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Portishead – Third

15 Dec

Third

I’m currently listening to Portishead’s third album, bluntly named Third. It’s been out for a year, but I only decided to pick it up today. It’s unmistakeably Portishead, but a vast departure from the 90′s trip-hop of their first two albums. Many of the same ingredients are there, spindly guitars, electronics, and brooding, trembling vocals. But the album spans a variety of styles and is at times noisy and dissonant. It’s a much more experimental sound than the cool, easy one Portishead made famous 15 years ago.

 
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Posted in Entertainment

 

State Street Electric Railway

13 Dec

One of the geekier things that I do in my spare time is design railway projects in a very amateur way, using Google Maps. One that I came up with about a month ago was a revived streetcar system serving the downtown area of my hometown: Santa Barbara, California.

In earlier times, the city of Santa Barbara did have an electric streetcar running up the main thoroughfare of State Street from the waterfront to the El Encanto Hotel, located up in the foothills in a neighborhood called the Riviera. Like many local railways in America were, it was dismantled sometime in the first half of the Twentieth Century when the conventional wisdom was that rubber tires were the ultimate future of transportation. The error of those ways has been realized, however, and several rail projects are being planned around the country.

Here’s a map of my idea:

View State Streetcar in a larger map

Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Transport

 

Devdutt Pattanaik: East vs. West

12 Dec

Today I watched a TED talk called East vs. West — the myths that justify by Devdutt Pattanaik. It was really interesting in how it explained that most of the world is very rigid and absolutist in the way it approaches life and business, while India is very loose and relativist. Though Mr. Pattanaik doesn’t answer the question of which way is better, he did seem to be rather glorifying the Indian way. He speaks with a great bit of humor, though, and it was very entertaining.

 
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Posted in Talks

 

Welcome

08 Dec

You’ve stumbled upon the blog of a one Andrew Hawkins, welcome.

I’m starting this “real” WordPress-based blog after years of using LiveJournal, kind of on a whim really. I don’t fool myself into thinking that my daily life is very interesting for others to read about, so here I will likely post things that I find amusing, musings or rants about the current state of world affairs, photos from my travels, or other such things.

I’m still playing around with the WordPress platform, so expect rapid changes as things get going.

 
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Posted in General

 
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