Sunday, February 15, 2009

Gitar

I never been lonely....
cause me so cool
baby you ever possibility
play with me

mmmm
Iaaai never been clever
because need it never
baby you ever possibility
play it with me

gitar gitar gitar gitar
come to my buduar
gitar gitar gitar gitar
jump to my yaguar...

-Peter Nalitch

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Thermoacoustics and Carbon Nanotubes

Nanotechnologists are exploring new fields of sound design AKA Building a sound speaker has never been so easy and... hot?

Just yesterday, with my own eyes, I saw one of those - a sound speaker that doesn't have a vibrating membrane or any moving parts, is not bulky and complicated, and is so simple in design it would make you spasm with joy. Super thin Carbon Nanotubes, when stretched as a sheet, will emit sound while electric current is applied to them. Its thermoacoustics y'all! In layman's terms here's what happens: when you send electricity through these super tiny threads of carbon they release little bursts of heat into the air, agitating the air molecules and changing the air pressure around them - make acoustic vibrations that we discern with our ears. This has been long known in the world of physics and just recently a team of Chinese scientists published an article in Science that shows CNT (carbon nanotubes) sheets as ideal for this purpose.

So anyway, yes, this is super wild and amazing, and has been shown to me and I even have a video clip of it. Why am I so excited about this? Because when I first saw it I was truly amazed! I was looking at a clear plastic box with some ultra thin threads of wire stretched from one end to the other and that, connected to a radio through an amp, was playing a song by Outkast! The wire never vibrated or moved, but produced heat that i perceived as sound. Well, and I could also feel the heat on my hands when I moved them right over. It wasn't perfect sound reproduction, in fact it was far from perfect with more treble and not enough base, but still, that shit was FREAKY COOL. I'm sure with enough tweaking it will sound good. You can have sound come out of your t-shirt or your name card, better yet, your poster of Bob Marley! That's some mad gritty nano steez :)

Monday, February 2, 2009

A day at the farm

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Take 35W South if you're driving from Denton, then exit onto FM 2449 and go until the going presses hard across your hands, far far away you'll make a left down on Robinson and then another right and a left and you get there. Watch for kids and dogs and hens running everywhere because running one down would be unpleasant. As you step out your car get your camera and voice recorder and start to record thoughts every minute, quick laconic notes about where your heart and soul is, where the love hidden comes through yearning for hay and dirt. Where shadows whisper to your ear about who you after now. Follow while the time permits, follow words without origin.. Today is peace kitchen. Chris is there since early pre-dawn cooking and shining his skill, making the best food you'll find west of Mississippi on that particular day: fruit drinks, cast iron dishes delicious, veggies, roots, wheat grass and beets mmmm. Next comes the spiral hug which extracts the final wow of hypnotic suspension, we're all suspended on each other's hands, each other's breaths, spiraling into the abyss of our childhood memories, looking through the clouded mirror. Then I see a friend of mine is there and she jumps up and down the trampoline and shadows the light particles landing on my brow, its like when you go rowing in the deep river and decide to stay for a while in the middle, mad chillin on them flows. Upon closer inspection of the farm you realize that there's a presence the blue grey wolf, he shifts back and forth mystified by the rising fumes across the plateau. As you follow him within you, you discover a house built from sandbags and barbed wire, a welcoming round structure reminiscent of an upturned well, with water-air flowing around it in slow circles. You enter, and once you look up into the round hole on the top you immediately fall through and stumble up into the blue beyond, past leaves and branches, past oxygen, past the cold and many layers of history, straight into a spiraling stream of the time-space echo system. And it's in that unusual place that things start to happen, its there that you discover a new link - new you.
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