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In early April, when Elon Musk randomly and very briefly replaced the Twitter bird logo with the face of the doge meme, the value of the dogecoin both rose and fell by a matter of billions of dollars in value on the crypto market.

Internet users reveled in the idea that a simple doge meme could impact the real world in such a dramatic way. This relative absurdity is also coupled with the fact that dogecoin itself was started in 2013 as a joke coin, but is now the seventh biggest cryptocurrency in the world.

The fact that a meme, based on a peculiar but largely unremarkable rescue dog, could rule over the fate of billions of dollars worth of market value speaks to the totally remarkable nature of the strange phenomenon of internet memes.

At one time in the internets history, memes were perhaps regarded as mere playful and inconsequential byproducts of online culture. However, now, it is clear that memes have very real impacts on our world. Things that leave impacts also leave history.

So not only do memes play a clear role in public discourse, but we are now appreciating that the family tree of memes holds memory. Memes are simultaneously a fascinating historical record of digital culture as well as the detritus of the cyber age.

Originally, a random internet user posted a photograph of their shiba inu dog on their blog, after which another user saw the image and posted it to the Reddit platform. This is where the image was first paired with the word doge (and the word doge has its own separate history).

Some memes come and go, ending as cyber-waste in the internet graveyardthese are the cringe memes like Minions or Bad Luck Brian that haunt early Facebook timelines.

Other memes have the capacity to hold so much meaning that they have impressive longevity and traverse endless iterations, mutations, and politics. The reasons for this are many and varied, but my research shows that in the case of doge, as in the case of Pepe the Frog, the anthropomorphic nature of the icon is part of its longevity and adaptability.

We laugh at animals because they remind us of the foibles of human nature. They are easy to laugh at because they are not us, but they are enough like us that we can project our weaknesses and vulnerability on themand laugh about them.

I say, of course, internet memes because the term meme actually existed prior to the home-based use of the internet.

In a research project by James Hall and myself, we explain that even though there is some contestation about the first uses of the term, as well as its usefulness in theoretical application, it is generally conceded that Richard Dawkins coined the term in the iconic book The Selfish Gene published in 1976.

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

At the time of writing, of course, Dawkins was not referring to the classic image macros usually thought of as memes. He was referring to other cultural units, such as: tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.

Dawkins felt that:

Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

As many concepts do, the term finally leeched out of the academic realm and into the popular vernacular.

So, what is it about memes that is so impactful?

The answer lies in understanding one of the most basic human drives: to communicate. The desire to reach out beyond the self. To be heard and, if were lucky, understood.

Tens of thousands of years ago, prehistoric humans painted on cave walls to communicate what was important to them. In 2023, we scrawl memes across the internet. These two practices are, essentially, the same thing.

Media theorist Mark Deuze has made this point before:

Its like cave paintings; what are we painting on the wallstories about who we are, where do we belong and what really matters to the community that we think we are a part ofthats the definition of every status update [] it used to be that only a privileged few could paint the walls of the cave; now were all doing it.

Just as we use cave paintings today in order to reflect on the very origins of the human condition, in time, we will use the archive of memes as a tree of knowledge to appreciate the complex web of communication we are building for ourselves on the grand project of the internet. They will help to archive the very earliest incarnations of how humans felt about communicating on digital platforms.

For those of us who grew up before the internet, it is almost bizarre to think that not only are memes a legitimate genre that holds masses of cultural information, but they also have history, even memory.

They may not be high art, and they may be totally organic and spontaneous, but perhaps that is why we feel they are so authentic. They documentin fantastically messy and complex wayshow cultural material moves around, grows, dies and, in the case of doge, becomes born again.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit:Kanchanara / Unsplash

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What the Revival of the Ancient Doge Meme Tells Us About the ... - Singularity Hub

Research software is like the tower-building game Jenga tools atop tools atop tools. When developers tweak their individual pieces, this can change the function of the software that depends on them, potentially altering results or causing the software to fail.

