Just another little blog

Third Person Lurkin - The Nameless City (from Dusted Wax Kingdom net label)

2010-09-24T11:31:00.006Z

Who said that free stuff are not excellent?

Check out this album of unexpected quality from the Bulgarian net label Dusted Wax Kingdom. (Very "Mo Wax"-ish name, I know).

English producer Tommy Marshall (a.k.a. Marshall Artist) ventured into trip hop and the result is very cool mixture of downtempo beats, familiar samples and a great genre aesthetic.

I am quickly loving the DJ Cam-ish, The Silver Key and The Ice Sheet which elegantly uses a sample from "Knowtoryus - The Revenge Of The Bomberclad Joint", yeap the one remixed by Kruder & Dorfmeister. And that is just because I need to listen to it some more...

To be honest, he won me from track 1 (Mountain Top Temples), which could easily feature in any Bonobo album!

I am sure it will win you too.

Get this great creative commons release before he signs with a big label!

Structural Biology Rap

2010-06-10T10:38:00.001Z

Now I know what I can strive for!!!

Top 10 goals in Aris History

2009-06-18T13:28:00.001Z

10:Αγαπητός Αμπελάς ολυμπιακός - ΑΡΗΣ 2004-05 2-1
9:Sergio Koke Αρης - Αστέρας Τρίπολης 2008-09 1-1
8:Marco Aurelio Αρης - Αστέρας Τρίπολης 2007-08 2-0
7:Γιώργος Κολτσίδας Αρης - πάοκ 2000-01 4-0
6:Μπουγιουκλης Hapoel Beer Sheva - Αρης 1993-94 1-2
5:Paolo Andrioli Servette - Aρης 1999-2000 0-2
4:Peral Javito Zaragoza - Αρης 2007-08 2-1
3:Γιώργος Σεμερτζίδης Perugia - Αρης 1978-79 0-3 (!!!)
2:Χρήστος Βελώνης Χαϊδάρι - Αρης 2005-06 1-2
1:Μανώλης Κεραμιδάς Αρης - πάοκ 1970-71 1-0

The Cutler: The new name from the "Pork Recordings" continuation

2009-03-17T15:32:00.006Z

The Cutler is the electronica/downtempo collaboration of Steve Cobby (Fila Brazillia's one half) & David ‘Porky’ Brennand (founder of legendary Pork Recordings).

Formed in 2006, their debut release came in 2007 on the electronica label Steel Tiger Records (based in Hull/Sheffield and established by Cobby with Sim Lister (member of Sheffield band Chakk and now, with Steve Cobby, is in The Heights of Abraham and J*S*T*A*R*S) with the single Stiletto.

The full length album Cutler was released on 7 July 2008 and is everything I've hoped for based on the band's credentials.

Tracklisting:
01 Scimitar (3:56) [vocals] - Sarah Johns
02 Stiletto (3:43)
03 Cinquedea (5:11)
04 Gladius (4:19)
05 Tyrfing (4:58)
06 Cleaver (4:38) [vocals] - Alex Crowfoot
07 Pickaxe (5:51)
08 Claymore (3:41)
09 Hacksaw (7:23)
10 Épée (8:58) [vocals] - Sarah Johns
11 Chandrahas (5:03)
12 Unagisaki Hocho (4:56)

Rob da Bank (BBC Radio 1) >>> "Beautiful! Lovin' The Cutler. Ace to hear some proper downtempo music being made again."

DJ Jazzy L (Jazzy Lounge, USA) >>> "A quality new product to showcase; after the pleasure of playlisting previous Cobby projects I am enjoying The Cutler on the Jazzy radio lounge!"

James Mountain (Ninja Tune) >>> "Lovely!"

Jean-Francois Fecteau (Le Vestibule, Canada) >>> "I always was a big fan of everything Steve Cobby has done and this is great! A pleasure for me to present it to my listeners!"

MmeFly (BeatConcious) >>> "Awesome Steel Tiger music!"

Daniel Pe acoba (www.ibizaglobalradio.com) >>> "Super stuff! I like The Cutler a lot! Will start to play it today on daily radioshow 'La Captura Del Sonido'."

Ben Gomori (Data Transmission) >>> "Lush mellow grooves - after listening to the album, we can confirm that it's damn good. Really great summery pool music."

Ben Hogwood (musicOMH) >>> "The breezy approach The Cutler take to their music reflects well in a record that's a subtle delight, funky and airy for moments where you don't care much about anything."

Matt Annis (Editor iDJ) >>> "An eccentric musical adventure."

Back to the roots? I think so... Tosca - No Hassle

2009-02-17T11:36:00.009Z

New stuff from one half (plus Rupert Huber) of the legendary uber-cool duo Kruder & Dorfmeister. Tosca's 5th release after Opera (1997), Suzuki (2000), Dehli9 (2003) and J.A.C. (2005), excluding their various self & friends remix projects [Fuck Dub Remixes (1997), Chocolate Elvis Dubs (1999), Suzuki in Dub (2000), Different Tastes of Honey (2001) and Souvenirs (2006)] will keep fans of the Viennese downtempo scene satisfied for a while.

Tracklisting:

01. My First
02. Elitsa
03. Springer
04. Birthday
05. Oysters In May
06. Joe Si Ha
07. Elektra Bregenz
08. Fondue
09. Rosa
10. Raymundo
11. Mrs. Bongo
12. No Hassle

The mysterious Clutchy Hopkins

2008-10-31T10:37:00.012Z

The freshest thing in downtempo electronica. Highly original and with strong jazz and hip hop influences. Some of the tracks are outstanding and highly addictive! For example track 2 from the 2005 debute. When I first listened to that album I got the same feelings as when I discovered Bonobo's Animal Magic. In a genre that nowdays is not as original and groundbreaking as it used to be this is something that surely is worth of your attention!

Clutchy Hopkins - The Life Of Clutchy Hopkins (Crate Digler - 2005)

Tracklisting:
1 3:06 (3:08)
2 3:02 (3:01)
3 4:08 (4:10)
4 3:25 (3:26)
5 2:15 (2:16)
6 3:11 (3:15)
7 2:07 (2:08)
8 3:26 (3:27)
9 3:34 (3:35)
10 3:05 (3:06)
11 3:14 (3:15)
12 3:24 (3:24)

MF Doom Meets Clutchy Hopkins (Crate Digler -2006)

Tracklisting:
1 Change The Beat (3:26)
2 My Favorite Ladies (3:44)
3 Melody (2:41)
4 Impending Doom (3:39)
5 Vomitspit (3:19)
6 Air (3:22)

1- from Viktor Vaughn's album Vaudeville Villain
2- from MF Doom's My Favourite Ladies / All Outta Ale 12"
3- from Blendcrafters Melody (Remix) 12"
4- from Daedelus' album Exquisite Corpse; mixed with track 9 from TLoCH
5- from MF Doom's album MM..Food (CD/LP)
6- from Dabrye's album Two/Three (CD/LP); mixed with track 12 from TLoCH

Shawn Lee and Clutchy Hopkins - Clutch Of The Tiger (Ubiquity Records - 2008)

Tracklisting:
1 Full Moon (3:36)
2 Two Steps Back (3:58)
3 Things Change (3:26)
4 Bill Blows It (5:29)
Flute - Tracy Wannomae, Trumpet - Todd Simon
5 So Easily, So Naturally (3:40)
6 Leon Me (3:35)
7 Dollar Short (4:21)
Flute, Clarinet [Bass] - Tracy Wannomae, Trumpet, Flugelhorn - Todd Simon
8 When I Was Young (3:52)
9 Across The Pond (3:47)
10 Bad Influence (3:05)
11 Till Next Time (4:32)
Flute, Saxophone - Andy Ross (2), Trumpet - Dominic Glover
12 Indian Burn (4:41)

Clutchy Hopkins - Walking Backwards (Ubiquity Records – 2008)

Tracklisting:
1 Sound Of The Ghost
2 Song For Wolfie
Producer [Additional] - Shawn Lee
3 Love Of A Woman
Lyrics By, Vocals - Darondo
4 3rd Element
5 Para Los Ninos
6 Horny Tickle
Horns [Arrangement And Playing] - Todd Simon
7 Percy On The One
8 Rocktober
9 Alla Oscar
10 Good Omen
11 Swap Meet Me At The Corner
12 Last Time For Your Mind

Clutchy Hopkins and Misled Children – Peoples Market - (Porter Records – 2008)

Tracklisting:
1 Untitled (3:25)
2 Untitled (4:56)
3 Untitled (1:52)
4 Untitled (3:04)
5 Untitled (2:55)
6 Untitled (1:18)
7 Untitled (3:36)
8 Untitled (5:01)
9 Untitled (1:15)
10 Untitled (3:42)
11 Untitled (3:01)
12 Untitled (1:40)
13 Untitled (3:26)
14 Untitled (3:38)

Season for change: Aris - Olympiakos 1-0

2008-10-31T09:59:00.003Z

Aris' first great result in a season that hasn't started well.

Hopefully we will see a change for the better, starting with this great win against olympiakos.

Piri Reis and the Hapgood Hypotheses: From the archives of the Ottoman Empire an intriguing and irresistible mystery...

2008-07-28T09:32:00.011Z

Piri Reis and the Hapgood Hypotheses

From the archives of the Ottoman Empire an intriguing—and irresistible—mystery...

Written by Paul F. Hoye and Paul Lunde

In 1929, scholars working in the archives of the Ottoman Empire in Turkey's Topkapi Palace Museum made an exciting discovery: a section of an early 16th-century Ottoman map based in part, apparently, on an original chart drawn or used by Christopher Columbus and showing his historic discoveries in the New World. The map, signed by an Ottoman captain named Piri Reis, was dated 1513, just 21 years after Columbus discovered America.

This find - disclosed two years later in Holland by German Orientalist Paul Kahle - astonished the 18th Congress of Orientalists. For if a notation on the map were true - "The coasts and islands on this map are taken from Colombo's map" - the Turkish map might finally settle a centuries-old debate: did Columbus know he had found a new world? Or did he die thinking he had found a new route to China?

As it turned out, the map did not settle the question. To the contrary, it has raised new and far more perplexing questions, and, in recent years, has sparked a rash of quasi-scientific and popular theories and hypotheses that attempt to answer those questions. Some of those theories, to be sure, verge on the ludicrous. But others, even when startling, have raised fascinating and sometimes disturbing possibilities.

Those developments, however, came later. In 1931, historians of cartography had quite enough to do trying to cope with the immediate questions posed by the discovery in Istanbul. Was the Piri Reis map authentic? If so, how did it get into the hands of Christian Spain's feared Muslim rivals? And just who, incidentally, was this Piri Reis?

According to subsequent research, the story of the Piri Reis map began in 1501, just nine years after Columbus discovered the New World, when Kemal Reis, a captain in the Ottoman fleet, captured seven ships off the coast of Spain, interrogated the crews and discovered that one man had sailed with Columbus on his great voyages of discovery. More important, in an age when maps were secret and maritime information invaluable, the sailor had in his possession a map of the New World drawn by Columbus himself. Kemal Reis seized the map, kept it and subsequently willed it to his nephew Piri Reis, also an Ottoman naval captain, and a cartographer.

In 1511, the story goes on, Piri Reis began to draw a new map of the world which was to incorporate all of the recent Spanish and Portuguese discoveries. To do so, he used about 20 source maps. Among them, he wrote, were eight maps of the world done in the time of Alexander the Great (the fourth century B.C.), an Arab map of India, four Portuguese maps of the Indian Ocean and China, and his uncle Kemal's bequest, "a map drawn by Colombo in the western region." He did not, however, say what the other six source maps were.

In Gallipoli, where he temporarily retired, Piri Reis reduced his source maps to a single scale - a difficult task in those days - and spent three years producing his map. When it was finished he added this inscription: "The author of this is the humble Piri ibn Hajji Muhammad, known as the nephew of Kemal Reis, in the town of Gallipoli in the Holy Month of Muharram of the year 919 [A.D. 1513]." (See Aramco World, July-August 1979)

This map, presented to Sultan Selim, seems to have helped the career of Piri Reis. He was made an admiral. But it was not Piri Reis' only contribution to cartography. In 1521 he also wrote a mariner's guide to the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean - which was to interest the cartographers trying to authenticate the map found in Istanbul. Called Kitab-i Bahriye ("Book of the Mariner," or "The Naval Handbook"), this book contained an account of the, discovery of America by Columbus that was virtually identical to a long inscription on the left hand side of the map (see page 19) found in the archives of Istanbul.

The map found in Istanbul, therefore, is authentic. Although research has never disclosed what the six unlisted sources were, or further identified the eight "done in the time of Alexander the Great," there is no doubt that one source was a map drawn or used by Christopher Columbus himself.

There is little doubt, either, that both Piri Reis' map and book were valuable to the Ottoman Empire. Focusing, as they both did, on the discoveries by Spanish and Portuguese mariners, they probably alerted the sultan to the growing threat to Ottoman power posed by European exploration of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Gulf.

Ironically, Piri Reis' book - in which he urged Suleiman the Magnificent to drive the Portuguese out of the Red Sea and the Gulf - also led to his death. Put in command of a fleet to drive the Portuguese out of the Gulf in 1551, he lost most of his ships and, although in his 80's, was executed. By 1929 both Piri Reis and his map had been virtually forgotten.

Even then the enthusiasm aroused by the map was short. Once the initial excitement over the discovery had faded, relatively few historians of cartography, with the exception of Kahle, paid much attention to the map or tried seriously to determine exactly what it proved - even with regard to Columbus. Imago Mundi, for example, one of the more important journals devoted to the history of cartography, has never run a full-length article on the Piri Reis map.

In 1954, however, a Harvard-trained teacher of the history of science named Charles Hapgood assigned his class at Keene State College in New Hampshire to the task of examining the Piri Reis map more closely. Starting with little knowledge of the subject - and, says Professor Hapgood emphatically, "no preconceived notions" - he and his students eventually spent seven years on the project. During that time, Hapgood says, "we discarded hundreds of hypotheses" before arriving at those advanced in a book called Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.

Two years later those hypotheses became unexpectedly famous when they were incorporated in the controversial best-seller Chariots of the Gods. Written by Erich von Daniken, Chariots went into at least 18 English editions and was translated into numerous other languages. Presented as fact, and written in a pseudo-scientific tone, Chariots described and briefly examined what the author called "the unsolved mysteries of the past." Among the "unsolved mysteries," von Daniken said, was the appearance on the Piri Reis map of information that 16th-century cartographers could not possibly have known. Citing Hapgood, von Daniken said that the map showed the coast of Antarctica, not discovered for centuries afterward, and certain mountains in Antarctica that were not discovered until modern sonar made it possible to locate them beneath the ice cap.

For the author - if not for his legions of critics - it was obvious how Piri Reis got such information: astronauts from another planet had provided it on maps. The astronauts, he claimed, had made numerous appearances on earth before and during the period of recorded history, and left traces all over the world.

Despite inaccuracies in describing what in some cases are mysteries - and in citing Hapgood - and despite frequently debatable logic, Chariots sold millions of copies. It also persuaded thousands of readers - brought up during a period of intense public interest in "flying saucers" and "UFCs" - that its premises were valid. Chariots, indeed, attracted such attention that BBC Television filmed and showed a two-part refutation of the book.

