syzygy

Syzygy playlist the first

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I’ve really enjoyed listening to Steven Garrity’s Acts of Volition Radio sessions. He’s got an eclectic taste in music and has introduced me to more than a few artists and songs that quickly became favorites. I don’t have the time or the patience to start up a podcast, but I found a neat service recently called Finetune that lets you build playlists to share with other people.

The music on Finetune is all properly licensed and there are a number of restrictions in place to ensure the service stays legal, the first being that each listener can only hear each song once. Another restriction is that playlists must contain at least 45 songs with no more than 3 songs from any given artist before they become playable. Their Flash player was envisioned for use on services like Myspace, but can be embedded just about anywhere.

So, without further ado, I present Syzygy Playlist the First for your listening enjoyment:

Syzygized

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My blogs have finally been combined into one. WordPress 2.1 was released a few days ago with a shiny new import/export feature (among other cool updates). Nothing could’ve been slicker about the migration. It was as easy as clicking a button on my other blog, then selecting the downloaded file and clicking a button on this blog. Not only are posts copied over, but complete comments, custom fields, and categories as well.

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Scrabble sets only have two y’s

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I experienced an episode of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon this afternoon. The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is when you stumble across an obscure piece of information and then encounter it again seemingly at random very soon afterward.

Yesterday I was reading a Wikipedia article, The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, where it talks about Arthur Dent spelling out the Ultimate Question using Scrabble tiles. The article mentions that it wouldn’t be possible to spell out the Question (“What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”) has three y’s in it, and that it wouldn’t be possible to spell out the Question because official Scrabble sets only have two y’s.

This afternoon I was showing my new blog design to a friend and he commented that the word Syzygy would be an excellent hangman or Scrabble word. He quickly corrected himself, however, and said that you wouldn’t be able to use Syzygy in Scrabble because official Scrabble sets only have two y’s.

It was so weird to hear him say that, so I brought up Baader-Meinhof and explained what I had been reading about yesterday. He said he had also been reading about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Wikipedia, so I immediately assumed we had read the same thing about Scrabble tiles. This turned out to be yet another bit of synchronicity, however, as he had not read the part about Scrabble tiles. He explained that he knew about Scrabble tiles because he had been playing Scrabble a few weeks ago. I haven’t been able to shake this odd feeling since then.