Chaos Atlantis provides “sonification” of data from a buoy off the coast of California.  Tempo, pitch and other variables are controlled by wind speed, temperature, and other recordings by sensors on the buoy.  The artist has also “sonified” data of the Antarctic ice shelf, but cannot verify if that is worth listening to.
In more listenable news, I noticed this morning that the Western Soundscape Archive finally allows downloads, though they are in a low bitrate mp3 format or mp4.  I am listening to a recording of Beaver Dam Wash taken at night followed by a recording of frogs in Markworth State Forest and it is a wonderful playlist to leave going all the time, unlike music which causes some kind of strain after several hours. 
Also rediscovered RAAN’s “The Nacrasti” while trying to formulate the ideal nature-infused ambient playlist based on the recording “Liber Lelle” by Urna.  Thanks to Ritualistic Nature for providing good taste in music of this sort.

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Today I saw this article at Gates of Vienna which explains how due to liberal policies of first accepting asylum seekers and war refugees from Africa and then reunifying those people with their families is causing small Norwegian villages to be overrun with African children.  Apparently the humane way to reunite somebody with their family is not to send them back to their family (of over 20 children under the age of 18) but instead to bring the whole family to the one person who originally got refugee status…in Norway.  
Looking at the big picture of the problem, I think that bringing this guy and his family will not help Africa.  More people will breed to take the place of the children that left, eating their United Nations/Red Cross allotment of food back in Addis Ababa.  Wait ten years and there will be some other spark in the African powderkeg and they will all run around cutting off each other’s heads, peacekeepers will come, refugees will be sent to other countries, and the process will begin anew.
Meanwhile, back in Norway, the africanization of this country continues.  Somalian streetgangs rape and kill whether due to an innate African need for violence or just because they are bored without jobs or skills to get them.  Whatever the problem, The West is not fixing Africa, they are only ruining their own countries. 
The answer to the African problem is to stop sending aid so that they will start to figure out how to make food and shelter for themselves.  Some will die, but hopefully it will be the stupid ones.  Enough will die so that there will be an appropriate number left that the continent of Africa can feed, alleviating the problem of starvation and the critical mass of people necessary to have giant massacres. 
Problems with this plan include:
The massive die-off of large species that the survivors will most likely hunt down in African game preserves.  These species are the only thing on the continent worth saving.
Destabilization of areas with minerals and oil would also occur, not that this wouldn’t be solved with private armies as is currently the solution.
Finally, the death of many innocents.  Unfortunately, if you bring these innocents away from Africa, they will harbor the germ of violent idiotic behavior that made their own countries shit.  This can be seen in the microcosm of liberal San Francisco in the USA, where the local city government established quotas of black people to live in apartment buildings.  Well-reasoned mothers brought their children from the ghettos, thinking that their children could be reared in a liberal and peaceful environment and would grow up to be successful.  Unfortunately, they only ended up bringing the ghetto with them.  Their male children grew into the same criminal element their mothers were trying to save them from. 
On a worldwide platform, the same process can be seen in France, Norway, Denmark, Germany, and the USA.  People trying to escape the problem merely bring the problem with them, just like the ever widening circles of death around the plagues in the middle ages.  The answer to me is clear: Shut down refugee programs involving Africa and Africans.  Put all the people in charge of these programs in a new line of work: Repatriating those who have unsuccessfully integrated into the cultures of the countries they came to.  Let the successful people who don’t cause problems stay for a few more years, but to help Africa they ought to be sent back too.  The brain drain of Africa is no doubt part of its problem.  If you force the capable to stay in their own shit countries maybe they could lead the populations of their respective shit countries to fix their own problems.

One shouldn’t complain too shrilly about something that is free but spotify is getting a lot of credit for being some great cloud application that is getting rid of the need for downloading and pirating music.  Nobody is calling them out for something that sucks about them so I am going to do it.  Almost all windows and gui programs respect the convention of control+w, alt+f4 etc and quit when you hit these keyboard buttons and the program is in focus.  For some reason spotify developers think that they are exempt from this expectation.  Or more likely the board of directors told them to ignore this.  I wonder if they know that this is the same behavior exhibited by spyware and malware for about the last fifteen years?  I immediately don’t trust a program if I can’t quickly exit it by hitting one of these keyboard combinations.  At least they weren’t brazen enough to pop up a dialog asking me if I was sure I wanted to exit the program.   I’m not sure why people like this more than grooveshark which I find to be superior.

