire nuclear weapons.

(4) We cannot allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

(5) Thus, we must go to war with Iran.

(6) But we can't trust a Democratic President to start a new war.

(7) Hence, we need to get the war started before November.

When pressed, the only specific hostile act DeLay was willing to explicitly endorse was a blockade. I'd say that's scary enough.

If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you

Here in Michigan, when someone wants to tell you where in the state something is what they do is raise their right hand as if taking an oath and then point at their palm. You see, if you look at a map of Michigan it sort of looks like the flat of the hand. Except, that is, for the upper peninsula, which is properly referred to as the you pee, and which can be represented by making the Boy Scout sign with your left hand and then holding that (again, palm out) over the right hand, slightly tilted, on the pinkie side, but isn't.

Which I mention by way of giving context to of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation's current ad campaign. Here's Gov. Granholm introducing the theme:

“CEOs are choosing Michigan for their business growth because they think Michigan is a great place to do business,” Granholm said. “We want those CEOs sharing that story with the world so that when other businesses are looking for a place to grow and create jobs, they look at Michigan first. MEDC’s advertising focuses on companies and CEOs who capitalized on Michigan’s business resources to give them a global competitive edge.”

The initiative will highlight Michigan’s key business-attraction tools including its competitive business environment, its world-renowned universities, its highly skilled workforce, its status as the world’s research and design hub, and its new, $2 billion 21st Century Jobs Fund. Together, these tools give Michigan businesses “The Upper Hand.”

That tag line -- 'giving Michigan business the upper hand' gets repeated, by Jeff Daniels no less, at the end of each of the TV ads.

To a Michigander, the practice of pointing at the hand gives this slogan an overt meaning which is at once banal, immediate, and difficult to resist. But come on. This is a dog-whistle for the investor class, a signal that the state will take the side of capital in disputes with labor. The invisible hand, as they say, helps those who help themselves.

Which isn't to say that I'm not sympathetic, on a whole lot of levels, with the goals and (explicit) arguments of the campaign. Jobs are good, good jobs are better, arguments that link jobs to investments in university funding are best of all.

And maybe I'm just an optimist because I haven't lived here through the last thirty years of economic stagnation and contraction, but it seems to me that the fundamentals look good for growth in the state. The MEDC campaign is right that Michigan has a very skilled workforce. What the ads don't mention, but which everyone knows perfectly well, is that a whole lot of the people who make up that workforce are unemployed or underemployed. Another thing they don't mention is the weakness of the dollar, but that can only help.

Wouldn't want to rush things

In a post entitled The System Works, TNR's Josh Patashnik writes:

You could make a similar observation about the institutional design of Congress and the 2006 election. There was a huge wave of discontent with the ruling party. The body designed to be most in tune with popular opinion (the House of Representatives) flipped to the opposition by a wide margin. The body designed to be slightly more insulated from momentary shifts in public sentiment (the Senate) flipped just barely, and perhaps thanks only to one ill-chosen word from George Allen. As dissatisfaction with the GOP has persisted, the party's prospects have become even bleaker, and now it stands a pretty good chance of losing the presidency too. (And if it doesn't, it will be because the two parties responded to the situation rationally in the manner Matt describes.)

All in all, it's a fairly elegant, and yet not impetuous, means of transferring power as public opinion changes. It makes you appreciate the wisdom of the system the Framers devised--something to keep in mind next time someone tells you the U.S. would be better off with parliamentary-style government.

A yes, "fairly elegant, and yet not impetuous."*

While we were busy being elegant and restrained in our transfer of power, we only:

* allowed Al-Queda to attack
* launched two wars
* dismantled constitutional protections
* turned the Supreme Court sharply right

But hey, thanks TNR, I will keep our stately dignity in mind the next time someone suggests any variant on our system whatsoever.


--
* Grammar Snark Says: .... as if elegance usually goes hand in hand with impetuousness. And yet not in this case!

Did you know

Probably you did. Anyhow, Split Lip is touring. Maybe I'll try to make the September show in Chicago. Also:

5/26/08 3:48 pm
Just wanted to give you all a head’s up…
We just spent the last week in the studio and are finally done recording the new record…

(image via)

Why I'm voting for John McCain, or It looks like a nail to me

America must invest its Iraq victory dividend in energy security! Quite frankly, nothing could be more vital and you are burying your head in the sand if you think otherwise.

What what

...awesome Michigan storms...

|Polyglot Conspiracy|

No such thing.

An awesome storm:

Kristol on McCain's campaign

McCain is frustrated. He thinks he can beat Obama (politicians are pretty confident in their own abilities). But he isn’t convinced his campaign can beat Obama’s campaign. He knows that his three-month general election head start was largely frittered away. He understands that his campaign has failed to develop an overarching message. Above all, McCain is painfully aware that he is being diminished by his own campaign. | NYT |

What is this supposed to mean, exactly?

If by "his own campaign" Kristol means McCain's decision to flip flop on a number of long-held positions to more convincingly pander to folks like Kristol, then yes, I would say McCain been diminished by his own campaign. But is this distinction between the man and his campaign supposed to imply that McCain is not at the helm? That he has some bad advisors?

Stay tuned for next week, when Kristol laments McCain's tacking towards the center.

Dumb Game 4th of July Hedgehog Launch!

This game is really, really fun. My advice is to start by upgrading your goggles. In other news, in searching for this game, I learned about "Hedgehog Space."

For any cardinal number K, the K-hedgehog space is formed by taking the disjoint union of K real unit intervals identified at the origin. Each unit interval is referred to as one of the hedgehog's spines. A K-hedgehog space is sometimes called a hedgehog space of spininess K.

Word. 

Breaking Chess News

15 Year old Marc Arnold -- from the NYC no less -- beat GM Vadim Milov in the opening round of the World Open yesterday. Milov was the top seed, and was ranked 28th in the world in the most recent FIDE rankings.

Not so conservative behind closed doors

According to a 1973 Supreme Court decision, one of the yardsticks used to determine if material can be considered obscene is whether said material violates “contemporary community standards”. Which is why, in his defense of an adult website operator, lawyer Lawrence Walters is using google search information from the area the trial is taking place in.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

| Grinding |

My main motivation for posting this is that it is wonderful. But I would also like to loop this back in to our recent discussions (here and here) about how society adjusts to a lack of privacy. It seems to me that privacy advocates are unwilling to acknowledge the disadvantages of privacy. Today's example: public policy that based on rank hypocrisy by social conservatives.

(I hope to do some more thoughtful posts about privacy soon, in which we might connect the dots between some of these instabloggy posts.)

Just the place for a snark

First, the government suggests that several of the assertions
in the intelligence documents are reliable because they are made
in at least three different documents. We are not persuaded.
Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has
“said it thrice” does not make an allegation true. See LEWIS
CARROLL, THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK 3 (1876) (“I have said
it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”).

Source: Page 28, Parhat v. Gates, US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, 20 June 2008. (PDF)

Context.

Via Ash.

Addendum: Check out the image used in the NY Times-ish coverage of the case. Also, note that the image is covered by a creative commons license. Huzzah!