Version 3.6.0 of the R programming language, for instance, introduced a replacement algorithm for generating random numbers. This and the older algorithm both work, but not in the same way. If you ran the same code with an older version of R and a newer version of R and it was using any function that needed to generate a random number, you would end up getting different results, says Tiffany Timbers, a data scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Among other things, that kind of variability can complicate collaboration (see Environmental testing). In 2020, Mine etinkaya-Rundel was working with another author on a statistics textbook, using R and a formatting language called R Markdown to calculate numbers, create figures and format the final document. We wanted to make sure that we were using the same versions, says etinkaya-Rundel, a statistician at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and also that when we re-render the book, were rendering it with a given version of the packages. If not, the two authors could have generated slightly different manuscripts.

An example of how variable computing environments can hinder collaboration.

Suppose you have the latest versions of R and Python installed, but your collaborator has been slower to upgrade. They want to share a Python script with you, and you have an R program you want them to use. Will the code work in each others hands?

Between Python 2 and Python 3, the print command that outputs text to the screen changed. The directive print hello, world! is valid in Python 2, but Python 3 requires parentheses print (hello, world!). Similarly, before R 4.0, the function that creates spreadsheet-like data tables treated text as discrete factors by default, whereas later versions do not.

To highlight these differences, we created scripts and environments for Python 2.7, Python 3.11, R 3.6 and R 4.2 (see go.nature.com/4tirjm7). Following the instructions (see go.nature.com/4tnd5ke), install conda. Then, open a terminal window, run the set-up script and execute run.sh. You should see the code working correctly in one environment but not in the other. For instance, although the R script behaves as intended in R 4.2 it changes the gender of a study subject it does something unexpected (and issues a warning) in R 3.6.

To address that challenge, they turned to the R package renv, one of a small group of tools that help developers and researchers to manage their computational environments; other options include venv and virtualenv for Python, and conda, a language-agnostic tool. Most are command-line utilities, although renv is tightly integrated with the RStudio Desktop graphical programming environment. All can help researchers to ensure that their code is reproducible, reusable, documented and shareable.

C. Titus Brown, a bioinformatician at the University of California, Davis, has 187 conda environments on his laptop. Most are one-offs, used to test new tools or to illustrate a point during lectures. His day-to-day work mostly takes place in a development environment that includes a specific version of Python and other programming tools.

Some tasks, however, require a change of computational scenery. For instance, Brown writes blog posts in Markdown, which he renders into HTML, the standard markup language for web pages. But the code that performs that step doesnt work well with newer versions of a crucial software library, and older versions conflict with his development tools. To isolate the problem, Brown created a separate environment. I just fixed the version to something really old that still works, and I run [the rendering software] there, he says.

NatureTech

A conda environment is a computational sleight-of-hand, says Johannes Kster, a computer scientist at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, who founded a bioinformatics-focused software repository called Bioconda. Basically, its just modifying your system path the place where your system searches for executable [applications]. You might have multiple versions of a tool installed, but when conda activates a particular environment, your computer can only see the one you want.

Computational environments offer several benefits, says Timbers. One is reproducibility the ability to analyse the same data with the same software on the same computing infrastructure to get the same results.

It can be very frustrating, tracing down the differences between outputs across different computers, says Ben Marwick, an archaeologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Some research projects take years to complete, he notes. And although Marwick prefers the newest libraries, his colleagues dont always upgrade at the same pace. Renv ensures that he and his collaborators always run their project codes in the same way. The resulting environment-description file can be version-controlled and shared on GitHub. Collaborators can recreate the environment using the command renv::restore()Conda is a command-line tool that both creates environments and installs software into them. To create a new environment called my_env pinned to a specific version of Python, for instance, use conda create --name my_env python=3.9

Both R and conda allow users to install their own tools rather than having to ask system administrators to do it for them. You dont need root privileges, says Rob Patro, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. This is a useful feature when working on shared computing resources.

Environment managers also make software installation easier. Scientific software is often released as source code, which might need to be compiled, configured and installed in a specific location. It might have a network of dependencies, written in multiple programming languages, that must be installed in a particular order. Sometimes, says bioinformatician Fredrik Boulund at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the process can be beyond users skills. That completely changed when solutions like conda entered the scene, he says. Installing a complex set of dependencies is simply reduced to asking conda to create an environment according to an environment specification file.

