Moore's Law in action

(source)

Mindblowing CGI

Check out this video on Vimeo. Yes, that really is 100% computer generated, nothing you're seeing is real. This is really incredible, it's leaps and bounds beyond anything I've ever seen before.

Called It

Sure, the Beatles are good and all, but "Tomorrow is another day. That you'll never forget."? Really, Apple? Yawn.

New things!

First off, Girl Talk's new album, All Day, was released for free download online this morning! As of now, their servers are still swamped, but there's a mirror on Mediafire here. I'm listening to it now, and I'm really liking it so far. I would put it ahead of Feed the Animals, but still a bit behind Night Ripper.

This Week's Episode of "Aging Executives Who Don't Understand The 21st Century"

I read this article earlier today about videogame retailers fighting back against Valve's Steam, the digital distribution platform I've previously gushed about here. According to the article, Steam is responsible for a whopping 80% of videogames downloaded on PCs (using "PC" to mean any personal computer, not just those running Windows). Apparently a number of UK videogame retailers are threatening not to stock any games distributed by Steam, to try and pressure publishers into not using steam. From the article:

The head of sales at a big-name digital service provider agreed: “At the moment the big digital distributors need to stock games with Steam. But the power resides with bricks and mortar retailers, they can refuse to stock these titles. Publishers are hesitant, but retail must put pressure on them.”

Yup, the power definitely does reside with the brick and mortar stores. Just to be safe, they should ask Hollywood and Blockbuster how they successfully put pressure on Netflix in order to.... oh.

L.A. Noire

This is the first I've heard of this game, developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar Games, of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption fame. The setting is an uncommon one for a videogame: film-noir Los Angeles from the late 1940s, and the atmosphere they've created looks pretty cool. On a more technical level, the characters' facial animation looks incredible. The people move very smoothly and naturally, and the developers claim that the player will be given an "open-ended challenge to solve a series of murders". Unfortuantely, it's coming out for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, neither of which I own,  but it looks like it could be a quite interesting game to follow.

EDIT: Embedding doesn't seem to be working right, you can check out the video on the original page here.

Flash

Flash

Various Lifehacks

If you haven't heard of a "lifehack" before, Wikipedia gives a pretty good definition:

Anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack. The term became popularized in the blogosphere and is primarily used by geeks who suffer from information overload or those with a playful curiosity in the ways they can accelerate their workflow.

My earlier post on dorm room engineering is a good example of that sort of thing. Here are a few more that I've been using lately.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

I've found this fantastic fanfiction, called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which asks what would be different about the Harry Potter universe if Harry had been raised by a scientist instead of by Vernon Dursely? I'm only a few chapters in, but here are some of my favorite quotes so far:

Take 2: TIME Magazine's Top 100 Films

Before I go through this, I'm guessing that I'll have seen barely any of their top 100 films as compared to the list of novels. For one thing, I tend to read more often than watch movies, but even when I do watch movies, it's usually just the latest thing that I'm seeing with my friends, not one of the timeless classics of cinema. Anyway, here goes nothing.

Jack Bauer, Always On Duty

My favorite part is the perfect crescendo of the opera in the background.

TIME Magazine Top Novels

Alternate title: My Long-Term Literary List (I would say to-do list, but I like the alliteration).

Sometimes I feel bad that I don't read as much as I used to when I was younger. Maybe I'll go to the library tomorrow and fix that, but to assuage my guilty conscience for now, here's TIME Magazine's list of the top 100 English Novels published after 1923. If I've read or heard of one of them, I'll talk about it.

Intimidation

When Oscar Peterson was still a young boy, his father played him a recording of Art Tatum performing "Tiger Rag". Once the young Peterson was finally persuaded that it was performed by a single person, Peterson was so intimidated that he did not touch the piano for weeks. (source) 

I can definitely sympathize with him there.

Spring 2011 Schedule

(Alternate title: The Most Stressful Thirty Minutes Of My Semester)

Today was registration day for my class at W&M, which is a mixed bag; it's exciting to know what classes I'll be taking next semester, but the actual registration process is extremely stressful. I've heard of some schools that have systems where you just put in a request for what classes you want, with no time pressure, and you get placed in them based on priority (which I guess includes your year, your major, that sort of thing). Here at W&M, that's not how we do things.

Android

My Software Development class is spending the rest of the semester doing something very cool: learning how to develop software for Google's mobile OS, Android. At first, I thought we were all going to get phones to work with, but sadly, that's not the case. Instead, we're using an emulator, which looks pretty cool.

I don't know why this emulated phone only has 50% battery...

Fireflies!

Go Lisa for getting video of this! Too bad I totally failed on the transition to the chorus; I promise I nailed it the first time I played it.

More Pictures from the Rally

Stolen from some friends of mine on Facebook:

Restoring Sanity

Probably my favorite sign I've seen online from the rally this morning.

Danny Boy

A truly moving take on the classic Irish tune.



P.S. Turns out the Latin sentence I translated for a blog post yesterday was the one I had to translate on the test today! Bam.

