august 2018 new music playlist

2018.09.04
4-star stuff in red. And there's a lot of it! So a good month but not much that really blew my mind.
A FB exchange from Aug 12 that stuck with me:
Nick:
"i'm listening to a radio production of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and i'm getting kind of tired of it. the whole premise is that some "psycho-historian" predicted the fall of his own empire and invented some crazy 1000-year plan of 120dimensional chess that would "limit the duration of the time of barbarism that followed". because if you're smart enough you can set into motion a thousand-years-long conspiracy. and if you are not in a gigantic empire then you're in barbarism apparently.

am I going to feel this way whenever I read a sci-fi classic?"
Kirk:
In theory, I like the metaphor of a billiard ball, that the course of a few atoms were unpredictable but get 'em into a billiard ball and it was pretty easy, and that's how psychohistory works. I guess it doesn't hold water but I can't exactly explain why not. (Maybe because the real world isn't the metaphorical equivalent of a nice flat billiards table :-D )
Matt:
Asimov was writing in a world that had statistical mechanics (which he'd have encountered in his chemistry training) but not so much chaos theory.
I thought Matt's point was concise and quite probably correct. See also: the law of unintended consequences...