Cut the tyranny of copy-and-paste with these coding tools

For the Galaxy project an open-source framework for reproducible data analysis those features were a key reason for choosing conda as the projects software installation manager. Bioinformatician Bjrn Grning, who runs the European Galaxy server at the University of Freiburg in Germany, says that the Galaxy community started searching for a cohesive tool-installation strategy in around 2015 because its existing, manual approach was unsustainable. Conda ticked all our requirement boxes, Grning says. It doesnt need root privileges; it is programming-language agnostic; and it uses human-readable package recipes that are easy to understand and maintain. Today, there are more than 9,000 bioinformatics tools available to Galaxy users through the Bioconda channel.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to environments, however, is isolation: environments enable researchers to explore new or updated tools while knowing that their code will still run.

Elana Fertig, a statistician at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, describes herself as lax when it comes to environments: For me, everything goes in one environment. But larger environments are harder to use, because the environment manager has to resolve a larger network of dependencies to install new tools. (Conda is notorious for poor performance with large environments, but a drop-in resolver called mamba accelerates the process.) Instead, Fertig suggests that her students use one environment per project.

Indeed, most researchers contacted for this article recommend creating environments to accommodate specific workflows or projects and to do so early on. Start your project with a package-management solution in mind, says Joshua Shapiro, senior data scientist at the Childhood Cancer Data Lab for Alexs Lemonade Stand Foundation, based in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. It has the potential to save a lot of headaches down the line.

Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code still run?

Tommy Tang, director of computational biology at Immunitas Therapeutics, a biotechnology company in Waltham, Massachusetts, uses dedicated environments for different computational tasks processing data from RNA sequencing or working in Google Cloud, for instance.

Users of the Snakemake and Nextflow computational workflow managers can even direct those tools to execute each step in a separate conda environment, says Kster, who leads Snakemake development. Make them as fine-grained and as single-purpose as possible, he advises. Besides being easier to maintain, he explains, small environments are also more transparent. People who want to understand what the analysis actually did immediately see what software stack was used for which step.

Still, environments cant do everything. Tools written in languages such as C, Perl and Fortran can be hard to encapsulate into environments, and dependency differences can make environments difficult to port across operating systems. In that case, users can try software containers, such as those from Docker and Singularity.

Containers, which essentially package a tool with its underlying operating system, are larger and more complicated than environments, but are more portable. They are also easier to share, because although an environment can hold thousands of files, a container has only one. On high-performance systems in which jobs can be run in parallel across hundreds of computing cores, transferring many small files can affect performance.

Computational environments, says Timbers, are the forgotten child of reproducibility. Journals increasingly ask for code and data alongside manuscripts, but full reproducibility requires knowing the environment in which they were run. Its the elephant in the room, she says.

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The sleight-of-hand trick that can simplify scientific computing - Nature.com

April 28 2023, 9:06 am | BY Kim Shaw | No Comments The One Club for Creativity has announced the finalists entries from 32 countries and regions for the global ADC 102nd Annual Awards. China has scored the most finalists from Asia with 74, followed by Japan with 38

In China the top performers are; Xian Gaopeng Xian (9), The Nine Shanghai (7), TBWAMedia Arts Lab Shanghai (7). Dentsu Inc., Tokyo (8) leads the way in Japan.

Overall, Hong Kong has received 6 finalists, Taiwan and Vietnam have 3 each and Malaysia, India & South Korea have 1 finalist each.

All finalists entries, as selected by this years jury, will win a Gold, Silver or Bronze Cube or Merit. All winners will be announced on May 17 during Creative Week in New York.

Squarespace New York tops the list with 23 finalists entries, including 11 for The Singularity, and seven for The Singularity BTS. Rethink in Toronto, Montral and Vancouver has 20 finalists entries, including five each for IKEA The Troll, and Penguin Random House The Unburnable Book.

DDB Chicago has 16 entries on the finalists list, including 13 for Chillboards on behalf of Coors Light. With 15 is McCann New York, including four each for SAS The Batting Lab and Mastercard Touch Card.

