Consider Pandora and Spotify, the streaming music services that are becoming ever more integrated into our daily listening habits. My BMI royalty check arrived recently, reporting songwriting earnings from the first quarter of 2012, and I was glad to see that our music is being listened to via these services. Galaxie 500’s “Tugboat”, for example, was played 7,800 times on Pandora that quarter, for which its three songwriters were paid a collective total of 21 cents, or seven cents each. Spotify pays better: For the 5,960 times “Tugboat” was played there, Galaxie 500’s songwriters went collectively into triple digits: $1.05 (35 cents each).
To put this into perspective: Since we own our own recordings, by my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one— one— LP sale. (On Spotify, one LP is equivalent to 47,680 plays.)
Or to put it in historical perspective: The “Tugboat” 7” single, Galaxie 500’s very first release, cost us $980.22 for 1,000 copies— including shipping! (Naomi kept the receipts)— or 98 cents each. I no longer remember what we sold them for, but obviously it was easy to turn at least a couple bucks’ profit on each. Which means we earned more from every one of those 7”s we sold than from the song’s recent 13,760 plays on Pandora and Spotify. Here’s yet another way to look at it: Pressing 1,000 singles in 1988 gave us the earning potential of more than 13 million streams in 2012. (And people say the internet is a bonanza for young bands…)
Damon Krukowski (Pitchfork)In alphabetical order:
Me. And the boys. Berkeley. 2012.
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. The first program to write is the same for all languages: Print the words: hello, world
So begins one of the most important programming books ever written, The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie, known by his login dmr wasn’t a household name like Steve Jobs* yet his influence on the world is immeasurable. He was the father of C, a co-creator of UNIX and the coauthor of a book so influential in the world of software engineering that it’s simply known as the “K&R.”
I haven’t coded in C in some 15 years (gulp) yet that book has never been far from my keyboard. Kernighan and Ritchie packed more information into those 272 pages than the 700+ page “Learn a Language” books that seem to be in vogue today.
I like to think that Steve Jobs made me want to program, but Dennis Ritchie taught me how. Ritchie died yesterday at the age of 70.
* Not quite a household name, surprisingly. When I learned of Steve Jobs’s death I was dining at New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Inn. Distraught, our waitress asked us what was wrong. “Steve Jobs just died,” we said. “Who’s that?” she responded.
Jayson Stark invented the Criminally Unsupported Start (CUS) metric a few years back: a game where the starting pitcher goes 6 or more innings and his team supports him with only 1 or fewer runs.
I cross-referenced CUS with Quality Starts (QS) for the 2011 Giants into a new metric—Criminally Unsupported Quality Starts (CUQS). These are games where the pitcher went 6+ innings, gave up 3 or fewer runs and got jack squat from his offense.
Here now, your 2011 San Francisco Giants starting rotation. Their current W-L records, followed by their imaginary records* if they’d won each of their CUQS.
UPDATE: I realized the Giants actually won a CUQS on May 10th. Lincecum was the starting pitcher, and got no decision. I’ve counted that as a win also.
* I assumed all CUQS were wins and took away any loss decisions they’d received from a CUQS. As expected Madison Bumgarner had the worst luck: 7 CUQS losses and in each one he took the loss.
Rk Player Date Tm Opp Rslt AppDec IP H R ER BB SO 2 Tim Lincecum 2011-03-31 SFG LAD L 1-2 GS-7 L 7.0 5 1 0 3 5 3 Madison Bumgarner 2011-04-27 SFG PIT L 0-2 GS-6 L 6.0 5 1 1 1 7 4 Tim Lincecum 2011-04-29 SFG WSN L 0-3 GS-7 L 7.0 7 3 3 0 7 5 Madison Bumgarner 2011-05-02 SFG WSN L 0-2 GS-7 L 7.0 4 2 0 1 7 6 Ryan Vogelsong 2011-05-26 SFG FLA L 0-1 GS-8 L 8.0 8 1 1 1 3 7 Madison Bumgarner 2011-06-04 SFG COL L 1-2 GS-7 L 7.0 7 2 1 1 6 8 Madison Bumgarner 2011-06-09 SFG CIN L 0-3 GS-7 L 7.0 8 1 1 0 7 9 Matt Cain 2011-06-19 SFG OAK L 1-2 GS-7 7.0 3 1 1 0 5 10 Tim Lincecum 2011-06-29 SFG CHC L 1-2 GS-7 7.0 5 1 1 2 9 11 Tim Lincecum 2011-07-20 SFG LAD L 0-1 GS-7 L 7.0 5 1 1 4 7 12 Tim Lincecum 2011-08-02 SFG ARI L 1-6 GS-7 L 7.0 3 2 2 3 8 13 Madison Bumgarner 2011-08-04 SFG PHI L 0-3 GS-8 L 8.0 6 2 2 2 9 14 Matt Cain 2011-08-06 SFG PHI L 1-2 GS-8 L 8.0 3 2 1 2 8 15 Matt Cain 2011-08-12 SFG FLA L 1-2 GS-6 L 6.0 6 2 2 2 4 16 Tim Lincecum 2011-08-18 SFG ATL L 0-1 GS-7 L 7.0 5 1 1 2 7 17 Ryan Vogelsong 2011-08-19 SFG HOU L 0-6 GS-7 L 7.0 4 5 2 4 3 18 Ryan Vogelsong 2011-08-25 SFG HOU L 1-3 GS-8 L 7.1 6 3 3 4 4 19 Ryan Vogelsong 2011-09-04 SFG ARI L 1-4 GS-8 L 7.1 5 2 2 1 6 20 Matt Cain 2011-09-07 SFG SDP L 1-3 GS-7 L 7.0 4 2 2 3 7 21 Tim Lincecum 2011-09-09 SFG LAD L 1-2 GS-8 8.0 6 1 1 2 6 22 Ryan Vogelsong 2011-09-10 SFG LAD L 0-3 GS-8 L 8.0 9 3 3 1 6Provided by Baseball-Reference.com
Generated 9/14/2011.
Here’s the full chart on Baseball Reference.
I wrote up some of my thoughts about software patents.
aaalso I’ll just leave this here in case there are any fellow Jens Voigt fans around~ |D