[SOLVED] How to pipe ‘find’ output to ffmpeg – Ubuntu Forums

Google is your friend as unhelpful people like to say but today that friend was indifferent to my needs: change 35 aac files to mp4 files.  The reason I wanted to do this is that most music players won’t read aac files and none of them will let you tag them including the vaunted foobar2000. 
It is an admitted personality flaw that I would rather spend two hours figuring out how to losslessly convert between file formats for an album I might only listen to a number of twenty times over the course of my life but so be it: I figured out how to do this linux bullshit and it might come in handy some day in another application.  Google had lots of info for people in windows and I might have been able to get it to work in a windows emulator but fuck that I need to get my feet wet in this bash piping shit.  So I searched for “ubuntu pipe find” in google because I knew what I wanted to do probably required what linux nerds call “piping” after the find command.  This means that you have your computer find a bunch of files and “pipe” each result from find into another command.  This was necessary because MP4Box, the program that puts aac files into mp4 containers (mp4 containers can have audio tags), does not allow recursive or batch processing.  If it does, the manual is so incomprehensible to normal humans not wearing coke bottle glasses that this was not apparent.  In this case, I am piping the results of the find command into the MP4Box command which will batch process a bunch of aac files into mp4 files.  It would have taken about ten minutes to do this one at a time but now you can profit from my wasted time (which I truly hate myself for spending this way).
First you have to write a bash script.  As nearly as I can tell this is like a halfassed programming language.  I don’t know what this bash script means, I reverse engineered it from this post.  It worked first try, which is unusual for linux and computers in general.  Following is the script:
#!/bin/bash

if [ -d "${1}" ] ; then
  cd “${1}” && for f in *.aac; do MP4Box -add “$f” “${f%.aac}.mp4″; done
fi

Save that as “aactomp4″ and put it in your home directory, like /home/yourusername/.
The command to type is “find /directorywithaac/ -type d -exec ~/aactomp4 “{}” \;” without quotation marks.  Now you have lossless conversion of aac to mp4 and can have replaygain and tags. 

Today I got home from some cheese bullshit and decided to look up information on resuscitating these fucking furbies my girlfriend bought a week ago.  I thought all my rechargeable batteries were waning but I now have working furbies that prove the other furbies are dead.  Anyway, the cdv laptop is having some sata seek errors (most likely gf knocked it on the floor and hard drive is about to die) so I gave up using it and decided to use desktop.  Then noticed that man command wouldn’t work.  Couldn’t read manuals (wanted to figure out how to wrap aac files in mp4 or m4a containers so that I can tag the fuckers). 
I got this crazy error and then realized that every manual entry spit this error out.  man ls: lseek error.  Fuck.  Then I read the internet where I learned that I may be the only person with ubuntu having this problem.  People with more esoteric installations like Suse and Redhat report that the command mandb -c works, and indeed it did.  I don’t know how my installation corrupted its man database but I suspect that was the problem. 
Sometimes you have to get away from computers and their inherent problem-making.  My parents give me all of their national geographics, and they are quality reading material.  Some aspects of the magazine bother me though.  They seem to be the pinnacle of photography, but so many of their photos are purposely blurred and crappy looking to me.  For a magazine with such a huge emphasis on photography, I would like better.  Their artistic director needs to get past their blurry photo phase because everybody should be over that after having a film camera for at most a few months. 
Second is their bleeding heart liberal bullshit.  In this article the author talks about this African volcano that is about to explode.  Apparently in the last 35 years it has sent rivers of molten rock down twice onto the town of Goma below it, destroying 14,000 homes and killing hundreds.  One million people live in this town.  Granted, 35 years in sub-saharan Africa probably represents multiple generations and with the child armies and what not there is probably not a lot of opportunity for older generations to tell the younger ones about how this giant fucking volcano in the backyard killed all the neighbors thirty years ago.  At the same time, I ask myself why these people live next to this volcano.  They know it is going to blow up.  “According to Tedesco, there is no question the volcano will erupt again, potentially transforming Goma into a modern Pompeii.  “Goma,” he says, “is the most dangerous city in the world.”"
So this city is like Pompeii, except the people of Pompeii didn’t have seismologists walking around town talking about how the whole place would probably be submerged in lava in the next decade.  The Greeks were sensible people.  They invented fucking democracy.  They wouldn’t live next to a volcano they knew would come down on them. 
I remember in middle school being shown these films in science class about Mt. St. Helens, and about this guy who owned a hotel and refused to be evacuated, preferring to stay in his hotel.  His body was never found.  The films all made it sound sad for some reason.  These Gomans are even more idiotic than the hotel owner because they probably don’t even have multi-story buildings.  They can move their pallet shack to any location in Africa and receive U.N. grain and dance around with Bono; wherever they want!  Why do they remain in the most dangerous city in the world?  Almost as importantly, why doesn’t National Geographic ask some of these urban youths this question?