Latin Insanity

While dutifully studying for my Latin test tomorrow, I realized I needed to make a blog post. Lacking any better ideas, I decided to make it about some of the absurd things those Ancient Romans did that I'm struggling with 2000 years later.

I Am Batman

(I failed to update my blog for yesterday! While I sit here contemplating my wrongs, have a funny picture)

My Professional Acting Debut

Pay close attention at 0:35, you can just kinda see me in the background.

Stephen Fry on Linguistic Pedants

Stephen Fry (aka Jeeves of Jeeves and Wooster fame) is one of those people whose voice is so pleasant to listen to that I could probably happily listen to him talk about anything; Morgan Freeman is another. Luckily, this excerpt from one of his podcasts (full version here) is actually quite fascinating, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. On top of that, someone has made an excellent video to go along with it, using a technique called Kinetic Typography if you want to be fancy, or "moving text" if you don't.


(original)

Gordon Goodwin and Take 6 - Comes Love

Here's a cool video from the recording session for Comes Love from the album XXL by Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band. This song features the absolutely fantastic jazz vocal group Take 6.

Zelda Reorchestrated And Other Assorted Videogame Music

I've been going back through some of my music that I've had for a long time but haven't listened to much, and discovered a great set of music produced by a project called Zelda Reorchestrated (or ZREO). They've taken songs from the classic Legend of Zelda games and spruced them up, rearranging them using some very high quality orchestral samples. Read on for some samples of my favorites.

lingua latina utilissima est

I've been taking Latin on and off for a long time now (7 years? Wow), but I'm only recently starting to appreciate how much it's taught me about English grammar. I'm taking an intro to linguistics class this semester and we've left phonology and morphology behind in the last week and started talking about English grammar and syntax, a horribly complex beast. However, I've noticed that a lot of things that are stumbling blocks for most of the class seem pretty simple to me because of what I've learned from Latin.

For example, take a sentence like "this dog is bored". In order to determine the syntactical structure of this (simple) sentence, we need to know what parts of speech all the words are. "This" is what's called a determiner (not really important), "dog" is a noun, "is" is a verb, and "bored" is..... what?

My Sleep Habits: Fun With Facebook, Part 3.5

(Previous post here)

I'm not making this a full post yet, because I don't feel like writing much but I still want to share this cool result. Basically, I got a working HTML parser for Ruby and am beginning to create a framework for analyzing the Facebook data stored in HTML. My first interesting result is this graph for frequency of wall posts (including status updates) by hour, in military time:

Interesting conclusions to draw here:

1. Facebook seems to indicate that I'm asleep before 2:00 the vast majority of the time.
2. The drop for the 15 hour (3:00-4:00) PM is probably related to going home at the end of the high school day, which ended at 3:50.
3. The other drop at 19 (7:00-8:00) PM is probably because that's when most people eat dinner.

Coding this took almost no time, so I'm super pleased with the cool results I got out of just this simple test. I'll be able to refine this particular dataset later once I can take comments into account too.

Lions, iLifes, and Airs, Oh My!

Apple had a big PR event today entitled "Back To The Mac" that just wrapped up a few hours ago. The big-ticket items were:

• iLife '11
• Mac OS 10.7, codenamed Lion
• New Macbook Airs

If only they hadn't released Tiger five years ago, I would have had the perfect headline for this post. Alas.

Anyway, I was eagerly following Engadget's liveblog as it went down, and here are my basic first impressions.

Sintel

Sintel is a great short indie film that you can watch on YouTube here. Amazingly, it was produced entirely with Blender, a free and open source 3D application. It's only 15 minutes long, but it packs quite an emotional punch. Check it out!

(Thanks to Andy at Everyday Nitrocellulose for the source.)

Fun With Facebook, Part 3

(Previous post here, and source code for this post here)

As I mentioned before, my method for generating searches to find names was really bad, because I was searching the whole space of strings and wasting a lot of time on searches that found no results, like "zx" or "qq". Last time, it took a little over two hours to generate only the useful searches that were 5 letters long. With my new, non-terrible code, it takes under 10 seconds to generate all 8348 search strings of any length. That's a pretty massive improvement. How massive?

Well, there are a total of 8348 search strings of any length that will produce at least one result. The actual alphabet they drew from is bigger than just "a" to "z", because some people's names have special symbols, like dashes for compound last names, but we'll just assume that they drew from "a" to "z" in order to get a lower bound. The longest search string that gets results is 13 letters long, so the space of all possible search strings I would have had to look through using the old method is the sum of all the spaces for each length, i.e. all the 1 letter strings plus all the 2 letter strings plus all the 3 letter strings, and so on up to 13. Computing that sum yields a whopping 2,580,398,988,131,886,038 possible searches. The 8348 searches that return results represent a rather small portion of those, approximately 3.2 * 10^-13%. In other words, if I'd run my bad program enough to find all the searches,  only 0.00000000000032% of my time would have been productive.