Rounding out the top five is Spotify In-house New York with 14 finalists, including six of Wrapped On Platform Experience, and four for Wrapped Design.

Other agencies scoring high on the ADC 102nd Annual Awards finalists list are Serviceplan Germany Munich and FCB New York with 13 each, Klick Health Toronto with 11, Goodby Silverstein & Partners San Francisco and R/GA US with 10 each, and three agencies Area 23 New York, INNOCEAN Berlin, and Performance Art Toronto with nine each.

A total of 782 entries from 32 countries and regions are finalists this year. The top five countries for finalists entries are the US with 367, Canada and Germany with 75 each, mainland China with 74, and Japan with 38.

The complete ADC 102nd Annual Awards finalists list is available here.

Tickets are on sale now for the ADC 102nd Annual Awards ceremony, taking place on Wednesday, May 17 at Terminal 5 in New York during Creative Week 2023.

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China leads Asia at finalist stage of the ADC 102nd Annual Awards - Campaign Brief Asia

In the publics mind, Stephen Hawking is a giant of 20th century science. He burst onto the popular stage with the 1988 publication of A Brief History of Time, which presented his esoteric ideas of evaporating black holes and the birth of the universe. It was an international bestseller, but given the complexity of its ideas, A Brief History has been called the most unread book of all time.

Hawking continued to explore the fundamental nature of the universe until his death in 2018. In a new book, On The Origin of Time, Belgian physicist Thomas Hertog unravels Hawkings final theory, which focuses upon one of the biggest questions of all just why our universe is the way it is.

Review: On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawkings Final Theory Thomas Hertog

Hertog is no passive player in this story, having been a student and collaborator of Hawking. He is, instead, an active participant. Intriguingly, as Hertog explains, we are all active participants in Hawkings final theory, shaping the universe by observing it.

In this new book, Hertog tells us that Hawkings final theory tries to address one of the deep mysteries of the universe, something known as the problem of cosmological fine-tuning.

Cosmologists have realised that the more they peer at the underlying nature of the universe (for instance the strengths of fundamental forces and the masses of fundamental particles), the more the cosmos seems tuned for our existence.

If the universe had been born with slightly different values for these fundamental properties, it would be dead and sterile, lacking the complexity and energy essential for life.

For some, the solution to cosmological fine-tuning lies in the multiverse, the idea that our universe is just one of countless others. Our universe, and all the others, crystallise out of a bout of eternal inflation, a super-energetic cosmic expansion. Each individual universe, at birth, is written with its own unique laws of physics. Most of these universes in the multiverse are dead, but our cosmic home won the physics lottery. We, unsurprisingly, find ourselves in a universe that can host life.

However, as Hertog writes in this new book, Hawking dismissed the multiverse and went on the hunt for an alternative solution to cosmic fine-tuning.

To get to this point, Hertog treads some very familiar ground, discussing the history of modern cosmological ideas. This includes the theoretical groundwork of Albert Einstein and Georges Lemaitre, and the observational insights of Edwin Hubble that revealed the expansion of the universe.

Hertog interweaves the story with the development, over the 20th century, of that other great pillar of physics, the strange behaviour in the world of the quantum, where the deterministic world of Isaac Newton, in which things have precise locations at precise times, is replaced by a fuzzy world of probabilities and uncertainties.

Usually we think of quantum mechanics describing the subatomic world, of electrons and atoms, but Hawking was thinking of the entire universe as a quantum system. The tale is brought up to date with the idea of cosmic inflation in the earliest instances of the universe and the surprising discovery of the dominance of dark energy in the closing years of the last century.Hawkings own story is similarly interwoven in the book including his revelation that black holes are not truly black.

Combining Einsteins general theory of relativity, which dictates the space-time curvature of a black hole, with quantum field theory, which describes the strange, ephemeral nature of seemingly empty space, Hawking showed that black holes actually radiate. Through this dribble of energy, black holes steadily evaporate into an eventual nothingness.

