Learn more and try it from home

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Try it out

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Coding is so much more enjoyable now.

Instructions follow. This only works on a mac because it relies on the built in afplay tool.

Step 1
Create a ~/.claude/alerts/ folder and load it up with your audio samples.
I strongly recommend this set of 8 bill-wurtz-alerts composed by the inimitable Bill Wurtz.

Step 2
Ask Claude to integreate this hook into your ~/.claude/settings.json

"hooks": {
  "Notification": [
    {
      "hooks": [
        {
          "type": "command",
          "command": "files=(~/.claude/alerts/*.mp3);afplay \"${files[RANDOM % ${#files[@]}]}\""
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
},

ª If you’ve never heard of Bill Wurtz before, start with his famous history of Japan video, and I’ll see you in 8 minutes or when your head explodes, whichever comes first.

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Some 30 years after those tapes were recorded, I digitized all 120 hours into a custom-built and deeply skeuomorphic cassette player type interface. Tap any cassette label to crack open a time capsule of early 1990’s rave, ambient dub, ethno techno, acid house, and second-wave industrial music. Each cassette includes Stephen’s J-card liner notes (when he provided them) as well as a randomly generated webpage that emulates Stephen’s long-gone MKZDK.org website.

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Erik Davis interviewed McKenna several times in this period, and the following audio is not comprehensive. Davis also posted death-related highlights from his interview on the Nettime listserv.

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The effect is accomplished by pitch-bending (or time-stretching) multiple layers of a loop played back at half/double time. As the extreme layer fades out, a new layer fades in to replace it. For details, see Dan Stowell’s research, which expands on Jean-Claude Risset’s original work.

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0h00m begins with breaks
0h50m moves into bass music & drum and bass
1h30m is for funky breaks and disco house
3h00m is acid and funky techno
3h50m some psytrance (!)
4h15m finally we wrap up with a little more bass music and euphoric house

Stream below or download the super high quality MP3 (580MB).

When a mix spans this many genres, I believe the proper spirit animal is the mutant octopus.

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“Everything obeys a secret music” sample from Joshua Schrei’s podcast The Emerald, Episode “All of My Lessons Come in the Form of a Sound“

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Do beings with longer lifespans experience frequencies even slower than sound? Greenland sharks live for 250-500 years. Do they experience the daily tides and movements of ocean currents as a low hum? Does a 3,000-year-old bristlecone pine feel the freeze of each winter as a buzz?

One of the lowest frequencies you will ever perceive in your lifetime is arriving soon. At 36 octaves beneath A0 (the lowest note on a grand piano), you can’t hear this 0.000000000396 Hz frequency. Instead, you will see it as a flash in the night sky.

To prepare for this event, learn how to find the Northern Crown constellation, west of Hercules. In that neighborhood, spinning darkly, is T Coronae Borealis, a binary system normally invisible to us at some 3,000 light years away. But within the next few months in 2024, and for one week only, this system will go nova, furiously blazing to light. A star will appear where there was none before. And one week later, it will disappear as suddenly as it appeared, going dark for another 80 years.

NASA visualization of a white dwarf + red giant binary system

This every-80-years blinking light comes to us courtesy of a binary star system comprised of a white dwarf star locked in orbit with a red giant. The hydrogen on the ancient red giant is gradually stripped away by its neighboring cold white dwarf. Once enough hydrogen accumulates on the dwarf, it spontaneously ignites with the force of a thermonuclear explosion we can witness for a full week. How long will this continue? There’s probably enough hydrogen in that binary system to continue this slow flashing for a hundred thousand years.

If you were to speed up that flashing to 27.5 Hz (A0 on a grand piano), that low hum would last for just one minute. I wonder what kinds of beings feel these ultra-low frequencies.

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I was demoing my company’s Internet music software at NAMM – the annual music business convention in Las Vegas. We were given a spare day, so I rented a car and drove as close as I could to Area 51. At the time, I was a compulsive listener to Art Bell’s radio show, so I knew I had to at least visit the famous black mailbox and stop for a drink at the “little A’Le’Inn”. While I was there I pulled out my minidisc recorder and interviewed the locals about their experiences living out in this wasteland by the famously secretive military base.

Today, 26 years later, I’m releasing “Area 51”, the audio-poem I assembled that year.

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We don’t get total solar eclipses simply because there are three balls in the sky that occasionally line up. We get solar eclipses because of an astronomically incredible coincidence that probably doesn’t happen anywhere else in our galaxy, even if we assume there are millions of planets and tens of millions of moons.

