Do you want to contribute to science? The guys from Google had another great idea (via Google weblog). Everybody who has a computer and an internet connection can participate in solving scientific problems. Most of the time when you use your computer it is actually idle, doing nothing. Why not let it perform some calculations for a good cause? The thing is called Google Compute and is activated in the toolbar which I advise you to install in case you haven't done so yet. The Google toolbar is a small application which lets you enter Google search queries immediately, gives you information (backlinks, link popularity, related pages, Google directory category, cached page, translation into English) on the current site you visit and lets you perform searches which go directly to the first result (four-leaf clover) or searches of the current site only. It is the most useful surfing tool I know. The current nonprofit project your computer could support concerns the geometric structure of proteins. The detailed FAQ on Google Compute should answer all questions.

P.S. The Google toolbar four-leaf clover search which goes directly to the first result without opening the Google result page is extremely helpful. It is the equivalent to the "I'm feeling lucky" button on the Google homepage.Instead of typing long URLs or navigating in my complex favourites categories I now often type one or two search words which have the page I want to surf to as first result. Example: to go to josh blog I just type "kortbein" and then hit the clover button. This brings me directly to the site. Embarrassing but true: the fastest way I know to arrive on my weblog is to search for "sex blog" but "alex fritz" works as well.

• David Raposa does not like the new Neil Young either and even started a new thread on ILM. The first six songs I listened to (see post further below) were embarrassing enough not to delve any further.
• Which rock chick are you? Catherine (me too BTW) is
  Which Rock Chick Are You?

Today's philosophical quotation "America is Rome reincarnate. Like the Roman empire, the American empire is vastly powerful and unfathomably corrupt. Like Rome, America imposes her civilisation upon an ungrateful world. Like Rome, America needs bread, circuses and philosopher-statesmen to forestall and yet to hasten her demise." Lou Marinoff --The Philosophers' Magazine, Summer 1998

Let's hope that America won't finish like Rome. Or would you be looking forward to the Middle Ages?

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen. I am going to bed now.

• Giant Sand: Cover Magazine. Metacritic comprises seven reviews to a disappointing score of 59/100. Adding up album ratings by many reviewers always favours the mainstream, the average, the established. The top two albums last year according to Metacritic were the latest release by Bob Dylan and the Strokes album. That's ridiculous. Who cares about these scores?
• Nowadays it's all about new words for the same old shit: Electroclash is the synth-pop for the zero years (via stevie nixed).
• Rinôçérôse: "Imagine Joy Division set to a disco beat..." (NME). "People waiting for a new My Bloody Valentine album might want to check out Rinoceros" (Request). Hype or not? Just an average French electronic band I suppose.
• Great Bob Dylan resource and linklog by fans: Expecting Rain: Love and Theft review #234. Oh God who reads all these reviews? (long MeFi thread)
• Music is a virus. The English speaking Blogger CD Swap Burn, Baby Burn! is closed due to overwhelming participation (210 music swappers) but there is a German one now: CD-Tauschring. The theme is summer music again but you only have to burn three copies of your summer faves and you obviously only receive three different summer CDs burnt by other participants. I think it's worth it. Other burning communities: CD mix of the month club and Midsummernight's Burn.
• Inofficial Google weblog with interesting news and infos concerning our favourite search engine. Latest entry on the advanced Google search operators like "cache:", "link:", "related:", "spell:", "site:" and "inurl:". Google started with this research paper: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (Mefi thread)

Are you jealous? If you have some spare time (25-30 minutes if you are fast) and stamina you can answer the 65 multiple-choice questions (sorry but this is a serious maybe even scientific exercise) of the Jealousy test. In fact some of those questions consist of several sub-questions so that there are probably close to a 100 questions altogether! My lowest score was a 16/100 in jealous behaviour and my highest was 28/100 concerning dependency issues. I am not really a jealous guy.