But if you are looking for an accurate description of just how Hawkings idea of black hole radiation operates, unfortunately Hertog relies on the same flawed picture of particles popping into existence at the edge of the hole as Hawking presented in A Brief History of Time. A copy of A Brief History of Time featuring a thumbprint of its author at an auction at Christies London in 2018. Neil Hall/AAP

Hertog also tells us that Hawking explored the state of the universe at the very beginning, arguing that at this initial point, at least in terms of general relativity, the density of stuff in the universe must have been infinite, (this idea is formally known as a singularity).

Hawking returned to this question with physicist Jim Hartle in the early 1980s to try and wrap quantum mechanics into the picture. Hartle and Hawking claimed that if you wind the universe back to the beginning, time loses its distinct nature and effectively becomes space. With this no boundary hypothesis, the universe did not have an origin, not at least one we would ever really understand.

Hawkings motivation for disliking the multiverse is a somewhat subtle argument, built on the idea of the anthropic principle, the fact that we should not be surprised to find ourselves in a universe which allows us to be here.

Hertog tells us that we should be, in some sense, typical of the possible observers who could inhabit the universes in the multiverse. But quite what typical means is a complicated topic. Does it mean that other life in other universes should be like life on Earth? Or typical in a more broader sense, that life should be composed of the same elements as us? Typical can be judged on many different criteria. And how will we ever find out how typical we are if we are forever limited to the observations of our one universe?

To posit an alternative solution, Hawkings first step was to upend the approach to understanding the universe.

The goal of modern science has been to unravel the fundamental operations of the universe and use these to predict how physical systems evolve. To do this, we need more than the laws of physics, but we need to know the starting point, the boundary conditions. But for a universe emerging from the strange singular state at its origin, where infinities abound, just what are these boundary conditions, and do they uniquely define the universe we inhabit?

Hertog explains that he and Hawking adopted a different view, a top-down view of the universe. Quantum mechanics is again wrapped into the picture, and the life of the universe is treated as a quantum system, described in terms of possibilities and probabilities.

It is here that Hugh Everett IIIs many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics makes its appearance. According to Everett, all of the possible outcomes of a quantum experiment play out in parallel existences, and it is this notion that Hawking applies to the universe.

Within this final theory, as expressed by Hertog, the observer now plays a central role. The fact that we all exist and observe the world around it, means we participate in shaping the universe we appear to inhabit.

Of all of the possible histories of the universe that could potentially exist in a sea of parallel universes, the fact that we are here observing this universe, singles out this universe, with all the others lost in a sea of quantum uncertainty. The situation becomes strangely self-referential.

At this point, the general reader is quite possibly going to be confused. This is, of course, quite a radical notion in understanding the nature of the universe. And, quite frankly, the reader might wonder what separates Hawkings final theory from what some might consider pseudo-scientific ramblings.

The idea that we, as observers, are essential for bringing the universe into being is not a new one, and is often the source of ridicule. Of course, given the scientific weight of the authors, this final theory must be given merit, but whether this hypothesis is a true contender for an accurate description of the life of our universe is hard to judge.

This should not put the reader off. Hertogs easy writing style jumps from topic to topic and provides an overview of the development of modern cosmology and the need for quantum mechanics in understanding the ultimate origins of the universe.

But when the going gets tough and the intricate ideas of Hawkings cosmos are explored, some things are stepped over a little too quickly and a little more time lingering on what might seem straightforward to quantum cosmologists would have been a benefit.

In closing, it is worth pointing out that there are some irritating features to the writing, including the almost hero worship Hawking receives. Clearly given the close relationship between the author and his subject, this is somewhat understandable, but can still be grating.

The text also mixes the philosophy-bashing that appears to be a badge of honour of modern physicists with various philosophical musings that underpin the cosmological and quantum thinking. But given the scope of the topic, and with a mix of anecdotes, quotes and analogies, Hertog provides an intriguing snapshot of our pondering of the ultimate origin of our universe.

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Stephen Hawking's final, god's-eye view of the cosmos ponders the ultimate origin of our universe - The Conversation

Ab-Soul has long held a reputation in Hip-Hop for being an abundantly mindful and highly introspective artist. These attributes have been prominently showcased on his outside the box projects such as Long Term Mentality and, most notably, Control System. The latter was Souls debut album, which he released via Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) around a time when the independent label was gathering some of its best early talent.