Anyway, I wrote a new program that didn't suck, and you can read a description of how it works after I go over some of the results. Like I said before, there were 8348 search strings that produced any results at all. Of those, 5507 return exactly one result. Of course, a lot of those are redundant. For example, if "icho" were to only hit "Nicholas", then so would "Nicho", "Nichol", "Nichola", "ichola", and so on. If you then reduce the redundant results down to just the shortest one, we'll get a list of what we'll call "minimal searches": searches (1) that return only one result and (2) for which there are no shorter searches that return the same result. Condition (2) is worded a little bit awkwardly because there can be more than one minimal search of a certain length. For example, it could be that "ich" and "cho" are both minimal searches for "Nicholas", if they both only match "Nicholas" and there are no two-letter strings that match only "Nicholas".

With that concept in mind, we can answer some even more questions. For example, how many names have minimal searches at all? Shouldn't all of them? Interestingly, there are only 481 names that have minimal searches. Part of this oddity is a result of the way I've implemented the searching. One name that fails to have a minimal search is mine. It doesn't work because there are other people in my friends list named Nick and other ones with the last name Starr. The way I've implemented this so far, you can't have multiple words (separated by spaces) in a search, so you couldn't search something like "ck rr" to try and get "Nick Starr". With that capability, there wouldn't be any names without minimal searches, unless there were literal duplicates in the list.

Well, that's about all I can think of doing with a list of my friends' names. If only facebook had provided more info (like which of my friends were friends with each other), there would be all kinds of other things I could do. As it is, my next goal is to find a good HTML parsing library for Ruby and write some code to start messing with the other data, hopefully in a more organized way than my friends list code.

Appendix A: How The Better Algorithm Works
The gist of how I made my code better is to restrict it to only look at valid search terms, by working from the names themselves rather than looking at all the possible search strings. For every name I go through a process of generating all the search strings that will match it. For example, for Nick, I would generate the following:

n, i, c, k
ni, ic, ck
nic, ick
nick

For each one of those search strings, I would run it against the whole list of names, seeing which names are matched by "n", which ones are matched by "i", and so on. Fortunately, this is a textbook example for the use of a simple optimization technique known as memoization. If you start running this method for a few sample names, you'll see that there's a lot of duplication. For example, in my dataset the string "nic" will match "Nick", "Nicholas", "Nichole", "Nicole", and a few last names. This means that every time I run the process above on any of those names (most of which are repeated a few times throughout the list), my code would have to search the whole list for names to see what matches "nic", even though it's already done that before. The key of memoization is to save the results of a function that gets repeated a lot. Sometimes you have to be careful about which results to save, but this computation is small enough that I just saved all of them. Then you end up with something like this (in pseudocode)

          Did we already search for this string?
                    If yes
                              Use the stored value instead of re-searching.
                    If no
                              Perform the search and then store the result for the future.


It may seem like a minor change, but memoization can often have a huge impact on a function's efficiency. In this case, it cut off about two thirds of my code's running time. Of course, memoization only works if the function being considered is what's called referentially transparent, which is a fancy way of saying that given the same input, it'll always return the same output no matter how many times you call it. Trivial examples of functions that are not referentially transparent would be one that returns a random number, or one that asks the user for input. In this case, if I were to change the underlying list of names that I'm working with, my memoized values would no longer be valid, because my searching function would no longer be referentially transparent.

WARNING: Ke$ha post

If terribly trashy yet catchy pop music isn't your thing, consider yourself forewarned. For the rest of us, Ke$ha has released a new single! It's called We R Who We R (yeah, I cringed at the "R"s too), and it's from her EP Cannibal that's set to be released in late November.

Wolfram Alpha... scrabble expert?

Yes, Wolfram Alpha, the "computational knowledge engine" better known for things like helping you cheat on your math homework, having incredibly detailed demographic data, and giving snarky answers to philosophical questions, now has a bunch of data on Scrabble.

The Friends List: Fun With Facebook, Part 2

(Note: I'll be uploading the source of all the scripts I'm writing for this project to pastebin, but I make no guarantees on the quality of the code. I'm just writing quick-and-dirty Ruby to get some results without a ton of regard for efficiency or readability. That'll come later.)

Source for this post

As I mentioned in my intro to this series, the friends list is the simplest info in this whole package - it's quite literally just a list of names in plain text (592 total for me). The first thing I did was just a basic frequency count, which came out basically how you'd expect.

Fun with Facebook, Part 1

(This is a continuation of this post)

So after a few hours, Facebook finally finished preparing the zip file with all my info and sent me a download link. They had some interesting security features to make sure that no one else would be able to download it. Not only did I have to re-enter my password, but I had to identify a bunch of my friends. They picked three pictures of each friend at random, and asked me to pick who it was from a list of names. Very cool method, and makes it unlikely that someone will get tricked into giving this info to someone else by a simple phishing scam or something.

Downloading Your Facebook Account

Facebook recently rolled out a a new feature: you can now download a zip archive of all the info associated with your account. Here's the full contents of the archive, according to Facebook's help pages:

Outside

I'm definitely going to buy this game, it sounds awesome!

