A remarkable choir from Slovenia.

From Marc Andreessen comes this excellent short guide to personal productivity.

Following Mark’s advice, I’m buying one of those cool fisher space pens right now, as a form of structured procrastination. Oh, I love that term.

An indoor autonomous helicopter from MIT. Can the remotely piloted dragonfly from Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy be far behind?

I found these amusing Volkswagen ads on the excellent Laughing Squid:

On this rainy Los Angeles day, I thought I’d post a link to this wonderful letter from actor Stephen Fry, to a depressed fan.

Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather:

Here are some obvious things about the weather:

It’s real.
You can’t change it by wishing it away.
If it’s dark and rainy it really is dark and rainy and you can’t alter it.
It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row.

BUT

It will be sunny one day.
It isn’t under one’s control as to when the sun comes out, but come out it will.
One day.

The letter is from my new favorite blog, Letters of Note which collects letters, from, er, notables.

I’ve found the IAmA section on Reddit to be an endless source of fascination the past couple of weeks. It’s essentially a 21st century version of “True Confessions” magazine. Some recent entries:

I am a male stripper. Ask me anything.

My blog is my principal source of income. Ask me anything.

I worked at a medical marijuana dispensary. Ask me anything.

I am a professional astronomer. Ask me anything.

I am a professional card counter. Ask me anything.

I ran the largest fake ID distribution ring in my state. Ask me anything.

I am the son of an arms dealer to a drug cartel. Ask me anything.

I am, you guessed it, a lion tamer. Ask me anything.

Beth Block shot and edited this video excerpt of my piece ‘Kasparov vs. Deep Blue’ at last June’s concert in Eagle Rock. In this piece, a computer-chess engine produces music in real-time as actors recreate a famous chess match on a chess board which is wired to the computer. The music is a very literal representation of what the chess computer is thinking.

This is one of six videos from the ‘Cams, Cranks, and Computers’ concert you’ll find on YouTube. Enjoy!

Ever heard a piano talk? This is why I love automatic instruments!

Thanks to Patrick Woodward for sending this to me.

Click the image to watch and hear my musical clock made of the stars.

To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.

I used this information to plot the brightest stars, and cause them to revolve about Polaris (the North Star) very slowly, as the stars appear to do. Like the night sky, this is a sidereal time clock — it takes nearly 24 hours for the stars to fully rotate. You’ll notice some familiar constellations, such as the Big Dipper in there. As the stars cross zero and 180 degrees, indicated by the center line, the clock plays an individual note, or chime for each star. The pitch of the chime is based on the star’s BV measurement (which roughly corresponds to color or temperature). The volume is based on the star’s magnitude, or apparent brightness, and the stereo panning is based on the position on the screen (use headphones to hear it better).

Basically, this is a very literal kind of “music of the spheres,” and is typical of my projects, which often involve circles and music. This idea for making a music box out of stars was a natural progression from some previous projects of mine, like the Whitney Music Box, and Musical Chess, which you might also enjoy.

If you’d like a large, high fidelity Wheel of Stars to project on the ceiling of your home, gallery or museum, contact me. I’d love to build you one, or provide you with plans and software.

I thought I’d post a few of my recent Aardvark answers here. Aardvark is a social network in which people ask and answer a variety of questions, using either instant messaging clients or email.

Q. If I weigh 225, is purchasing a Vespa still a good idea? Will it hold me?

A. This guy looks like he weighs about that…

Q. How many and which birds can fly backwards?

A. As far as I know, the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards (it’s able to use its wings a bit like a helicopter).

Q. I was given the honor to officiate my friend’s wedding ceremony; I have to give a speech but don’t know where to start. Can anyone give any tips or web resources? Google hasn’t been too helpful in this regard.

A. Tips about speaking at weddings.

1) Keep your remarks short – no more than 5 minutes.

2) Make the audience laugh. One way to accomplish this is to point out the wedding party’s (less-important) faults. In other words, use the blunt truth as a tool for humor.

3) Make the audience cry. If you find yourself tearing up when you write something, use it. If you are worried you can’t deliver the whole speech without tears, you’re in the right ballpark. If you can make the audience run the whole gamut from laughter to tears in the course of 5 minutes, you will have done splendidly.

4) Keep your remarks focused on the wedding couple, yet make it personal.

Q. What if the hokey pokey is really what it all about?

A. I would find it deeply comforting to know that the Hokey Pokey was indeed what it is all about. It would mean life has a known meaning. A somewhat cryptic, but perhaps ultimately knowable meaning, as opposed to the indecipherable thicket we actually find ourselves in. One would merely need to put one’s right foot in…