Michael Burkhardt Modify

2025-09-24 04:38:41

The TRON:Ares soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails was released last week so I thought I'd download it and give it a listen ahead of the film’s upcoming release. While I was at it, I thought it would be fun to listen to the music from the previous films too. Here are my thoughts.

TRON (1982)

For the 1982 film soundtrack, Wendy Carlos leaned into scene-specific music that closely shadows the action on screen. As I listened to this album, I could almost see the movie in my head. This type of soundtrack helps to amplify the moviegoing experience, but it doesn’t make much sense musically and it’s just boring to listen to on its own. Yawn.

TRON: Legacy (2010)

Revisiting the 2010 soundtrack, I was quickly swept into Daft Punk’s world of pulsating rhythms and sweeping themes. This one is much more musically coherent and much more engaging to my ear. It’s not just midnight rave stuff though. It’s a true score and a luscious one at that. Turn up the volume, turn out the lights, and soak it in. Magnificent!

TRON: Ares (2025)

Right from the get-go the new 2025 score from Nine Inch Nails is teeming with grit and intensity and punctuated by soft, deep lulls. Musically, it straddles the line between scene-specific background music and caffeine-fueled bangers. It couldn’t be more different to the two previous scores, which is a great strength. I predict it’ll carry the film well, and I’m looking forward to seeing if I’m right.

2025-09-20 05:32:45

Inspired by Jason Kottke’s post “52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023” I started keeping a similar list. Somewhere along the way I lost the habit and didn’t make it through the year. Anyway, here are 36 things that I think are pretty interesting.

1. When you think of bromeliads, you might think of Medicine Man, the 1992 film starring Sean Connery and Lorraine Bracco. It turns out that the Bromeliaceae family comprises over 3,700 species of plants, including the pineapple.🍍

2. According to Nicholas Ward, the abacus emoji on Apple devices shows the number 1976, the year of the company’s founding. 🧮

3. There are no “baby” birds. (The term generally only applies to mammals.) The life stages of birds are: hatchling, chick, fledgeling, juvenile, and adult.

4. All sea lions are seals (or more precisely, pinnipeds) but not all seals are sea lions.

5. I had heard of Michelin stars, but actually looked up their meaning:

   • One star: Cuisine de qualité, mérite une halte (High-quality cooking, worth a stop)
   • Two stars: Cuisine excellente, mérite un détour (Excellent cooking, worth a detour)
   • Three stars: Une des meilleures cuisine, vaut le voyage (Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey)

6. According to Wikipedia the maximum size of a PDF document (a limit imposed by Adobe Acrobat and not the format itself) is 15 million inches square, or 145,161 km². That’s a little bit bigger than Tajikistan (144,100 km²) and just a little smaller than Montana (147,040 km²).

7. When we think of the Galápagos Islands the word biodiversity may come to mind. In reality, the archipelago has very low biodiversity—that is, relatively few distinct species are found there. There are, however, quite a few species that are not found anywhere else.

8. There is a cute rhyme (one of several variations) for remembering metric temperatures:

0 is freezing

10 is not

20 is pleasing

30 is hot

9. A corvette is a type of warship.

10. The world’s tallest tree is a coast redwood in California called Hyperion, and stands 380 feet tall.

11. A “hob” is a range or cooktop. This will undoubtedly sound silly to many readers, but I’d never heard this word before.

12. The county of Merseyside (in England), which includes Liverpool, has a LOT of pubs. The Merseyside Pub Guide , lovingly curated by Phil Wieland, lists 1,982. That seems like a lot.

13. There are pink pelicans! (source)

14. In the US military, F-16 fighters are generally flown only by the Air Force. Similarly, F-14s and (more recently) F/A-18s are flown by the Navy. (I learned this after I remarked to a Navy veteran that I had seen some F-14s flying from a nearby Air Force base.)