Jukebox the Ghost - Good Day

(Crap, I missed Thursday! Here's a song while I think of something else for today to make up for yesterday)

I kind of discovered Jukebox the Ghost by accident. I've had an album of theirs (Let Live and Let Ghosts) for ages now, but haven't really listened to it much at all. A few weeks ago, I gave it another chance, and now I'm in love with it. Here's a video of them playing the opener from the album:



I'll admit to liking them partly because they feature the piano so much. The guy playing is really quite good, and his style reminds me a bit of Ben Folds.

Sesame Street + Old Spice = ???

I'm guessing many of you have seen this Old Spice ad from the Super Bowl. It's been parodied countless times, but I think this is my favorite one yet:

Dorm Room Engineering

Too bad W&M doesn't have an Engineering major, that might have been a good fit for me after all. Keep reading to see pictures of some of the useful things I've accomplished using totally unrelated items in my dorm room.

Cab Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers - Jumpin Jive

A great big band song and some mindblowing tapdancing.

What *isn't* Google doing?

Google. It started out as a research project written by two guys at Stanford, and now it's officially a word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Since then, it's branched out to all kinds of other services, some of which you've probably used: Google Maps, Gmail, Google Docs, etc. However, they're also branching out into all kinds of other projects, and at this point it looks like it's only a matter of time before they take over the world.

Pink Floyd + The Beegees = Stayin' Alive In The Wall

Here's a great mashup of The Beegees' "Stayin' Alive" and Pink Floyd's "Just A Brick In The Wall (Pt 2)" (thanks, Kremer).

Fall Break Adventures

So this weekend is Fall Break at W&M, which means no classes on Monday and Tuesday. Not much even compared to Thanksgiving Break, but hey, I'm not complaining! I decided to stay at school and relax, but my roommate went home with his family this morning. I woke up after they had left, and went out to run some errands.

Like a phoenix from the ashes

So, this blog kind of died out over the summer (because I got tired of trying to update it on tour), and I never really resurrected it when I got back to school. But that's all about to change! I'm going to give this whole "updating once a day" thing a shot again.

Enjoying an incredible lightnhng show across the plains of the midwest

Sitting in a hockey stadium with at least a few other corps waiting out a toqnado warning! Fun stuff.

Just found a scale in the locker rooms - i've lost about 12 pounds so far!

Naperville show delayed for an hour due to rain, and the percussion bus is drumming on pads and listening to techno.

In vicksburg, MI for a big show tonight at kalamazoo!

Driving from 4:30 PM to 2:30 AM and then waking up at 8 to rehearse... that's drum corps for you!

On the road to our last parade at Bristol, RI! Then it's time for laundry and a long haul to Chambersburg, PA

It's a bit chilly up here at UMass

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What the pit does when it rains

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Possibly the oldest vending machine i've ever seen

Pulling into Indy and we can see Lucas Oil on the horizon. Finals is seven weeks from today...

Great show last night - we now have the full ending on the field! Excited for laundry and free time in indy today

There's also now an official DCI ipod/phone/pad app, and it's really nice. Free too!

After 3 days of storms and clinics, it felt great to finally have a long and productive ensemble block. Can't wait for the show tomorrow night!

The entire drum corps is in a big open field house right now and the fiercest storm i've seen in my life is brewing outside. Woo!

It's now 7 AM and we're STILL driving. Wow.

Fantastic turnout at our home show tonight! On the way to charleston wv now and heading to normal for 4 days tomorrow night.

Rehearsal Nicknames

Now that we're on tour and I get Internet access more often (via the
buses), I'm going to try and write some longer posts rather than just
brief updates from my phone.

There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes and on the rehearsal
field that you don't get to see during a drum corps performance. One
of the most quirky things we do, at least as individual sections, is
give nicknames to measures of music or pages in the drill that we
commonly start or stop at. There are a ton, but just for illustration,
here are some of the nicknames we use in Khachaturian's Second Symphony.

Khach begins with a percussion feature named Snake Bite. The name
comes from the fact that the pit had a HUGE black snake come through
the pit while we were rehearsing that section, and the name spread to
the battery too. In the same vein, the pit has an exercise based on
that section that we've named Black Anaconda.

For the pit, measure 38 of Khach is officially known as Giraffe. At
one point, we were told to go to one measure past 38, and someone
asked why we didn't just say 39? Our tech Mike explained that the
offcial rehearsal numbers often don't line up with the real measure
numbers, so we phrase everything in terms of rehearsal numbers.
"Measure 38 could be called Giraffe," he said, "and I'd still tell you
to stop at one past Giraffe". We all liked the name, and so it stuck.

Next up, measure 77 is known as Furry Woodland Creature, because we
saw one running by during rehearsal yesterday in Allentown.

