Eternal Egypt on the High-Tech Texan
This Saturday at 12:30PM Central I will be interviewed as part of Michael Garfield’s High-Tech Texan show on Talk Radio 950 AM KPRC in Houston. The subject is the placement of the first Eternal Egypt kiosk at the Houston Museum of Natural Science as part of their Mummy: The Inside Story exhibit.
I’m tempted to scream “Am I the fourteenth caller!? Did I win!?” when I get on the line, but I’ll probably refrain. I will, however, be in New Orleans with no good (quiet) place to take the call so who knows what will happen.
The High-Tech Texan is streamed live for you Eternal Egypt junkies outside broadcast range.
To create an aquifer
My father wants to add a word to the Oxford English Dictionary. Now, I love my parents very much so I mean no disrespect when I say that language is not their strong suit. They’ve been making up words for as long as I’ve known them — but they don’t know they are making up words. For example, my mom calls me an “aggravant” which is like an irritant who aggravates. Great word, but not in the dictionary of course.
Only recently has my dad gotten the bee in his bonnet to actually get one of his neologisms into the OED. Poor guy. He doesn’t realize you can’t just write the editor a letter to petition for inclusion. Here’s an excerpt of his submission:
The word is “acquifier”. It means “the process of acquifying”. It is used in governmental and scientific writings to refer to the material comprising the “acquifer” and / or performing “the process of acquifying”. Unfortunately, it is believed by some that the only acceptable word is “acquifer”. But, “acquifer” refers to a specific area or place (frequently a proper noun) rather than the afore stated material and / or process.
Essentially what he is asking for is a word for the process of the creation of an aquifer. The problem is that “aquifier” implies that there is a process called aquifying and it suggests that there is an agent of this aquifying (the “aquifier”). I am not sure this is the case. What is the agent? Water itself? But the real problem is that, unlike the word police French, American lexicographers don’t just add words. New additions have to be proven to be in common usage.
So let me take a moment to state officially that Ascent Stage does not use nor does it support the usage by others of the word “aquifier.”
Digital music 2.0
Digital music is mainstream, that’s for sure. But we’re only now seeing the true power of what having one’s collection digitized can do — beyond the obvious portability of it all.
In the vinyl and CD eras, one navigated a music collection by album. There was no other way to do it. You selected the record/disc and then maybe the track and that was that. Digital music libraries with filterable metadata, smart playlists, and all manner of apps for organization make navigating music a lot more flexible, if not significantly easier than the old days.
CoverBuddy gives you an iTunes-like interface that represents albums as cover art thumbnails. CoverFlow takes this concept one step further and presents 3D cover art that you can flip through as though through a booklet of CDs.
Fun for sure, but it is online music services that truly open up possibilities.
Most talked-about these days is Pandora from the Music Genome Project. Basically a streaming radio station set atop a massive database of style data for thousands of songs and artists, Pandora delivers tunes based on the internal characteristics of a single song (or more) that you like. Once you start listening you can further hone your tastes — er, genetic composition.
Pre-dating Pandora is Last.fm and their Audioscrobbler service. This too delivers customized recommendations and a personal radio station, but it is based on what like-listening users have played rather than a close (human) analysis of styles. (It also powers the playlog of Ascent Stage.)
MusicBrainz offers a different slant. Think of it as a wikipedia for musical meta-tags. CDDB on steroids. MusicBrainz offers downloadable applications to help you properly tag your music in a way that reflects the user-contributed info in their vast database.
But this presents a problem — at least to me. Certainly artist and album information can be somewhat standardized, but much of tagging is subjective. For example, I find that I almost always start listening by heading into a genre first and then to an artist and then (maybe) to an album. The genre category is my front door. But it is also the most subjective and least standardized. One person’s Ambient is another’s New Age, Heavy Metal another’s Hard Rock; Dance another’s Techno. But that’s a good thing. There’s opportunity for personalization, to make the categories your own. Here are mine.
| 1980’s | If it was released in this decade and has that new wavy feel (i.e., not classic rock) then it goes here. Obviously a problem category since it is the only chronological one. |
| Alternative | If it was ever played on mainstream radio and is not 1980’s or classic rock, it goes here. |
| Ambient | Mostly electronic. Not New Age. |
| Audiobook | Including spoken word. |
| Children’s | Obvious, though certain bands like They Might Be Giants have kid albums that might as well be in other genres. |
| Christmas | Obvious. |
| Classic Rock | There’s certainly a cutoff date for this in my mind, but I have no idea what it is. |
| Classical | Obvious. |
| Country | For my wife. Please disregard. |
| Electronica | Most everything, but increasingly difficult even to know what part of an album constitutes electronic. |
| Halloween | Obvious. (I love Halloween.) |
| Jazz | Obvious, though there’s much overlap with certain sub-genres of Electronica. |
| Mashup | My newest genre. For categorizing music whose reason for being is to mess with generic labels. |
| New Age | Gotta put Ottmar Liebert somewhere. |
| Oldies | I suppose this is chronologically-bounded too. Classic rock and roll, pre-1970. |
| Original | My own music. |
| Pop | Not 1980’s, not rock, not alternative. Prince, for instance. |
| Soundtrack | Both scores and soundtracks, actually. |
| Surround Sound | There’s no confusion on this one. Pure sonic muscle-flexing. |
| World | Global styles. |
There are more here than I would like, but this is the smallest number that adequately divides. My feeling is that keeping the number of these doors few is key. Too-fine generic subdivision makes a top-level category useless. I have a friend who sub-divides using the Grouping tag religiously. (There’s even a guy out there who hacked iTunes to let him more easily categorize classical music.) Yet, to me, that way insanity lies. You can always further describe something, but how much is enough? Is genre a function of chronology, musical style, popularity?