The BBC, moreover, was not alone; most serious observers scorned the book. Yet one of the points raised by Hapgood and quoted by von Daniken went stubbornly unanswered: how did Piri Reis know about Antarctica and its mountains in the 16th century, if, in fact, his map did show them?

One answer, in science-fiction form, was put forth by author Allan W. Eckert in a ponderous 1977 novel called The Hab Theory in which the Ottoman admiral's map was a focal point of the plot and in which other, apparently true, phenomena were described in great detail. Among them was the undeniable fact that mammoths - extinct for 18,000 years - were found in Siberia embedded in the permafrost, the frozen subsoil of Arctic and Antarctic regions.

According to Eckert, the mammoths were "quick-frozen" rather the way orange juice is today, thus explaining why the meat was still edible. Furthermore, some mammoths were found in an upright position with undigested grasses in their stomachs - facts confirmed last July by a spokesman at the British Museum. The grasses, moreover, were tropical grasses.

To Eckert, this suggested that Siberia was once a tropical region and that the shift in climate from tropic to arctic was very swift: in a matter or hours.

This occurred, The Hab Theory goes on, because every 6,000 years or so the polar regions accumulate so much ice that the earth begins to wobble on its axis. At a critical point the wobble becomes so bad that the earth capsizes, leaving the polar regions at the equator and the equatorial regions at the poles. The earth's normal rotation then resumes until the new polar regions accumulate enough ice to cause another wobble and another cataclysm.

This process, the book continues, explains what characters in the book call scientific mysteries. One is that the ancient Berbers, in what is now the Sahara, left cave paintings showing people swimming and sailing in "a vast body of water." This, according to The Hab Theory, was a sea created when the earth capsized and the polar ice cap, now close to the equator, melted, creating a large sea - now reduced to today's Lake Chad.

Even for science fiction, it is a startling idea. Yet it is not entirely without a basis in fact. In the New Scientist issue of May 17, 1979, two professors from Cardiff and Oxford Universities in Britain were quoted as saying that the last ice age may have come on quite swiftly and cited the mammoths in Siberia as proof. "Their excellent state of preservation is also evidence that they were quickly frozen after death," the article said.

Science fiction, of course, is as much fiction as science. Still, at the heart of The Hab Theory there were some ascertainable facts. The Piri Reis map does exist, there were mammoths preserved in Siberian permafrost, and cave paintings of some sort have been found in the Sahara, though whether they show "vast seas" or not could not be determined. Even more to the point, there is a real Hab theory. In fact, according to Professor Hapgood, the real Hab theory - as distinct from Eckerfs science-fiction treatment - was what launched him on his first studies of Antarctic "mysteries" and led, in a curious chain of events, to the Piri Reis map.

The real Hab theory was first proposed by an engineer specializing in centrifugal force: the late Hugh Auchincloss Brown, whose initials are the same as the fictional proponent of Eckerfs book. In a book called Cataclysms of the Earth, Brown suggested what is basically the same theory presented in the novel: that massive accumulation of ice at the poles, especially the South Pole, caused the earth to wobble on its axis and then, about every 7,000 years, to "careen." Like the novel, it has some basis in fact. A spokesman at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England-who says "careening" is impossible - confirmed last month that the ice does accumulate at the South Pole in massive quantities: 2,000 billion tons a year, enough to build a wall 10 inches thick and half a mile high from New York to California.

For Charles Hapgood in New Hampshire, Brown's theory was fascinating. "I spent about 10 years looking into it," he said in a recent interview, "until mathematical calculations proved it impossible." But as his research had raised certain questions in his own mind, Hapgood continued to work on the subject and eventually came up with his own theory, which he outlined in Earth's Shifting Crust (Pantheon Books, New York, 1958). Essentially, he said, the earth's crust "slips" over its core, thus periodically changing the positions of the poles.

Aware that ideas that deviate from traditional scientific beliefs get short shrift in the scientific community - as did, for instance, Wegener's theory of continental drift, now widely accepted - Hapgood took the precaution of submitting his manuscript to a scientist whose views were generally thought to be acceptable: Albert Einstein. Though neither cartographer nor geographer, Einstein read the manuscript, agreed to write the introduction and said Hapgood's ideas "electrified" him. He also said that if Hapgood's theory "continued to prove itself" it would be "of great importance to everything that is related to the history of the earth's surface."

Meanwhile, Hapgood had heard of the Piri Reis map. A U. S. Navy cartographer, engineer and ancient-map specialist - Captain Arlington H. Mallery - had come across a copy of the map, studied it and said publicly that the map seemed to show Antarctica - unknown at the time the map was drawn - and that, furthermore, the coast seemed to have been mapped at a time when it was free of ice, an apparent impossibility. Furthermore, Mallery's opinions had been endorsed by the directors of the astronomical observatories at Boston College and Georgetown University, Daniel Linehan and Francis Heyden.

To Hapgood, already caught up in the subject of Antarctica, the questions raised by Mallery and the Piri Reis map were an irresistible challenge. As Antarctica was not discovered until 1820 - 307 years after Piri Reis drew his map - how could Piri Reis possibly have included Antarctica - if he did? And, since Antarctica had, presumably, been covered with ice for millennia, why would he have shown it without ice? And why does the notation on the map read as follows: "There is no trace of cultivation in this country. Everything is desolate, and big snakes are said to be there. For this reason the Portuguese did not land on these shores, which are said to be very hot"?

Hapgood thought that investigation of these ideas would be an interesting challenge for his students. Accordingly, he presented it to them as a class project and began to work with them himself.

As the investigation began, Hapgood and his students immediately came across several puzzling facts. One was that, on the Piri Reis map, the mountains in the western region of what is obviously South America seemed to be the Andes. But since Magellan did not find a way around the continent, through the strait named after him, until 1520 - seven years after the map was finished - and since Pizarro did not sight the Andes until 1527 -14 years afterwards - how could Piri Reis have known about the Andes? The answer, obviously, was that one of Piri Reis' 20-odd source maps must have shown them.

But which map? Hapgood concluded it was probably one of the eight maps of the world done in the time of Alexander the Great, or one of the six other "unknown" maps - which meant someone had not only known of the Americas, but had mapped them at least 1,700 years before Columbus.

It was possible, of course, that the mountains were not - and were not supposed to be - the Andes at all. Still, the map did show them roughly in the right place, and included a drawing of a creature that Kahle had tentatively identified as a llama. As the llama is exclusive to the Andes and was not known in Europe in 1513, when Piri Reis finished his map, Hapgood concluded that the mountains were indeed the Andes.

As the study went on, the Hapgood team noticed, toward the south, what looked very much like the Falkland Islands - even though the Falklands were not discovered until 1592 - and reasoned that if they were the Falklands, the land south of them would almost surely be the coast of Queen Maud Land - Antarctica - not discovered until more than three centuries after the Piri Reis map.

As it was this feature that had fascinated Hapgood originally, his team made a particularly careful comparison of "Antarctica" on the Piri Reis map with Antarctica on a modern globe. They concluded that there was "a striking similarity" between the Piri Reis coastline and the Queen Maud Land coast. Later, after a series of complicated calculations, they also came to believe that the Piri Reis map, in that area, was accurate to within 20 miles.

In what was a vital aspect of the developing hypotheses, they also concluded that Mallery's "mountains" -the mountains not discovered until this century - were, on the Piri Reis map, the small cluster of islands shown at the bottom toward the right (see page 19). According to Hapgood, the "heavy shading of some of the islands" was, in 16th-century map-making techniques, an indication of mountainous terrain. In addition, he said, a seismic profile made by a Norwegian-British-Swedish expedition in 1949 disclosed a range of undersea mountains. Some of these, the Hapgood team concluded, would emerge from the sea as islands if there were no ice cap - another indication that Antarctica had really been explored and mapped earlier, at a time when no ice cap existed.

By then, of course, Hapgood and his students were captivated by the mystery of the map. They proceeded cautiously, however, because they knew that many cartographers in ancient times vaguely believed in the existence of a landmass in the southern regions and, with or without evidence, might have added something to their charts out of blind faith - or even out of a preference for esthetic balance.

In 1959, however, in the Library of Congress, Hapgood noticed a presumably authentic map that instantly wiped out his doubts: a map of what was almost certainly Antarctica, done in 1531 by the French cartographer Oronce Fine, also known as Oronteus Finaeus.To even the most skeptical, the Oronteus Finaeus map (see pages 28-29) is startling. Although it was printed in a book in 1531 - and was thus not subject to subsequent amendment - it is remarkably similar to today's maps of Antarctica (see page 29). Admittedly it is too close to the tip of South America, and it is incorrectly oriented, yet the proportions seem similar, the coastal mountains, found in the 1957 geophysical study are in roughly the right places and so are many bays and rivers. Furthermore, the shape of South America itself seems right, and the close resemblance between a modern, scientifically exact map of the Ross Sea and Finaeus' unnamed gulf is striking.

What is different, however, is that the Oronteus Finaeus map does not seem to show the great shelves of ice that, today, surround the continent, nor the great glaciers that fringe the coastal regions.

Instead there seem to be estuaries and inlets, suggesting great rivers. To Hapgood and his team, that meant that at some time in the past the Ross Sea and its coasts - scene of the November, 1979 air disaster on Mount Erebus - and some of the hinterland of Antarctica were free of ice. It also suggested to Hapgood that since the Antarctic was certainly ice-bound in 1531 - when Oronteus Finaeus made his map - Finaeus must have had access to very ancient maps indeed: maps made when Antarctica was largely free of the mile-thick ice cap that buries it today, and presumably has covered it for millennia.

Those observations, however, were just the beginning. "We had to have more than a resemblance," Professor Hapgood said recently. The evidence - "the only evidence" - is in the mathematical calculations by which Hapgood and his team - with the help of an M. I. T. mathematician - converted the "rhumb" lines on the map (see page 19) into modern lines of latitude and longitude. This, briefly, involved the assumption that a system of lines of longitude and latitude underlies the network of rhumb lines which radiate from the five wind roses located in the Atlantic. These wind roses lie on the perimeter of a circle whose center would be near Cairo on the missing portion of the map. Hapgood postulated from this that the map was drawn on what is called an "equidistant projection" centered on Cairo.

This conversion required years of trial and error and eventually involved a cartographic unit of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). But the results, Hapgood says, were startling. They seemed to show an accuracy impossible at the time Piri Reis drew the map and inconceivable in the time of Alexander the Great when, presumably, Piri Reis' sources drew their maps.

To Professor Hapgood the conversions of the underlying lines of latitude and longitude are vital. "They establish beyond any doubt the extraordinary accuracy of the maps, clearly beyond the capability of any medieval or ancient cartographers known to us."

Hapgood and his students also examined the late medieval and early Renaissance maps called "portulans" or "portolanos." These were highly accurate mariners' charts of the Mediterranean area - sometimes including the Black Sea - made by Portuguese, Venetian, Spanish, Catalan and Arab seamen. They are extremely beautiful maps, but what struck Hapgood was their accuracy. How, Hapgood asked, could medieval sailors, with no navigational aids but the compass, have prepared such accurate charts?

Hapgood was not the only one - nor the first - to have been puzzled by portolano maps. Years before, the Norwegian scholar Nordenskjold - the leading authority on them - had shown that all portolanos appear to be based on a single prototype - that had vanished. But, says Hapgood, Nordenskjold did not check the mathematical foundation and so postulated that the lost prototype was a product of classical Greece or Phoenicia, whereas Hapgood's researchers concluded that the Greek geographers, from whom Piri Reis had taken certain basic data, had to have used still other maps as sources because the data on the Greeks' maps was drawn with a precision that predated Greece's own development - about 200 B. C. - of plane geometry and trigonometry. And without knowledge of geometry and trigonometry, they said, no one could have produced such accurate maps.

The matter of accuracy, in fact, is debatable. (See pages 22-23.) But according to Hapgood, his examination of one portolano - the Dulcert Portolano of 1339, drawn 153 years before Columbus - is conclusive proof that the Portolanos, at least, are "scientific products." Although this portolano covers an area measuring 3,000 miles by 1,000 miles, 50 localities in the area are pin-pointed with less than one degree of error in longitude and latitude, as reprojected by Hapgood.

The researchers also examined, compared and recalculated the work of numerous geographers from Ptolemy through the Renaissance - including the first world map made by Mercator, a seminal figure in cartography, and a remarkable map dated 1380 called the "Zeno Map." It sjeemed to show Greenland too without an ice cap.

Thus, gradually, Hapgood, after exhaustive research and imaginative mathematical and cartographic experiments, came to his conclusions and, eventually, published them in a book called Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (Chilton Books, Philadelphia, 1966). Briefly these are the conclusions:

- that the Piri Reis map, the portolano charts and many other ancient maps include information supposedly unknown in the 16th century and, in some cases, information that was not confirmed until the middle of this century.

- that the Piri Reis map and other maps were inexplicably accurate, particularly with regard to longitudes, which neither mariners nor cartographers could calculate until spherical trigonometry was developed in the 17th and 18th centuries.

- that some civilization or culture still unknown to archeology - and pre-dating any civilization known so far–had mapped North America, China, Greenland, South America and Antarctica long before the rise of any known civilization - and at a time when Greenland and Antarctica were not covered with their millennia-old ice caps.

- that to have done this, the ancient civilization had to have developed astronomy, navigational instruments - such as the chronometer–and mathematics, particularly plane geometry and trigonometry, long before Greece or any other known civilization.

-that the advanced cartographic knowledge appearing on the Piri Reis map, the Oronteus Finaeus map and other maps came down in garbled and incomplete fragments that somehow survived the destruction of the unknown civilization itself and the repeated destruction of such ancient repositories of knowledge as the library at Alexandria.

These hypotheses, obviously, were revolutionary and some reviews of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings were, predictably, skeptical in tone. Yet one American reviewer called it a "seminal book," an English reviewer called it "provocative" and Kenneth R. Stunkel, who challenged the conclusions in Britain's Geographical Review, admitted that Hapgood's work on ancient maps was "... a model of thoroughness and meticulous engagement with a complex and elusive subject." Furthermore, Hapgood, before publishing his book, had submitted it to John K. Wright, director of the American Geographical Society for 11 years. Wright - a geographer and cartographer - said that Hapgood "posed hypotheses that cry aloud for further testing."

Unfortunately, from Hapgood's point of view, his theories were not tested. Most scholars, in fact, seem to have ignored them. As noted, there is relatively little - with the exception of Paul Kahle's book -written on the Piri Reis maps by scholars. This may be because Hapgood himself, quoting Thomas Edison, had said that some problems are too difficult for specialists and must be left to amateurs - and most scientists took him at his word. They largely ignored him.

This was not entirely unexpected. As writer J. Enterline put it, in discussing the response of science to the Hapgood hypotheses, acceptance "engendered the necessity of so many accessory explanations, rationalizations and postulates that it became untenable." But their basis for rejecting it, said Enterline -who was also skeptical - was not because of any demonstrated counter proof but because it seemed to violate common sense and probability - which, he added, is also true of modern physics.

To put it another away, Hapgood's work simply cannot be lumped with the lunatic fringe and he certainly cannot be held responsible for the Chariots - level offshoots that fed on his research. Although unquestionably an amateur theoretician, he did do his homework and had it thoroughly checked by professionals. The U.S. Air Force SAC cartographers, for example, worked with him for two years and fully endorsed his conclusions about Antarctica.