A lot of these are only being used by the pit, but these two came from
the battery. I heard this story secondhand, so it might be inaccurate.
Apparently the battery kept missing a hold at page 51 in the drill, so
their tech Zach had them repeat over and over "the hold is after the
triplet diddle. The hold is after the triplet diddle. The hold is
after..." and so on. Apparently in the movie Fight Club, there's a
point where they repeat the name Robert Paulson a lot, so page 51 was
christened Robert Paulson, and page 50 became Tyler Durden, another
character from Fight Club.

So there you have it. Next time you're watching a drum corps rehearsal
and someone yells out "Play out at Snake Bite! Watch your spacing at
Tyler Durden!", you'll have some idea of what's going on. Of course,
these are just a few of the many names that we have, and this is
mainly just the pit. Every section in the corps has their own
nicknames like these, and it's still June, so there are surely many
still to come.

Four shows done in two days, and we won both nights! Phew. On the road now heading from chesapeake VA to ft mill SC for firstbeat, our first home show!

The corps just made a walmart run, and now there's a lot less free space on the bus...

First 1 AM refueling stop of tour....

Officially on the bus heading to a rehearsal day in west va! Glad to finally be on the road away from spring training.

Just saw the buses pull in - we're loading them up tonight, i can't wait

Spring training is almost done! Leaving here wednesday night, first real show on friday. We got a special treat today - no morning block! We're starting at 1:30

Our ever-growing garden of broken mallets

Percussion campers playing with the crown drumline

131 pages of drill on the field! Preview show on sunday night! First real show in 10 days! Things are starting to get rolling around here

The rest of the pit learning some new music

We've done 100 odd sets of drill with the rest of the corps now - all the way through the ballad! Longer ensemble than usual because we ran some encores - fun!

First real rainy day of the season so far - we spent all morning inside and the rain is still going.

Got to see the hornline sing the show for the guard tonight! Cool stuff, you'd think they were all proffesional singers. I hear it might go up on youtube...

This HUGE snake got about a foot away from Steve and Mike before we all saw it and freaked out for 5 minutes

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Gorgeous sunset at gwu

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Day 3!

First full day of spring

First full day of spring training is underway! Pit spent the morning on technique and finished up the tango. Next block in 15!

New toys!

We found a cat!

Just a few packages...

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Gooood morning! Up bright and early to shower, eat, and begin a day of leadership camp.

Oh, the things I do for Carolina Crown...

Before:

And after...

Google's "Liquid Galaxy"

Can't wait until this is in my living room someday!

http://mashable.com/2010/02/11/google-liquid-galaxy-video/

2010 Source music

Get ready for a bunch of YouTube videos! Obviously a drum corps is not exactly a sit-down orchestra, but these recordings should give you an idea of what the music we're playing will sound like. First up is Mahler's Second Symphony:

Show Schedule and Contact Info

Here's our schedule for the summer once we start touring:

Carolina Crown 2010: A Second Chance

Yep, Carolina Crown has officially announced their 2010 program! Here it is:

Think about it for a minute...

If you choose an answer to this question at random what is the chance you will be correct?
A) 25%
B) 50%
C) 60%
D) 25%

(via reddit)

A long overdue update

Hi! I'm not dead! Sorry for not updating my blog. It's finals season, I was sick recently, etc etc, excuses excuses. Basically life has been incredibly busy and I've slacked off on the blog. I'm going to try and get a little more in the swing of updating before the summer comes around, when I do plan on updating (hopefully!) daily, with details of what Crown life is like on the inside.

For now though, check out this beautiful video (thanks to Chris Brophy for showing it to me!). For more info on the instrument involved, check out the wikipedia page.

North Korea - A day in the life

I've only just started watching this, but it looks fascinating. A Dutch documentary filmmaker managed to get permission to film a documentary of the average life of a North Korean citizen. Check it out!

Pictures, part 2!

Here's some more funny and interesting pictures I've come across online lately. As usual, click to see them in full size

Mean Disney Girls

If you've seen the classic teen movie Mean Girls (Lindsay Lohan's first big role), you'll appreciate this video - they took the sound from the trailer and synced it up with videos of various Disney movies. Enjoy!

Fall 2010 Schedule, Part the Second

So I've been pretty lax about updating my blog lately - sorry! It's been almost a week since I last touched it, because school's been pretty busy (also I probably just got lazy). I'll try to get back on that, and hopefully start blogging about Crown a little bit more as the summer gets closer and closer. For now, here's my finalized class schedule for next fall:

A truly thought-provoking infographic

From the webcomic The Doghouse Diaries:

A 60 ton angel falls to the earth

A pile of old metal, a radiant blur
Scars in the country, the summer and her

A mind-boggling Rube Goldberg Machine

Courtesy of OK Go.

Errrrr

I haven't really updated my blog lately (again). I had a Crown camp over the weekend, and I was crazy busy last week. I'll probably pick up my planned series on Time Control tomorrow or so, but for now, I'll share a neat little thing I was doing today. I googled "er", "err", "errr", and so on, took down the number of results, and plotted them in Mathematica. Here's the result, with number of "r"s on the x axis and number of results on the y axis (it's actually the logarithm of the result, to keep them at a manageable size).