I’m disgressing. The point is that there is no answer to these questions and that is a good thing. Genre is personal. I’m the first to admit that my categories make no good sense and overlap horribly. I’m all for data standards, but not in this case.
Which isn’t to say that digital music depersonalizes the experience. If anything it has multiplied the possibilities of expressing oneself. Collaborative, themed mixes are all the rage these days. And just recently Jason Freeman released the iTunes Signature Maker, a stunningly cool app that scours your music collection and creates a unique sonic “signature” of your musical taste — a kind of schizophrenic flashback through what matters most to you. The output is uncanny. Here’s mine (2:12 minutes, 3.1 MB, MP3).
Howdy, neighbor
Nearly every day for the last three years I’ve said hello or briefly chatted with our next door neighbor, Steve, “Home Improvement”-style through the wooden fence. He’s always around so I presumed he either didn’t work or that he worked from home.
Today, thanks to a holiday gift of a bag full of cookies I now know what “Uncle” Steve does. Who would have ever guessed?
Golly, they’re flavorful!
Cleaning up the gutter
Quick note of thanks to Jeff for manning the marginalia links this past week. Good stuff. Just one question: how do you really feel about religion?
I’ve got a backlog of links to post so expect a dumping.
That is all.
Ultimate snowball
Last night, as the snow came down in buckets, a friend commented on how perfect it would be to start a snowball fight against the masses huddled on the opposite L train platform. As we all waited for the delayed trains and came more and more to resemble snowmen, it seemed like a great idea. Perfect distance, a perfect no-man’s land — the electrified rails — in between the opposing armies, and in fact a perfect reason: people on the east platform were, in part, headed to the south side on the orange line. People on the west were headed to the north side on the brown. How better for Cubs fans to blow off some post-World Series steam? (Poor purple line commuters. They were going north too but were unfortunately clumped in with the orange liners. Collateral damage, I guess.) Only one problem. The snow was way too dry. You couldn’t form a snowball at all.
Pity. That would have been fun. At least until someone fell into the tracks.
Composting waveforms
My interest in Four Tet led me to a novel application he uses called AudioMulch. In a nutshell this program allows you to build a visual diagram of how your sound sources will flow, enabling what the developers call “an analog approach to electronic music.” The main window allows the composer to stitch together “contraptions” — basically nodes that either input, output, or modify sound — to create a kind of sound machine that can be tweaked entirely visually. The interface is fascinating (not unlike the video processor GraphEdit, which I mused on so long ago) and gets you creating interesting sounds immediately. The tool is powerful, too, permitting layering and full sequencing. And the potential for creating visually interesting networks of contraptions (beautiful in their own right) that also create cool music is really appealing. I’ll work on that.
The Physics of Santa and His Reindeer
This piece of Internet humor never gets old. Every holiday season I stumble upon it and crack up. Not sure where it originated. I’m sure I’ve had it for at least ten years.
- No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
- There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.
- Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour. - The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized LEGO set(2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull ten times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload – not even counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison – this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
- 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion: if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.
‘Tis the season for re-gifting
My wife and I are going to try an experiment this holiday season. We’re initiating a multi-year project to track the travels of a single bottle of party favor wine as it hops from party to party, host to host, forgotten cabinet to forgotten cabinet. How will we do this? GPS? RFID? Nah. Just gonna re-gift a bottle to a recipient who we know will play along and re-gift it to someone else, and on and on. A viticultural chain letter.
Since gift wine is almost universally crappy* it doesn’t get better with age and so, after a while, what gets shuffled in social circles is actually a container of steadily more noxious (and possibly dangerous, if consumed) liquid. A gift that depreciates in the giving.
What’s really interesting to ponder is the origin of a re-gifted bottle. Who actually starts the process? The quest to know is the equivalent of an epidemiologist searching for the origin of a mutant virus.
Also, can the re-gifted bottle jump the “holiday barrier” and enter the mainstream gifting community or — gasp — will it actually be consumed?
[*] An exception to this is the tier of really good wines that get shunted around. These bottles are re-gifted precisely because they are so good. Too good to drink yourself when they’d make a perfect re-gift. And thus the fine wines get finer in the same way that the re-gifted hooch gets hoochier.
$$$
“Daddy, why do you work?”
“Um, so we can have money.” Thinking, crap, I should have said something more meaningful like “well, son, I work to make the world a better place.” Ah well, better roll with it.
“But money comes from the machine.”
“Yes, but work puts it in the machine.”
My son thinks about this for a very long time, then walks off without saying anything. I’m pretty sure he thinks my job is to actually load money into ATM’s.
Eh. As long as he’s proud of me.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
