Of Dust and Disks and Music for Animals
Etching by John Sloan from a 1938 edition of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.
The customers that are the easiest to provide for are the hobbyists – people who want to buy ten, 20, or maybe 50 floppy disks. However, my biggest customers — and the place where most of the money comes from — are the industrial users. These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That’s a huge consumer.
A wonderful little essay by Andy Crouch on praise songs and antiphons.
I’ve been listening to Nils Frahm’s piano music for years, and enjoying also his forays into electronica, but Music for Animals is something new: three hours of ambient music, made primarily with analog synthesizers. I think it’s just exceptional, and am eager to get to know it better.
Some recent posts on the blog:
- Thoughts on the Queen and her crown
- As deepfakes get better, which path will we take?
- “The wish to hear such baseness is degrading”
- Some thoughts on Hud, Pauline Kael, and art that’s ambivalent about its characters
- A meditation on two varieties of covid skepticism, drawing on an excellent essay by Ari Schulman
