Rolling Stones - Dance (Promo Only Disco Instrumental). This is so great. SO GREAT. That era of the 70s with rock meeting disco and funk and fusion, then giving birth to new wave and electro in the early 80s…what could ever be better.

“This one however not many know of as it was a promo only 12″ release of prob the best cut on the “Emotional Rescue” LP and also, hands down the best dance tune the stones ever made.

Here it is in its hard to find 12″ promo disco mix form.”

Here’s a live version with vocals, not the dance mix:

It’s funny how Rolling Stones — Dance has basically the riff from Led Zeppelin’s Trampled Under Foot. GOD BLESS 70s/80s classic rock disco!!!

Frankie Beverly - We Are One. This song’s totally out of control. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone point out some nice atmospheric similarities between this and Daft Punk’s brilliant “Something About Us.”

Here’s Daft Punk’s Something About Us.

Here’s the album version of Maze’s We Are One.  Check out the similarities between the bass, drums, keyboards, and guitar.  Both amazing songs!!!

Kool & the Gang - Get Down On It

Gap Band- Party Train

Doesn’t get any better than this…

Gap Band -Early in the Morning

Gap Band - You Dropped a Bomb on Me

Pretty smooth…Shalamar - Night to Remember.  let’s hope the 70s/80s come back for real some day. Prince, Gap Band, Earth Wind and Fire.

mp3: Lock and Shawl - Run That One By Me Again

This is the best drum and bass song ever made, hands down!

Killer space plants illustration by Doug Cummings (looks like my backyard); more plants.

Wow, such propulsiveness/rhythm, without any drums–though I would pay to have Damon Che from Don Caballero to record a drum track to this just to see how it would sound. Love the sax and woodwinds? in this piece. I love early Philip Glass, like the Glassworks album. Very organic, it’d be neat to see more contemporary electronic musicians add sax and woodwinds to their arpeggiations…Some of it, including the singing, sounds like a few seconds of Magma looped and built upon ad nauseum…

That is an insane progression in pt. 2, it is cool and unexpected, very vertiginous and slightly barf-inducing, at least to my ears…

When looking at a function name, the input variable(s)/independent variable(s) are the letters in parentheses next to the function name such as the x in f(x). (Disclaimer: I’m no math pro, so take this all with a grain of salt). See the post When to Use the Composite Function/Chain Rule for Derivatives for what to do when the variable inside the parentheses is modified in any way, such as multiplied by some factor or raised to the power of or added to or subtracted some other terms; in that case the function is a function of another function, is a composite function, in which case you may have to use the composite function/chain rule to find the derivative.

Now, it’s important to figure out what variable you’re differentiating with respect to, and what exactly that means. Basically, “differentiating with respect to” a variable means that you’re figuring out how much the output of the function changes, how much the dependent variable changes, based on a change on the variable you’re differentiating with respect to. So if you have y=f(x), and you differentiate the function with respect to x, so it’s f’(x) or also written as dy/dx, that means you’re figuring out the ratio at each x of how much y changes based on how much x changes; it’s a rate. (See What dx Actually Means for more info on the dx notation, dy/dx is basically the limit of as , meaning the change in y based on change in x as the change in x gets very, very small, i.e. the “instantaneous rate of change,” instantaneous as in the x hardly changes at all; the change in the output y of the function is based not over a range of x but practically right at that x since the change is infinitely small.)

Now the interesting thing is that if your function doesn’t change based on the variable you’re differentiating with respect to, the derivative is zero. That’s pretty important, and makes sense. If your variable is y=f(x) and f(x) isn’t a function of z, i.e. it doesn’t changed based on changes in z, differentiating f(x) with respect to z will yield no change, i.e. the derivative will be zero.

This becomes important especially when dealing with constants and doing partial derivatives where you treat some variables as constants. The common sense thing to remember, is that you have a constant, if a variable is being treated as a constant, and if a function isn’t a function of some variable, differentiating the function with respect to that constant or variable being treated as a constant or variable not affecting that function will yield a derivative of zero, which makes sense; the function’s output won’t change at all based on that constant, or variable treated as a constant, or changes in a variable which doesn’t affect the function.

When we are given “constants” such as c, without specifically specifying the value of the constant such as if we were to specify that c=5, c really a variable that we just treat as a constant when we differentiate the function?.  If we don’t specifically specify the value, that means c could equal 1, 5, -100, or anything else, like a variable…it’s only treated like a constant when we differentiate the function.

