Saturday, November 29, 2014

Music is the cup which holds...

He calls it Science vs. Music but I'd call it the Science within Music: Cymatics.

This kinda makes the Raspberry Pi look like a toy: the Neutron is a palm-sized Windows PC. Fully funded on Kickstarter, it's said to be shipped in time for Xmas.

To be fair to the Raspberry Pi, they've got a new, $20 version called the Model A+.

Speaking of Xmas shopping, have you heard about Amazon Smile? Just start your shopping visit at smile.amazon.com and 1/2 percent of your purchase will go to the charity of your choice.

But you probably just want to browse, but not shop at, the Sky Maul. (Where you'll find the Personality Alert Bracelet and when you do you'll see why I should have one.)

Howard Hodgkin, A Small Thing But My Own, 1983-1985
By now we've all seen flight tracking software, but Flightradar24.com's mashup with Google maps makes it easy to find out exactly which flight is above you.

If you're gonna offer your software for beta testing, here are 7 rules to live by. But 10-12 weeks of beta for a year's worth of development?

While we're on the topic of programming, Software Carpentry got inspired by the Joel Test and comes up with a series of questions for judging your teaching efforts. #2 Does each lesson solve a problem your learners think they have?

Oh, and your job is not to write code. Your job is to improve our product for our users.

Worth watching: Michel Gagne animates Gheorghe Costinescu's "Dots, lines, and patches for recorded electronic sounds" and the result is Synesthesia.
Pointless: driving an F-1 car under a 18-wheeler that's gone over a ramp.

The ideal length of everything (in social media). Some examples: 40-55 words per paragraph, 6 words per blog headline, 3 minute YouTube videos.

The separation of past, present, and future is a stubborn illusion. Thoughts about time.

A 250-million year old fossilized skeleton of an amphibious ichthyosaur is getting people excited.

Behold the Tracy-Widom distribution which pops up everywhere and seems to correlate to weak and strong coupling of related variables.
NASA is on Soundcloud and all their stuff is free for you to download and reuse. They've included all the stuff you'd expect (rocket sounds, radio chatter) but also things like the sound of interstellar plasma from Voyager.

Speaking of space-age sounds, check out the Yaybahar.

Did someone say outer space? This time lapse video of the Sun's surface must be watched.

How big is your vocabulary? According to this online test mine is 32,500-35,500 words (97th percentile).

This chromapoem is a way to visualize the complexity of Shakespeare's Sonnet #18. See more at the link.
"Creation is embarrassing" and other thoughts on the process ideation by Isaac Asimov.

I suppose this isn't a "duh" moment for everyone, but Pixar uses a lot of math in making their animated films.

Kinda related: Bezier clock.

After reading Schlosser's Command and Control I'd really like to tour the Titan Missile Museum. (And while I'm at it, the Pima Air and Space Museum.)

This wouldn't be funny if you weren't thinking of a specific kid right now.
For everyone who's wanted their poo to smell like avacados.

Pixact.ly is a game that should be easier than it is: draw a rectangle of a given size.

...the wine of silence. ~Robert Fripp

Quote continued: "Sound is that cup, but empty. Noise is that cup, but broken."

2 comments:

Francis Shivone said...

I have a lot of posts to get through but I have to say that the LotusF1 under the truck is great and i'd have paid real money to ride shotgun 30 years ago.

Bookmarked the Grand Illusion piece.

John said...

You couldn't pay me to be in that car. Nor do I see the point.