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)