Review: SUNN O)))

My brief review of the Sunn O))) show from 9-28-09 in Athens GA:

The show started (not including the opener) with smoke filling the very small chapel, lights off, with a droning electronic loop playing a relatively low volume.

The lights came up and through the immensely thick smoke we sense hooded figures on stage, occasionally the fret of a guitar can be seen.

At this point, the band can barely be seen but in the air is an extremely heavy, low, and droning guitar. Oh and it’s skull-splittingly loud.

Finally, the cult, er.. band leader emerges at the front of the stage, shrouded in black robes, doing silly things with his hands, and chanting in Latin ? Hungarian ? Something.. Meanwhile, unbelievably loud and low guitar flattens our heads and makes our teeth chatter.

Still chanting (summoning?), a fourth member of the cult band can sort-of be seen, way in the back, holding a trombone. Yes, a trombone.

After the chanting stopped, more super droning, heavy, doom metal stylings. Then, out of nowhere, the Sunn god emerges.

(Picture Credit: Javier Villegas)

Yes, those are lasers on each of his fingers. Let me tell you, in a chapel full of smoke, lasers are awesome, especially when he shoots them at this Sun crown and they reflect all over the place, blinding the fanboys in the front row.

In case you’re curious, here are some resources. Sunn O))) is named after the brand of amplifiers, which seems to be out of production currently, though the brand is owned by Fender.

One of the main members is Stephen O’Malley, whose very interesting website can be found below:

Stephen O’Malley

My overall review is: two laser-thumbs up.

SOMA fab double gate toe clip, broken

SOMA fab double gate toe clip, broken, originally uploaded by brunoj.

Yesterday I split open my old SOMA fab toe cage, the drive side one. I’ve had the pair since around February of last year when I built the blue Raleigh. Recently they’ve been attached to GR9’s on my Steamroller and they’ve been good toe clips, no complaints. Well, maybe the tend to get bent too easily (the steel could be more substantial perhaps).

Anyway, I was in the middle of a flying cross-style mount and before I had the change to kick into the cages, I smashed the drive side one into a curb and POW, toast.

Now I’m going to put some old power grips on the GR9’s and see how that feels for a while. The powergrips will likely survive longer since they don’t stick out far enough for me to smash them during clumsy mounts.

Books… Movies..

Books:

1. Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (by Micheal Chabon)
2. Inherent Vice (by Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr.)
3. House of Suns (by Alastair Reynolds)
4. We Might as Well Win (the oh so humble autobiography of Johan Bruyneel mailed to me by Ryan and India)

Movies:

1. The Proposition (written? by Nick Cave)
2. Ponyo (Miyazaki playing at Cine now..)
3. The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog, also apprearing on my previous movie / book list on this blog. Incidentally, “Encounters at the Edge of the World” was awesome)
4. … something else I’ve forgotten now

A great bike quote

I still feel that varable gears are only for people over forty-five.
Isn’t it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailer?
We are getting soft…As for me, give me a fixed gear!

–Henri Desgrange, L’Équipe article of 1902

Super (Ultra)-powered links

• New York Times Article Skimmer: http://prototype.nytimes.com/gst/articleSkimmer/, a prototype article reader provided by the Times itself. This is the best way to read it online IMO
• Readability: Go here to retrieve your customized bookmarklet: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/, it’s a proxy that filters out all the crap (adds, graphics, pulsating flash applications, …) on a webpage you’re trying to read and makes the main text actually readable.
• Note in Reader: Link: Click on your shared items in Google Reader and look on the left hand sidebar for the bookmarklet you can drag to your bookmark bar. surf to a page you think is cool, click the bookmarklet, and the page gets shared along with your shared Google reader items, with a note and comments.

Strange river names

Since it’s flooding all over Georgia lately, rivers are in the spotlight. There are some strange rivers around here, for example (from the National Weather Service Flood Warning today)

TUCSAWHATCHEE CREEK NEAR HAWKINSVILLE (looser say whatCHEE ?)
OCMULGEE RIVER NEAR ABBEVILLE (find me another name that has a C followed by an M)
OCONEE RIVER NEAR PENFIELD (Oh-Cone-EE), see below
CHATTAHOOCHEE RIVER NEAR WHITESBURG (I just like the HOOCHEE part of this one)

(Roots on the North Oconee River)

Sage and group cohomology

I’ve been thinking about computing group cohomology by computer
recenty, I thought I’d point out some features of Sage (the leading
free and open-source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematics, etc..).

Specifically, with the 4.1.1 release there was added a package for
computing p-group cohomlogy. Below is the link and description.

Also, if you don’t know about Sage, you can download and install it
here: http://www.sagemath.org/

One nice side-effect of installing Sage is that you get a whole bunch
of other useful mathematics programs pre-compiled, configured, and
installed for you, like GAP (for doing group-theory, symbolic linear algebra, and much more).

————————

http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/SimonKing/Cohomology/

New optional package p_group_cohomology version 1.0.2 (Simon A. King,
David J. Green) #6491 — The package p_group_cohomology can compute the
cohomology ring of a group with coefficients in a finite field of
order p. Its features include:

* Compute the cohomology ring with coefficients in
for any finite p-group, in terms of a minimal generating set and a
minimal set of algebraic relations. We use Benson’s criterion to prove
the completeness of the ring structure.
* Compute depth, dimension, Poincare series and a-invariants of
the cohomology rings.
* Compute the nil radical.
* Construct induced homomorphisms.
* The package includes a list of cohomology rings for all groups
of order 64.
* With the package, the cohomology for all groups of order 128 and
for the Sylow 2-subgroup of the third Conway group (order 1024) was
computed for the first time. The result of these and many other
computations (e.g., all but 6 groups of order 243) is accessible in a
repository on sage.math.

Mushroom Forest

Mushroom Forest, originally uploaded by brunoj.

This is outside my office. There’s been almost 20 inches of rain in the last week here (in Athens GA). There has been 3-4 inches of standing water in my front yard for almost that long as well. It usually absorbs into the ground after each hard rain, but I think it’s so saturated already that the water just pools on top.

I’m bring a real camera with me tomorrow to get better pictures of this mushroom explosion.

—————-
Update 9/23/09: I went back today and the forest has been clear cut (or eaten by beavers).

Poll of the day!

Facebook, no facebook

I gave in and started a new facebook account, under cover. Now I’ve deleted it again because I realized it’s stupid to be on facebook as your dog. It’s too bad that facebook is such a good organizational tool especially when one has so many friends who only check facebook and never check their email.

What alternatives are there? Start a listserve / google or yahoo group? A meetup group? Mass text messages several times a week? That seems expensive. I also feel a little guilty for being the only one not on facebook, so why should everyone adapt to my preference?