Lego faces getting angrier

While clicking around the aforementioned Universal Construction Kit I also came across this article: apparently Lego faces have been getting angrier of the last fifty years. I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise, since when I was a kid none of the spaceships had guns (which simply meant that that was the first thing everyone changed on them) and now it seems like they are all meant for battle of some sort. What really impressed me was they way that the academic in this case seems to have made a respectable career out of playing with Lego - his website is more interesting than this particular story, I think.

How to connect Lego to K'Nex to Duplo to etc., etc.

With the Free Universal Construction Kit!


Basically, some enterprising artist collective with a fondness for dubious acronyms has created a set of 3D designs of components to connect a variety of kid's toys (most of which I haven't heard of, but which includes Lego, and that's the main thing). The aim is to allow people to print these out at home - you have to really go through the small print to find the admission that, unless you've got access to the really high end machines, the current crop of 3D printers can't print at a fine enough resolution to successfully connect your creation to, for example, Lego.
However, it is a brilliant idea.
I also particularly like the following rant from their website - particularly the idea of the commercial system enacted as an infinite series of micro-punishments for us, the humans:
"Consider the frustrating experience of purchasing a new computer (a Mac, say) and discovering that it will not play your aunt’s Windows Media video of your little cousins. Likewise, imagine your aunt’s corresponding annoyance when she finds that her PC will not play the Apple Quicktime video you sent her of your cats. This humiliating little episode isn’t an accident; it’s just a skirmish in a never-ending battle between giant commercial entities, played out, thousands of times every day, in exactly such micro-punishments to customers like you. If you’re well-informed, you may happen to know about VLC — a free, open-source video player, developed by independent hackers as a grassroots remedy for exactly this problem. Until the advent of ubiquitous 3D printing, software remedies like VLC weren’t readily available forhardware products, like toys. That’s changing."

Vibrato on a piano, anyone?

Coming soon on Kickstarter... a multi-touch piano. Although all pianos are multi-touch by definition. Sort of what you iPad piano app would like to be when it grows up.

 

On Cliche: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Song

My name is Matt, and I'm a novophiliac.

I think I always have been, right from when I was a kid. It's actually pretty common, although it's not something that's talked about very often: but I just love new stuff. The old is dull, bring me something shiny. Most of the time, I've got it pretty much under control, but there are a couple of areas where the desire for newness can be a bit of a problem, and one of them is music.

Modern life is saturated in pop music. The format - everybody knows it, three minutes of words and music - is part of the sea we swim in, completely unavoidable, like shopping trolleys, Ikea furniture and adverts for credit cards. However, unlike reading credit card adverts or going to Ikea, it's actually a lot of fun getting together with like-minded people and singing these songs; but when I see these songs written down there is a little part of me that starts to itch. I worry that if I mention it people will think me petty and small-minded, but sometimes it's hard to keep quiet. Oh, hell, I'm just going to come right out and say it.

 When they're written down, most pop lyrics are rubbish. Some of them don't even make sense.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I could be cleverer, so it's possible that there are subtle allusions I'm missing, or that I'm not picking up on some of the finer feelings expressed. And there are honourable exceptions (one of my favourites is Paul Simon, who writes some lovely stuff - I rather like this from his 'Rhythm of the Saints' album:  He says, hard times, I'm use to that / The speeding planet burns, I'm used to that/ My life's so common it disappears). But sometimes I see lyrics written down, and I just think, 'I'm sorry, what?' Call me a philistine, but anyone trying to shoehorn some meaning into, for example, "it's a terrible love that I'm walking with spiders" is stretching the bounds of credulity. Try it. I dare you.

 So, naturally, I start to brood. I mean, this is truly part of modern life, we listen to it all the time - and yet when you see it written down it is a grab-bag of cheap cliche, thrown together into a baffling list of non-sequiturs. How has this taken such  a hold on us? Presumably we must hear something we recognize, something that speaks to us. Is it just that we pick up the occasional phrase that rings true? Or perhaps (and I must have been in a dark mood when I considered this possibility) is it that our lives have that same structure - a series of semi-disconnected cliches?

But that's not the weirdest thing. The weirdest thing is that all these words are rammed into an even more cliched format. How many notes are there on the Western music scale? Thirteen? How many times can you reorganize thirteen notes? (That's one for the maths pedants). Well, okay, but once you've eliminated the hideously discordant options, and thought about the fact that most pop songs follow a startlingly strict recipe (four-four time, verse, chorus, middle eight) and considered how many pop songs are produced every week, you can see there's an awful lot of recycling going on. Which just brings me back to that central mystery: how is it that this endlessly regurgitated pap has managed to keep such a hold over us for so long?

I think the answer is in two parts. First of all, I've been terribly sniffy about cliche so far. But cliches are cliches for a reason. After all, what is a cliche, but an apt description of a common experience? In the endless stream of music and words that roll past us every minute of every day, they crop up time and again because they do a good job of describing something. So to hear them sung back to us should not be a surprise - and it should not be a surprise that we hear some echo of our own lives in them.
More importantly, though, is the fact that a song is not just words, and not just music, but the combination of the two. I read somewhere that humans are the only animals that can appreciate rhythm, which sounds wrong to me because it feels like this stuff goes deep into some pre-human, warmly mammalian part of the brain. A song is the best definition of synergy I can think of, because the whole is infinitely better than the sum of the (cliched, repetitive, sometimes nonsensical) parts. I have to confess, those Paul Simon lyrics I quoted earlier are from a climactic part of their track, right at the peak where the music has been building to and the trumpets kick in. So it's not surprising they've stuck in my head, is it?

So it's okay that there's nothing new under the sun. Maybe it speaks to me because I've been around a while, too. And if some of the expressions are a little careworn, well, maybe not all of my emotions are completely unique. Maybe that's the point.

I still fast-forward past Coldplay, though.