I've only gotten up to 60, but it's actually non-zero all the way up to 128 "r"s, at which point Google tells you the search string is too long. It starts off with a gorgeous example of exponential decay (though since it's log data, it's not really exponential decay. Double exponential decay, maybe?), but then goes into a more random jittering pattern. The log data goes down in a pretty straight line, which means the original data goes down roughly exponentially. Of course, that doesn't take into account that weird spike at around 50. Who knows what's up with that?

Track 1: Time Difference

Clocking in at 6 minutes and 19 seconds, Time Difference starts the album off with a bang. I've actually been putting some time into figuring out this one on the piano, and boy is it complicated. It starts out in a truly bizarre meter: 13/4. Yeah, 13. And people thought Dave Brubeck was crazy when he played in 5/4.

Gasp!

I let a few days go by without updating my blog - shame on me! As penance, I'm going to do something a little more structured with it for a while. I've been listening to Hiromi Uehara's album Time Control quite a bit lately, so just for the heck of it I'm going to go through the album one track per day, and just, well, write about it.

Hiromi is a Japanese jazz pianist, active today (Time Control came out in 2007). The lineup for the record sounds like any one of a bunch of classic 70s jazz fusion records: drums, bass, electric guitar, and piano/synthesizer. As the name suggests, the album is all about time: there are songs in odd meters, incredibly complicated manipulations of those meters, and all the songs are performed with deadly rhythmic precision. The title might be an homage to Dave Brubeck's classic album Time Out, which featured songs in a number of different time signatures, which was a very bold move at the time (1959).

Classes!

I'm not sure how long they've been up, but W&M's Fall 2010 course times are available for viewing (and countless hours of planning). I try to maintain a Google Docs file of my 4 year course plan, but that doesn't take the actual times and locations of the classes into account, just my degree requirements. Fortunately, I plugged in my Fall 2010 plans and it actually looks fantastic. Check it out! You'll need to click to see it full-size in order to actually read any of the words.

Complex Numbers

A wonderfully readable brief explanation of imaginary and complex numbers from - The New York Times?

I'll admit, I've been guilty of this myself sometimes

The Failure of Videogame Companies to Understand Piracy - An Ubisoft Case Study

Internet piracy is rampant for many forms of electronic media, including movies, music, and videogames. One common method for companies to try and prevent piracy is to put something called Digital Rights Management, or DRM, on their products. As time went on, pirates continued to get more resourceful at getting around DRM restrictions - in the context of videogames, this is often referred to as "cracking" a game. As pirates got better at cracking, videogame companies developed more and more complex systems to keep them out. An important point to keep in mind is that the pirates have always won. To date DRM has never fully prevented the cracking of a game, just delayed it (caveat lector though, I haven't researched this in depth). This brings us to today's topic - Ubisoft's DRM system in Assassin's Creed 2 (or AC2), a recent port of a popular Xbox 360/Playstation 3 game to the PC.

Here's another Beethoven Sonata you've never heard before

3 AM still counts as "today", right?

So here's my post for today: a harp cover of Owl City's Fireflies:

Rule #9

Not much for today, just thought I'd share a wonderful article I came across on DCI's website about Rule #9 and learning to Figure It Out. I think it's a good insight into what life on tour is like for those who've never experienced it.

Steam for Mac?

Steam is a content delivery system made by the videogame company Valve. Valve has been responsible for some of the most popular PC games in recent memory: the Half-Life series, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead. Up until now, their primary method for distributing the games, as well as the games themselves, has been Windows only. However, Valve has as good as confirmed recently that they will be bringing Steam and their games to the Mac with a series of 6 images featuring Valve characters in parodies of Mac advertisements. They released one image each to a number of online news outlets, along with a subtle suggestion that there were other images to be found. Not only is it a cool ad campaign, but it draws in iconic Mac advertisements from throughout Apple's lifetime - very cool, Valve! The announcement will probably coincide with the Game Developer's Conference next week, a traditional time for companies to break big news. Personally, I can't wait. The last piece of the current (incredibly good) Half-Life story arc is due to come out sometime soonish hopefully; Valve hasn't been very clear. I'd love to be able to play it natively on my computer, so fingers crossed!

Why you've never really heard the Moonlight Sonata

Check out Slate's fantastic article here. The article describes how Beethoven's famous third movement of the Moonlight Sonata, along with countless other works, was designed for the instruments of the day in an essential way. This viewpoint is pretty common in looking at Baroque music, as you can see in the huge market today for "period" version of Baroque music - played on authentic instruments, with authentic stylistic nuances and often in authentic frilly costumes. However, when you get to Classical period composers and the invention of the pianoforte, we all sort of assume that wham bam, the modern Steinway grand descended from heaven pre-made. However, one of the most obvious differences in the older pianos is that when you hold down the sustain pedal on an older piano (1805 in the article), the notes don't last as long. Beethoven directs the performer to hold down the pedal the entire time, and if you tried this on a modern piano, you'd get what the author delightfully calls a "tonal traffic jam". But that's enough of me talking - go read (and listen to) the article!