15. There has never been a US president who was an only child—i.e. had no siblings.

16. The Lattice Method is how Japanese kids learn to multiply two numbers. (I need to learn this too.)

17. Tylenol helps with emotional pain too.

18. While hiking near Mount Rainier (in July, btw) I learned that snow bridges can be quite dangerous.

19. The number of a CR battery indicates its diameter and thickness . For example, CR2032 is 20 mm wide and 3.2 mm thick. (Thanks to Marco for this bit of wisdom.)

20. Blind Soccer is a thing. USA Blind Soccer Men's National Team will compete for the first time in the 2028 Paralympic Games in LA.

21. The Strawberry Tree is a fruit tree native to Europe.

22. A quine is a computer program that takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. This came up when someone on Mastodon shared this link to a quine clock.

23. Pawpaws are fruits that grow natively in Ohio. They are said to taste like banana, mango, and pineapple. I’ve never actually tried them though.

24. The puzzle piece as a symbol of autism has been controversial, so the infinity sign was introduced a few years ago as an alternative. I first learned about this from a social media post.

25. There is a unicode character for the minus sign (−) U+2212 that looks a lot like, but is different to, the en dash (–) U+2013.

26. The Caesar Salad was invented in Mexico.

27. The four-letter Hebrew-language word יהוה ‎ (transliterated as YHWH and sometimes written as Yahweh or Jehovah—is called the Tetragrammaton.

28. The word etiology. There are etiological stories in the Bible, such as the story of Lot’s wife. She is turned into a pillar of salt in order to explain the existence of salt pillars in the vicinity of the Dead Sea.

29. Vickrey auctions encourage truthful bidding.

30. Those things on the tops of buildings we call gargoyles often aren’t. They’re called grotesques, although the terms are often conflated. (Gargoyles spew water.)

31. The [Baby] Boomer generation is split into two groups, Boomer I (1946–54) and Boomer II (1955–64). The latter group is called Generation Jones.

32. Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in both the Western and Southern Hemispheres, is only the 189th tallest mountain in the world.

33. Chippy Tea has nothing to do with tea.

34. Annatto is used to make cheddar cheese yellow. As I understand it all cheddar cheese is white in the UK.

35. An anticyclone is an area of high pressure caused by sinking air. Anticyclones are characterized by few or no clouds and light winds. Heat domes are the result of summer anticyclones. Cyclones, or depressions (areas of low pressure) are the opposite of anticyclones.

36. Fount—as in “fount of knowledge”—is spelled “fount” not “font” even though it is pronounced like the latter.

2025-07-08 01:22:00

I have worked in technology my entire career, which began in the early 1990s. I am a technology proponent. And I tend to be an optimist when it comes to its impact on society. But the last ten years or so have given me pause. I thought it would be interesting to ask Claude, an AI assistant, about it. Here’s what I asked:

It occurs to me that since the dawn of the personal computing era, and in the era of the Internet, technology has largely failed on its promise again and again to deliver better lives for ordinary people. Sure, the Internet gave us Amazon and Facebook, but at the cost of monetizing our attention and leaving us at the mercy of “the algorithm.” A lot of the cool stuff that computers and the Internet can do remain largely available to the techno-literate class and challenging (at best) and out of reach (at worst) to average users. The gains in productivity afforded by any number of technological breakthroughs over the years (including, as it appears so far, artificial intelligence) accrue largely to corporations and billionaires rather than to workers. So, my question is this: do you think this is so? Can you expand on that by providing a point and counterpoint summary?

Claude’s reply, exactly as it appeared, follows:

You’ve touched on a fundamental tension in how technology has evolved over the past few decades. Let me explore both sides of this argument.

The case that technology has failed ordinary people:

The promise of technology creating more leisure time and prosperity for everyone has largely gone unfulfilled. While we can now order groceries with a few taps or video chat with people across the globe, many of the supposed benefits have come with significant costs. Social media platforms have indeed monetized our attention, creating what some call “surveillance capitalism” where our personal data becomes the product being sold. The algorithmic curation of information has contributed to echo chambers, misinformation, and mental health issues, particularly among young people.

