Are You Ready for the Transit (Camp)?

Transit Camp
(from CityTV)

Alright,

Something even more timely than Saturday's post, a current event!

Yesterday, Joey the Accordion Guy and several others organized something that, weirdly, has probably never happened before. A bunch of tech-savvy, bleeding edge, [Insert web cliché here] geeks, who also happen to be transit nerds, got together for self organized Bar Camp style get together to figure out how to improve the Toronto Transit Commission (or at least it's website).

Transit Nerd-dom is usually a little weird even for geeks, but there's plenty of geeks who spend their commutes (you know, that time you spend going between one computer screen and another) on the TTC. A subset of those geeks blog, and one geek recently posted something about how terrible the TTC website was. TTC Chair Adam Giambrone responded (he's actually web savvy [cliché]) and it snowballed into a whole weekend afternoon with geeks suggesting solutions to the TTC. And TTC staff were there and paid attention. Weird.

I actually wanted to attend this thing, being a transit freak myself, but it happened to coincide with my first day of real work this year. Hopefully there'll be another one. God, I'm such a nerd.

Nerdcore II

Nerdcore Rising f. MC Frontalot

What better way to follow a trailer for a documentary on Nerdcore Hiphop, than with another trailer for a documentary on Nerdcore Hiphop.

MC Frontalot is arguably the founder of the Nerdcore genre. As such he is also one of it's best known proponents. From his Wikipedia entry:

Early days

Damian Hess began releasing music as "MC Frontalot" in 1999. His first successes came through Song Fight! where he was known to roll over the competition almost at will. Throughout his history at Song Fight! MC Frontalot has never lost a single competition, though he has entered only seven entries in the traditional fight style. He went on to make a song specifically about his winning ways in a competition titled "Romantic Cheapskate"; that song went on to get four times the votes of the rest of the competitors combined.

Nerdcore

In 2000 he released the song "Nerdcore Hiphop". From the first words spoken ("Initiating startup sequence") to the countless references to a proud geekish lifestyle and nerdly leanings ("Pish posh, man, I come as whack as I like!"), the song became an immediate hit in the geek and nerd communities. The rap subgenre of nerdcore hip hop, which had been around though unnamed beforehand, embraced the name and since has been expanding rapidly.

Many consider Frontalot, if not the founder of nerdcore, certainly the man who shone the torch on it. Front himself though is quick to point out the many artists who came before him and those which he considers his peers on his info page.

So there ya go. He is relevant to this whole Nerdcore thing I'm obsessing about. So relevant, in fact, that someone's doing a Nerdcore doc just on him, called Nerdcore Rising - The Movie. Well, OK, mostly on him. The site, which also features another trailer on the start page, mentions other artists and notables in the film, such as Al Yankovic, MC Chris, MC Lars, Jello Biafra. The synopsis ends thusly:

Nerdcore Rising will unlock the secret world of nerdcore - a first glimpse into a growing phenomenon where computers are the ultimate instrument, where the smart guys are cool, and where the geeks finally get the girls!

Geeks get the girls! Bring it on! Finally a film about what music is all about!

Terry Jones, The Mathematical Python?

The Story of 1

Okay, so, what am I doing mentioning math, of all things, in a week I've devoted to slack?

My father was an uncelebrated mathematical genius who worked in computer graphics before computer graphics was cool (we're talking the 60's and 70's here). I discovered sometime in High School that, although I was suitably bright, I had not inherited the math genes. Dad was very, very good at doing math (there are, apparently, bits of his old , 70's FORTRAN and COBOL code that are still in use in hydrographic mapping systems for Fisheries and Oceans Canada, all of which work beautifully) but not so good at explaining it (one piece of the aforementioned code, for calculating True North from Magnetic North, is completely incomprehensible to those without an extensive background in this particular kind of advanced and esoteric math, and as the government has very few such people now, if any, there is, at present no one who can understand his code well enough to write a more modern replacement). After a few head scratching sessions trying to follow his notes on the back of a used punchcard, I stopped asking for his help with my homework. To this day I still don't understand what a cosine is.

So why math now? Because it's Terry Jones, dumbass. The Monty Python Terry Jones. And he's explaining math from it's very beginnings, by following the story of the numeral 1. You see, the BBC has a history of finding very bright people who are good at explaining things in an entertaining way, and having them do documentaries that actually do just that. About all kinds of subjects. Just because it's interesting. From a Canadian perspective that's a surprising thing for a public broadcaster to do (with apologies to the CBC).

What this means is you can sit back for an hour on a Sunday afternoon (or whenever you read this) and watch a very funny man talk about math throughout history. And if anyone gives you grief, you can tell them you're learning something. And who knows, it might actually be true.

Now if only he'd do a doc on cosines.

He's The Computer Man

He's The Computer Man

In the spirit of slacking off after the holidays, here's one I know little about.
Apparently he's a computer man, and by computer, he means Mac. To each their own.

this was Dugg a while ago, and there's a thread about it here.

This guy seems to be the one that put it up, and claims to work for the White Hatted One. This is obviously from the mid 90's and there's probably some sort of ritual embarassment of one's employer involved, which I wholeheartedly support.

Just watch it. It's weird.

He Only Loves His Collider

This picture (courtesy Wikipedia) is believed to be the first picture ever placed on the web. The subjects are believed to be the first band on the web. Ladies, Gentlemen, and the rest of you, I present Les Horribles Cernettes.

Sometime around the beginning of the Gayer Nineties (as in much more gay than the Gay Nineties), a young woman working as a secretary at the CERN labs in Switzerland was upset because the long shifts her physicist boyfriend was on were making it difficult for them to get together. To get his attention, she enlisted the help of Silvano de Gennaro, an analyst in the Computer Science department at CERN to write "Collider" a song about the perils of loving a high energy physicist. They performed it at the CERN Hardronic Festival to get his attention. The song was a hit and is now acclaimed as "the national anthem of high energy physics", at least according to the band. Speaking of the band, it formed subsequently around de Gennaro and took the name as a backronym from the initials of CERN's largest experiment, the soon to (finally) be completed Large Hadron Collider.

So why all this history, and where's the video? Keep yer shirt on, pilgrim, and let me 'splain. I don't think I can properly explain the current state of internet video without talking about what has gone before. So, from time to time I will be dredging up some hoary old internet artifact, probably in some obscure format (speaking of which you'll need Realplayer for this one).

So back to history. The CERNettes were a hit with the hard physics community, were invited to perform at all manner of Phyisics conferences, Nobel prize parties, and the World'92 Expo in Seville. AT the '92 Hardronic Festival they were seen by a guy named Tim Berners-Lee, who was working on something called a World Wide Web, whatever that was. After the show he asked de Gennaro for a few scanned photos of "The CERN girls" to publish on his web thingie. She later said "I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim's now famous "info.cern.ch". How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!"

So now on to the video. What I've dug up is a music video for "Collider", from the band's site complete with CERNettes in prom dresses do-wopping their way around what might be the largest physics lab in the world. And if that's not hot I don't know what is. And the video is... Here.