In a post this week on the ongoing problems of subscription music services, Anthony Volodkin aptly summarizes the perilous landscape of the space from a user’s perspective:

So [instead] they end up in a minefield, whenever they try one of these services out. This minefield experience is present in every single music subscription service to date and comes from the simple impossibility of licensing all available recorded music. We all know why that’s so difficult, but this issue continuously eats away at the real, mainstream viability of these services regardless. Your users don’t care that it’s hard to license music.

Folks were much agog this week as the above video made the rounds – first at New Scientist, and subsequently picked up over at Beyond the Beyond and elsewhere.

Lost in some the dialogue was that both the video and the discussion surrounding it focused not on ’seeing through walls’, as implied by the title, but rather around corners. This is, to be sure, a semantic point – and one that does little to diminish the wow factor of seeing around corners via augmented reality. Still, I was drawn in by the promise of X-Ray-Spex – not, of course, the folks who brought us the seminal ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours’, but rather the idea of peering through the myriad walls that stand between us and those things we covet (or might covet, if only we could see them).

Project Natal Xbox 360 Announcement:

“When the Wii entered our lives and living rooms, it completely transformed gaming into a rich and more social experience. Project Natal is another revolutionary development to the gaming industry. It starts to break down the barriers between generations (even more so than the Wii), and between gaming and entertainment.”

via Nicola Davies

Much-maligned here (and elsewhere), it seems that amidst the reports of $100 homes, Detroit is poised for renaissance. Via PSFK:
Detroit has been in economic decline for some time now, and the current recession has made things even worse – or into an opportunity, depending how you look at it. At this point in Detriot, you [...]

Heavyset loyalists know that I’m a fan of Kevin Rothermel’s blog. A few days back, Kevin posted what he termed a ‘rant’, but is, in this reader’s opinion, is quite the opposite. In response to some of the wholesale generalities bandied about by a handful of unabashed social media mavens, Kevin writes:
Interesting doesn’t go away [...]

The far-more-on-top-of-things-than-I Noah Brier posted a link today to Saved by Science – a collection of large-format photographs by Justine Cooper of the archives at the American Museum of Natural History, and published by Seed.
In Noah’s post, he references this quote from an accompanying essay by Carl Zimmer:
I knew that natural history museums kept fossils [...]

Henry Owings, publisher of the seminal zine Chunklet, posted recently on an endeavor by Soundscreen Design to publish a collection of the best 7″ record sleeve artwork of the last 2o or so years.
As a fan of Henry’s (the photo above demonstrating proof of my friendship via my Chunklet Neighborhoodie was taken at the 2008 [...]

If you can’t ride two horses at once, you ought not be in the circus. – James Maxton, former Labour Party MP
Mike Delosreyes over at Big Spaceship poses a great question this week on gaming:
Why don’t more games require us to multitask?
I imagine the gamers who like taking care of their Sims’ needs in The [...]

Christian over at Zeppelin Repair posts today on a new poster by design student Olly Moss, whose re-thinking of the poster for The Deer Hunter brings a brand new perspective to a 30 year-old film.
Some years ago, I was enamored of the idea of founding a music magazine that would review and cover only backcatalogue [...]