Susanne Sundfor - The Silicone Veil

Susanne Sundfor – The Silicone Veil

The first thing that stands out on this track is Susanne’s amazing voice. The instrumental is subdued and makes a lot of room for her to unfold. And unfold she does, showing magnificent strength and range. But don’t worry, there’s much more that this song has to offer besides the convincing vocal performance (which is among the best I’ve heard in years).

Synth veils will soon join the singer and lead us into the lively portion of the melody. It’s not long until we’re treated with a beautiful orchestral arrangement. My only gripe with the composition is the ending, which is not in such a good harmony with the rest of the melody.

The live performance is beautiful in its own right and I highly recommend watching it.

Kids and Screens

Kids and Screens

There’s been a lot of research in the past years regarding exposing children to screens (of various kinds). The “when and how much TV to watch” debate has been raging on for decades (with clear results but with even harder to apply rules, especially as a lot of people seem to not care about the facts).

However, the new screens available to children today, namely mobile phones, pads, portable game consoles and other such interactive entertainment devices are an order of magnitude more powerful when it comes to influencing brain development.

Alarm bells should start ringing when some of the most famous people dealing with technology try to protect their children from these sort of devices.

Dub Fx - Everythinks A Ripple

Dub Fx – Love Someone

As much as I could possibly love the music here, the lyrics will always outshine it. And that’s saying quite a bit, because the music is excellent. This song spoils the listener with a feast of thumping percussion and sweeping, deep sound curtains. But the message is wise, powerful and important. You’ll need more than open ears to truly enjoy this sound. You’ll need an open mind.

Dub FX is an expert in creating electronica / drum’n’bass music using verbal sound effects. The video version of this song (which I’ve linked below) is made purely with verbal sound effects. The other versions feature a combination of verbal sound effects and synthetized textures. Both versions are amazing.

Machine Learning and Our Future

Machine Learning and Our Future

Machine Learning is all the rage these days. Be it computer vision, speech recognition, pattern matching or high-speed decisional capabilities, this century is the century of software. Like all technological revolutions, there’s potential for miracles and catastrophes.

Large corporations have started to realize that Machine Learning is a way to prevent smaller competitors from threatening them. This is because small companies can’t (yet) afford the huge infrastructure and Big Data investments that ML requires. It’s not surprising then that Microsoft, Google, FaceBook and others have open-sourced ML platforms, trying to attract developers and smaller companies to their ecosystems.

This post will touch on but a few of the changes we can expect in the coming decades thanks to the upcoming advances in Machine Learning. Looking at our history, we can see how the industrial revolution has supercharged our progress as a species. I believe that the Machine Learning revolution will make the industrial revolution seem like a snail in slow motion. This is both hopeful and scary.

The Polish Ambassador - Ecozoic

The Polish Ambassador – Live Inside A Dream (feat. Ayla Nereo)

It starts airy and carefree but the melody doesn’t waste a second to make it clear that despite Ayla’s soothing voice, this is still a groovy electronica song. Call it psybient, call it tribal electronica, call it whatever you want, this is one solid creation.

Like all songs from The Polish Ambassador’s “Ecozoic” album, this one ends with an outro that is in the same time fitting and seems like it’s coming from another story. “Ecozoic” is a massive album that is filled to the brim with all manner of sound experiments.

Love

Painful Facts about Pornography

When asked, “How do you know a guy likes you?,” an 8th grade girl replied: “He still wants to talk to you after you [give him oral sex].” A male high school student said to a girl: “If you [give me oral sex] I’ll give you a kiss.” Girls are expected to provide sex acts for tokens of affection, and are coached through it by porn-taught boys. A 15-year-old girl said she didn’t enjoy sex at all, but that getting it out of the way quickly was the only way her boyfriend would stop pressuring her and watch a movie.

This was a quote from the article below. The topic of pornography has been debated a gazillion times but there is now a renewed discussion in the light of what is quickly becoming a torrent of painful social studies. These findings keep popping up increasingly often. Through statistics and surveys, we keep finding a direct connection between pornography and dismal changes in the attitude men have towards women. Were women emancipated only to wake up in an age where their freedom is transformed in a choice of what sort of sex object they want to be?

Petrol Money Poison

Petrol Money Poison

One of the most unfortunate things that can happen to human beings is social disconnection. Depression often causes this. But in today’s article I’ll focus on wealth. A root cause of social disconnection due to wealth is when an unprepared individual attains great wealth. In this situation “unprepared” means not ready to emotionally and rationally adapt to a sudden change of situation. The moral compass of such individuals is vulnerable. In time, many of them end up behaving in ways that would seem unacceptable if they could ask their own younger selves.

Social disconnection also occurs in children born in a situation where vast wealth has already disconnected the entire immediate social group (friends & family) from the way “normal” people live. By “normal people” I mean the statistical average for the standard of living when looking at the entire planet. Children born in socially disconnected families (and this includes royalty) grow and develop using completely different life standards. They don’t even get to opt out of this until much later and sometimes never, something that will in the future probably be considered akin to abuse through deprivation of opportunity (similar to what children in poor, unstable families experience with parents that have a history of substance abuse).

In this post, I’m focusing on a certain social group: petrol-rich citizens from the Middle East. Here’s what that triggered me to write this piece, an article that tells about how Qatar’s billionaires have migrated to the richest areas of the most expensive city (property-wise) in Europe.