The Book of Soul, one particularly important song off Souls debut told the rappers story with both eloquence and grit while other tracks like Pineal Gland and Terrorist Threats showed him in the thick of his trademark fascination with the human conscious, experimental use of psychedelic drugs and an all-around unwillingness to conform to the status quo.

This time period was pivotal in the rappers career and has been dissected both in regards to his singularity as a musician as well as his role in TDEs rise alongside prominent artists such as ScHoolboy Q, Jay Rock and, of course, Kendrick Lamar. Nevertheless, this early leg of Souls career by no means explains his full story, one that is remarkable and that his newest effort Herbert shows he is all but finished telling.

Ab-Soul has stated that in the time leading up to Herbert he experienced heavy bouts of mental ailments such as depression and other internal struggles that brought him to his very breaking point. While many of the songs on his newest album were said to have been recorded during these difficult times, some also came during a time of relative relief for the rapper. Regardless of what songs materialized when, this album does not feel like a mix of different ideas and feelings bundled together into one loose package.

Rather, for the most part, the flow of Herbert feels natural. More confident and exuberant-feeling tracks boost the project from one section to the next while comparatively more difficult ones such as Do Better, challenge the upbeat moods of the record in such a way that not only gives it balance but also shows an emotional range that is surely appropriate for all that the artist has been through.

This approach rivals that of Do What Thou Wilt and its predecessor These Days, both records that, while certainly possessing their own level of topical study and skillful proficiency, and both of which stand firm as strong albums (particularly in the case of These Days), did not quite bring the listener into the rappers true mindset. Instead, these projects dug around said mindset to merely reveal its more outward appearance and perhaps even a mirage of what could have really been seen if Soul had taken further steps into exploring many of the more interesting aspects of these works.

On Herbert, Ab-Soul gives listeners an eighteen track album that comes off as sincere, purposeful and uncovered. He begins the album with Message in a Bottle, a song that is immediately reflective, both from his inward perspective as well as from the way others view him or at least how he perceives them to.

With lines such as, First they love me, then they hate me, then they love me again, and recordings from The Joe Budden Podcast (Rory and Mal era) placed in the track to help describe how Hip-Hop as a whole views Soul, Message in a Bottle accentuates one aspect of the artists self-perception.

As he looks inward again, perhaps more intentionally this time, Soul speaks on his struggles with self-doubt, feelings of insufficiency and more in a clear, vulnerable way on Do Better when he raps,

Lord forgive me, amenWear the crown of thorns for sportIm just waitin for a stone to hit meRelationship on the rocks, my family all concernedMy homie still on the block, gettin it off the the curbIm stricken by survivors guilt, Im gettin it off of wordsWordCome on, Herb

Soul also reflects on the reclusive state of mind his troubles have cast him into with the line, Hidin from the same world that made me who I am which he follows with a sentiment of a depressive episode, saying, Deep rest, cant even get out of bed.

This track, undoubtedly the darkest on the album, also references Souls late friend and collaborator Mac Miller as well as the loss of Doeburger, the latter of whom was someone closest to Soul and whose passing is a frequent topic on Herbert.

On GangNem, Soul professes his dedication to those he loves and came up with, both living and deceased. The beat on this track features sweet, old style backing instrumentals placed on top of a sample that has been morphed into a slow, curving whine and slow paced drums. It is an ode to loyalty and features bars such as, Since a youngin Ive been on some ride or die shit / I got secrets Ima die with.

Tracks like FOMF, Hollandaise and Church on the Move all bring a more energetic, braggadocious and at times celebratory tone to the album as Soul commands the mic with sharp flows and ample attitude. Aided by able and often high-flying production these songs not only balance the mood of the record but essentially tip the scales toward making this a more tall-standing record all around.

Herbert is ultimately a view of one mans heavy burdens and difficulties surrounded by declarations of overcoming. This album is not only a testament to hope and strength, it is at its core a robust and competitive feature from an artist who is all but down and out.

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Ab-Soul :: Herbert RapReviews - RapReviews