New noise and surreal monsters

This weeks music acquisition was Thurston Moore/Cotton Museum: Split 12″ LP (Yes, we still play vinyl :-) released on Tasty Soil Records). Side one (a very nice noise feedback/effects-piece by Thurston Moore) is playable at both 33 and 45 rpm providing two very different pieces of music. The 33 rpm version was maybe the better of the two. It’s not easy listening - but who says music has to be easy?

Not only the music of this numbered limited edition of 500 LP is great. The cover art work (shown above) was made by Chris Pottinger who is also the person behind Cotton Museum and the label Tasty Soil. I have never seen the artwork of Chris Pottinger before - but his drawings are great if you are into surreal monsters, weird creatures, and such.

Hello World

First post. “Hello World!” is maybe an appropriate exclamation - and what better way to get started than to display some nice maps?

These four maps show the four hemispheres mapped using the Lambert projection. Upper left: the Northern hemisphere, upper right: the Western hemisphere, lower right: the Southern hemisphere, lower left: the Eastern hemisphere.

The maps were generated using GMT — The Generic Mapping Tools, an open source collection of more than 60 tools for generating high quality maps. Being a command line tool, the learning curve of GMT is quite steep, but once conquered, GMT is more flexible than most GUI based map making software. The above maps were made using the following four lines of code:


pscoast -Rg -JA90/0/5c -B5 -W0.25p -G -P -K > world.ps
pscoast -Rg -JA0/-89/5c -B5 -W0.25p-G -X5.2c \
-P -O -K >> world.ps
pscoast -Rg -JA270/0/5c -B5 -W0.25p -G -Y5.2c \
-P -O -K >> world.ps
pscoast -Rg -JA0/89/5c -B5 -W0.25p -G -X-5.2c \
-P -O >> world.ps


R indicates the Region of interest (here: global), J indicates the projection (A for Lambert, then the projection center and map width), B is the border, W is the coastline, G indicates filling of land areas. If you want to know what the rest means, then go have look at the GMT — The Generic Mapping Tools, and maybe install it on your computer. It runs on Linux, Mac, as well as Windows. There are some very illustrative tutorials as well as cook books available to get you started—but do expect a somewhat uphill learning curve.

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