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A fair and balanced compendium of spontaneous exclamations and excited utterances, with 22 entries on the front page. And, now, Home of the YATSASS™ Reports Yet Another True Story About Stupid Studies: • Breathing Bus Exhaust is Stressful • Depressed People May Take Drugs To Feel Better • Smart healthy people choose foods more wisely than stupid drunks • Stressed Out Moms Think Their Babies Are Annoying • People Are Groggy When They Wake Up • Airport Screeners Probably Can't Stop Spread of SARS & Flu • Study on Studies Yields Disappointment! • Lengthy Study with No Findings! A perfect YATSASS! • Making Fun Of Fat Kids Depresses Them • Drinking Highly Sugared Beverages Can Make You Fat! • Americans Prefer Safe & Effective Drugs to Unproven and Dangerous Ones • Study Shows Poor & Homeless Drink More Malt Liquor • Study on People in Studies Yields Predictable Answers, But Also Raises New Questions • Women Don't Like Getting Up to Feed the Newborn While Their Husbands Sleep Like Babies • Sperm Levels Drop With Frequent Ejaculation • People Who Don't Screw Around Get Less Clap • Swimming Can Cause Fluid Build-Up in Lungs • People Who Eat A Proper Diet are Healthier and Thinner • People who don't wet their pants feel better than people who do • Maybe Left Handed Winter Babies have More Brain Cancer, Maybe Not... • People who had nose jobs and people who didn't both like the same kind of noses • People pass more gas when they are active • Kids who spend too much time reading will get headaches • People who get drunk think others are more attractive than they do when they're sober In the old days, My thoughts were more coherent, and I could string together whole sequences of actual paragraphs! Those essays can be found here for those so interested.
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Wednesday, February 01, 2006 Posted 8:50 AM
  Find Music You'll Love - Pandora Anybody remember Firefly? It was a way cool project run by MIT back in the mid 90's during the first first Internet boom (not to be confused with any of the subsquent so-called first Internet booms.) Developed by Pattie Maes (who, as she skis, dives, is beautiful, and brilliant is the perfect woman), Firefly was a Software Agent that helped you find more of what you like. To briefly explain, you could type in Ramones and then Mozart and it would say Try Dave Edmunds or Kate Bush. You could type in The Grand Illusion, The Harder They Come and Eraserhead and it would return Go see Repo Man or Rude Boy. Firefly was truly brilliant and truly creepy all at once. Its supposed mechanism was not looking at similarities in what you liked, but in looking for items in the lists of people who liked things you liked and suggesting things they listed that you had not. Like all good things on the Internet during the first, first boom, it was free and it went away. Fast forward a dozen years, enter Pandora from the Music Genome Project. Similar idea, different methodology, awesome result. Pandora asks you to name a recording artist or composition. It then plays (yes, streaming high quality free music) songs with similar musical qualities. Real live musicians have catalogued almost half a million records on the basis of things like vocal harmony, rhythmic syncopation, acoustic rhythm piano, vocal centric aesthetics, mixed minor & major tonality... wtf? Completely different methodology - although both methodologies are beyond the ken of mortals, but similar sublime result. I am hearing music that I have always loved, but have never heard! You just need to go and try it out. Create your own radio station that plays only what you like! My radio station WRAF, is a little too heavy on emotional female vocal-centric aesthetic, but I'll fix that in a couple minutes. Yeah, you keep telling Pandora what you like and don't like with a TIVO like thumbs system, or just type in more songs or artists that you like, and your personal station keeps getting better and better. It feels good to rave. Go get your own while it's free and it's still here! © 2002-2008 Rob Falk, All Rights Reserved. All Wrongs Denied. Your mileage won't vary; it will be less. | Subscribe to Rants!
  
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