Nonetheless, there are serious weaknesses in Hapgood's case. For one thing, Hapgood's theses depend entirely on mathematical projections and logic. While he admittedly reasons carefully from observation to conclusion - and had his calculations done by an M.I.T mathematician - he obviously cannot produce any of the "advanced" maps or display a single artifact from the "lost" civilization that supposedly mapped the Americas and Antarctica. For another, he may not have accorded enough importance, at least in the Caribbean portions of the Piri Reis map, to the Christopher Columbus map - as a close examination of the Piri Reis map may show (see pages 22-23). Lastly, he was led by his own logic into postulating an ice-free Antarctic - which conflicts totally with accepted geological theory that says the Antarctic ice cap has been in place for 50 million years.

There are other arguments too. One is that many place names on the map, written in the Turco-Arabic script, are clearly transliterations of Portuguese and Spanish. If, as the Hapgood hypotheses suggest, Piri Reis used maps drawn by ancient cartographers, why don't the place names at least reflect their language?

The most compelling arguments against the Hapgood hypotheses, however, concern the Andes and - above all - Antarctica, both vital to Hapgood's conclusions. Is the chain of mountains to the left of the map really the Andes? Is the coastline at the bottom really Antarctica? Are there any mountains shown there? And is Antarctica free of ice?

A cursory examination would certainly suggest that the mountains are the Andes; they are the most striking topographical feature on the map. But beside the mountains there is an inscription (see pages 24-25) that doesn't quite fit into Hapgood's scenario. It reads: "In the mountains of this territory were creatures like this, and human beings came out on the seacoast..."

Assuming the inscription refers to the eastern coast, this means that's to come out on the seacoast," those "human beings" would have had to walk all the way from, say, Peru, rather than from one of the ranges near the Brazilian coast. And as to the llama, is it really a llama? The animal shown on the map definitely has horns and the llama definitely does not (see page 19).

The reference, of course, might have been to the Pacific coast. But that also poses an awkward problem - as a look at the map suggests. Hapgood assumed that the western base of the mountain chain coincided with the Pacific coast of South America. If so, Hapgood is correct that the west coast, the Pacific and the Andes must have been known before Balboa and Magellan. And thus those "human beings" could have come down from the Andes.

Unfortunately the heavy black line to the south of the mountains and the reddish line at the base of the mountains probably do not indicate the west coast. For one thing, the long inscription (see pages 24-25) covers terra incognita - "unknown land" - and for another, neither the Pacific Ocean nor the Strait of Magellan are shown. Is it reasonable to suppose that the advanced mariners of ancient times could locate the Andes and miss the Pacific Ocean?

A similar argument applies to the section of coast which by rights should correspond with the Isthmus of Panama, Central America, the Gulf of Mexico and Florida. Even allowing for the necessary distortions that Hapgood's "equidistant projection" would entail, this section of coast bears only the most tenuous relationship to reality-and raises still another doubt. Would Hapgood's hypothetical, highly advanced civilization - capable of sailing to the New World and mapping it - have done such an incredibly bad job? (See pages 22-23.)

The same question applies to the coast of South America where - as Hapgood admits - his advanced cartographers lost 900 miles of coastline. As a look at the map will show, the coast, below the Rio de la Plata, simply turns east and becomes, according to Hapgood, Antarctica.

This part of the Antarctica hypothesis - the key part - is actually the weakest. First, the hypothetical cartographers left out the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn. Next, they connected the coastline of "Antarctica" to South America and extended it eastward.

There is, admittedly, a resemblance between the Piri Reis "Antarctic" coast and modern maps of the area. But the resemblance is slight. Indeed if this section of the map were to run vertically—that is, to the south - it would bear a much closer resemblance to the east coast of South America and could thus restore some of the missing 900 miles (see page 21).

This is by no means impossible: some of the more distinctive coastal features of the Piri Reis'"Antarctica" do jibe remarkably well with those on a modern map of South America (see page 21). But if it were true, "Antarctica" would not be Antarctica after all; it would be South America - which, of course, was never covered with ice - and the animals drawn on the map would not be in an ice-free Antarctica, but in South America. Last - and a key point - the famous "mountains" in Antarctica that so excited Mallery and Hapgood, and were presumably "clearly indicated," appear as islands, not mountains.

On the other hand...

On the other hand, some of the objections are themselves open to debate and Hapgood himself anticipated and answered many of them.

To start with, Hapgood and his advocates knew full well that to suggest a "lost world," with its echoes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and subsequent science-fiction elaborations, might well evoke merciless public scorn from scholars and scientists - as the writings of the late Immanuel Velikovsky had in the 1950's and as Chariots of the Gods did in 1968. The existence of this "lost civilization," after all could only be inferred; there were no artifacts.

Hapgood, therefore, pointed out in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings that civilizations have vanished before. No one knew where Sumer, Akkad, Nineveh and Babylon were until 19th-century archeologists dug them up. And as late as 1970 - only 10 years ago - no one even suspected the existence of a civilization called Ebla (See Aramco World, March -April l978). It had existed. It was real. But it vanished without a trace. Why then, argue Hapgood advocates, couldn't there have been other civilizations that vanished?

The same is true of Hapgood's unspecified advanced technology. Greek fire - something like napalm - was developed in the ninth century but its composition has never been duplicated. Arab scientists of the Golden Age were able to perform delicate eye surgery - using advanced instruments - but these skills were later lost. And in 1900, according to Scientific American, archeologists discovered an astoundingly advanced gearing system in a Greek navigational instrument. It dated back to 65 B.C. and its existence had never been suspected.

Hapgood addressed more specific criticisms too. He had not overlooked the fact that on the map the Andes seemed to be in the center of South America, nor ignored the possibility that, maybe, they were mountains on the east coast drawn out of proportion, or drawn on the basis of information, rather than observation - or even drawn in to account for the great rivers emptying into the sea. And his answer is persuasive: could Piri Reis, entirely by chance, have placed a range of enormous mountains in approximately the same place where there is a range of enormous mountains? Furthermore, there is the notation on the Piri Reis map: "The gold mines are endless." Doesn't this suggest Peru, which is rich in gold?

With regard to Antarctica, there is also the inscription on "Antarctica" describing nights "two hours" long (see pages 28-29) -which does suggest Antarctic latitudes.

There is, moreover, the perplexing problem of the Oronteus Finaeus map. Even if Piri Reis "Antarctica" turns out to be South America - drawn horizontally - or even Australia, the Finnaeus "Antarctica" is surely Antarctica and his map was also drawn in the 16th century: 1531. Where did Oronteus Finaeus get his far more detailed and accurate information? And why does Finaeus also show Antarctica without an ice cap?

Furthermore, the Hapgood team identified 50 geographical points on the Finaeus map, as re-projected, whose latitudes and longitudes were located quite accurately in latitude and longitude, some of them quite close to the pole. "The mathematical probability against this being accidental," says Hapgood, "is astronomical"

There are other factors too. The cartography of the Age of Discovery, for instance, often seems to have been independent of the voyages themselves; that is, certain early maps of America contain features before their supposed date of discovery.

The most notable example of this is the map of America made by Glareanus, a famous Swiss poet, mathematician and theoretical geographer, in the year 1510. This map, which was probably based on the 1504 de Canerio map, clearly shows the west coast of America 12 years before Magellan passed through the strait that bears his name. In other words, Piri Reis was not the only one to include anachronous information.

The map of Glareanus, furthermore, was reproduced in Johannes de Stobnicza's famous 1512 Cracow edition of Ptolemy and is unquestionably similar to the map of Piri Reis. Did Piri Reis have a copy of this early printed edition of Ptolemy before him when he drew his map? Is this what Piri Reis meant by "maps drawn in the time of Alexander the Great"?

Again, this is plausible, since to the Arabs - and later the Ottomans - the second century (A.D.)geographer Ptolemy was often confused with the earlier General Ptolemy-Alexander's general, Ptolemy I, who became king in Egypt in the fourth century B.C. and was an ancestor of Cleopatra. Still, where did de Canerio and Glareanus get their information?

The subject of the Piri Reis map, obviously, is enormously complex - as well as a great deal of fun. It involves Christopher Columbus, his sources of information, his conclusions and even his motives. It involves two Ottoman naval captains and 20 unknown or vaguely identified maps. It involves the portolano charts that seem to be based on a single lost source, the Zeno map - with an ice-free Greenland - and the Finaeus map, possibly the most inexplicable of all. It involves, in sum, questions that are not only fascinating but, so far, unanswered - except by Charles Hapgood.

The Hapgood hypotheses, therefore, cannot be j ust dismissed - if only because it is indisputable tha t famous maps known to have existed have been lost. None of the maps from the classical world, in fact, have survived. The maps accompanying Ptolemy's great work on geography, for example, were quickly lost and the earliest maps based upon his text were drawn 1,000 years after he wrote. Marinus of Tyre, a precursor of Ptolemy, is a shadowy figure whose works have perished. And the great library at Alexandria, the chief depository of classical learning, was repeatedly destroyed.

It is reliably reported by an Arab author, moreover, that a globe of the world by Ptolemy - the geographer - existed in Cairo in the 14th century. Arabic literature contains numerous tantalizing mentions of "lost maps." The 10th century author Ibn Nadim, for example, speaks of a Persian map of the world drawn on silk in colored paints - conceivably a copy of a classical map, but in any case lost to history.

As maps by their nature are perishable - even maps by such well-known and relatively recent cartographers as Mercator are extremely rare—is it so improbable that Hapgood's mysterious maps did exist and did vanish?

Admittedly, the answer of many cartographers and historians would be, yes it is improbable. The Hapgood hypotheses, after all, challenge basic and long-standing historical and geological premises. But Hapgood, now retired and living in Florida, remains confident that his theories will be accepted eventually. "After all," he said, "they haven't even been examined yet."

Hapgood, furthermore, is still working on his hypotheses. Last year he finished revisions of both books and one of them, Sea Kings, was published by E. P. Dutton & Company, New York and by Turnstone Books, London, in October. The other will be published this year. Beyond that, however, he has no plans to fight for either attention or acceptance. "I will not wear myself out trying to persuade people with pre-fixed ideas. My books speak for themselves and someday, I think, they will be acknowledged."

It is unlikely, of course, that such acknowledgment will be forthcoming soon, if ever; as the supplementary articles on pages 22 and 28 suggest, there could be other explanations. Furthermore, the work of an obscure 16th-century Ottoman admiral does not command a high priority on science's crowded calendars.

But it is not impossible either. Increasingly, scientific writers and critics are beginning to re-examine some of the traditional premises and several, as recently as last year, have openly objected to the kind of cool dismissal that the Hapgood theories received on publication. In the magazine New Scientist, for example, several articles in 1979 focused on what they call "deviant science" and one critic said that it is from deviant science "that seminal ideas sometimes arise, later to be accepted as scientific orthodoxy" One example is the highly controversial Velikovsky - who died just two months ago. In addition to other, admittedly fanciful theories, Velikovsky hypothesized that Venus and Mars had once disturbed the rotation of the earth on its axis; he was not only belittled but threatened. Yet, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, space probes have subsequently verified some details of his theory.

Verification of the Hapgood hypotheses of course, would require highly persuasive evidence. As a New Scientist writer quoted, "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof," and in the case of Professor Hapgood that means location of the "lost" civilization or least one of the "advanced" source maps presumably used by Piri Reis.

But this, says Hapgood, is not impossible. Somewhere, he thinks, those source maps exist: hidden, perhaps, amid the massive collections of documents crammed into museums and archives in Istanbul, many still unexamined. No search for the source maps has ever been made, Hapgood says, but when there is "the result might be a discovery of vast importance."

His view, given the reception of his hypotheses, is natural. But it is by no means implausible. In 1955, a cartographer named M. Destombes announced the discovery of Ferdinand Magellan's own chart of his epochal circumnavigation of the world. No one had known it existed, but Destombes found it - in the archives of Istanbul.

Paul F. Hoye, Editor of Aramco World and formerly a reporter and columnist on The Providence Journal, studied Middle East affairs at Columbia University under the Advanced International Reporting Program. Paul Lunde is a graduate of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, and is currently working on Arabic manuscripts in the Vatican Library in Rome.

The Oronteus Finaeus Map
Written by Paul Lunde

Whatever one may think of the Hapgood hypotheses, the Oronteus Finaeus - or Finé-map poses questions that are difficult to answer.

Oronteus Finaeus Delphinas—his vernacular name was Oronce Finé - was born two years after the discovery of America. A Frenchman, he taught mathematics at the University of Paris, published a number of important works and was one of the first "modern"cartographers. His careful maps of Europe are models of their kind and superseded all those which had gone before.

Finé's world map, done on a "cordiform" or heart-shaped projection, was drawn in 1531 and published for the first time in Grynaeus' Novus Orbis. Quite apart from its scientific interest, this map is a thing of great beauty. It influenced - both in projection and design—many later maps, including the famous world map of Mercator himself (see page 29). The most striking feature of the Finé map, and the one that particularly struck Charles Hapgood, is its representation of Antarctica. The continent of Antarctica, as is well known, was not discovered until 1820, by seal hunters and neither its true extent nor its major geographical features, including the Transantarctic Mountains, were fully known until as recently as 1957-1958, when the continent as a whole was scrutinized by scientists on the occasion of the International Geophysical Year.

Yet here is a map, published 426 years before the IGY and 289 years before the discovery of the continent, which fully outlines Antarctica - and even seems to show such features as the Ross Sea, which is normally hidden by great sheets of ice. That this is so can be seen immediately by comparing the reproduction of the Finaeus map with the outline of Antarctica as shown in modern a tlases (see page 29). It is no wonder that Hapgood was amazed, as it is difficult indeed to explain away the similarity between Finé's Antarctica - called on his map, Terra Australis, "the southern land" - and today's Antarctica.

Classical geographers, it is true, had hypothesized the existence of just such a southern land, but in doing so they appear to have been led by esthetic - or logical - considerations. Since they knew the earth was a globe and that the land mass to the north was frozen, it was logical that there should be a land to the far south, balancing that to the north. But it is a long way from a general hypothesis such as this to the delineation of a continent.

This is not to deny that there are differences - important differences - between Finé's "southern land." and Antarctica as we know it. The most obvious of these is the distance between the southern tip of South America and Antarctica. In Finé's map the two continents are virtually touching, when in fact they are separated by some 600 miles. He appears to have thought that the "southern land" lay immediately south of the Strait of Magellan and that it was much bigger than it really is.

Furthermore, there is nothing on the Finé map that could correspond to the Palmer Peninsula. If a charitable critic should say that this is because it is partially obscured by sheet ice, and its true outline could not have been visible, then why is the Ross Sea shown - as it apparently is—without ice? And there are smaller differences as well, such as the slightly mistaken orientation of Byrd Land.

