This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in October 2007.

Halloween 2007 mix

According to Movable Type, this blog entry is my 1,000th entry into the system (which also includes the podcasts and photography sections of this site). I like to blog. This much I’ve noticed.

Halloween 2007 · A mix by Daniel R Stout for Manufactured Environments

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you. – Bertrand Russell

1. MC Cula · E Só Sentar
2. Of Montreal · My British Tour Diary
3. Modeselektor · Silikon
4. Ben Folds · Jesusland
5. Lily Allen · Friday Night
6. Billy Corgan · Mina Loy (M.O.H.)
7. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club · Spread Your Love
8. Dangerdoom (featuring Cee-Lo) · Benzi Box
9. Till West & DJ Delicious · Same Man
10. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah · Is This Love?
11. Jellybean · The Mexican
12. MC Solaar · Obsolète
13. Datarock · Fa Fa Fa
14. Electric Six · Gay Bar
15. Depeche Mode · Nothing (Headcleanr Rock Mix)
16. Nicole Willis & The Soul Investigators · If This Ain’t Love (Don’t Know What Is)
17. Jarvis Cocker · Fat Children
18. Samira Saeid · Aal Eah
19. Architecture In Helsinki · Heart It Races
20. The Egg · Walking Away (Tocadisco’s Acid Walk Mix)
21. Herbie Hancock · Watermelon Man

Playing Time: 79 minutes, 45 seconds.

Tags: 2007 · cd · cd-r · halloween · mix · mix tape

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45 RPM: The 7-inch Single

I was in the record store the other day buying a record. There were a whole bunch of promotional CDs on the counter with a label by them that said “free CDs.” I didn’t ask about the CDs, but when I went to the sales counter, the guy said that they were cleaning house, and off of a shelf behind him, he selected some 7” vinyl singles (that is, the 45 RPM) off of various stacks and handed them to me. The four singles he gave me were some new solo work by Siouxsie Sioux (of Siouxsie & the Banshees fame), a new single from the Foo Fighters, and a couple of other bands I wasn’t familiar with.

I must admit I’ve never been one for 45 singles. I’ve owned a few over the years. Some good, and some bad. But I’ve long since gotten rid of whatever ones I had. In fact, I don’t even have a 45 adapter to play singles with the wide hole at the center. I noticed that three of the discs had small holes in the center like that on a regular LP. No adapter necessary. But one of the discs had the traditional wide hole at the center. I know the record store sellers plastic puck adapters for a couple of bucks. That’s all you really need to do the job.

I decided to look online at the Needle Doctor and see what they offered. The 45 RPM adapters were a little sub-category on the audio accessories page. At the very bottom end is those plastic inserts that you keep permanently on the record. A pack of 10 costs $2.00. Also at the bottom end is the plastic puck that I’ll be purchasing locally for $2.99. But you go up from there in price, and you can select a shiny metal puck. A Stanton metal 45 adapter puck will run you $10. Stanton is known for cheap Technics-imitating turntables. The Technics metal puck costs $15, but if you already have a Technics turntable, this came with the table. At the high end is a stainless steel puck from clearaudio that runs $40. Forty bucks seems a little pricey, and hopefully if you spent several thousand dollars for a clearaudio turntable that they threw one of those buggers in the box.

It’s quite an array of choices for something as simple as a 45 RPM adapter. By writing this blog entry, I’ve clearly shown that I’ve thought about this far more than I should have. But I just thought it funny that Needle Doctor had such an impressive array of such a trivial thing. It just seems strange too that I should have gotten four promotional 7” records at the record shop in 2007. I mean, who is the intended market. I worked in college radio twice – in the early ’90s and at the cusp of 2000, and most record companies had either discarded vinyl for the most part or were in the process. So do they send promotional 45s to radio stations? Or were these purely meant as giveaways at the retail level?

And I must admit that the local record shop has an impressive array of 45 singles. I don’t look through them much because 45s are pretty much a pain in the ass, but there are some startling releases on the 7” vinyl format. I recently saw a box set of 45 RPMs from Coldplay that ran about $80. I guess some people love 45s. I don’t.

Tags: 45 rpm · 7-inch · adapter · single · vinyl

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A theory of justice

Too often punishment for crimes is implemented by punitive justice. Some societies try to abide by “an eye for an eye.” Obviously that doesn’t make a lot of sense in the real world. If someone kills an entire family – as happened earlier this year here – then do we take justice by killing the murderer’s family. I don’t think any reasonable person would suggest such a solution.

But the problem with punitive justice is that it can be harmful in itself. Someone who gets a long prison term due to minimum sentencing laws will undoubtedly come out of prison a much harder person. There was a case here over the past couple of years of a person who had gone to prison for a number of years on a murder charge. Later DNA evidence found that the person in prison had not committed that particular crime. A couple of years after his exoneration and release from prison, he committed a crime very similar to the one he had been accused of initially. His freedom was short lived, and I think the effect of prison on that particular person was probably harmful.

Prison serves a function, but it shouldn’t be harmful for the people who are incarcerated.

Justice should be a conversation. Instead of asking ourselves, how can we punish this person, we should be asking, how can we help this person to not cause harm again? That involves looking at the circumstances that led to that person causing harm in the first place. That may involve therapy to talk through their problems. That may involve medications if they have an emotional disturbance.

But through the dialog, we can find a way to help and hopefully not harm. The focus should be on rehabilitation instead of punishment. Some people – through upbringing, genetics, or choice – will spend most of their lives inside of a prison. But for those who are sitting in prison – they could be getting education and treatment, but instead they are simply warehoused. Warehousing isn’t good for livestock, and it’s certainly not good for human beings.

Tags: justice · punitive · rehabilitation · theory

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Halloween Festivities

Tonight Dan and I did our yearly ritual of Halloween festivities. We began by carving a pumpkin and listening to Rob Zombie’s CD, Hellbilly Deluxe. As you can imagine, it was very intense! After we were done making the pumpkin look as evil as possible, we watched the Blair Witch Project. The leaves are brilliantly colored in this part of Wisconsin, and there is a nip in the air. It was the perfect fall night to engage in these enjoyable pre-Halloween activities.

Tags: blair witch project · halloween · wisconsin

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A book for the technical typographer

There seems to be a divide between the worlds on traditional and digital typography. If you’re interested in the former, you’ll read Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. There are a couple of approaches to computer typography. You can focus at the GUI level – applications like InDesign have a lot of typographic features built-in. With OpenType fonts now fully in the mainstream, there are a lot of built-in facilities for applications to insert ligatures or numeral variants and other high-end typographic features.

But another tack to take is technical typography. This deals with issues of fonts in the OS and character sets and encoding. O’Reilly has a new book for the technical typographer called Fonts & Encodings. The book is by Yannis Haralambous and translated into English by P. Scott Horne. It looks to be a pretty thorough treatment of the topic, and at over 1,000 pages it should be.

Here’s the table of contents:

1. Before Unicode
2. Characters, glyphs, bytes: An introduction to Unicode
3. Properties of Unicode characters
4. Normalization, bidirectionality, and East Asian characters
5. Using Unicode
6. Font Management on the Macintosh
7. Font Management under Windows
8. Font Management under X Window
9. Fonts in T_EX and Ω, their installation and use
10. Fonts and Web Pages
11. The History and Classifications of Latin Typefaces
12. Editing and Creating Fonts
13. Optimizing a rasterization
14. Enriching Fonts: Advanced Typography

Tags: books · encoding · fonts · o'reilly · yannis haralambous

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