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Posted in Humor,
News,
Photoshop
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1 Comment
My sister Selena had her on-air debut on NPR Morning Edition yesterday, as the translator voice of a Chinese woman whose family recently sought asylum in the United States. Listen in at about 0:55.
Where did she get that exceptional radio voice? It couldn’t have been here. Or here. Hmm… It must have been here:
This is Canine Public Radio Morning Edition, I’m Tasha. Grrr… Ruff. Achoo! That’s my bone!
Congratulations, Selena! You’re following in Tasha’s footsteps. And you’ll pull ahead as soon as she stops to sniff something.
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Posted in Music,
News
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0 Comments
Tonight I had the amazing experience of singing a concert with Blue Heron, one of the premier early music choirs in the country.
I had an unusual week, attending lectures on topological field theory and writing about neutrinos by day, getting into the 1430’s groove in rehearsals by night. And the music wasn’t easy. Many of the pieces were thick with cross-relations, rhythmically complicated, and generally funky. I’ve had a few nightmares where I stop concentrating, and either I sing an incorrect B-flat, or the seesaw mechanism stops working. Continue reading »
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Posted in Nerdiness,
News
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0 Comments
Wired Magazine has an interesting article about redesigning North American flight paths to improve efficiency. (via Rachel Maddow)
It’s sort of what you’d expect: flight patterns were originally drawn up decades ago, and have been added to haphazardly and chaotically since then, like the streets in Boston.
The redesign creates a kind of airborne suburbia, paving the skies far out into what was the countryside. The idea is that the controllers can get planes off the intercity highways sooner, keeping them clear for through-traffic.
Continue reading »
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Posted in Awesome,
Music
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2 Comments
On a 5 minute break (read procrastination vacation) from preparing for my oral exam next week, I came across the interesting YouTube Symphony: “The world’s first collaborative orchestra.”
YouTube explains:
We have invited musicians from around the world to audition for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. The video entries will be combined into the first ever collaborative virtual performance, and the world will select the best to perform at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in April 2009.
Musicians “auditioned” by posting on YouTube a video of themselves playing one of a few designated audition pieces. From there, YouTube picked a few dozen finalists and has invited us viewers to vote on the ones we like (or give thumbs down to the ones we don’t). Continue reading »
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Posted in Code,
Projects
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1 Comment
I should probably document the real origin of the Theorem of the Day and Philosophy of the Day. Coffee and Henry David Thoreau are perhaps less involved than originally indicated.
The theorem generator was written by a good friend of mine, Matt Gline, as a project for CS51: Abstraction and Design in Computer Programming, which we took together as freshmen.
The assignment was to use LISP to implement a context free grammar — basically a set of rules for computer-generated mad libs. The subject was whatever we wanted. Good ones from past years include computer-generated mystery novellas, course-guide reports, and performance art directions. Every year there’s a contest, and Matt’s theorem generator was hysterical enough to win him lunch at the faculty club. Continue reading »
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Posted in Humor,
Nerdiness
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0 Comments
Dangers
— Dec 26, 2008
On January 13, 2008, the wonderful webcomic xkcd posted this cartoon.
Within hours, the comic rendered itself spectacularly inaccurate. Recognizing that it’s important that the public properly understand the dangers of this modern world, we provide here some more recent research. Continue reading »
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Posted in Humor,
Music,
Physics
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25 Comments
This is the story of how Honda engineers screwed up a big expensive project with a simple arithmetic mistake, tried to fudge their result with sound editing software, and congratulated themselves for being totally awesome.
When I was a kid, my family used to drive up to The Pinery in Ontario, a beautiful park by Lake Huron. Very scenic. My favorite part, though, was a stretch of road a half-hour outside of the park. To discourage reckless Canadians from barreling past the houses and barns, the local government carved five sets of grooves in the road before every stop sign. Drive over them, and the car would vibrate: “vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb.” The faster you drive, the higher the pitch.
My Dad is a musicologist, with a particular interest in tuning. So there was no way he was going to pass up the chance to experiment with this instrument. Every time we approached some grooves, he’d start fast over the first set, and try to slow down by the last set, to play a descending scale: G-F-E-D-C. If there was no oncoming traffic after the stop sign, he’d swing over to the other side of the road and play an ascending scale as we sped up. Continue reading »
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Posted in News
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4 Comments
I’m often frustrated by not having a canonical place to write things down, but what really pushed me over the edge is the subject of the second post here. It’s nerdy. It’s kind of hilarious. I know people who will definitely appreciate it. So this blog exists for that.
However, I don’t expect to be writing those kinds of posts very often. I’d also like to write some notes on high energy physics subjects that are widely misunderstood (at least among us grad students), or not often spoken about, but actually important. Half my life these days is figuring out such things. I guess this blog could save some people the same trouble. But it’s just as much for me, since my memory isn’t great, and I’d like to be able to look up answers instead of figuring them out all over again.
Visuals
The current theme for this blog is a slightly horrible mash-together of my old website and the default wordpress theme. Web design is one of my hobbies, so expect that I’ll find some time to fix things up around here.