On the other hand there is no denying that Tine's "southern land" closely resembles Antarctica - nor the fact that Finaeus had added a Latin inscription that reads: "The recently discovered southern land; it is not yet fully known"

As far as is known, the first cartography to indicate a southern continent was by the great Leonardo da Vinci himself, who depicted it on a globe and the planispheric map made by Francesco Rosselli. Dated to about 1508, the globe shows a vast land below Africa, labelled Antarcticus. In 1515 a southern continent was shown on another globe made by Schoner. But Finé's continent is more exactly drawn than those of his predecessors and in fact - as can be seen from the illustrations - the great Mercator adopted Finé's version of the shape of the continent wholesale, along with a similar Latin inscription: "It is certain that there is a land here, but what its limits and boundaries are is unknown"

One possible explanation appeared in a longer inscription on a map by Cornelius de Judaeis dated 1593. It says that a promontory of this land was "discovered by the Portuguese, but they did not explore the interior. This reference to the Portuguese is interesting, for Finé inscribes a portion of the Antarctic continent, "Regio Brasilis", "the region of Brazil" - which might imply Portuguese discovery.

Furthermore, the coastline that turns eastward on the Piri Reis map - identified by Hapgood with the coast of Queen Maud Land - also bears a curious inscription referring to the Portuguese. It reads: "It is related by the Portuguese that on this spot, night and day are, at their shortest period, of two hours duration, and at longest phase, of twenty-two hours. "Unfortunately, this tantalizing bit of information - which would certainly suggest Antarctic latitudes - is vitiated by what immediately follows: "But the day is very warm and in the night there is much dew"

Put together, those clues suggest that some unknown Portuguese navigator, before 1513, reached Antarctica, mapped part of its northern coast and left only maps as the record of the expedition.

It is a tempting explanation. But it does not, unfortunately, explain warm days and dewy nights in Antarctica, the details of the Ross Sea or the outline of Antarctica as a whole on Finé's map.

Another possibility is that the Portuguese—who occupied Timor, only 285 miles away - may have mapped the northern coast of Australia; it does resemble the far coast of Antarctica. Because of the intense rivalry with Spain, such a map not only could have been kept secret, but most likely would have been. If Finé had a copy of that map his map of Antarctica could have been a composite: of rumored Portuguese sightings of the coast below South America and the secret Portuguese map of the Australian coast. If Finé did combine them, it would account for the otherwise inexplicable - and incorrect—sizeof Finé's Antarctica. This theory would also account for its resemblance to modern maps—there is at least some resemblance between the northern coast of Australia and the opposite coast of Finé's Antarctica - and explain the, inscriptions referring to the Portuguese.

It is, certainly, simpler than Hapgood's hypotheses. But it still involves missing maps and undocumented voyages. Major historical and cartographical problems, therefore, remain unsolved. The mystery is still there.

Piri Reis and the Columbian Theory
Written by Paul Lunde

Until the discovery of the Piri Reis map, there were only two cartographical sources, both indirect, for how Columbus viewed his discoveries.

One was a sketch made about 1525 by a certain Alessandro Zorzi of Venice, who said it was based on a map brought to Italy by Columbus' brother Bartholomew in 1506. Unfortunately, Zorzi's map also embodies information not known in 1506 and cannot, therefore, be used as evidence of Columbus' geographical notions, although it does show the New World as a part of the Asian mainland.

The only other surviving map going back to Columbus' own voyages is one drawn by Juan de la Cosa, who was a member of Columbus' first expedition of 1492 and who later sailed with Vespucci. But this map too, traditionally dated 1500, incorporates information that was not known to Columbus. For example, it shows Cuba as an island - yet Columbus not only believed Cuba to be part of the mainland of Asia but made each of his crew members swear that it was not an island.

This is why Kahle's 1931 lecture on the Piri Reis map so electrified his audience. It seemed almost miraculous that the only direct cartographical record of the greatest discovery of all time should have been preserved in a library in Istanbul, and that we should owe its preservation to an admiral of the Ottoman navy.

Oddly enough, however, few scholars since Paul Kalile seem to have carefully examined the "Columbian" portions of the Piri Reis map, and the question of whether or not - and to what degree - it represents Columbus' ideas is still far from settled.

The Map. The Piri Reis map is drawn on gazelle hide, with a web of lines criss-crossing the Atlantic. Called "rhumb lines" they are typical of late medieval manners'charts, and most scholars believe do not indicate latitude and longitude, but were used as an aid in laying a course.

Among the map's illustrations are two lozenges, which give the scale, and beautifully drawn ships, some accompanied by inscriptions which record important discoveries (see pages 24 and 25). One is almost certainly an account of the expedition of Cabral in 1500; Cabral discovered Brazil when he was blown off course across the Atlantic while on his way to India.

The Iberian Peninsula and the coast of west Africa are carefully drawn, in a manner suggesting the style of the practical mariners' charts called "portolanos" Here many of the place names are given in Turkish, rather than being merely transliterated from Portuguese or Spanish—showing that the Ottomans had practical experience of their own along those coasts.

At the top of the map is a ship anchored near a fish, with two people sitting on its back. The accompanying inscription tells a tale from the life of the Irish Saint Brandon, a charming medieval legend. Faithfully copied by Piri Reis from one of his source maps, it is evidence that at least one of the mappaemundi-maps of the world - mentionedas sources by Piri Reis was a medieval European production and not a map of the "ancient sea kings"

Another immediately striking feature of the mapis the number of islands, most of them legendary, and some of them adorned with parrots. Maps showing islands scattered through the Atlantic were current in thelater Middle Ages, and a globe made by Martin Behaim in 1492 - the same year Columbus first set off-shows a quantity of them; so does the Toscanelli map, which we know Columbus used.

The Caribbean. With regard to the Hapgood hypotheses, the Caribbean portion of the Piri Reis map is particularly important. In its northwest corner, for example, there is a large island labeled Hispaniola - today the home of Haiti and the Dominican Republic - which Columbus discovered on his first voyage and where he set up a colony, marked by the three towers on the map. Immediately below Hispaniola is Puerto Rico, and to the northeast is a group of 11 islands labeled Undizi Vergine - "The Eleven Virgins" The fact that this name is in a recognizable form of Italian -as opposed toPortugucse-is evidence, as Kahlepointed out, of its Columbian origin. This part of the Piri Reis map is thus not based on maps from the ancient civilization postulated by Hapgood.

Further evidence is the fact that the map of the Caribbean area is so wildly inaccurate. Hapgood attempted to bring it into line with geographic reality by postulating an equidistant projection based on a point near Cairo, identifying the island clearly labeled Hispaniola as Cuba, and re-orienting the entire Caribbean regions—which is seriously forcing the evidence. Not only is Hispaniola—Hapgood's "Cuba"—grossly out of proportion to Brazil, for example, but it is oriented north-south rather than east-west. Most striking of all, it is almost identical to the conventional represen tations of Marco Polo's "Cipangu"—that is, Japan—on late medieval maps such as Behaim's and Toscanelli's. Why? Probably because Columbus was convinced, on his first voyageat least, that he had found the fabled Cipangu (japan), and he may have drawn Hispaniola in this shape to support his claim.

An even more important argument for the Columbian origin of this part of the map and against its classical or "ancient"origin - unless Hapgood's ancient mariners were very bad cartographers indeed - is the fact that the real Cuba, as an island, is missing. And so it should be on a Columbian map, for Columbus thought Cuba was part of the mainland of Asia, and drew it accordingly. On Piri Reis' map, the wedge-shaped projection on the mainland opposite Hispaniola is almost certainly the eastern tip of Cuba; the southward-trending coast below is an attempt to draw Cuba as if it ran north and south—as Columbus believed it did. It is interesting that Behaim's globe and other maps influenced by Marco Polo's description of Cathay show a very similar wedge-shaped projection opposite the island of Cipangu; if Columbus thought he was off the coast of Asia, he may have drawn the mainland this way to correspond to its then conventional representation.

South America. The delineation of the coast of Brazil on the Piri Reis map is much more accurate than that of the Caribbean. The relationship and distance between South America and the west African coast, for example, is much more correct than on most European maps of the time - and the place names along the coast, clearly transliterated from Italian and Spanish names, are taken from accounts of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and others.

The most striking topographical detail, and the one that has caused the most discussion, is the chain of mountains running through South America - the mountains which Hapgood identified as the Andes. The rivers which issue from their base are obviously meant to be the Amazon, the Orinoco and the Rio Plata, and the animal with two horns standing on the mountains is Hapgood's "llama". Interestingly, though, the Piri Reis map is not the only early map - nor the first - to show mountains in the interior of South America. The Nicold de Canerio map, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and the Waldseemuller chart both show the east coast of South America, though schematically drawn, and a chain of mountains adorned with trees. The de Canerio map was drawn between 1502 and 1504 - long before the eastern coast of South America had been explored. As there is a striking similarity between this map and the Piri Reis map, it is therefore possible that one of Piri Reis'source maps was based on that of de Canerio rather than on one produced by an ancient civilization. Other maps showing the east coast of South America may also have been available in some form to Piri Reis -such as the maps of Martin Waldseemuller (1507), Glareanus (1510) and Johannes de Stobnicza (1512). All of these are related to each other and, almost without question, ultimately derive from a de Canerio-derived map.

The map by Johannes de Stobnicza, in particular, could - have been available to Piri Reis, for it was printed in Cracow, Poland, in an edition of Ptolemy, in 1512, the year before the Piri Reis map was drawn. Thus it could have been one of the maps "drawn in the time of Alexander the Great" which Piri Reis refers to—especially considering the confusion that existed between the two Ptolemies.

Antarctica and the Eastward-Trending Coast. This portion of the map was crucial to Hapgood's hypotheses, yet it too could have been derived from sources other than a forgotten advanced civilization. While none of the maps derived from de Canerio's shows an Antarctic continent, other groups of early maps do. Beginning in the early 15th century, mapmakers often indicated a huge southern landmass that linked Africa to Asia and made a landlocked sea of the Indian Ocean–a geographical notion derived from Ptolemy's references to a "southern land". When Magellan passed through the strait that now bears his name, he sighted Tierra del Fuego to the south and assumed that it was a promontory of Ptolemy's southern landmass; it was not until Drake's southern voyage of 1578 that this idea too was exploded.

The search for terra australis went on for centuries—incidentally leading to the discovery of the land which now fittingly bears the name that so fascinated Renaissance cartographers: Australia. But Antarctica itself eluded the great discoverers.

There are, however, some indications that the coast of Antarctica was sighted before its "official" discovery in 1820. The great Amerigo Vespucci related how, blown off course and driven 500 miles south, he sighted a land which he named Terra da Vista - "Land Seen" - and which was possibly the Falklands or even Antarctica. In 1514, theyear after the completion of the Piri Reis map, two Portuguese ships reported something similar, as did two Dutch ships about the same time: also blown off course, they sighted land and named it "Pressillgtlandt". Whatever land was sighted on these obscure voyages, the accounts prove one thing: there was no inherent impossibility in a 16th-century ship getting a long way south.

There may, in fact, bean even simpler explanation of the presence of "Antarctica" on the Piri Reis map. To start with, as Hapgood admits, about 900 miles of South American coastline are missing from the map: below the Rio de la Plata the coast simply turns eastward. And, interestingly, if this eastward section of coast is looked at vertically - that is, as continuing south instead of east (see page 21) - it does bear a remarkable resemblance to the actual east coast of South America from below Rio de la Plata down to Tierra del Fuego. Some of the smaller coastal features, moreover, jibe with a modern map as well, and the small group of three islands (Ma de Sara) could then be identified as the Falkland Islands, and the wedge-shaped projection at the most easterly point of the line could correspond to the tip of South America.

To put it more simply, Piri Reis, or the scribe who copied his work, may have realized, as he came to the Rio de la Plata, that he was going to run off the edge of his valuable parchment if he continued south. So he did the logical thing and turned the coastline to the east, marking the turn with a semicircle of crenelations, so that he could fit the entire coastline on his page. If that was the case, then the elaborate Hapgood hypotheses - or at least those elements based entirely on the Piri Reis map - would have no foundation whatever.

This article appeared on pages 18-31 of the January/February 1980 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.

See Also: CARTOGRAPHY, EXPLORATION, HAPGOOD, CHARLES, PIRI REIS, ADMIRAL

Check the Public Affairs Digital Image Archive for January/February 1980 images.

ARIS KAI DEN EIMAI KALA

2008-07-22T12:34:00.000Z

Blog traffic: June 2007- June 2008

2008-06-23T14:14:00.001Z

Bristol Time: The return of a trip-hop legacy (The Independent - Friday, 11 April 2008)

2008-06-06T08:06:00.005Z

Bristol Time: The return of a trip-hop legacy

The capital of trip-hop is back on track with a slew of new recordings from its Nineties pioneers. By Nick Hasted

They call it "Bristol time". As well as being a historical reference to when Bristol's clocks struck the hour later than they did in the capital, it's a dismissive term for a city whose musicians live far enough from frenetic London to get up when they're ready and, cliché has it, smoke a spliff or two before considering their options. Somehow, the early Nineties saw a series of such apparently slothful types seize control of the musical agenda. Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead were at the vanguard of what they hated to be called trip-hop, while Roni Size won the 1997 Mercury Prize for turning jungle music into avant-garde dance-jazz with New Forms.

Now, in 2008, they are all back. There is huge expectation around Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack's new albums. The latter are also curating the London Southbank Centre's Meltdown festival. Size has rebooted and re-released New Forms, and Goldfrapp and Martina Topley-Bird, fellow travellers from the old Bristol days, have lauded, imaginative new records, too. It's a remarkable renaissance, begging the question of just what was so special about this scene in the first place, and where its originators have been.

The Bristol sound was Britpop's shadow. Oasis and co were bullishly life-affirming, patriotic and hedonistic, embracing their celebrity and partying like they were in The Faces in 1973. They made their massive mid-Nineties audience buzz with all those qualities. Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, by contrast, offered a crepuscular world, dealing in guilt and apocalyptic despair.

They instinctively distrusted journalists, and successfully sought anonymity. Though drawing on hip-hop and dub, they also continued the punk project, insisting on intellectual aggression, provocation and artistic transformation. "Right from the start, we never made music in line with the tempos that were required in clubs," Massive Attack's Grant Marshall noted. "It's made for after clubs, when you want to chill out, learn how to breathe again." As Portishead's Geoff Barrow admitted: "There is a Bristol sound... where punk meets hip-hop and reggae, like [Mark Stewart's punk-funk iconoclasts] The Pop Group and early Massive Attack and [sound-system veterans] Smith and Mighty. Tricky was absolutely that. He was more a punk than a rapper."

When Portishead's debut, Dummy (1994), fuelled by its use on Nineties twentysomething zeitgeist soap This Life and winning the 1995 Mercury, famously became aspirational dinner-party music (to the band's disgust), it was the Bristol scene's greatest triumph. For such edgy, noir-inflected songs insidiously to become a middle-class soundtrack was as strange as Pink Floyd's previous omnipresence in such homes, with their own anonymous, alienated sound-world.

The nature of the city helped make the scene unique. With its past in the slave trade, it was also a port with one of Britain's oldest West Indian populations, a West Country Liverpool. This was the most genuinely multi-racial scene since Coventry's 2-Tone, a decade before. With its easy use of dub and hip-hop for millennial torch songs such as Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy", its musical miscegenation was, if anything, still greater.

Bristol's small size also saw accidental chain reactions occur as disparate artists collided, at a speed impossible in London. So Tricky met his future muse, musical partner and mother of his child Martina Topley-Bird outside mutual friend Mark Stewart's house. Size worked at the youth club where Robert del Naja of Massive Attack's punk band, The Lunatic Fringe, played. And Portishead linchpin Geoff Barrow was the tape-op, watching and learning, as Massive completed their classic debut, Blue Lines (1991).