Some other interesting information about derivatives and constants:

As far as I know any constant can be written as a function of a variable. For example, if you have the constant 5, say y=5, you could write that as a function of x, . 5 can be thus written as a function of x to the power of zero, which equals one. The derivative of with respect to x is zero, since any change in the x results in no change in the output variable y. No matter what change in x, the output y still equals 5. You can also prove this using the power rule: using the power rule on which equals 0.

This is all useful to know once you start doing partial derivatives. You could have a function of three variables, say z=f(s, x, y). However, if the s variable is raised by the power of zero, wherever the s variable appears in the function, its value is actually 1, as . Therefore, f(s, x, y) is equivalent to f(1, x, y), since everywhere an s appears in the function equation you can substitute a 1. What this means effectively is that the function f really only depends on the x and the y; s acts as a constant since it’s raised to the power of zero, there can be no change in the output z based on any change in s; where s is raised to a zero, it’s derivative will be zero, by the power rule, . For example if you had z=f(s, x, y)= , that would be , which equals , so the output z of function f only depends on changes in the x and the y variables. If in the equation you are adding as a term in a polynomial, no matter what s changes to, the value of will always be equal to 1; you would always be adding a 1 to the rest of the terms in the polynomial, so once again, the value of the function would not depend on the s, the value would not change based on any changes in s. The appendix to chapter 14 of the book Mathematics for Economists discusses this topic.

Nice…Sebastien Tellier - Une Heure. Some kind of new wave analog synth 70s/80s pop fusion song…the full, finished album version with vocals and lyrics is on the Sebastien Tellier - Sexuality album, produced by Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo of Daft Punk. Sounds sort of like a mix between Josef K and the Happy Family (Momus), and the Flying Lizards or something. Or the band Out on Blue Six (pre -Shreikback).

Listening to Sebastien Tellier’s albums Politics and Sexuality, it’s like he’s a great descendant of Francis Lai, mixed with bits ofthe Sparks, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Stereolab, Andrew Bird, and Daft Punk. I hear some Magma in there too, believe it or not (especially the vocals on “Lenny)! Sort of like some good Brian Eno in scope and experimentation within the pop format…

Oh, this makes sense re: the Magma connection (from Last.fm):

His growing popularity has won him some well-known fans. Once the smart, artsy kid from the 17th Arrondissement could count only one hip musical connection: his father played with nihilist French prog rockers, Magma.

Nice!

LA Times: Bret Easton Ellis, two decades beyond ‘Zero’

“I think in the last five years or so there’s been a rather ominous silence,” said Jonathon Keats, a San Francisco critic and artist who admires Ellis’ work. “It seems like Ellis has never been given the benefit of a test of time. He’s gone from being poster boy for everything extreme to a name that’s quaintly nostalgic — a moment from the past.”

But talk to some of the more serious writers of his generation and a different picture emerges.

Many see him as an overlooked figure, one whose literary heft grows with time. It may be that like a lot of things that emerge from California, the style and vision of Ellis’ work creates problems for East Coast intellectuals, but will become as enduring as psychedelia, surfing, the hard-boiled novel or fast food.

A.O. Scott, the New York Times film critic who is working on a book about contemporary American fiction, considers 1991’s “American Psycho,” a skewering of ’80s greed sometimes seen as an endorsement of it, “one of the most misunderstood books in all of American literature.” For Scott, “Glamorama,” which got scathing reviews, is a book that “in 100 years might be understood as a masterpiece,” the work that presaged the combustion between the Internet and celebrity.

It’s totally true, Glamorama, a great book, totally predated and predicted the rise of the ga-ga crazy paparazzi internet TMZ Perez Hilton Lindsey Lohan Nicole Simpson celebrity TV/news/celeblog culture going on currently…AND it has crazy predictions of a 9-11 type thing going on with bad guys and airplanes, etc…another very, very misunderstood and underrated book.

Bret Easton Ellis’ writing is very misunderstood sometimes, he has a great amount of control and style–he has such fine control over style that you have to look for subtle shifts where you realize he is writing in certain ways, which may seem boring or pedantic or whatever, but is actually finely crafted and tailored to fit the scene and fits the character, the style is actually an active, changing part of the storyline, responding to characters and situations, rather than a constant throughout the book–though I think he kind of overplayed this in the first quarter or half of Lunar Park, where the style and plot are rather boring and mundane, and kind of overtly ridiculous, in an intentional way, to reflect the mundane life of the protagonist, and the style and plot pick up quick rather quite grandly later on. That went way over people’s heads…it took me a few attempts to get through it myself.