A quick pun for today

If you're blue and you don't know where to go, why don't you go where fashion sits...

(courtesy of reddit)

There's a lobster on my head

(via A.S.B.)

Lockhart's Lament

I've probably already showed this link to a lot of people I know, but if not, you ought to read this. It's an essay entitled "A Mathematician's Lament", written by Paul Lockhart, a teacher of mathematics. It's more commonly referred to as just "Lockhart's Lament". It's a really fantastic read, especially if you've never pursued math beyond high school or early college - you have no idea what you missed. Of course, I'm not saying that everyone should be a math major, but I'm saying that the tedious drills that schoolchildren do are about as far away from real math as they could possibly be. You can read the whole thing here (it's a pdf), but keep reading for some of my favorite quotes.

Every Base is Base 10

All Along The Watchtower

Just when I thought I wasn't going to have anything to write about today, I came across this absolutely fantastic cover of All Along The Watchtower. This version was composed by Bear McCreary for Battlestar Galactica - check it out!

Precious and libraries

Today's blog post has two parts. First off, I went and saw Precious tonight, and I highly recommend it. It's really intense and depressing at times, but in the end it turns out positively, maybe even a bit inspiring. It's one of those movies that you walk out of kind of stunned, but later glad that you went.

Second, a very interesting post I found today in an online discussion. For context, the discussion was over whether paper books will eventually die off in favor of e-books. Someone asked what everyone thinks about libraries, and someone else replied:

Waiter Rant

One of my absolute favorite blogs to read is Waiter Rant. It started out as what you might expect, given the name: the rants and ravings of an anonymous waiter working at a high class restaurant in New York City. However, the author is so much more than just a waiter. He also used to work at a mental hospital, and has since quit his job as a waiter and now writes about random parts of his life. On top of all that, he's a fantastic writer. It's hard to do justice to his writing, so I'll give you some examples:

Post?

So I've been trying to keep up with this whole posting something every day thing, but this weekend at Crown threw me off that schedule. I didn't really do anything interesting or blog-worthy today, so instead I'll share with you some of the things I've recently favorited on YouTube - guaranteed to be a good source of entertainment.

12 hours on the train today, oy. Thank god for my computer and amtrak's power outlets

TED

Where to begin? TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a yearly conference designed, in the words of their mission statement, to "offer free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers". They do this by first inviting a great number of great minds and giving each of them 18 minutes max (no matter how famous they are) to tell the audience about "ideas worth spreading". Then, they put each one of those talks online, absolutely free and open. The talks are all fascinating, and they cover a huge amount of subject matter. You can check out the list of all talks, but here's a list of some of my favorites.

Bruce Schneier on the value of privacy

Bruce Schneier is one of my favorite people to read on the topic of security. I found out about him from this excellent article on airport security, and why it's a sham, or to use his best-known phrase, "security theater". However, today I came across a post on his blog about the argument that any government surveillance is okay because "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care if they're looking?" Enjoy it, and look around and read more of his stuff.

EDIT: just finished another long but excellent article about him (circa 2002) explaining what's wrong with the security measures being taken in response to 9/11. His basic thesis is that our security systems are "brittle"; that is, when one component of the system fails, the whole thing fails, and fails hard. Systems should instead be designed to "fail well" when someone goes wrong, because it inevitably will. Read it here.

Picture messaging!

This is a picture of a bench outside Ewell Hall, showing the accumulation we got (not much compared to Nova!).

EDIT: Apparently to get MMS pictures to show up, I can't use the same number I use for SMS, instead I have to use the email address I use for email posting. Plus this horrible ad shows up beneath every post, I guess I'll just have to get used to that over the summer.

LoL oMg LiK Hi Evry1! kidding aside, here's a post by text. awesome! wonder what becomes the title though?

EDIT: looks like there is none, oddly enough. I can live with that though.

Testing?

So for today, I'm testing out two cool features that'll let me update
my blog quite easily over the summer without a computer. First up is
posting by email -this is being written on my iTouch! Next up will be
posting via SMS.

Google Buzz!

Just a few hours ago, Google announced their latest service: Buzz. It seems like it's basically Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google Reader, etc all rolled into one service available straight through Gmail (Buzz is going to go right between Inbox and Starred). I'm really interested to see if it takes off. I'm very plugged into Google when it comes to socializing (mail and reader), as are a lot of my friends, so I could certainly see us using this. It seems like it'll basically be like Google Reader, except you contribute your own content rather than sharing someone else's (the two services are begging to be integrated!). Hopefully this'll do better than Wave, which seems like it's kind of stalling so far.

Pictures!

I've decided that today will be picture day for this blog. Some of these pictures are just random, but a lot of them come from a fantastic photojournalism blog called The Big Picture, run by the Boston Globe. It's a perfect example of how to take advantage of the unique opportunities for news offered by the internet, i.e. incredibly detailed, high-resolution photos on an extremely simple website. No obtrusive ads, no complicated interface to navigate, just a page with pictures. Now, with that said, have some pictures!