Portishead are the first of the scene's major players to return, with the appropriately named album Third. And they are the classic example of why Bristol's great generation never did quite conquer the world, and instead seemed to vanish for so long.

Listen to Dummy today, now its mid-Nineties over-exposure has worn off, and it is still a shockingly strange record. Its combination of abrasive scratching, ambient vinyl hiss, the spy-movie guitar of jazz veteran Adrian Utley, and the sensual but untouchably distant vocals of Beth Gibbons, remains potently unique. So unique, in fact, that Portishead themselves were unable to capitalise on it.

Selling well over a million in the year of Britpop's triumphalist high-water mark, they shunned success. "We heard a lot of the sounds that we used on Dummy on TV adverts in England and on other people's records," Barrow noted. "It made us massively distrust what we were doing." The template they had set was so instantly perfect that following it up proved almost impossible. "We were in hell for 13 months," Barrow admitted of the next record's gestation. "We were afraid to finish a song because there was so much to live up to." Portishead (1997) now stands as a bold, extreme refashioning of their signature sound. At the time, it seemed more of the same.

Eleven years later, Third is here. In the interim, Barrow and Utley both divorced, the latter quit the music business for four years, and Gibbons fell ill and returned to her native Devon (also managing a solo album, Out of Season [2002]). "We have a policy which is one step forward, eight steps back," Barrow confessed to Uncut of these latest traumas. "We've never felt any pressure from outside, it's all internal – there's a lot of self-doubt in Portishead."

Third is so radically different from the first two records, abandoning cinematic melancholy for crude synth grooves and exposed folk, that the decade of depression and doubt it represents has paid off, creatively. The messianic self-belief of, say, Manchester musicians may permit repetitive, pointless records, and the commercial momentum that sustains. But that is not the Bristol way. As Del Naja once noted, the place gives "a slightly misguided sense of independence... Some people say Bristol's the graveyard of ambition. But I love it that if you don't want to fucking do anything, don't do it."

"People talk about the amount of time between Portishead albums," considers Will Gregory, now half of Goldfrapp, who played sax with Portishead in the early days (and guests on Third). "But the first one changed the face of music. And that's quite a task to set yourself. Geoff's got this wide-ranging, self-critical mind, that's interested in taking the hardest route. Alison [Goldfrapp] and I have that spirit, too. It's pointless pumping out music if you don't have anything to say."

Gregory was in Bristol throughout the 1980s. He met Alison Goldfrapp at a Startled Insects theatrical show at a near-derelict studio in the city. He has much experience of Bristol time, and its effect. "The Aardman studio also started in Bristol, where you move one tiny figure one micro-centimetre," he explains. "There's that culture of building through increments for months on end. And then people stop and go to the pub. Bristol felt rural in the Nineties. There's a bit of the hayseed floating through it. It's just slower. As you travel down the M4, time tends to dilate. By the time you get to Bristol, clocks are running slower. People are listening to music that is not current. What's now, what's fashionable, have disappeared, and people are putting on V C the Mahavishnu Orchestra or Neil Young. People are more aware of music as a whole, not chasing 'now'. Back then, there wasn't this urgency to get a job and pay the rent. You can't imagine any of those bands in London, where there's a frenzy to make it. In Bristol, everyone was down the York Café having their three-course £1.50 dinners, and in the pub spending a little bit of their dole, surviving on cheap rents. It meant that people could have artistic integrity about what they were doing. Because, in that time, there was a little enclave from Thatcher's Britain, where the climate was conducive."

Massive Attack have been that scene's one apparent constant. Its core trio of Robert del Naja (aka 3D), Grant Marshall (G) and Andrew Vowles (Mushroom), as well as Nellee Hooper (later producer for Soul II Soul and Madonna) and Tricky, came together in the city's now-legendary 1980s sound system, The Wild Bunch. Blue Lines and "Unfinished Sympathy" took Bristol into the mainstream. But first Vowles left, then so did Marshall (back now, for the new album). Blue Lines' front-line singer, Shara Nelson, and rapper Tricky were soon replaced by a rolling cast including the Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser and Sinead O'Connor.

"We were very aware that we weren't a personality-driven band," Del Naja tells me. "We were coming much more from the collaborative world of sound systems, and creating a look for each record that is based around the mood of something, rather than the people, which always changed from project to project. Always trying to be radically different is one of the philosophies behind working with different people. Bowie, The Beatles, The Clash and Public Image Ltd were very important on that level – those artists all had a really big influence, in that after finishing one album, you want to do something else."

There's one other element to Bristol's slow-burning scene, and why it has taken so long to gather itself. Geoff Barrow once confessed to an interviewer that he lived expecting humanity to be extinct within eight years, not expecting us to survive the Nineties. Tricky's third album, Pre-Millennium Tension (1997), caught the same fin de siècle mood, forgotten now. And Tricky, the loosest of Bristol's loose cannons, didn't need dates to lose himself in the darkness. Famously, he picked up the blue mood of Billie Holliday's music as a child, when his grandmother would play her records while staring at him, convinced she could see his mother, dead since he was four, in his eyes. "Sometimes, I think everything is going to fall apart," he would tell interviewers. "Sometimes I feel this is the living hell." The great critic Ian MacDonald (a depressive who later committed suicide) warned Tricky against such corrosive misanthropy. But his classic debut, Maxinquaye (1995), fed on the paranoia of a diet of spliffs, alcohol and cocaine.

I remember one extraordinary night at London's Hackney Empire in 1997 when it seemed this unlikely, damaged character was the true genius, not only of the Bristol scene, but the world. He played in darkness, a silhouette rooted to the spot by a leg brace, with the young Alison Goldfrapp taking over from Topley-Bird as the singer locking her body into his groove. Words were repeated into irrelevance, the music's dense noise crushed the idea of songs, and you almost wanted to scream. I have still not seen anything like it since. He left for New York years ago, and his many subsequent albums have been the product, not of Bristol time, but individual fragility. Called the scene's Sly Stone after Maxinquaye, he is really its Syd Barrett: a fragile casualty of drugs, and his demons. "I had a lot of problems," he admitted in 2001. "Depression, mood swings... It's astonishing how dark your life can get without you even noticing. It slips further and further." His comeback in July with Knowle West Boy, named after his old Bristol neighbourhood, is the one invested with the least expectation, but the most hope.

"Tricky gave musicians like Alison space to be themselves," Gregory says. "That idea of improvisation was part of what all that Bristol scene were doing. It's important to what we do in Goldfrapp. That's where time's important – when you're improvising music, it takes time to arrive at the magic." Suddenly, despite the fits of melancholy self-doubt, fractures and feuds, here they all are again. London has blazed through a hundred trends in the interim. But Bristol time always comes back round.

'Third' by Portishead is out on Island on 28 April

GOLDFRAPP

Goldfrapp's secret isn't so much what they did next, as what Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory did first. Gregory arrived in the wake of Bristol's only previous rock success, Pigbag's punk-funk in the Eighties. While he played sax with Portishead, Goldfrapp became her friend Topley Bird's substitute singing with Tricky. The pair's first album as Goldfrapp, Felt Mountain (2000) seemed very much in Portishead's film noir/trip-hop mode, though Gregory says: "We shared a sensibility, but I didn't want to explore their territory."

After their debut, the duo retreated to Somerset and reinvented themselves. Black Cherry (2003) and Supernature (2005) saw Alison's conceptual artistic background in play, kitting out herself and her dancers in mirrored horse's heads and tails, or Brazilian showgirl undress. It was hard to equate with the non-glamour of the Bristol scene. But the desire to shape-shift, not to repeat music, is one Massive Attack would recognise. It brought hits such as "Ooh La La" and huge sales.

New album Seventh Tree abandons all that for rustic psychedelia. Drawing on Nick Drake and The Wicker Man's folk-horror soundtrack, Alison's new image as a clown undercuts her sexiness."We can't do it any other way," Gregory considers. "If something starts to not be connected to the music, it just seems wrong."

Goldfrapp play the Royal Festival Hall on 18 April

TRICKY

Tricky abandoned Britain for New York in the late Nineties, leaving behind "silly bad boy behaviour". The change didn't do him much good. The Tricky I had seen in mesmeric control of something like genius in two 1997 London shows was, by the next year, croaking in a half-empty hall. Prodigious dope-smoking seemed to have shaken an already delicate sense of self.

Later albums such as Angels With Dirty Faces (1998), Juxtapose (1999) and Blowback (2001) saw him attempt to re-engage with the US hip-hop that had so inspired him. All three records were largely self-pitying. Tricky's problem has been a bit like Prince's; constant material from a natural musical mind, with no one on his wavelength to help sift it.

Vulnerable (2003), an attempt to return to basics, found few fans still interested. But, five years on, Knowle West Boy could be different. Cautiously, welcome back.

MASSIVE ATTACK

Blue Lines (1991) and "Unfinished Sympathy" still define Massive Attack, the moment dance and rock sparked into something new. Their story since has been one of unmet expectations, although Mezzanine (1998) was perhaps their masterpiece. Since then, it has been a struggle. Only Robert Del Naja (above, left) remained to make 100th Window (2003); Grant Marshall (right) was absent. The album was a UK No 1, but the suspicion remained that this was Massive Attack in name only.

However, the band enter 2008 stronger than ever. Del Naja is a committed political activist, using his artistic skills for a gallery show of antiwar album art. Being invited to curate the Meltdown Festival seals the band's status. A new album, tentatively titled Weather Underground, will test their musical future.

Meltdown starts on 14 June

PORTISHEAD

Of the whole Bristol scene, Portishead seemed the most likely to be destroyed by their own success. Dummy's distressed, vinyl-scratched samples simply seemed unimprovable, to the band as much as anyone. The nature of its adoption by the mainstream also worried their leader, Geoff Barrow. "The idea of people having dinner parties with it meant that the mood of the record was overlooked a bit," he told Uncut. "Because that wasn't really very nice."

Portishead responded in a mood of self-sabotage. Where Dummy had seen obscure, digital samples from soundtrack albums and Isaac Hayes put on vinyl acetates for that authentic crackle and hiss, Portishead was made with samples recorded from scratch by the band, with full orchestras – an insanely time-consuming method. The Fender Rhodes organ and tremolo guitar sounds that defined Dummy were banned at first. In the long decade since, as we've learnt to live without any Portishead music, its emotionally and sonically extreme recasting of their original template sounds strong. But Roseland NYC Live (1998), in which an orchestra helps re-imagine their songs without samples and Beth Gibbons cuts loose, couldn't shake the suspicion that the band were a one-trick pony – however fine that trick was.

Beth Gibbons' collaboration with Talk Talk's Paul Webb, aka Rustin Man, on Out of Season (2002) was a well-received surprise. But for four years in their seemingly interminable absence, Barrow walked away altogether, to run a small indie label in Australia. Adrian Utley did soundtracks. Portishead, riven by personal problems and shattered after their last, 1998 tour, were effectively finished. It's not a normal career path, outside of Bristol. But it was the break they needed. Curating last Christmas's All Tomorrow's Parties, they invited the underground US bands who inspired them now. Third sees them refreshed, and reborn.

MARTINA TOPLEY BIRD

Martina Topley Bird was discovered as a 15-year-old, when the then-equally unknown Tricky saw her waiting on the wall outside the house of Mark Stewart (of The Pop Group, the linchpin in Bristol's post-punk scene). He asked her if she could sing, and they started recording, and a relationship. They had a child, and made four of his albums together (Maxinquaye [1995], Nearly God [1996], Pre-Millennium Tension [1996] and Angels with Dirty Faces [1998]), before splitting. "It was highly acrimonious between those two, and I was caught in the middle," Alison Goldfrapp remembered, of replacing Topley Bird in Tricky's band.

Typically of the Bristol scene, Topley Bird only really arrived with her solo debut, Quixotic (including collaborations with David Holmes and Tricky) in 2003. "I find it weird when people remark that it takes a long time to make a record," she tells me. "I find that rude, ignorant and ridiculous."

But an audience remained who remembered her coolly feminine counterpoint, vocally and on video, to the often equally feminine, cross-dressing Tricky in his prime. It was Mercury-nominated. Its follow-up, The Blue God, produced by Gnarls Barkley's Danger Mouse, fulfils much of her early promise. Its slightly psychedelic torch songs are all sugary threat and noir mystery. These days, she sounds more Portishead than Portishead. Here, she looks back on Bristol's effect on her.

"I spent three years in Bristol," she recalls. "It was the most crucial period of growing up for me, from 13 to 16. We'd been in West Sussex, and it was a bigger town, a bigger school. I'm a West Country girl and we'd go on the Downs, to escape and be a bit mad. I had my share of adventures there. But Bristol's an old port town, it's mixed. It's weird – you could call it cosmopolitan, because it's not got that big-city vibe. But it's been there long enough to have an entrenched character. It's not a transient place, like most university towns."

With her looks and fashion sense, Topley Bird could have parlayed her start into stardom long ago. But, as with her fellow West Country chanteuses Beth Gibbons and even Goldfrapp, such hungry, London notions mean nothing to her. "It is a weird anomaly that none of the musicians who've come from there have any interest in being stars," she agrees.

"I suppose if you start out with a certain ethos, then you won't think about playing the pop game. I didn't even know what the game was. I didn't go through stage school. I met someone [Tricky], and it was quite an organic thing. I didn't create the early days of that Bristol scene. I was caught up in all that stuff. So trying to make myself an industry model is uncomfortable to me.

"Me and Tricky had really different upbringings," she continues, considering her one-time partner. "But we just had an affinity. I suppose we recognised a little bit of hurt in each other. We had similar things in our backgrounds. Both of us had parents who had died. We'd grown up around other people who were really sad about it. But we weren't. It's a thing that takes a really long time to understand. It caused perplexity, as much as sadness. We weren't depressed people, hanging out being miserable.

"Things change as you get older," she says of her split with Tricky. "We turned out to be wired differently. I met him when I was a teenager, and was very open to – whatever. As far as our creative interaction, I made him a mix-tape, when I was hanging out with him, when I was still at school. Michelle Shocked was on there, and probably a lot of the alternative music I was listening to then, like Jane's Addiction. And then we did a couple of songs, including "Aftermath", and then I left Bristol. Two years later, he signed to Island, and we started working on Maxinquaye. Mainly, he worked on the music with Mark Saunders. I was given lyrics on bits of paper. Then I'd do vocals.

"Bristol was the backdrop for my teenage years of massive change, 13 to 16," she says, recalling how she left it. "And I met who I met, and that had quite a long-reaching effect on my life now [she has a 12-year-old child with Tricky]. I was sorry I left for a little while. I was being feisty at the time and went to study in Cambridge. I missed the identity and the atmosphere of Bristol then. The Cambridge music scene was quite hippie, there wasn't one black person. The only racist bad stuff that ever happened to me was there. It was empty and bleak and lonely. Whereas Bristol was quite melancholy. But we weren't lonely. Maybe we were happy being melancholy together.

