Thursday evening, I had an odd experience on my ride home on the subway. I was sitting on a crowded E train, next to a middle-aged white woman who was sound asleep. It’s always amazed me when someone manages to fall asleep on a crowded subway train during rush hour. Somewhere along the ride, the woman’s wristwatch alarm went off with the standard Casio digital beep. She didn’t wake. The alarm kept beeping, and for a moment, I was scared. I could feel the fear from the people around me on the train, as well. A simple, beeping wristwatch on a crowded train. Was this a portent of death?

If you’re reading this, you know the ending. Nothing happened. The watch stopped beeping, the woman kept sleeping, and everyone around her returned to their own world. Even I forgot about the incident until I got home, and had a chance to breathe and think back on my day. I had to think about this. I’ve lived in New York City for only nine months, but I’ve been a city dweller for the majority of my life. There are more likely threats than a subway bomb, and I know it from experience. One Christmas Eve, on the subway in Philadelphia, I was the victim of an attempted mugging for my phone. [1] Why, then, should a beeping wristwatch alarm scare me, or anyone else on the train?

The Casio F–91W is ubiquitous. An inexpensive digital watch, with classic styling. I’ve owned three, once because they’re cheaper to replace than spend the effort to replace the band. The Casio F–91W is also easy to turn into a timer for an improvised explosive device. The bombs used in the London subway bombings in 2005 didn’t use watch-based detonators, but it’s not impossible for a future attacker to try it. I don’t know how many of my fellow passengers knew what I knew, but the shared moment of fear as the alarm beeped confirmed that my paranoia wasn’t exclusive.

The denizens of any dense, urban environment go about their day living in their own little bubbles. We’re all less worried about the threats to our lives as we are about the little threats: if we can make the rent, if our boss is planning to fire us, if tickets to that show are sold out. We don’t think about the possibility that something could happen to us, by accident or by malice. We’re inured to the idea of our own safety. Perhaps this is for the best. We could be afraid of anything, but we choose not to be. It takes something serious to pop that bubble. If something does, and it turns out to be a false threat, it hones our sense of what to really be aware of.

I choose not to live in fear. I don’t always succeed.

This week, Crush On Radio talks about death: DEVO’s Alan Myers, what happens when you love a creative inspiration, the emotional connection we get with artists and musicians, and, well, our music picks as well

It’s been a while, but my music podcast with the amazing Andrew Marvin, and Matt Keeley is still a going concern. This week’s an emotional rollercoaster of a show, talking a bit about dead musicians and other related concerns.

Please give it a listen and subscribe.

Early Wednesday morning, I could not sleep. As I am wont to do during bouts of insomnia, I found myself checking my various social networks. That was when I came across a status update on Facebook, linking a post from drummer Josh Freese. He reported that Alan Myers, former drummer for DEVO, who played on their best records in their prime, had died of brain cancer. I was devastated. DEVO was, and continues to be my favorite band, and now the first member of the group has passed.

Though Alan hadn’t played with the band since I was a toddler, his drum beats formed the sonic glue to the greatest albums of DEVO’s career. Video of DEVO performing with Alan shows him typically barely moving behind his kit, all action in his forearms, a machine: The Human Metronome. I long hoped that some day, DEVO might reunite with Alan, perhaps for a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction—wishful thinking on both counts. More realistic was the idea that I could find him and have him sign my copy of In The Beginning Was the End, the pseudoscience book that inspired the band in the late 70s. I already had the other four members sign my copy, but now both dreams have been dashed.

For an idea of Alan’s sheer rhythmic excellence, and beat-precision, just listen to DEVO’s cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” from their debut album, though really any song from DEVO’s first four albums shows Alan’s skills at their peak. They called him the Human Metronome for a reason. Now, the metronome rests. Duty Now for Eternity, Alan.

Read DEVO’s own tribute to Alan Myers at Rolling Stone

I recently posed a question on App.Net, asking about why Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) were so “bad”. The impetus to ask came from a post on Facebook where a friend expressed dismay at the number of GMO ingredients used by Chipotle. I’ve long said, in other corners of the web, that GMOs, and genetic engineering of food, is little more than an advanced form of the same cross-breeding techniques we’ve used in agriculture and animal husbandry for centuries—even predating Gregor Mendel’s famous pea experiments. Considering that everything we grow and eat has been, in some form, bred and cross-bred in ways that nature never intended, and has been since before we were born, the panic over GMOs seems a bit… unnecessary. [1]

It seems genetic engineering is the new nuke—a strange, exciting and dangerous technology that, applied one way, could change the lives of billions for the better, and applied another could kill us all. This idea has pervaded popular culture enough that it has its own listing on TV Tropes. In the case of nuclear energy, the fear came from how we first saw it applied. Gigantic mushroom clouds that wiped two cities off the map, a Cold War and an arms race based around the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, loose fissile material, and dirty bombs are not a great résumé for something that could also bring light to dark corners of the world. As it stands, nobody’s provided as horrifying a résumé for simple genetic engineering.

Though the potential is there for some unethical, scientifically advanced nation to put researchers to work on engineering new diseases, or create poisoned cereal grains to grow in our farms, nobody’s really tried it. Nature, by the way, seems to be doing a good enough job trying to find new ways to kill us on that front. The difference is that the minds aware of how this stuff works know the dangers, and have enough ethical sense to apply their knowledge towards more constructive goals. Their fears are grounded in the potential consequences of misapplication of genetic engineering as a tool. If you ask the average person, they might say the same thing, though the scientist might disagree. There are risks, but they can be mitigated by ethics and strict testing guidelines.

What do average people know about genetic engineering? I remember watching a news report on a protest against genetically modified food from several years ago. An image that stuck with me was a woman wearing a costume of a tomato with a fish head and tail. She’d heard that agricultural companies had created tomatoes with a gene derived from fish, and the costume was meant to illustrate how horrified she was of eating tomatoes that were “part fish”. Let’s step back just a moment. The genes used in those tomatoes may have come from a fish, but to say that an individual gene from a fish in a tomato makes the tomato part fish is like saying humans are part banana, because we share 50% of our genes with the fruit. The set of genes is what makes an organism, just like a LEGO spaceship is made from individual bricks. An individual gene, like an individual LEGO brick, can become anything; it is no more part of an organism than the brick is part of the spaceship.

This requires a way of thinking about what life is in a way that’s different from what we’re used to. We didn’t even understand what DNA looked like until 1953. The Human Genome Project, started in 1990, took thirteen years to complete. People are still catching up. Sixty years sounds like a long time, and so does ten years, but not everyone gets the same level of scientific education. [2] When you don’t understand something, fear is as natural a reaction to it, as it is to seeing a single bomb sink an entire atoll. Learning how these tools that are changing our lives actually work is the first step to understanding. It’s important to know that a tool is never good, or bad. It is all in the application, and unless we know how a tool works and how to apply it, we’ll always be afraid those who do understand.

David Lowery’s “My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89” article has been picked up over and over and over, including by very respectable folks, often without comment.

This has left many readers with two impressions:

1. Pandora only paid $16.89 for 1 million plays.
2. Pandora pays much lower royalty rates than Sirius XM and especially terrestrial AM/FM radio.

Music royalties are complex, but both of these are patently untrue.

Michael Degusta

An interesting followup to the post that sparked my Devaluing Content essay. I don’t think it disproves my point, but it’s certainly fuel for the discussion we should be having about making a living as a content creator in the Internet age.