Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Dave Brubeck on Guaraldi Peanuts Music
There is a mixture of sadness and joy in the Peanuts characters. Their all-too-human disappointments and minor triumphs are reflected in Guaraldi’s music. It is a child’s reality. Dave Brubeck, as quoted by Charles Solomon in a recent interview with Chronicle Books about his newly-released The Art and Making of Peanuts Animation, a book that I need to pick up.
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Slime Mold Music
What happens if you grow slime mold on electrodes hooked into a sound oscillator? This, evidently. Slime mold music. Science!
The recorded signals from the electrodes were eventually fed into an audio oscillator, with each recording representing a different frequency. By mixing the sounds generated from all of the recordings the researchers were able to create an eerie type of music – reminiscent of the sound effects used on early science fiction movies. As an added feature, the researchers report that they can cause different sounds to be generated by shining light on different parts of the mold, in effect tuning their bio-instrument to allow for the creation of different types of music.
I’ll picture the setup looking something like a Bleep Labs Bit Blob.
(Via arXiv)
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The History of AOL as Told Through the New York Times Crossword
Working the NY Times crossword, AOL and MSN and Juno and NetZero pop out as weird things to see show up as current-day answers. Granted they make easy crossword fill for the editor, and I guess it’s not that much different than the other archaic jokes and in-references that you’re expected to keep track of (OLEO, OONA, OBI, IBO…), but dotcom-era corporate names just seem more dated than most of the other topical references. The evolution of clues for these answers, though, is pretty interesting, as can be seen here in AOL’s case.
The Quartz folks made this list using a home-grown crossword clue/answer historical lookup tool, which is definitely fun to play with! Hmm, according to this tool, web in the WWW sense didn’t show up until 2000, dotcom didn’t appear until 2001, blogs exploded in 2005, and USENET continues to show up with surprising frequency. Crosswords are weird.
(Via Kottke)
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Portal for the Ti Graphic Calculator
Last week I discovered that the batteries in my late 90’s TI-85 had leaked and corroded, and cleaning it up and turning it on first the time in years I lamented the awesome lost ZShell ASM games that I’d loaded the thing up with back in high school (that was one of the best versions of Tetris ever, right?).
And now, news that Portal has an awesome-looking unofficial TI graphing calculator port. I hope somewhere this is bringing some pleasure and enjoyment to some poor kid sitting in a boring class or study hall.
(Via Ars Technica)
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John Cage on the Beauty of the Moon
I don’t agree. I think that we can still at unexpected moments be surprised by the beauty of the moon though now we can travel to it. John Cage, in response to critics claiming an urgency for the scholarly, analytical study of “difficult to understand” twentieth Century art, quoted from this acceptance speech in which he talks about Finnegans Wake and his own works influenced by that book.
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The Bandwidth of Foraging Ants
In other insect news, a case of life imitating (well, at least acting similar to) network transmission protocols:
This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.
It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food. … A forager won’t return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off.
(Via ACM TechNews)
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Shaw and Lee: the Beau Brummels
Some comedy for your Saturday: Shaw and Lee, AKA The Beau Brummels. We saw this Vitaphone short on TCM last week, and were mesmerized by the duo’s Andy Kaufman-esque deadpan delivery of bad jokes and Vaudeville songs (stick with it for at least a couple of minutes!). Strangely modern, or in any case I gather from digging around that this was considered a bizarre, unique act at the time.
Always eat when you are hungry.
Always drink when you are dry.
Go to bed when you’re sleepy.
But don’t forget to breathe or else you’ll die. -
Eff the Ineffable
Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. From Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which I’m reading again for the first time since the eighth grade. It’s weird reading it now, knowing that it was originally written as part of a Dr. Who series!
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Google Joyce
Yeah. Hello, This is a message from Super Shuttle scheduled to pick you up. Yeah 6 Yes team. In the morning. Yeah going to Byron bird from the airport. Yeah if you need to make any changes. Yes. Call 5 Yeah, 12, your moving on. Yeah, we will see you tomorrow. Sunday. Yeah 6 yeah. 15. Yeah in the morning. Yeah. Please allow up to you Yeah, 15 minutes. Yeah, after scheduled pickup time, for traffic, your routing yo of other passengers yank you for choosing Super Shuttle, yeah. And please, buckle up force safety. Yeah. Google Voice’s transcription of an automated robo-call I just got from Super Shuttle, which seems to be channeling Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. I’ve joked about Google Freud before, so I’ll chalk this one up as Google Joyce.
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Kittydar
Hmm, @harthvader has written some impressive neural network, machine learning, and image detection stuff, shared on her GitHub — wait, she’s combined these things into a JavaScript cat-detecting routine?! Okay, that wins.
var cats = kittydar.detectCats(canvas);
console.log(“there are”, cats.length, “cats in this photo”);
console.log(cats[0]);
// { x: 30, y: 200, width: 140, height: 140 }You can try out Kittydar here.
(Via O’Reilly Radar)