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Thursday, May 18, 2006

last.fm top 10 charts

The mechanics of stochastic calculus are finally making sense...at this late date. Should've figured this out weeks ago. I eventually need/want to learn more of the mathematics. But unfort there's just not time right now.

Listening to some jazz through iTunes, and as always uploading the track info last.fm. I've already pasted into my template the html badge for showing recently played tracks--it's there on the RHS, along with badges showing recent content from my flickr and upcoming.org account (neither of which I've had time to add content to lately), and also my del.icio.us account (which I have somewhat).

But I just discovered that last.fm provides a snippet of html code for including my most played artists overall. The entire list of 277 artists makes for an interesting "long-tailed" distribution. But here's the top 10:



A few anomalies there: I think Derrick May is so high b/c I just shuffled through his tracks one day. Plantlife we listened to heavy for a few weeks after first picking it up last summer, but haven't gotten back to it much. Interesting that Caetano Veloso is there. Prince should move up b/c I shuffled through his tracks all last weekend.

Might as well include top 10 tracks too:




Didn't realize the Big Pun and Greyboy tracks had gotten so many spins. The others def I play often. Here is where I got the Coke Escovedo track...what a burner. I really should get out and buy some Coke Escovedo. And also I should get the new Soul Sides comp--considering how much music and knowledge that site has dropped on me. (And look at that, he included William Bell's "I Forgot to be a Lover"! If he posted that on Soul Sides, I missed it. I bought it through the iTunes music store a couple months ago after reading a NYT review of a Jaheim concert which noted as an aside that his "Put that Woman First" is a reworking of the Bell track (which itself has some echoes of Van Morrison in places).

Now that I think of it, it's odd that "Put that Woman First" isn't among the top 10 above. I play the hell out of that track.

Actually, now that I check my last.fm page again, it's tied for #10 with the Luther track (which has it's own story behind it)...and oddly the William Bell is up there at #10 already as well.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

the death & life of Jane Jacobs

The blogging has been much less steady since my schedule got a lot busier about 6.5 weeks ago. E.g., I should be reading for a quiz that I have to take in about 7 hours: CAPM, APT
--both of which fall under the general category of factor models. That's a nice collection of links there that Google turned up for those 3 topics; e.g., the latter one is from Sharpe himself, who developed CAPM (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1990).

But this post was meant to be about Jane Jacobs. However, given that I have other more pressing things to do, I just wanted to post the NYT obit, as well as a Slate obit by Witold Rybczynski. I still haven't read The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It's been on my to-read list for a long time.