Voice recognition has come a long way in recent years, but what about melody recognition? Just spent 10 minutes at Midomi, a new search engine that lets you sing, whistle, or hum a few bars into a Flash-based recording widget, runs a whole bunch of voodoo analysis on your input, and spits back results based on what song it thinks you must have intended. Potentially great for those times when you remember how a song goes but not what it’s called, or any of the lyrics. The goal is to sell you downloadable versions of the search results, but based on the miserable output it generated for me, it’s back to whistling for friends and co-workers - Midomi batted nearly zero.

Started with PiL’s “Track 8” - Midomi thought I was singing “The Rainbow Connection.” Whether that’s a limitation of the technology, or a matter of the song being too obscure, or that my rendition would have been unrecognizable even to humans, I don’t know. But when I couldn’t get it to recognize “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” my confidence in the technology’s ability to recognize common songs plummeted. My attempt to render Herb Alpert’s “Spanish Flea” fell flat as well (Midomi thought I was humming “A Spoonful of Sugar” — yipes. Tried whistling the same song rather than humming, but no dice — Midomi interpreted that attempt as “My Sharona.” Captain Beefheart’s “Orange Claw Hammer,” according to Midomi, must be a drunken version of “Edelweiss.”

Amy’s a better singer than me, so turned her loose. When Midomi guessed that her version of “Fly Me to the Moon” must have been one of “Like a Virgin,” “Rhiannon,” or “Ebony and Ivory,” she lost interest. Finally hit paydirt with “Happy Birthday,” but sheesh.

Nice collection of early stop-motion animations by the great Ray Harryhausen.

Arguably, Ray Harryhausen’s creations aren’t the most realistic in the realm of special effects, nor will his films ever join the ranks of cinema’s classics. Yet Ray’s touch can be instantly recognized. His creations are absolutely alive; in each frame his creatures move, twitch, breathe, act with a personality and pathos that can only be ascribed to a direct connection to Ray.

The samples are brief, but quickly raise memories of lazy Sunday afternoons watching TV at cousins’ and friends’ houses in the 1970s, when this flavor of model/miniature animation was already old, but was new to me. Today the line between what’s real and what’s not in cinema is not only blurry, it’s gone. But through most of film history, the line was clear as day, so more suspension of disbelief was required on the part of the viewer. I think there’s something valuable in that. And also something enjoyable.

Update: Video collage of some of Harryhausen’s work (via Weblogsky):

Miles and I made walkie talkies today. He’s getting way into helping, which means I need to find a way for him to contribute to just about every home project. And he’s been getting curious about the vice in the garage, which led to cutting and hammering and sanding opportunities. Which lead to this pair of dynamite phones.

He signed up for the basic plan, which is fine for starters, and very affordable, though coverage was lousy - 30′ max range before he started breaking up. Can you hear me now?

“Hello, Porridge?” “Miles, who is Porridge?” “Porridge is another name for God.”

Amy transcribed a conversation with Miles earlier today:

I asked M to go wash his hands. After 5 minutes, I hear the water still running in the bathroom. When I get in there, find that he’s carefully shredded nearly an entire bar of soap by digging into it with his little fingernails. There’s a mound of shredded soap in the sink and no water is going down the drain.

Me: Miles, where do you get all these ideas?

M: From Nothingland

Me: Where’s Nothiingland?

M: It’s just 2 blocks from Legoland.

Me: Do you have to go there to get these ideas?

M: Yes, I go on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

Me: Do you go there in reality, or in your imagination?

M: I go there in my imagination. Nothingland is where there is nothing, but if you use your imagination, you will figure out that there really is something there. There’s no one there except for me. If you go to Nothingland, you can get a cake or a coin. If you go to Nothingland, you can go on a Easter egg hunt, and if you use a different imagination, you can get a shower bath. At Nothingland, I can go to Nothingland with our pets Plato and Louise. They don’t get lost in Nothingland, because wherever they go, I go. At Nothingland, Louise and Plato like to get coins and cakes. If you go to Nothingland, you can get a new puzzle, but the new puzzle is only for playing with at Nothingland. If you go to Nothingland, you can get a new cat to go to Nothingland with you, and at Nothingland, it’s okay if somebody else goes to Nothingland with me.