"My musical identity was still forming when I left Bristol. I had beliefs then that I still have now. But I've changed 100 per cent, even from Quixotic to The Blue God. I almost feel sorry for people trying to compare my work now to what I did with Tricky, or other people from Bristol. The new record's hooky, direct, not too subtle. But it's characteristic of me that I got bored with that after a few songs. It's deliberately more direct, simple and solid. Brian Burton [Danger Mouse] was really eager to make it psychedelic – he played me some Pink Floyd tracks. But the voices are really weak on that music, so I toned it down. Some vague bits of psychedelia remain, but we made it more pop. More Fleetwood Mac."

Topley Bird may have left Bristol after only the briefest stay, when still a child. But in her chameleon musical sense, and mule-headed individuality, it has certainly left its mark.

'The Blue God' is out 11 May on Independiente

"Where has Fila Brazillia gone?"

2008-06-05T11:28:00.003Z

Upcoming Album Release Marks the End of Fila Brazillia

NewswireToday - /newswire/ - Dallas, TX, United Kingdom, 05/21/2008 - Fila Brazillia fanatics finally have an answer to the question that's left them baffled... "Where has Fila Brazillia gone?".

Fila Brazillia fanatics finally have an answer to the question that's left them baffled... "Where has Fila Brazillia gone?" While official news of the electronic duo's demise may prove shocking to some, co-founder Steve Cobby has been in pursuit of something greater, starting with the creation of Steel Tiger Records in late 2006. Having over 45 singles, 16 full length releases, and remixes for artists such as Radiohead and Black Uhuru under his belt, the move was the next logical step in the progression of Cobby's career.

Steel Tiger Records is the brainchild of Cobby and long-time compatriot Sim Lister. The two had previously partnered on numerous ventures, including Twentythree Records, the label responsible for the release of Fila Brazillia's final projects. Additionally, Cobby and Lister were two-thirds of the side project Heights of Abraham - with vocalist and composer Jake Harries - and continue to produce music together as the duo J*S*T*A*R*S*. With these two talents combined, Steel Tiger Records promises an abundance of fresh sounds that past Fila Brazillia fans will likely find both satisfying and addictive.

In its first year of operations, Steel Tiger Records saw a full-length release by the dance-oriented project J*S*T*A*R*S*, a one-off EP release by Peacecorps and preliminary digital singles by The Cutler. While post-release feedback has given Cobby and Lister reason to be optimistic about all three projects, the two are currently focusing their attention on The Cutler's upcoming debut of Cutler, a release that will truly mark the beginning of a new era... and the end of Fila Brazillia.

In late 2007, BBC Radio 1 DJ and UK music festival "Bestival" curator Rob da Bank played an exclusive preview of The Cutler on his radio show and expressed his praise for the duo and their tunes stating, "Beautiful! Lovin' The Cutler. Ace to hear some proper music being made again."

A testament to shared aspirations, the electronic duo known as The Cutler reunites Steve Cobby with the man partially responsible for the success of Fila Brazillia, Dave "Porky" Brennand. Brennand made his mark on the European music scene after forming the UK-based indie label Pork Recordings in 1991 and has released over 100 singles and albums to date. "Porky bestows his own brand of musical sensibilities as part of The Cutler duo," says Cobby. Brennand adds, "The success of Fila Brazillia was a glimpse into the future that is with us now." The Cutler's self-titled debut album will see a digital and physical CD release on 7 July 2008, and will be distributed physically and digitally world-wide by Kudos Records Ltd. Digital versions of the release will be available via iTunes, Emusic, Napster and a host of independent download stores, and over mobile.

For past followers of Fila Brazillia and the talented individuals behind it's success, the next chapter lies in the hands of Steel Tiger and its upcoming Cutler release. As they move upward and onward, Cobby, Lister, and Brennand maintain a focused mission... to make proper music again.

Fere mas to kypello, OOOO...

2008-04-19T12:44:00.004Z

ARH mou se agapw, oooo, ARH mou 8a trela8w, ARH den eimai kala, ARH den bazw myalo, oooo, fere mas to kypello, oooo ...

Portishead - Third

2008-04-05T18:25:00.004Z

The long long wait has come to an end...

The 3rd (also album title!) is here! Different, but it grows on you.
I will post a decent review soon but for now I already fell in love with the track "Magic Doors'.

Sergio Koke's 10 goals from 2006-2007 - I hope he scores tonight against Xanthi!

2008-03-20T10:17:00.001Z

Thiago's first Aris goal - A star is born!

2008-03-20T10:10:00.005Z

Thiago Gentil!!!

The game against AEK was admittedly the best away performance of Aris in the greek superleague. And Thiago's goal was special!

What I miss the most... Not the turtle, the person I took the pictute with!

2008-03-13T19:09:00.003Z

Pictures from Orleans, France

2008-03-13T18:45:00.008Z

An original Mixmag article from the early days of trip hop (follow the link).

2008-03-13T18:21:00.003Z

Trip Hop: bad name amazing music!

2008-03-13T17:52:00.005Z

Usually, following the question: "What kind of music do you like?", a long pause follows on my behalf. I will try to give an accurate description of my musical palette later but for now a few things about "trip hop" which has been my easy answer, even though I and many others (including artists of the genre), hate the term.

Trip hop (also known as the Bristol sound or Bristol acid rap) is a term coined by British dance magazine Mixmag, to describe DJ Shadow 's hip hop instrumentals that (inspired by Organized Konfusion's track "Releasing Hypnotical Gases") changed-up the beat and pallet mid-cut, giving the listener the impression they were on a musical journey. The word trip in the title refers to a psychedelic experience. Later, the Trip Hop description was applied to a musical trend in the mid-1990s; trip hop is downtempo electronic music that grew out of England's hip hop and house scenes. Sometimes characterized by a reliance on breakbeats and a sample-heavy, often moody sound pioneered by Coldcut's remix of Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid in Full", trip hop gained notice via popular artists such as Portishead, Björk, Massive Attack, Thievery Corporation, Tricky, and rock-influenced sound groups such as Ruby, California's DJ Shadow, and the UK's Howie B.

Morcheeba originating from Hythe in Kent and Londoners Glideascope are also often associated with this sound. The latest additions to this line of performers are Jem and Australia's Spook. The Bristol Sound came out of the wider Bristol Urban Culture scene.

History

Trip hop originated in the '90s in Bristol, England, during a time when American hip hop was taking over Europe's music industry. British DJs decided to put a local spin on the international phenomenon and developed hip hop into a different style, marking the birth of trip hop. The originators in Bristol developed hip hop with a laid-back beat (down tempo). Bristol hip hop (trip hop's predecessor) is characterized by the emphasis on slow and heavy drum beats and a wide open sound that draws heavily on acid jazz, Jamaican dub music and electronica. Massive Attack's first album Blue Lines in 1991, is often seen as the first manifestation of the "Bristol hip hop movement" (known as the "First Coming of Bristol Sound"), but in fact Massive Attack drew heavily on the pre-existing British hip hop scene, and their sound is remarkably similar to that pioneered earlier by Marxman, an Irish-Jamaican hip hop crew that was popular in the UK in the 1980s.

1994 and '95 saw trip hop near the peak of its popularity. Massive Attack released their second album entitled "Protection." Those years also marked the rise of Portishead and Tricky. Portishead's female lead singer Beth Gibbons' sullen voice was mixed with samples of music from the '60s and '70s, as well as sound effects from LPs, giving the group a distinctive style. Tricky's style was characterized by murmuring and low-pitched singing. Artists and groups like Portishead and Tricky led the second wave of the Bristol Movement (a.k.a. "Second Coming of Bristol Sound"). This second wave produced music that was dreamy and atmospheric, and sometimes deep and gloomy. The British press termed this style of music "trip hop," referring to this evolved style of hip hop.

Incidentally Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky all had a common history. Massive Attack's three members used to work with Tricky, under the group "The Wild Bunch" (headed by Nellee Hooper in 1982), explaining why many Massive Attack songs feature Tricky. Portishead member Geoff Barrow also previously helped produce Massive Attack's "Blue Lines."

The Bristol sound

The Bristol sound was the name given to a number of bands from Bristol, England, in the 1990s. These bands spawned the musical genre trip-hop, though many of the bands shunned this name when other British and international bands imitated the style and preferred not to distinguish it from hip hop.

It is characterised by a slow, spaced-out sound that a number of artists in the early and mid 1990s made synonymous with the city. These artists can include the aforementioned original Bristolians Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky and others such as Way Out West, Smith and Mighty, Up, Bustle & Out, and The Wild Bunch.

The Bristol Sound was part of the wider Bristol Urban Culture scene.

Post trip hop

In 1994 Trip-Hop was applied to a wide variety of electronic music that was later divided into sub categories such as Big Beat, and Electro. After the success of Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky albums in '94 and '95, a new generation of trip hop artists emerged with a more standardized sound. "Post trip hop" artists included Morcheeba, Chloe Day, Alpha, Mono, The Aloof, Glideascope, Cibo Matto, etc. These artists integrated trip hop with Ambience, R&B, Brit-Hop, Breakbeat, Drum 'n' Bass, Acid Jazz, New Age, etc. Furthermore, vocals expanded beyond melancholy female voices. The first printed record for the use of the term "Post trip hop" was as late as October 2002 when British newspaper The Independent used it to describe Second Person and their hybrid sound. Trip hop has now developed into a diversified genre that was no longer limited to the "deep, dark style" of the early years, eliminating the original impression of trip hop as "dark and gloomy."

Abstract hip hop

James Lavelle, founding member of UNKLE and owner of the famous trip hop label Mo'Wax used to say, "British hip hop lacks the lyrical skills of U.S. counterparts, but British kids have got the musical side." This offers insight as to why trip hop artists like DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, and DJ Cam often choose to strip out vocals in their works. The absence of vocals produces an effect that emphasizes the intrinsic nature of the music, allowing the listener to step into unknown territory (just like viewing an abstract painting). Though this style of music was described by the British press as "trip hop," many artists (including DJ Shadow) frown upon this term. They are proud that their music is part of Hip Hop culture and feel no need to break off into a separate genre. DJ Cam calls this style of music "abstract hip hop."

Musicology

Trip hop is known for its moody, dark, yet lyrical sound.

The trip hop sound relies on jazz samples, usually taken from old vinyl jazz records. This reliance on sampling has changed the way record labels deal with clearing samples for use in other people's tracks. Trip hop tracks often sample Rhodes pianos, saxophones, trumpets, and flutes, and develops in parallel to hip hop, each inspiring the other.

Trip hop production is historically lo-fi, relying on analog recording equipment and instrumentation for an ambience. Portishead, for example, records their material to old tape from real instruments, and then sample their recordings, rather than recording their instruments directly to a track. They also tend to put their drums through considerable compression.

source: Wikipedia.com

Long absence!

2008-03-13T17:46:00.003Z

Haven't been posting much lately. Thesis writing can do that to a man!
But now I'm back, ready put out my thoughts on music mostly, science, chess and of course Aris the best team in the world!

I guess this comes next: Aris eliminates a team of 118 million euros budget!!

2007-10-05T09:12:00.000Z

Pictures soon, this qualification has been unbelievable!

Clear 4th and UEFA cup next season, what comes next?

2007-05-01T10:33:00.000Z

Natalie Portman Rapping! Cool and very funny..

2007-04-24T14:43:00.000Z

An interesting point of view: Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

2007-04-23T15:18:00.000Z

Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

May 2003

(This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.)

When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work-- that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge.

Both of these images are wrong. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.

What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They're not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.

I've never liked the term "computer science." The main reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia. At one end you have people who are really mathematicians, but call what they're doing computer science so they can get DARPA grants. In the middle you have people working on something like the natural history of computers-- studying the behavior of algorithms for routing data through networks, for example. And then at the other extreme you have the hackers, who are trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters. It's as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same department.

Sometimes what the hackers do is called "software engineering," but this term is just as misleading. Good software designers are no more engineers than architects are. The border between architecture and engineering is not sharply defined, but it's there. It falls between what and how: architects decide what to do, and engineers figure out how to do it.

What and how should not be kept too separate. You're asking for trouble if you try to decide what to do without understanding how to do it. But hacking can certainly be more than just deciding how to implement some spec. At its best, it's creating the spec-- though it turns out the best way to do that is to implement it.

Perhaps one day "computer science" will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component parts. That might be a good thing. Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking.

Bundling all these different types of work together in one department may be convenient administratively, but it's confusing intellectually. That's the other reason I don't like the name "computer science." Arguably the people in the middle are doing something like an experimental science. But the people at either end, the hackers and the mathematicians, are not actually doing science.

The mathematicians don't seem bothered by this. They happily set to work proving theorems like the other mathematicians over in the math department, and probably soon stop noticing that the building they work in says ``computer science'' on the outside. But for the hackers this label is a problem. If what they're doing is called science, it makes them feel they ought to be acting scientific. So instead of doing what they really want to do, which is to design beautiful software, hackers in universities and research labs feel they ought to be writing research papers.

In the best case, the papers are just a formality. Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software. But often this mismatch causes problems. It's easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers.

Unfortunately, beautiful things don't always make the best subjects for papers. Number one, research must be original-- and as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure that you're exploring virgin territory is to to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants. Number two, research must be substantial-- and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome in order to get things done. Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions. Most of AI is an example of this rule; if you assume that knowledge can be represented as a list of predicate logic expressions whose arguments represent abstract concepts, you'll have a lot of papers to write about how to make this work. As Ricky Ricardo used to say, "Lucy, you got a lot of explaining to do."

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

So why do universities and research labs continue to judge hackers by publications? For the same reason that "scholastic aptitude" gets measured by simple-minded standardized tests, or the productivity of programmers gets measured in lines of code. These tests are easy to apply, and there is nothing so tempting as an easy test that kind of works.

Measuring what hackers are actually trying to do, designing beautiful software, would be much more difficult. You need a good sense of design to judge good design. And there is no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between people's ability to recognize good design and their confidence that they can.

The only external test is time. Over time, beautiful things tend to thrive, and ugly things tend to get discarded. Unfortunately, the amounts of time involved can be longer than human lifetimes. Samuel Johnson said it took a hundred years for a writer's reputation to converge. You have to wait for the writer's influential friends to die, and then for all their followers to die.

I think hackers just have to resign themselves to having a large random component in their reputations. In this they are no different from other makers. In fact, they're lucky by comparison. The influence of fashion is not nearly so great in hacking as it is in painting.

There are worse things than having people misunderstand your work. A worse danger is that you will yourself misunderstand your work. Related fields are where you go looking for ideas. If you find yourself in the computer science department, there is a natural temptation to believe, for example, that hacking is the applied version of what theoretical computer science is the theory of. All the time I was in graduate school I had an uncomfortable feeling in the back of my mind that I ought to know more theory, and that it was very remiss of me to have forgotten all that stuff within three weeks of the final exam.

Now I realize I was mistaken. Hackers need to understand the theory of computation about as much as painters need to understand paint chemistry. You need to know how to calculate time and space complexity and about Turing completeness. You might also want to remember at least the concept of a state machine, in case you have to write a parser or a regular expression library. Painters in fact have to remember a good deal more about paint chemistry than that.

I've found that the best sources of ideas are not the other fields that have the word "computer" in their names, but the other fields inhabited by makers. Painting has been a much richer source of ideas than the theory of computation.

For example, I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape. Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and oversights. The way I worked, it seemed like programming consisted of debugging.

For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once felt bad that I didn't hold my pencil the way they taught me to in elementary school. If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.