Here’s how I made the scale of the improbability meaningful for myself:

First, I started off by finding the biggest ball in my home: a 54cm diameter yoga ball. This became my standard of measurement. One yoga ball equals one Sun. Thus, one inch equals 66,666km.

Now, I had to find something to represent the Earth. At this scale, the Earth’s diameter would be 5mm, exactly the size of a juniper tree berry (abundant here in New Mexico.) If you don’t know what a juniper berry is, imagine a middling to small blueberry.

Lastly, I had to find something to represent the size of the Moon. After discounting coriander seeds (too big) and poppy seeds (too small) I found that a mustard seed is a perfect fit for the requisite 1.25mm.

So now we have our three balls to place in the sky: A giant yoga ball, a juniper berry, and a mustard seed.

Let’s put together our model of the Solar System. We place the yoga ball (Sun) on the ground. Now we walk 56 meters away and hold our mustard seed (the Moon) 15 cm away from our nose. At our eye level, we’ve got the juniper berry (Earth).

A total solar eclipse is only possible because from the vantage point of the juniper berry, the mustard seed (at 15 cm) appears to be the EXACT SAME SIZE as the yoga ball (56 meters away).

That is a honking crazy coincidence. And in fact, it’s a short lived coincidence that also happens to coincide with this period on Earth in which humans are around to witness it. In about 600 million years, there won’t be any more total solar eclipses. Every year, the Moon pulls away from us tiniest bit. Remember how your mustard seed (Moon) is just 15 cm away from the juniper berry (Earth)? In 600 million years, the mustard seed will have drifted another 7cm away from the juniper berry. This minuscule deviation is sufficient such that the mustard seed’s profile will no longer cover up the yoga ball.

So, what are the chances of this happening? Specifically: what are the chances that for any given star system, a planet’s moon will be the exact right size and distance from its central star to completely eclipse its central star? I don’t have the math skills to calculate that out, but I would guess that it’s pretty damn unlikely and almost certainly unique within our galaxy. How lucky that life evolved here so we could witness it!

How do we explain this statistical unlikelihood? My only suspicion is an unsettling one. To me this bewildering coincidence is the best evidence we have that what we call reality is in fact a simulation being run by computers. I imagine that one of the programmers of our reality thought to itself, “Let’s make life more interesting and beautiful for our simulated Earthlings by providing them with a spectacular total solar eclipse every 18 months. All we have to do is make a moon that’s exactly the right size and distance from the Sun, and make sure that civilization is happening during the brief window in which the Moon stays in just the right place.” It’s an unsettling concept, but a serious one first proposed by Hans Moravec.

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This website redesign involved consolidating content that had previously sprawled across two different websites into one unified site. Gorgeous imagery provided by the client made it easy to design expansive pages whose design reflected the open skies and reflective opportunities offered by the Foundation.

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If you pay attention to the moon in the masthead, it reflects the current phase of the moon. Here it is on a day when the full moon was rising:

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The copyright symbol doesn’t give you special protection. In the United States, when you create a painting/novel/song/illustration and bring it into the world, it is automatically copyrighted, whether or not you choose put a symbol on it. If someone uses your work without your permission, you can demand that Google remove it from their search results, have a lawyer send them a cease and desist, etc.

Even so, the © symbol is still worth including, because it unambiguously lets other people know, “in case you were wondering if this was in the public domain, no, it’s not. You need my permission to reproduce this.”

However if you anticipate both needing to and willing to defend your copyright by suing someone for infringement in federal court, then you must register your copyright (which costs money) within 90 days of releasing the work.

Personally, I think it’s a pretty high bar to justify spending the money and time to register a copyright. I’d have to look at my creation and answer BOTH of these questions with a “yes”:

1. I can see how lots of folks are going to be tempted to use my work without permission
2. I’m absolutely willing to spend the lawyer fees to try to get each infringer to cough up $750 (or more) for using my work without permission.

Copyright registration is about preparing to battle infringers in court to make them pay money, even if they weren’t making any money by using your work themselves.

This is why everyone should be very cautious about using images found on the web to illustrate their web pages. Photo licensing companies like Getty have lawyers whose sole job it is to seek out and financially punish individuals for using their images without permission, even for personal and profitless projects. I’ve had several clients pay $1,500 claims for copyright infringement just because they decorated a blog post with an image they found using Google images. In one really unfortunate case, a client was fundraising for Palestinians and had to pay a huge fine after including a newspaper photograph of miserable Palestinians on their website appeal.

To decorate this blog post, I found this image which was released by opensource.com under a Creative Commons “attribution, share alike” license.

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