Right off the top, “Furnace Skies” forgoes the soaring beauty of Dirty Three’s ballads in favor of a kind of low, foreboding, vaguely ugly rumble. From there, Toward the Low Sun works for its moments of cathartic beauty instead of letting them come easily in each track. But when they do arrive, as in the gorgeous pairing of “The Pier” and “Rain Song,” they hit harder for the troubled-sounding textures that surround them. Ellis and Turner each lend a bit of piano work, in “Ashen Snow” and elsewhere, and it only adds to the moody beauty throughout.

• Jordan Mechner
• Pippin Barr
• Fu

Nevermind the mystique; the actual mechanics of pour-overs are more or less those of a broken coffee pot: hot water slowly goes through coffee grounds, making only one cup of coffee at a time. That is all it is! It’s not magic.

via The Scourge Of Pour-Over Coffee | The Awl.

Transportation Staff are developing a Trails Report, and invite the cycling community to review staff recommendations prior to its submission to the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee.

via City of Toronto: Cycling in Toronto – Bikeway Network.

A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to Lomax’s imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads.

via ‘The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center’ – NYTimes.com.

Arcane statistical analysis, the business of making sense of our growing data mountains, has become high tech’s hottest calling. There are billions of bytes generated daily, not just from the Internet but also from sciences like genetics and astronomy. Companies like Google and Facebook, as well as product marketers, risk analysts, spies, natural philosophers and gamblers are all scouring the info, desperate to find a new angle on what makes us and the world tick.

via What Are the Odds That Stats Would Be This Popular? – NYTimes.com.