The productivity gains from automation and digital tools have predominantly flowed to capital owners rather than workers. Despite massive increases in productivity since the 1970s, wages for most workers have remained relatively stagnant when adjusted for inflation, while corporate profits and executive compensation have soared. Many jobs have become more demanding and stressful as technology enables 24/7 connectivity and constant monitoring. The “gig economy” promised flexibility but often delivered precarious work without benefits.

Meanwhile, truly transformative technologies often remain gatekept by technical complexity or cost. Advanced AI tools, sophisticated automation, and cutting-edge software require significant technical literacy or expensive subscriptions to access meaningfully. The digital divide means those without resources are increasingly left behind.

The counterpoint - technology has dramatically improved lives:

This perspective may underestimate how transformative everyday technologies have become. The ability to instantly access virtually all human knowledge, communicate globally for free, navigate anywhere with GPS, and conduct financial transactions from a phone represents an unprecedented expansion of human capability. These tools have democratized access to information, education, and opportunities in ways that would have seemed magical just decades ago.

Technology has created entirely new industries and job categories, from app developers to YouTube creators to social media managers. While some traditional jobs disappeared, others emerged. The internet has enabled small businesses to reach global markets, creators to monetize their work directly, and entrepreneurs to start companies with minimal capital.

Medical technology has extended lifespans and improved quality of life dramatically. Computing power has accelerated scientific research, leading to breakthroughs in everything from weather prediction to drug discovery. Even everyday conveniences like online banking, ride-sharing, and food delivery have eliminated significant friction from daily life.

The argument about productivity gains going to capital rather than labor may reflect broader economic and policy choices rather than inherent flaws in technology itself. The same tools that enable corporate efficiency could theoretically benefit workers if paired with different economic structures or policies.

The nuanced reality:

The truth likely lies somewhere between these positions. Technology has delivered remarkable capabilities and conveniences, but the benefits have been unevenly distributed due to a combination of economic structures, policy choices, and how the technology industry has evolved. The challenge isn’t necessarily that technology failed, but that we haven’t successfully harnessed it to serve broader human flourishing rather than primarily capital accumulation.

The question moving forward may be whether we can shape emerging technologies like AI to avoid repeating these patterns - ensuring benefits are more widely shared and that human agency isn’t further diminished in favor of algorithmic control.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

(End of Claude’s response)

I don’t offer this with any agenda or conclusion. I just happened to be thinking about this and thought it would be interesting to plug the idea into an LLM and see what happens. Do you have thoughts? If so, share them with me.

2025-06-05 00:57:00

Lately I’ve been trying to get a 5 km run/walk in once a week, in a (perhaps unrealistic) attempt to improve my endurance. So it was fortunate that this week’s effort coincides with the latest Apple Fitness “Limited Edition Challenge.” Hoot!

I’ve recently noticed that my running posture (and thus my breathing and recovery between running segments) is much improved when I “think” my chin up and forward. No surprise there, I suppose.

But I also noticed today that my knees and hips were much happier if I also think my toes forward and focus on landing my weight straight down into the running surface, rather then slightly forward. (I run on the balls of my feet, btw.) I assume seasoned runners know all this already, but I am still in my “discovery” phase.

Cheers, all!

2025-05-19 19:12:00

For the second year in a row, I ranked the Eurovision Song Content finalists. I used a simple rubric, which is described at the end of this post. Instead of force ranking, as I did in the semifinals, I wanted to take a (slightly?) more objective approach. Each song’s actual ranking, according to the official results, is also shown. Ties are listed alphabetically by Country.

I scored the contestants on three dimensions, as follows:

Entries with a higher song score take priority, followed by staging, and finally visuals.

Keep in mind these scores are based on my preferences, not necessarily on “quality.” Overall I felt this year’s entries were a bit weak across the board—notice that none earned a perfect score in the above scoring system. Still, I had fun watching the event and I’m already looking forward to next year. Cheers!

Update: I found and corrected a couple of scoring mistakes, which altered the final ranking somewhat. Poland and Finland both moved up a bit. I also fixed the final rankings to skip place numbers in the case of ties.

2025-05-16 05:44:00