by SHANE SINNOTT

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is managed by the University of California campus of the same name. It has an annual budget of more than $500-million, 3,800 staffers, and the distinction of being the oldest of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratories. That department has a mandate to act in the defensive interests of the United States, though it seems the definition of “defensive interests” can be relaxed in the face of a budget of a half-billion dollars—one of the most recent projects born in the lab to see the light of day is an incredible music search tool called SeeqPod (www.seeqpod.com).

The SeeqPod catchphrase is “playable search,” which they say is made possible “through biomimetic search & discovery technology, a method that mimics the way the human mind might use context to make and recall associations, an approach which relies on context by finding the hidden relationships in digital content and data.” What that means in plain English is, you can type artist and song info into a search box and instantly play the results, and then press “discover” for a pretty good “people who liked this liked this” kind of result.

Key here is that SeeqPod doesn’t let you download anything. You just stream it, and because of this they have a lot more leeway, copyright-wise, and are able to bring you pretty much anything it finds. So now, when you’re at your friend’s house going on about how good the Animal Collective song “Peacebone” is, he doesn’t have to take your word for it. Type it in seeqpod.com and you’ll have it playing in two seconds. You also have the option of creating an account, so you can bookmark your tracks, share them with friends and do all that other social networking stuff that makes advertisers wet their pants. It has a slick iPhone interface as well, but who the fuck has one of those?