Pope will remain in Vatican to avoid prosecution for child sex abuse – National Humanist | Examiner.com.

Certainly this should be enough to bring some sort of widespread reform to the Catholic Church and its antiquated views on sexuality.

Fond memories of Soul Food Farm – SFGate

Sad story of a couple of independent farmers who created “chicken heaven” and produced amazing chickens and eggs that sold to some of the best restaurants in San Francisco and the bay area.  Despite having the best product around they still couldn’t make the business work.

Netherlands Highways Will Glow in the Dark Starting in mid 2013 | Ars Technica

The idea of bringing technology out of the screen and into the world really resonates with me, but projects like this sound so hard to actually do on a large scale. It wasn’t easy to build the interstate highway system in the US either, though. Big ideas can come to life.

With The Oatmeal’s help, nonprofit buys property to build a Tesla Museum | Ars Technica.

Cooperation comes easily but thinking makes us selfish | Ars Technica.

That article got me really thinking about what that means for humans as a people.  Over the past 100 years we’ve increasingly moved away from collaborative working towards competitive.  That’s also been a move away from fulfilling and satisfying work.  As people become more selfish and greedy they pull even farther away from what actually makes them happy… connections with other people!

This is What Happens When a Squid Listens to Cypress Hill | Colossal.

Science is fun!

What Bill Clinton Wrote vs. What Bill Clinton Said – Politics – The Atlantic Wire.

This is really quite a nice read and gives you a lot of insight into what goes into turning a speech from a written form of communication to something more conversational and relatable.

QuNeo was the first Kickstarter project I ever funded and I just got mine in the mail a couple of weeks ago.  I’ve only had a few hours to spend with it, but that’s been enough to get a feel for what it’s capable of and what it will do for my setup.

I play live laptop/keyboards/synths/drum machine in a rock-tronic band called Thrillouette in San Francisco.  The setup is primarily Ableton Live on a laptop with some midi controllers plugged into it for live control.  The controllers include a Softstep from Keith McMillen, the people who make the QuNeo, as well as an Akai MPD32.  The QuNeo is expected to replace the MPD32 so I’m going to do a quick comparison of the two.

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The Awesome New KORG Not From KORG: Raspberry-Pi Plus MS-20 Controller, Making Dreams Reality.

We recently bought a bunch of Raspberry-Pis as little gifts for our team but I didn’t take one myself… maybe I should re-think that now!  I have one of the USB controllers being used there.

Hacker steals $250k in Bitcoins from online exchange Bitfloor | Ars Technica.

There’s been a lot of bitcoin thefts lately and while that’s probably pushing many people away from the nascent digital currency, it also shows that it’s impact on the world economy continues to grow and it’s probably here to stay.