Vinyl Pressing Quotes

Should you want to listen to Variations, try hearing it from a good-condition original 1978 vinyl pressing. Because the sides are relatively short, the sound quality is amazing.

Because you know, truth is, I don’t give a shit about some scratched-up vinyl Rahsaan Kirk, Ornette Coleman sound-like-a-goose-trying-to-fuck-a-bicycle bootleg pressing from the rare Paris concert of 1967. I spend five minutes listening to that, I’m like to want to slap somebody. I

An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople. In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups: 1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes. This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

inbox. It was from Ogden Morrow. The subject line read “We Can Dance If We Want To.” There was no text in the body of the e-mail. Just a file attachment—an invitation to one of the most exclusive gatherings in the OASIS: Ogden Morrow’s birthday party. In the real world, Morrow almost never made public appearances, and in the OASIS, he came out of hiding only once a year, to host this event. The invitation featured a photo of Morrow’s world-famous avatar, the Great and Powerful Og. The gray-bearded wizard was hunched over an elaborate DJ mixing board, one headphone pressed to his ear, biting his lower lip in auditory ecstasy as his fingers scratched ancient vinyl on a set of silver turntables. His record crate bore a DON’T PANIC sticker and an anti-Sixer logo—a yellow number six with a red circle-and-slash over it. The text at the bottom read Ogden Morrow’s ’80s Dance Party in celebration of his 73rd birthday! Tonight—10pm OST at the Distracted Globe ADMIT ONE I was flabbergasted. Ogden Morrow had actually taken the time to invite me to his birthday party. It felt like the greatest honor I’d ever received. I called Art3mis, and she confirmed that she’d received the same e-mail. She said she couldn’t pass up an invitation from Og himself

Sophie Bushwick/Popular Science 7/16-inch inner diameter ribbed hose 5/16-inch wood dowel 1/4-inch outer diameter vinyl tubing Small hose clamps Five 1/4-inch hose barbs x 1/4-inch male threaded adapters Five 1/4-inch hose barbs x 1/4-inch female threaded adapters Electrical tape Yellow Teflon thread tape Several long balloons (type 350Q) 1-inch x 6-inch board or other support Fluidic control board Robot Hand Instructions 1. Insert the 5/16-inch dowel into the ribbed hose to hold it straight. Use the center punch to carefully punch holes between each rib in a line along the seam of the hose. Flip the hose over and repeat along other seam. (Photo ) 2. Use the drill press to drill a hole at each center-punched location between the hose ribs, leaving the dowel in place to provide support. It is best to drill the holes on each side of the hose separately, rather than drill straight through. When you are done you should have a neat line of holes on each side of the ribbed hose. These holes will act as a stress relief and prevent the hose from splitting when it is flexed. (Photo ) 3. Remove the dowel and cut the hose into five 3-inch fingers with the utility knife. For each finger, use the utility knife to very carefully cut between each rib from the hole on one side to the hole on the other. Leave the first two ribs on each end uncut. Cut through one side of the hose only. It is critical that you do not nick the far side of the stress relief holes or you will reduce the reliability of the finger dramatically. Now the hose can flex in one direction more than in the opposite direction. (Photo ) 4. Insert another piece of dowel into one of the long balloons. Use it to gently feed the balloon into one of the fingers until the end of the balloon sticks out enough to grab it. Remove the dowel, and fold about 1/4-inch of the balloon tip over the rim of the hose. Secure it by wrapping a piece of electrical tape all the way around the tip of the finger. (Photo ) 5. Now feed the dowel back inside the finger from the non-taped end, but on the outside of the balloon. Insert it until it is just within two ribs of the tip of the finger. Fill the tip of the finger with hot glue, allow to cool, and then carefully remove the dowel. 6. Use electrical tape over the end of the finger, covering the hot-glued end. Another wrap of electrical tape over this will seal the end of the finger. (Photo ) 7. Cut the open end of the balloon away, leaving about an inch beyond the end of the finger. Stretch the open end of the balloon out and over the end of the finger. (Photo ) 8. Repeat steps 4 through 7 for each finger. (Photo ) 9. Use the yellow Teflon tape to wrap the threads on each of the male hose barbs. Thread each male hose barb onto each female hose barb and tighten firmly with the crescent wrenches. Then use more yellow Teflon tape and wrap each female hose barb several times around. The ends of these hose barbs should fit snugly into the open ends of each finger. (Photo ) 10. Use the small hose clamps to affix each finger onto the Teflon wrapped ends of the five hose barbs. (Photo ) 11. Now use hot glue to firmly attach each finger to the end of the 1x6-inch board (or other support) to form a hand. Finally, attach a length of 1/4-inch O.D. vinyl hose to the open hose barb on each finger. (Photo ) 12. Now the hand is complete--but it still needs a control system. Check out Harvard’s Soft Robotics Toolkit for inspiration, or just follow the instructions below. Building The

Three creations of terrible alchemy sit crammed into a booth in the all-night Denny’s, pressed against the red vinyl seats, looking at their menus.