Silflay Hraka

http://www.fuckthenewyorktimes.com/.

“Anyway, there is one way to make sure the spooks don?t listen in when you?re having phone sex with Fatima: speak fucking Farsi. The FBI’s got a backlog of untranslated audio that would choke a hippo. And no wonder ? for a while there they were telling their translators to stop, um, translating so fast. What?s next? Demotions for dogs that find too much cocaine? Maybe I?m missing something here, but I kind of figured since we have only four people who can speak Muslim-ese on the government payroll, we?d want them reading through the transcripts as quickly as possible. Turns out, not so much.”

Here’s the deal: if I’m the only one updating the blog, I’m going to post whatever I f^cking feel like posting. Suck it.

One of my favorite gifts to give for birthdays, Christmas, Valentine’s, etc. is a compilation CD. It’s a gift that is uniquely personal and the thought involved is generally appreciated.

One of the difficulties in creating a good compilation is coming up with 80 minutes worth of music that fits a particular theme. I usually have about 8 to 10 songs that I know I want to include and I have to agonize over the other 8 or 10. I also feel that I have to fill the CD, so it isn’t good to just stop at 8 or 10 songs. (An especially enjoyable game is to see exactly how little space you can leave on the CD and still stay on theme. Typically I leave something less than a minute’s worth of space.)

Anyway, it can take hours to find similar artists with similar sounds to make the CD just right.

Today, I stumbled across a tool that will make it much easier to find similar sounds: Pandora. Pandora allows you to create custom stations based on artists you enjoy. The software then researches the artists “dna” and comes up with artists with similar sounds based on an analysis of things like timbre, instrumentation, tonality and syncopation.

For example, to create my first station, I entered David Gray, James Blunt, Jack Johnson and Pete Yorn. Pandora used this information to play songs by not just the four artists above, but by Colin Hay, Peter Case, Billy Bragg and Ryan Adams.

Of course, you can help the software learn your tastes by telling it which of the recommended songs you enjoy and which you dislike, or by adding or removing artists to your list. So far I’ve enjoyed most everything played for me.

I know that Yahoo Launch similarly allows you to add or remove artists and songs and will make recommendations based on that information but, in my experience thus far, Pandora sticks much more closely to the aural theme.

Check it out