frey

Right. After pissing around for far too long I have finally changed the way the spam blocker works. I figure spammers will have a script that just posts faux comments to wp-comments-post.php, so I’ve added an extra boolean value that will only come up if someone comes to the actual website to post a comment.

We’ll see if it works… edit: crap! It doesn’t work. Bugger.

I have been mucking around with BEAM robotics, solar-powered musical sculptures, and my Wiring board — working along with my friend Dan (Anaesthesia Associates/Elbow vs Knee/Intimacy and In.yer.face) a pair of vision-enabled robots (built from hacked RC tanks) are taking shape. I have also bought a Mac 250 Entour moving head intelligent light and an open-source USB-DMX512 box to control it with, so expect the Frey live show to start having exciting lighting.

Philosophy at the moment seems to be emphasising hardware. I’m going to retain the computer for listening and incoming sound analysis, as well as vision and lighting control (wip), but I’ll be looking to move more to hardware-based musical sound generation, because the scope for creating interesting sound in a live situation from first principles is much higher. The plan is to control home-made analog gear by home-made interface to the computer — so I can combine the sequencing and high-level logic possibilities of digital with the sound, tangibility, and baseline unpredictability of analog. Wish me luck.

Traditional music composition is suffering, unfortunately. I’m not feeling inspired to write at all, and what little creative musical energy I have is being spent on my school project, which is currently not going very well. Will let you know when the situation changes (it will). Stay warm and beautiful in the meantime, darling ones.

This is a response I made to this post over on WorldChanging:

The article linked to on Bt cotton (under the ‘rip-mix-and-burn’ link) isn’t really specific to genetic engineering — indeed, take out the phrase ‘genetic engineering’ from the article and what you’re left with is, in essence, “new cotton breed doesn’t live up to marketed expectations – farmers upset”.

Consider that ‘conventional’ crop breeding methods involve encouraging and/or inducing the kind of random mutations in genetic material that happen in nature anyway — in other words, indirectly engineering the genetic material. The purpose of breeding is and always has been to introduce new genetic code, be it by crossbreeding existing ‘natural’ plants to encourage ‘natural’ mutation from sunlight or the background radiation of the earth or just mistakes in the cell division process; be it inducing these mutations using uv light or x-rays or alpha/beta/gamma radiation; or be it genetic engineering.

I think there is a place for genetic engineering in a Bright Green future, but not the way it is currently being used. Most of the problems associated with genetic engineering at present are political, not scientific: they are to do with the politics of massive-scale argicultural corporations, not the science itself.

Imagine if community organisations were able to breed GE plants tailored for their specific local needs and problems, and then were able to grow these seeds organically (in the artificial fertiliser, pesticide and herbicide free sense of the word). No corporate argicultural hegemony, no terminator genes, no patents or intellectual property — just seeds to address specific local agricultural issues in specific local ways, grown in accordance with local practise and with the long-term interests of the community at large firmly in mind.

(Ironically, the main reason Big Agriculture seem to be the only folks into GE is that the process of testing and approval required by current law is such that only Big Agriculture can afford to do it; what’s more, because of the pervasive idea that GE bred crops cannot be classed as ‘organic’ (even though seed produced using GE methods can be organically grown) there are political reasons to reject GE seed. The reason some poor countries’ governments (governments, mind) have rejected GE food relief is because they don’t want to reduce the prices their own crops sell for in the markets of rich Europeans.)

For anyone interested in thinking about GE from a non-polarised perspective, I can very much recommend a book I read earlier this year called Mendel in the Kitchen (which you can read in its entirety online here, for free).