...more recent posts
allows you to get a birds-eye view of the Billboard Hot 100 by listening to all the #1 singles from 1958 through the millenium using a technique I've been working on for a couple of years called time-lapse phonography. The 857 songs used to make the piece are analyzed digitally and a spectral average is then derived from the entire song. Just as a long camera exposure will fuse motion into a single image, spectral averaging allows us to look at the average sonority of a piece of music, however long, giving a sort of average timbre of a piece. This gives us a sense of the average key and register of the song, as well as some clues about the production values present at the time the record was made; for example, the improvements in home stereo equipment over the past fifty years, as well as the gradual replacement of (relatively low-fidelity) AM radio with FM broadcasting has had an impact on how records are mixed... drums and bass lines gradually become louder as you approach the present, increasing the amount of spectral noise and low tones in our averages.
The spectral average of each song used in Billboard plays for one second for each week it stayed at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Thus we run about 52 seconds per year, for a grand total of a 37 minute sound work. The video image tells you what song was used to generate the current spectral average. Note that nothing of the original recording is used in this piece; everything that you hear is derived from a statistical algorithm applied to the original recordings. If you know the song used in the average, you may be able to sing the first few bars (or the main hook in the chorus) over the spectral average and find that you are quite in tune with it; in some cases, you may be surprised not to be.
Just now learned of Bob Denver's death. All obits I find mention an arrest for marijuana in 1998 but none mention an arrest for pot posession in the early 1970's. I swear I remember him being busted back then. Anyone know?
deep sky "in" jokes
thx sally
million dollar homepage
a friends step uncles hedge fund book reviewed.
future technology timeline
timbls blog
"Affiliates of terrorist organization Hezbollah cloned the mobiles of senior executives of Canadian operator Rogers Communications....":
"They were cloning the senior executives repeatedly, because everyone was afraid to cut off Ted Rogers' phone," Hopper told Gefen, in an interview that recognised the cleverness of the social engineering trick. "They were using actually a pretty brilliant psychology. Nobody wants to cut off Ted Rogers' phone or any people that are directly under Ted Rogers, so they took their scanners to our building... Nobody wants to shut off Ted. Even if he is calling Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Kuwait."Pretty clever.
googlemapping your blog visitors
that big ole grey pack of lies, the nyt
jarvis and auletta together on lopate
who is charmin?
bunnies with cookies and pancakes on their heads and stuff
I don't remember Dave's pickup truck sounding exactly like this, but for some reason the video made me remember riding along on many an Atwells Ave to The Coffee Exchange run. (34 MB Quicktime movie)
rip rp
my neighbor had jury duty yesterday, and if i heard him correctly, they had wifi available while you wait but they charge $8 for the privilege. i wonder how much they charged for air. glad to see commerce alive and well in the halls of justice. although i was excited to hear it said that if you bring a guilty verdict, you get a free metro card and twofers for the matinee performance of spamalot.
"If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college." ¯ Kurt Vonnegut
tom moody pictured here is secretly a mac lover. and those are just the ones hell show us!
whats the site that always has video of important news stories? id like to hear Jean Schmidt getting booed off the floor one more time.
also misquoted attributed source.
my weather bug monitor is reading a sultry 28 degrees. is god running out of oil? whats going on here?
Best Christmas lights ever. At least for some definition of the word 'best'. (.wmv file.)
In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away. Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda [...]daily kos
At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.
Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.
There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.
Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary. former fla sen bob graham (d)
Note, that classified NIE was not available to every congressperson. Just to members of the Senate and House committees on intelligence.
Graham asked Tenet to produce an unclassified version of the NIE. But what the CIA produced was a propaganda piece absent any of the reservations or caveats presented in the classified edition of the document. The vast majority of senators and congressment, much less the American people, did not see the full classified document.
Hence, Bush's claims that congressional Democrats had access to the same intelligence that the administration had is pure bullshit.
better concept than content - romeo and juliet in emoticons.
I don't think this has been posted, worth a look and a chuckle in my humble opinion:
http://www.bigad.com.au/movie.html