Realizing this has real implications for software design. It means that a programming language should, above all, be malleable. A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen. Static typing would be a fine idea if people actually did write programs the way they taught me to in college. But that's not how any of the hackers I know write programs. We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.

While we're on the subject of static typing, identifying with the makers will save us from another problem that afflicts the sciences: math envy. Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are. I think mathematicians also believe this. At any rate, the result is that scientists tend to make their work look as mathematical as possible. In a field like physics this probably doesn't do much harm, but the further you get from the natural sciences, the more of a problem it becomes.

A page of formulas just looks so impressive. (Tip: for extra impressiveness, use Greek variables.) And so there is a great temptation to work on problems you can treat formally, rather than problems that are, say, important.

If hackers identified with other makers, like writers and painters, they wouldn't feel tempted to do this. Writers and painters don't suffer from math envy. They feel as if they're doing something completely unrelated. So are hackers, I think.

If universities and research labs keep hackers from doing the kind of work they want to do, perhaps the place for them is in companies. Unfortunately, most companies won't let hackers do what they want either. Universities and research labs force hackers to be scientists, and companies force them to be engineers.

I only discovered this myself quite recently. When Yahoo bought Viaweb, they asked me what I wanted to do. I had never liked the business side very much, and said that I just wanted to hack. When I got to Yahoo, I found that what hacking meant to them was implementing software, not designing it. Programmers were seen as technicians who translated the visions (if that is the word) of product managers into code.

This seems to be the default plan in big companies. They do it because it decreases the standard deviation of the outcome. Only a small percentage of hackers can actually design software, and it's hard for the people running a company to pick these out. So instead of entrusting the future of the software to one brilliant hacker, most companies set things up so that it is designed by committee, and the hackers merely implement the design.

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.

So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they'll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It's hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it's hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand to hand combat. It would be pretty easy to write a better word processor than Microsoft Word, for example, but Microsoft, within the castle of their operating system monopoly, probably wouldn't even notice if you did.

The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. That's where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and having the same people both design and implement the product. Microsoft themselves did this at the start. So did Apple. And Hewlett-Packard. I suspect almost every successful startup has.

So one way to build great software is to start your own startup. There are two problems with this, though. One is that in a startup you have to do so much besides write software. At Viaweb I considered myself lucky if I got to hack a quarter of the time. And the things I had to do the other three quarters of the time ranged from tedious to terrifying. I have a benchmark for this, because I once had to leave a board meeting to have some cavities filled. I remember sitting back in the dentist's chair, waiting for the drill, and feeling like I was on vacation.

The other problem with startups is that there is not much overlap between the kind of software that makes money and the kind that's interesting to write. Programming languages are interesting to write, and Microsoft's first product was one, in fact, but no one will pay for programming languages now. If you want to make money, you tend to be forced to work on problems that are too nasty for anyone to solve for free.

All makers face this problem. Prices are determined by supply and demand, and there is just not as much demand for things that are fun to work on as there is for things that solve the mundane problems of individual customers. Acting in off-Broadway plays just doesn't pay as well as wearing a gorilla suit in someone's booth at a trade show. Writing novels doesn't pay as well as writing ad copy for garbage disposals. And hacking programming languages doesn't pay as well as figuring out how to connect some company's legacy database to their Web server.

I think the answer to this problem, in the case of software, is a concept known to nearly all makers: the day job. This phrase began with musicians, who perform at night. More generally, it means that you have one kind of work you do for money, and another for love.

Nearly all makers have day jobs early in their careers. Painters and writers notoriously do. If you're lucky you can get a day job that's closely related to your real work. Musicians often seem to work in record stores. A hacker working on some programming language or operating system might likewise be able to get a day job using it. [1]

When I say that the answer is for hackers to have day jobs, and work on beautiful software on the side, I'm not proposing this as a new idea. This is what open-source hacking is all about. What I'm saying is that open-source is probably the right model, because it has been independently confirmed by all the other makers.

It seems surprising to me that any employer would be reluctant to let hackers work on open-source projects. At Viaweb, we would have been reluctant to hire anyone who didn't. When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software they wrote in their spare time. You can't do anything really well unless you love it, and if you love to hack you'll inevitably be working on projects of your own. [2]

Because hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers. What else can painting teach us about hacking?

One thing we can learn, or at least confirm, from the example of painting is how to learn to hack. You learn to paint mostly by doing it. Ditto for hacking. Most hackers don't learn to hack by taking college courses in programming. They learn to hack by writing programs of their own at age thirteen. Even in college classes, you learn to hack mostly by hacking. [3]

Because painters leave a trail of work behind them, you can watch them learn by doing. If you look at the work of a painter in chronological order, you'll find that each painting builds on things that have been learned in previous ones. When there's something in a painting that works very well, you can usually find version 1 of it in a smaller form in some earlier painting.

I think most makers work this way. Writers and architects seem to as well. Maybe it would be good for hackers to act more like painters, and regularly start over from scratch, instead of continuing to work for years on one project, and trying to incorporate all their later ideas as revisions.

The fact that hackers learn to hack by doing it is another sign of how different hacking is from the sciences. Scientists don't learn science by doing it, but by doing labs and problem sets. Scientists start out doing work that's perfect, in the sense that they're just trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Eventually, they get to the point where they can do original work. Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it's just very bad. So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.

The other way makers learn is from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.

Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.

Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs-- not just at what they do, but the source code too. One of the less publicized benefits of the open-source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program. When I learned to program, we had to rely mostly on examples in books. The one big chunk of code available then was Unix, but even this was not open source. Most of the people who read the source read it in illicit photocopies of John Lions' book, which though written in 1977 was not allowed to be published until 1996.

Another example we can take from painting is the way that paintings are created by gradual refinement. Paintings usually begin with a sketch. Gradually the details get filled in. But it is not merely a process of filling in. Sometimes the original plans turn out to be mistaken. Countless paintings, when you look at them in xrays, turn out to have limbs that have been moved or facial features that have been readjusted.

Here's a case where we can learn from painting. I think hacking should work this way too. It's unrealistic to expect that the specifications for a program will be perfect. You're better off if you admit this up front, and write programs in a way that allows specifications to change on the fly.

(The structure of large companies makes this hard for them to do, so here is another place where startups have an advantage.)

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design-- deciding too early what a program should do.

The right tools can help us avoid this danger. A good programming language should, like oil paint, make it easy to change your mind. Dynamic typing is a win here because you don't have to commit to specific data representations up front. But the key to flexibility, I think, is to make the language very abstract. The easiest program to change is one that's very short.

This sounds like a paradox, but a great painting has to be better than it has to be. For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. No one will look that closely at it.

Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting didn't depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.

Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible. When people walk by the portrait of Ginevra de Benci, their attention is often immediately arrested by it, even before they look at the label and notice that it says Leonardo da Vinci. All those unseen details combine to produce something that's just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.

Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too. I'm not claiming I write great software, but I know that when it comes to code I behave in a way that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way. It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names.

If a hacker were a mere implementor, turning a spec into code, then he could just work his way through it from one end to the other like someone digging a ditch. But if the hacker is a creator, we have to take inspiration into account.

In hacking, like painting, work comes in cycles. Sometimes you get excited about some new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it. Other times nothing seems interesting.

To do good work you have to take these cycles into account, because they're affected by how you react to them. When you're driving a car with a manual transmission on a hill, you have to back off the clutch sometimes to avoid stalling. Backing off can likewise prevent ambition from stalling. In both painting and hacking there are some tasks that are terrifyingly ambitious, and others that are comfortingly routine. It's a good idea to save some easy tasks for moments when you would otherwise stall.

In hacking, this can literally mean saving up bugs. I like debugging: it's the one time that hacking is as straightforward as people think it is. You have a totally constrained problem, and all you have to do is solve it. Your program is supposed to do x. Instead it does y. Where does it go wrong? You know you're going to win in the end. It's as relaxing as painting a wall.

The example of painting can teach us not only how to manage our own work, but how to work together. A lot of the great art of the past is the work of multiple hands, though there may only be one name on the wall next to it in the museum. Leonardo was an apprentice in the workshop of Verrocchio and painted one of the angels in his Baptism of Christ. This sort of thing was the rule, not the exception. Michelangelo was considered especially dedicated for insisting on painting all the figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel himself.

As far as I know, when painters worked together on a painting, they never worked on the same parts. It was common for the master to paint the principal figures and for assistants to paint the others and the background. But you never had one guy painting over the work of another.

I think this is the right model for collaboration in software too. Don't push it too far. When a piece of code is being hacked by three or four different people, no one of whom really owns it, it will end up being like a common-room. It will tend to feel bleak and abandoned, and accumulate cruft. The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible, as articulated as programming languages.

Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.

When I was a kid I was always being told to look at things from someone else's point of view. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what I wanted. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a point of not cultivating it.

Boy, was I wrong. It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success. It doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations-- in war, for example-- you want to do exactly the opposite. [4]

Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need. Nearly all the greatest paintings are paintings of people, for example, because people are what people are interested in.

Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one. Some hackers are quite smart, but when it comes to empathy are practically solipsists. It's hard for such people to design great software [5], because they can't see things from the user's point of view.

One way to tell how good people are at empathy is to watch them explain a technical question to someone without a technical background. We probably all know people who, though otherwise smart, are just comically bad at this. If someone asks them at a dinner party what a programming language is, they'll say something like ``Oh, a high-level language is what the compiler uses as input to generate object code.'' High-level language? Compiler? Object code? Someone who doesn't know what a programming language is obviously doesn't know what these things are, either.

Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So to write good software you have to understand how little users understand. They're going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and it had better do what they guess it will, because they're not going to read the manual. The best system I've ever seen in this respect was the original Macintosh, in 1985. It did what software almost never does: it just worked. [6]

Source code, too, should explain itself. If I could get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be the one at the beginning of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

You need to have empathy not just for your users, but for your readers. It's in your interest, because you'll be one of them. Many a hacker has written a program only to find on returning to it six months later that he has no idea how it works. I know several people who've sworn off Perl after such experiences. [7]

Lack of empathy is associated with intelligence, to the point that there is even something of a fashion for it in some places. But I don't think there's any correlation. You can do well in math and the natural sciences without having to learn empathy, and people in these fields tend to be smart, so the two qualities have come to be associated. But there are plenty of dumb people who are bad at empathy too. Just listen to the people who call in with questions on talk shows. They ask whatever it is they're asking in such a roundabout way that the hosts often have to rephrase the question for them.

So, if hacking works like painting and writing, is it as cool? After all, you only get one life. You might as well spend it working on something great.

Unfortunately, the question is hard to answer. There is always a big time lag in prestige. It's like light from a distant star. Painting has prestige now because of great work people did five hundred years ago. At the time, no one thought these paintings were as important as we do today. It would have seemed very odd to people at the time that Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, would one day be known mostly as the guy with the strange nose in a painting by Piero della Francesca.

So while I admit that hacking doesn't seem as cool as painting now, we should remember that painting itself didn't seem as cool in its glory days as it does now.

What we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory days of hacking. In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel.

Over and over we see the same pattern. A new medium appears, and people are so excited about it that they explore most of its possibilities in the first couple generations. Hacking seems to be in this phase now.

Painting was not, in Leonardo's time, as cool as his work helped make it. How cool hacking turns out to be will depend on what we can do with this new medium.

Notes

[1] The greatest damage that photography has done to painting may be the fact that it killed the best day job. Most of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits.

[2] I've been told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source projects, even in their spare time. But so many of the best hackers work on open-source projects now that the main effect of this policy may be to ensure that they won't be able to hire any first-rate programmers.

[3] What you learn about programming in college is much like what you learn about books or clothes or dating: what bad taste you had in high school.

[4] Here's an example of applied empathy. At Viaweb, if we couldn't decide between two alternatives, we'd ask, what would our competitors hate most? At one point a competitor added a feature to their software that was basically useless, but since it was one of few they had that we didn't, they made much of it in the trade press. We could have tried to explain that the feature was useless, but we decided it would annoy our competitor more if we just implemented it ourselves, so we hacked together our own version that afternoon.

[5] Except text editors and compilers. Hackers don't need empathy to design these, because they are themselves typical users.

[6] Well, almost. They overshot the available RAM somewhat, causing much inconvenient disk swapping, but this could be fixed within a few months by buying an additional disk drive.

[7] The way to make programs easy to read is not to stuff them with comments. I would take Abelson and Sussman's quote a step further. Programming languages should be designed to express algorithms, and only incidentally to tell computers how to execute them. A good programming language ought to be better for explaining software than English. You should only need comments when there is some kind of kludge you need to warn readers about, just as on a road there are only arrows on parts with unexpectedly sharp curves.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Dan Giffin, and Lisa Randall for reading drafts of this, and to Henry Leitner and Larry Finkelstein for inviting me to speak.

This is what I call reviewing!

2007-04-05T19:41:00.000Z

LOL: Internet slang meaning = Laugh(ing) Out Loud

And this is exactly what you are going to do when you read the following review from "The New Yorker" columnist, Anthony Lane.

Fan or not, you will enjoy this!

Space Case “Star Wars: Episode III”

Sith. What kind of a word is that? Sith. It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other, but to George Lucas it is a name that trumpets evil. What is proved beyond question by “Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith,” the latest—and, you will be shattered to hear, the last—installment of his sci-fi bonanza, is that Lucas, though his eye may be greedy for sensation, has an ear of purest cloth. All those who concoct imagined worlds must populate and name them, and the resonance of those names is a fairly accurate guide to the mettle of the imagination in question. Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith.

Lucas was not always a rootless soul. He made “American Graffiti,” which yielded with affection to the gravitational pull of the small town. Since then, he has swung out of orbit, into deep nonsense, and the new film is the apotheosis of that drift. One stab of humor and the whole conceit would pop, but I have a grim feeling that Lucas wishes us to honor the remorseless non-comedy of his galactic conflict, so here goes. Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and his star pupil, Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), are, with the other Jedi knights, defending the Republic against the encroachments of the Sith and their allies—millions of dumb droids, led by Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) and his henchman, General Grievous, who is best described as a slaying mantis. Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the Republic, Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), is engaged in a sly bout of Realpolitik, suspected by nobody except Anakin, Obi-Wan, and every single person watching the movie. Anakin, too, is a divided figure, wrenched between his Jedi devotion to selfless duty and a lurking hunch that, if he bides his time and trashes his best friends, he may eventually get to wear a funky black mask and start breathing like a horse.

This film is the tale of his temptation. We already know the outcome—Anakin will indeed drop the killer-monk Jedi look and become Darth Vader, the hockey goalkeeper from hell—because it forms the substance of the original “Star Wars.” One of the things that make Episode III so dismal is the time and effort expended on Anakin’s conversion. Early in the story, he enjoys a sprightly light-sabre duel with Count Dooku, which ends with the removal of the Count’s hands. (The stumps glow, like logs on a fire; there is nothing here that reeks of human blood.) Anakin prepares to scissor off the head, while the mutilated Dooku kneels for mercy. A nice setup, with Palpatine egging our hero on from the background. The trouble is that Anakin’s choice of action now will be decisive, and the remaining two hours of the film—scene after scene in which Hayden Christensen has to glower and glare, blazing his conundrum to the skies—will add nothing to the result. “Something’s happening. I’m not the Jedi I should be,” he says. This is especially worrying for his wife, Padmé (Natalie Portman), who is great with child. Correction: with children.

