Helmintholog

The library also provides access to the complete Naxos music library. Everyone knows that Naxos recordings are not the best; they are also, in some sense, already available on eMusic. But these are full length streaming recordings of an extraordinary quantity of classical music. If you just want to know what someone is talking about when they refer to a particular piece of music, the answer is now almost immediate. That is quite astonishing, and a clear example of how the internet can really improve libraries.

I see that the library’s subscription runs out in spring next year, and must presumably be reviewed then by both sides. I hope very much that it continues. I certainly wouldn’t pay $25.00 a month for streamed music at 128kbps.

On a related note (ugh) close observers will not that the endlessly repeated story that the Dead allow other people to give away their music for free online is no longer exactly true. All of the high-quality recordings on the Internet music archive have been withdrawn: they can now only be streamed, which is not a pleasant experience. The live, paid for, concert downloads have also been shut off from Munck music.

I have written before about Essex Libraries’ group access to all sorts of online databases — the OED, the Grove Dictionary of Music, Who’s Who and a curiously rebranded version of Lexis-Nexis. But what I hadn’t realised until this moment was that the system also gives access to the NYT’s paywalled content. The Infotrac database finds and gives access to all of Paul Krugman’s columns and presumably everything else. This kind of aggregate payment seems to me the only way to navigate between Wikipedia on the one hand and the grotesque overpricing of authoritative journals like Nature. It will be the future for music, too.

On a related note, the “Pirate Party” in Sweden, which campaigns for legal file-sharing of copyrighted material, now has more members than the Greens. This is, in both cases, fewer than 8,000. But under PR, that can tranlate into a lot of power. The Greens have been a vital prop to the Social democrats for the last three years, along with the other party of silly gesture politics, the Left, formerly the Communist Left. The competition for the adolescent vote is hotting up. The Left wants to abolish homework. Is this more important than free pr0n forever? Only the voters can decide.

As part of moving the web site over, I had to move all of the mail accounts associated with it, and owrk out how the new place does its spam filtering. So the Darwinwars.com domain was exposed, for about 12 hours, to dictionary attack spam: the stuff that is sent to random christian names @ any particular domain. This has been entirely shut off for the last fifteen months: mail to any but five particular addresses @darwinwars.com has been silently and automatically deleted without even a bounce message. One might think this would discourage the peole who sent it. It did not. In the first ten hours in which the domain was open at its new address, it got 364 pieces of dictionary spam. The black hole is back in place now. But it does make one realise what hideous volumes of spam are howling around outside our safe tents all the time.

At least, I think this is a windup. David Chalmers, incensed that Dan Dennett is saying in interviews that he has admitted defeat in their almost interminable argument about qualia, claims that Dennett, “in private email” now embraces Cartesian dualism. If this were taking place in a wrestling ring, we could expect Michael Ruse to bound over the ropes at any moment.