Space Shuttle

So I realize this might be a day too late to be relevant, but a fairly historic event took place at 4:14 AM this morning - the last nighttime space shuttle launch by NASA. For those of you that don't know (and I didn't until quite recently), NASA is in the process of phasing out their aging fleet of space shuttles. Will there be a next generation of some kind? Probably, but no one really knows what's going to happen. Other nations still have space programs that can fly, so they'll be taking care of the International Space Station and that sort of thing. I think there's something like 5 shuttles launches left, but regardless, this one was the last one at night, and thus probably the last one I'd ever be able to see from where I live.

So, I mustered my insanity and geekdom and got up at 3:30 AM to go see it. I was barely able to get myself to get out of bed. I pitched the idea to my roommate, but he was not really interested in freezing himself when he should be sleeping in order to see a speck in the sky; I can't say I blame him. Anyway, I did manage to force myself out of the bed, out of the dorm (COLD COLD COLD), and walk about 10 minutes to a pretty open area devoid of streetlights. And right on schedule at 4:20, I saw it. A small but distinct dot, about as bright as the brightest stars out that night, was cruising across the sky a little bit above the horizon. Fortunately, it was high enough that the trees and buildings didn't block it, so I was able to watch it for the whole way.

On the one hand, it really was just a little speck, and arguably might not have been worth it for how tired I felt for the rest of today. But on the other hand, I just took advantage of one of the last chances I'll have for a while where I live to see people going into space. People. In space. How crazy is that? That little dot wasn't some mysterious fusion reactor billions of miles away that we call a "star", it was a human-engineered and human-launched chunk of metal, with actual people in it, leaving the confines of our planet behind. It's really mindblowing, and I wish I'd been alive for the first moon landing, because I feel like people who grew up with that as a given might find it easy to not be all that impressed by space shuttles. It's just something that's there. We sent people into space, yup. Whoop-dee-do. I'm glad I had this opportunity to sort of think about it freshly.

It was also interesting to see how artificial our concepts of "time", "night and day", and so on are. NASA launched people into space at 4:14 AM, a time when most of humanity is rightfully asleep. And what's more, they had a news conference about the launch at 5:30. Five! Who else but NASA has the guts to hold news conferences at five in the morning?

Mashups

Mashups are a funny kind of music. A mashup basically consists of bits and pieces of existing songs spliced together, i.e. mashed up together. There are quite a few different varieties of mashups - the simplest is to just take the vocals from one song and add them to the music of another. Others take that concept to its extreme, adding tiny pieces of different songs together to make an incredibly complex new work, often changing what songs are used quite rapidly. I'll give some great examples after the break

Not Always Right

Here's a funny website for today: Not Always Right. It's site that features user-submitted customer service horror stories, except it's not the service that's bad, it's the customer! The name comes from "The customer is Not Always Right". It updates about 4-5 times a day, but it has an RSS feed so you can keep tabs on it. See some sample stories after the jump

Solitaire Meets Number Theory

First off, when I say solitaire, I don't mean the game that everyone calls "Solitaire". That's Klondike. Solitaire refers to any card game that can be played by just one person. The solitaire game I'll be talking about here is called Pyramid. The rules are pretty simple: first, you lay out cards in a pyramid of 7 rows (first 1 card, then 2, then 3, etc). The goal is to remove all the cards from the pyramid, and you can only remove cards in pairs that add up to 13 (where A = 1, J = 11, Q = 12, and K = 13). So, for example, you can remove an A and a Q, 6 and 7, 5 and 8, or a K by itself. You can also only remove cards that aren't covered by other cards. You can see in the image how each card is covered directly by two others, plus a bunch more farther below

If you get stuck, you can draw cards one at a time from the rest of the deck, called the Stack. So, that's all well and good, but what on earth does math have to do with this? Read on, dear reader.

A February 4th resolution?

So, as you can see, I've discovered that it's hard to have enough substantive, interesting content to fill a blog with regularly. I think that's partly because I have a tendency to not want to write anything here unless I have something that I think is really super awesome. So, I'm going to go to the other end of the spectrum. I certainly use the internet at least once a day, and I definitely think or say or see or experience something interesting or noteworthy every day, so why not combine the two and update this blog every day? That's what I'm going to try and do.

So, for today (it's past midnight, but it counts as today), I'm going to share a picture. I'm in a class called Worlds of Music, which is basically about learning to see and listen to music in a broader context than just the usual "classical" music. It's a really cool class so far, and our first quiz is tomorrow, so I made a playlist in iTunes of the musical samples we've listened to so far to study. It's a pretty varied list, to say the least. You have to click on the picture to see it full-size.

If you only play one video game in your life...

Make it Braid.

What is Braid? If I wanted to be Wikipedia, I'd call it something like a 2D platforming/puzzle game with some time manipulation elements, but that doesn't really tell you much, does it? Braid is much greater than the sum of its parts, much like another wildly popular recent game: Portal. WARNING: Spoilers within for Portal.