Harlan

Celebrate the lasting legacy of Harlan Ellison—the highly influential, sometimes spicy Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker Award winner—with Greatest Hits, a short-story collection (including some that have been out of print) arriving next year. It’s edited by J. Michael Straczynski and features a foreword by Neil Gaiman, as well as an introduction from Cassandra Khaw.Dominic Monaghan on Attending Fan Conventions“Harlan Ellison’s writing left an indelible mark on the world—and on me,” Khaw said in a statement provided to io9.…

This simple, versatile notebook can help you maintain attribution for your graphics and AI artwork. It can even embed secret data.“Watermark” with a deliberately visible watermark that was generated by the Colab notebook referenced in this article. (Image by Author using Stable Diffusion)T o watermark or not to watermark, that is the question. Alas, there’s no simple answer. You’ve spent countless hours refining your data visualization or artwork to share online. Perhaps you want to help establish copyright ownership,…

Music as Data SeriesThe distribution of interval-related data in Coltrane’s famous solo is a wonderful example of a power-law in actionA frame from an animation of Giant Steps (Image by author)“When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hang-ups.”— John Coltrane (1926–1967)John Coltrane's improvisation on his composition Giant Steps, first recorded in 1959, stands out as one of the seminal recordings in jazz history. There are 26…

Harlan Band had turned a corner. He was 29 years old and back in school, catching up on algebra and Shakespeare, earning A’s, seeking to put a lost decade behind him and looking ahead to studying medicine.That was the story Mr. Band told his family. He also said it was the reason he sought help from Done Global Inc., an online mental-health company that prescribes stimulants like Adderall in video calls as short as 10 minutes. In his first appointment with Shabnam Rahimi, a…

Well-chosen variables can make a randomized sequence of notes sound musicalA frame from an animation of the fractal composition “Brecker 8.” (Image by author)“My life seemed to be a series of events and accidents. Yet when I look back, I see a pattern.”― Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924–2010)Motivation and BackgroundMusic is a rich source of multi-dimensional data. This data can take the symbolic form of a score, usually represented by MIDI values, or the form of an audio signal.For many years, I’ve used MIDI data to identify…

Maybe he’ll wear a new hat for the occasion.Photo: Greg Doherty (Getty Images)Jason Blum thinks he could get Robert Englund to return to Nightmare on Elm Street. Joaquim Dos Santos and Kemp Powers tease Across the Spider-Verse’s villain, the Spot. Taika Waititi says a nude scene in Thor: Love and Thunder was inevitable. Plus, set pictures from Furiosa, and the return of My Hero Academia. Spoilers now!Scream 6Deadline reports Josh Segarra (Arrow, The Electric Company) Jack Champion (Avatar: The Way of Water), Liana…