Lost in cyberspace

• Sonic Youth article in the LA New Times on their status as indie rock's foremost band (via stevie nixed blog). On their site they announce that they have finished their new album with Jim O'Rourke which is due June 6th. I am less excited than ten years ago but I feel that they can still have a surprise in store.
• Great long artist-by-artist account by Jeff LeVine from lost for life on the four days of the All Tomorrow's Parties stretch at UCLA. Sonic Youth had chosen the bands and closed the festival on Sunday. Cat Power was out of herself again.
• Music blog by Mike with a wide spectrum from prog to indie via alt.country: troubled diva. Mike wrote on 40 episodes of his life during the last 40 days before his 40th birthday, a great feat I'd like to repeat. Luckily I have another year to think about it: 40 in 40 days project
• Hydragenic is a very well written relatively new blog by someone who fights with nicotine as well and who choose "what doesn't destroy me, makes me stronger" as motto (all three via wherever you are)
• Stevie Nixed succinct listening log
• Another fine music blog oriented towards indie: e-moo-la-tion
• Tiny mixtapes like the latest A Silver Mt Zion... (8.9)
• Ryan Adams the ingenious rock'n roll chamaelon in a short interview with the NME (via badger). What to think of this: he just covered the Strokes album as a blues record. Soon Ryan will have more albums in his drawer than will ever be released during his lifetime. At least he is not too full of himself: he labelled his output to date as "a bunch of singer/songwriter crap".
• Encyclopedia of Percussion via ILM

Neil Young: Are You Passionate? Neil Young's new album is coming out in Germany April 8th but you can already listen to it here at the buzztone site (via stevie nixed). You can skip the first song. With my slow connection at home I only had the time to listen to five more songs. The second is ok but not great, the third one rubbish again, number four is a nice bluesy ballad, number five is "Let's Roll", the famous 9/11 tribute song on the flight which crashed near Philadelphia. The last song I listened to was the title song which is noodling into no man's land. I hope the title of the record is not meant in the way that you have to be passionate to buy this Neil Young album. I have got most of them. Obviously I really did not appreciate someone who wrote on the ILM thread Neil not so Young that the lyrics of "Cortez the Killer", which is one of my favourite rock songs of all-time were dumb. I'd say they are naive which was quite normal in those utopian times in between the hippies and the punks. Though as Ned pointed out in the thread the starting line "He came dancing across the water" is probably one of the most powerful beginnings of a song in pop history.

Mysterons After having followed the ILM thread Portishead - are we fickle or did they deserve to become dated so quickly? and having read Josh's recent post on them I relistened to "Dummy" as well. I was sure that the record would not have the same impact as in 1994 when I heard "Roads" on MTV and was completely overwhelmed by the tristesse and Verlorenheit (forlornness) emanating from that voice, the trembling synthesizer and the slow beats. I hadn't listened to it for a long time and back in 1994 I definitely had listened to it too often so that it had become one of those loved-to-death records. But I had a nice surprise. Especially the first track "Mysterons" with the extremely addictive slow drum machine rhythm which has a drum roll at the end did it for me. Already the start of that song is gorgeous. A guitar plays some ascending notes and the synthie sounds like a quacking duck. First the duck is quite shy and not too loud and then it bursts into some serious quacking which comes from scratching I guess. The song is then dominated by a low synthie sound layer. After a while the theremin (apparently only a patch on a minimoog according to this thread) joins in and produces some long beautiful sounds. They seem to come from the sky and remind me of the whoosh of a fast-blowing wind. Absolutely otherworldly. At the end of that song the drumming becomes very shaky and rolls like a thunder in slow motion. The less poetic technical term for this is reverb I think.

Give me a reason to love you. Give me a reason to be a woman. (Portishead - Glory Box)

• A German weblog update tracker: Blogscout. You can register your German weblog there.
• Another weblog tracker: Blogtracker
• Automatic classification and summary of news: Columbia Newsblaster (via perlentaucher)
• On average we laugh 18 times per day. Want to know more about the repeated emission of 75 milliseconds long vowel-like notes? Telegraph: Laughter? It's a funny business (via a&l daily)
• On the worldly aberrations of a zen roshi. The passage I liked most was about the purchase of a 7 series BMW for the roshi: "A smaller car, wouldn't allow him to sit in zazen posture while driving." New York Review of Books: Zen & the Art of Success (via a&l daily)

Blogger resources Blogger is the most widespread tool to write weblogs on the net. Some useful less known resources concerning the use of and news on Blogger are:

• the Blogger FAQ blog. A Blogger FAQ must be a blog. That makes sense. The syntax of Blogger is explained in detail by Phil Ringnalda. The last post on template tags is from Sunday.
• Status.Blogger.Com is a blog by Evan Williams on the latest news and developments at Blogger. If something is going wrong the answer why is usually posted there.
• Philringnalda.com is on more general weblog subjects like PHP, pinging, CSS, weblog hosting etc. On the site there is also another less often updated blog bloggertech with more technical posts on javascript, archives, comments etc. Phil Ringnalda is always worth a read.
• the Blogger Pro FAQ is on Blogger's premium blog service. Phil Ringnalda is the author once again.
• Evhead is Evan Williams' (Ev.), who is the CEO of Pyra Labs (the creators of Blogger) personal weblog. Occasionally he writes about weblogging issues. A must read.