What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth? Mind you, how Padmé got pregnant is anybody’s guess, although I’m prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes. After all, the Lucasian universe is drained of all reference to bodily functions. Nobody ingests or excretes. Language remains unblue. Smoking and cursing are out of bounds, as is drunkenness, although personally I wouldn’t go near the place without a hip flask. Did Lucas learn nothing from “Alien” and “Blade Runner”—from the suggestion that other times and places might be no less rusted and septic than ours, and that the creation of a disinfected galaxy, where even the storm troopers wear bright-white outfits, looks not so much fantastical as dated? What Lucas has devised, over six movies, is a terrible puritan dream: a morality tale in which both sides are bent on moral cleansing, and where their differences can be assuaged only by a triumphant circus of violence. Judging from the whoops and crowings that greeted the opening credits, this is the only dream we are good for. We get the films we deserve.

The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith” seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. So much here is guaranteed to cause either offense or pain, starting with the nineteen-twenties leather football helmet that Natalie Portman suddenly dons for no reason, and rising to the continual horror of Ewan McGregor’s accent. “Another happy landing”—or, to be precise, “anothah heppy lending”—he remarks, as Anakin parks the front half of a burning starcruiser on a convenient airstrip. The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves.

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in “Gremlins” when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink—squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,” he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.

The prize for the least speakable burst of dialogue has, over half a dozen helpings of “Star Wars,” grown into a fiercely contested tradition, but for once the winning entry is clear, shared between Anakin and Padmé for their exchange of endearments at home:

“You’re so beautiful.” “That’s only because I’m so in love.” “No, it’s because I’m so in love with you.”

For a moment, it looks as if they might bat this one back and forth forever, like a baseline rally on a clay court. And if you think the script is on the tacky side, get an eyeful of the décor. All of the interiors in Lucasworld are anthems to clean living, with molded furniture, the tranquillity of a morgue, and none of the clutter and quirkiness that signify the process known as existence. Illumination is provided not by daylight but by a dispiriting plastic sheen, as if Lucas were coating all private affairs—those tricky little threats to his near-fascistic rage for order—in a protective glaze. Only outside does he relax, and what he relaxes into is apocalypse. “Revenge of the Sith” is a zoo of rampant storyboards. Why show a pond when C.G.I. can deliver a lake that gleams to the far horizon? Why set a paltry house on fire when you can stage your final showdown on an entire planet that streams with ruddy, gulping lava? Whether the director is aware of John Martin, the Victorian painter who specialized in the cataclysmic, I cannot say, but he has certainly inherited that grand perversity, mobilized it in every frame of the film, and thus produced what I take to be unique: an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation. I keep thinking of the rueful Obi-Wan Kenobi, as he surveys the holographic evidence of Anakin’s betrayal. “I can’t watch anymore,” he says. Wise words, Obi-Wan, and I shall carry them in my heart.

Indie Rock jems recently discovered!

2007-04-05T19:01:00.000Z

1. midlake – roscoe
2. benoit pioulard – palimend
3. peter bjorn and john – young folks
4. the teenagers – homecoming
5. munk & james murphy – kick out the chairs
6. rah rah – winter sun
7. califone – pink and sour
8. andrew bird – a nervous tic motion of the head to the left
9. jose gonzales –teardrop (massive attack cover, live at bazaar curieux)
10. beirut - postcards from Italy

Movie of the week: 300 (2007)

2007-04-05T18:47:00.000Z

Ancient greeks, kicking ass..

Big screen and faithful adaptation of the historically-inspired graphic novel series written and illustrated by Frank Miller. This is a retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae and the events leading up to it from the perspective of Leonidas of Sparta. 300 was particularly inspired by the 1962 film The 300 Spartans, a movie that Miller watched as a young boy.

Worth watching for being visually stunning, catching up with your history and getting an overdose of washboard abs!

A very early zugzwang!

2007-03-25T18:04:00.000Z

Zugzwang: “Compulsion to move.” A German term referring to a situation in which a player would like to do nothing (pass), since any move will damage his game.

Well, in this case, my oponent spent most of the game in this situation. Pretty much everything after move 10!

Game 13 (23-03-2007) Division 5

My best game! until the next one..

2007-03-21T15:13:00.000Z

A game for the Club Championship, against a 120+ rated oponent.
After a normal opening (rather clumsy on the black side) an underdeveloped oponent wasted valuable tempi by manouvering his queen and tempted his luck by castling long.

I think it represents my best game so far, look out for the cool knight sacrifice (19.Nb5) that can not be refuted! I also think that the timing of the sacrifice is quite unique, less chances of being effective if played sooner or later than the given moment.

They're back!!

2007-03-01T08:48:00.000Z

Portishead delighted fans in Bristol on Sunday night by playing a surprise show and previewing material from their forthcoming album. Geoff Barrow, Adrian Uttley and Beth Gibbons were billed as 'Grumpy Man DJ's', but surprised everybody by performing live as Portishead for the first time since 2005 at the tsunami support concert alongside Massive Attack (By the way.. I was there! Not Sunday though..).

More of my games.

2007-02-24T17:35:00.000Z

Game 3 (5-12-2006) Division 6
Nice knight sacrifice, for two pawns, providing both much needed defence, and attacking prospects.

Game 1 (21/11/2006) Division 4

And the usual 1.f4 action. I'm a Bird opening addict! Moves 18-23 (23.Re5!) are a good example of creating advantage out of thin air.

A draw to remember!

2007-02-21T14:36:00.000Z

Moro in time trouble (2 minutes on the clock) missed a chance for glory with:

38.Qd8+ Kg7 39.f6+ Kh6 40.Kh4!! Qxd4+ 41.g4 Qb4 42.Qf8! Qxf8 43.g5#

Nevermind, it's games like this that make him my favourite active player.

Movie of the week: The last kiss (2006)

2007-02-21T12:19:00.000Z

Zach Braff's effort to top up Garden State is an engaging bitter sweet experience.
29 year olds in crisis, relationships realism and yet another worthwhile soundtrack.
Worth watching, even if you're not around 30!

"Just another bedroom rocker – Volume 1" by yours truely

2007-02-19T14:04:00.000Z

1. bonobo – kota
2. gak sato – penetrare (beleville mix by kid loco)
3. j-walk – following the noughties
4. big bud – persian blues
5. invisible pair of hands – once upon a time
6. peace orchestra – the man (gotan project remix)
7. moped – after the pain
8. a forest mighty black – reflections of a fake night
9. dj spinna – bahia blues
10. nightmares on wax – bleu my mind
11. sneaker pimps – wasted early sunday morning
12. sumo – limpid
13. the herbalizer – theme from control centre (reprise)
14. the chess cadet all stars feat. etta james – see me smile
15. the stic – levitation dub
16. marshmellow – splendid
17. sukia – the dream machine (space echo mix)
18. layo & bushwacka – blind tiger

DJ Krush megamix tribute

2007-02-16T19:54:00.000Z

Tracklisting only for now. I might post the mix soon. Sounds amazing!

1. DJ Vadim – Variations in USSR (DJ Krush remix)
2. Sugizo – Spiritual Prayer (DJ Krush remix)
3. DJ Krush feat. Abijah – What about tomorrow?
4. DJ Krush feat. Eri Ohno – Mind games
5. DJ Krush – Dig this vibe
6. DJ Krush – Edge of blue
7. Hamid Baroudi – Arabica (DJ Krush mix)
8. DJ Krush & Ronny Jordan – Season for change
9. DJ Krush feat. Deflon Sallahr of Hedrush – Ground
10. kudO – Ibuki reconstruction (DJ Krush remix)
11. DJ Krush – Big city lover
12. DJ Krush – Keeping the motion
13. DJ Krush & Toshinori Kondo – Shoh ka
14. Boom boom satellites – On the painted desert (DJ Krush remix)
15. DJ Krush feat. Ahmir ?uestlove Thompson – Endless Railway (sentiment mix)
16. DJ Krush feat. D-Madness & Masato Nakamura – But the world moves on
17. DJ Krush feat. Angelina Esparza – Alepheuo (truthspeaking)
18. DJ Krush feat. C.L Smooth – Only the strong survive (attica blues remix)
19. DJ Krush – 3rd eye
20. DJ Krush feat. Sunja Lee – Paradise bird theory
21. DJ Krush feat. Zap Mamma – Danger of love (gray sky mix)
22. DJ Krush & Toshinori Kondo – sun is shinning
23. DJ Krush feat. Deborah Anderson – Skin against skin
24. DJ Krush feat. Rino – Shin Sekai
25. DJ Krush feat. Black Thought and Malik B. of The Roots – Meiso (Silent gun mix)
26. DJ Krush feat. Mos def. – Shinjiro (Harsh mix)

More 1. f4

2007-02-15T23:11:00.000Z

Good queenside play.

And a good one..

2007-02-15T16:30:00.000Z

Calculated, merciless attack!

A bad game..

2007-02-15T16:01:00.001Z

Thinking only about attacking and creating complications does not pay off!

Power play : recent and frequent tracks on my playlist

2007-02-13T19:01:00.000Z

Should I do this weekly again?
Well, we'll see..

In no particular order, here it goes:

1. 8mm - you know
2. boom boom satellites - on the painted desert (dj krush remix)
3. joel - won't take no (giorgios lights out dub)
4. lyrics born - concentration (instrumental)
5. kosheen - catch (beauty's confusion night mix)
6. sugizo - spiritual prayer (dj krush remix)
7. rodney hunter - work that body
8. tekitha - walking through the darkness
9. urchin - nile rose
10. zero one - inner space
11. mylo - sunworshipper
12. urbs - the incident
13. lemongrass - passengers
14. dutch rhythm combo - come on
15. shantel - your hands
16. millenia nova - I'm dead
17. dzihan & kamien - ay ay ay
18. sofa surfers - tsetse fly (remixed & dubbed by the hi tek steppas)
19. obO - forelash
20. dj krush feat. Ahmir Questlove Thompson - endless railway (sentiment mix)

Slight dj krush influence, but what can I say, the guy is brilliant!
And I've had some new material recently..

Movie of the week: Brick (2006)

2007-02-13T18:54:00.000Z

New proposal, every week, if I can keep up with it.
Don't be surprised if I turn it into Movie of the month soon..

I'm not gonna say much about it, just watch it and see!
Best described as: "High school confidential, film noir in a teen movie package".

Next please...

2007-01-18T23:15:00.000Z

Once again, the hottest home court in Europe has made a difference.
Italian champions, Benetton Treviso bowed before those crazy fans, loosing 65-60 to Aris. The "yellows" are now one win away from the 16 best teams in Europe.
Great night from Terrel Castle, who despite recent surgery led the team with 22 points and 5 three-pointers, alongside Scales (17) and Iliadis (10).
More soon on the Emperor of greek basketball, including video footage from the Aris - Napoli (80-72) game , that I was fortunate to attend.

Graduate Advice and Hilarious Truths

2007-01-15T16:20:00.000Z

Dark matter mapped in 3D for first time

2007-01-10T17:54:00.000Z

Blue Foundation

2007-01-10T10:48:00.001Z

Blue Foundation is a music - artist collective with members from Denmark, Japan and England. The music reflects their metropolitian life in urban culture of today. With influences from hip hop, turntablism, trip hop, classical music, film noir and contemporary music, Blue Foundation creates a musical world that takes you back into the history of music.
They are mostly known for their 2004 release Sweep of Days. Their track "Sweep" featured on the Miami Vice OST.

Tracklisting (Sweep of Days):
1 History
2 As I Moved On Guitar - Hans Landgreen
3 End of the Day (Silence)
4 Ricochet
5 02.17 AM
6 Embers
7 Bonfires
8 The Yellow Man
9 Shine
10 Save This Town
11 Sweep
12 My Day

Their selftitled release from 2001 is equally enjoyable.

Tracklisting (Blue Foundation):
1 Wiseguy (5:06)
2 Grand (5:03)
3 Witch Of Trouble (3:39)
4 Crushed (3:07)Scratches - Kruzh'em
5 Jabber (4:18)
6 Hollywood (3:58)
7 Burgeon (1:50)
8 Black S (4:54)
9 Mazda (0:58)
10 Hide (4:07)
11 Cutting Me Up (3:58) Vocals - MC 'Iruk , MC Reef K.
12 J. Hurt (4:17)
13 Evo (4:17)

Now I just need to get my hands on this year's release!

Happy New Year!

2007-01-07T12:42:00.000Z

1st sunset of 2007 in Thessaloniki. What can I say? I love this city.

Aris TT Bank - CSKA Moscow 62-65

2006-12-21T15:56:00.000Z

This is what happens when we loose!
In front of a sell out crowd, Aris TT Bank gave the current Euroleague Champions a hard time before succumbing on details due to a turnover during the last attack.
This was the 1st home defeat, however the chances of qualifying to the next round are very much intact.

CSKA Moscow Guard,PAPALOUKAS, THEODOROS: "I haven’t felt like today for a long time. I was nervous before the game because of the support of the fans. However, I felt really proud and I should thank the fans for the standing ovation. Alexandreio is the most difficult arena I have ever played in. Maybe, there is no hottest court around Europe. The image of the fans will remain in my soul forever."

Aris TT Bank Head Coach, MAZZON, ANDREA: "I am very proud of my team today because we struggled for the win until the final buzzer of the game against the current Euroleague Champion. Even though we had higher evaluation number, we lost the game! Let me repeat that we can qualify for the next round with such huge support in Alexandreio. Our fans are absolutely incredible."

They are indeed incredible, and I will be one of them on the next home game against Napoli at the beggining of January.

Littlethorpe Christmas QuickPlay 2

2006-12-21T09:52:00.000Z

Turns out that I was joint 2nd, but with the best grading performance of 143!

Littlethorpe Chess Club Christmas Quick Play

2006-12-20T11:13:00.000Z

The Littlethorpe Chess Club Christmas Quick Play took place last night at the plough, with 4 rounds of all moves in 15 minutes. Amazing performance for an unrated outsider such as myself, scoring 3 wins out of 4 games, including a win against a 145 BCF rated player. I think it was a joint 1st, had to leave before all games were finished, but I will get back to you on that.

Iron & Wine - Woman King EP

2006-12-18T18:00:00.000Z

Iron & Wine is the stage and recording name for Florida singer songwriter Sam Beam. His cover of "Such Great Heights" by The Postal Service was featured in the 2004 film Garden State and its soundtrack. That's when it caught my attention.
Been a fan ever since, and with this release he expands his characteristic sound to a more complete and energetic level.

A little bit about my research

2006-12-18T11:52:00.000Z

My research involves the use of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscpy for the determination of the three dimensional structure of the BcII metallo-b-lactamase from Bacillus cereus in complex with the promising inhibitor R-Thiomandelic acid.

Atromitos - Aris 1-1

2006-12-16T17:06:00.000Z

Atmo Brtschitsch - Change your life (2004)

2006-12-16T16:43:00.000Z

Best thing I've listened to during the last week. From 2004, only recently made it to my headphones.

New pics

2006-12-16T16:40:00.001Z

More pictures today. Subjects highly irregular.

Links + Picture

2006-12-15T18:20:00.001Z

Just added a few of my favourite links and a picture from Paros.

Welcome to my blog!

2006-12-13T12:04:00.000Z

Hi everybody, this is just me wasting my time. Who knows? This may turn out to be fun.