Buzz earlier this week about the fact that stinky kitchen sponges can be made fresh again by microwaving them for two minutes. What the widely distributed article didn’t say (originally) was that you need to make sure the sponge is wet before firing the bacterial death ray. Microwave experiments cause sponge disasters:

“Just wanted you to know that your article on microwaving sponges and scrubbers aroused my interest. However, when I put my sponge/scrubber into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off,” one correspondent wrote in an e-mail to Reuters.

Mark Morford, amazing/insane as always, riffs on the debacle, and on our national obsession with germs.

Wait, there’s more. What’s the most germ-clogged, festering item on your body right now (besides, of course, your body itself)? That would be your cell phone, silly. After all, it just sits there all day, simmering in the happy juices of your toasty pants pocket, churning out microbes of horror like Paris Hilton churns out intimations of death. And you put that thing up to your face without first disinfecting it with some ethyl alcohol and a flamethrower? What are you, high?

For our part, we’re just amazed that it takes so much longer for kitchen sponges to get stinky now that we’ve got that little humidity problem under control. Amazed.

Why is Avid / Digidesign suddenly pushing Garage Band rather than Pro Tools? Is there an implicit acknowledgment here that PT is too complicated / expensive for a huge swath of users? Maybe this doesn’t seem weird to others — of course Avid can still sell you the hardware, even if you don’t go for their integrated M-Box/Pro Tools package. Maybe it strikes me as odd because of the endless battles we’ve gone through at work over the question of whether PT is overkill for our users (we’re now teaching Soundtrack Pro to multimedia journalism students rather than Pro Tools, so I guess we landed somewhere in between).

Apple profiles ukulele master Lyle Ritz, who recorded his latest album No Frills entirely in Garage Band (at age 75 no less). And it does sound gorgeous.

There’s a lot of competition in the web-based calendaring / personal time & resource management space, but there’s something special about Scrybe, now in extended beta. “Focus on details without losing the surrounding context.” The demo video is impressive. Cross-platform, syncs between multiple computers, off-line mode, smooth interface, some nice innovations. A little Backpack, a little Exchange Server, a little Ajax… nothing earthshaking overall, but seems really well put-together, and solves real-world problems. The “Thoughtstream” feature seems innovative. Haven’t joined the beta (which is currently in waitlist mode), but will keep an eye on this.

Thanks Rob

Quick: What’s the most commonly shoplifted item in America? Batteries? Makeup? Candy? According to the Food Marketing Institute, it’s meat. Didn’t used to be. A couple years ago, meat took a back seat to cough medicines, which were often stolen by meth chefs. But when those medicines went behind the counter, meat was promoted to first place. So who’s lifting rib-eye? The occasional kleptomaniac, starving student, or dude on a dare, sure, but the bulk of beef is pilfered by house mums. Slate:

Though men and women shoplift in equal numbers, such aspirational meatlifters are most likely to be gainfully employed women between 35 and 54, according to a 2005 University of Florida study.

So apparently the practice is not only more widespread than I would have thought, but apparently commonly practiced by a demographic I would never have suspected. Which got me thinking: What percentage of Birdhouse readers are clandestine meat poachers?

Designed by Sander Mulder & Dave Keune, Buro Vormkrijgers. This is functional kitsch; the wrong becomes the new right. By adding a function to an otherwise grotesque object, it acquires new aesthetic values, becoming an object of desire. Pun intended, this woofer holds the mids between an addition to your sound system and your loyal 4 footed companion. Available in a co-axial two way speaker system version [two dogs].

Fun as they are, somehow I just can’t see giving over my audio to a visual gag certain to wear thin after a few weeks. Or to have to repeatedly answer the obvious next question: “Are your tweeters shaped like birds?” Especially for 600 Euros.

Returning home from a weekend snowboard trip, got off the highway at a random exit to enjoy coffee and the sunset. Behind me, a small canal and some tall weeds. Heard some splashing, some voices. “Everything OK?” someone called out. “Just wondering what you were doing,” I answered. “Come around and check it out,” the voice responded. Walked around the fence to find three guys with a gas-powered winch, a tow-rope, and a couple of wakeboards, getting air in a 5-ft.-wide, inches-deep canal, in which they had built a trick rail out of 4×4s. By itself, the tricks were nothing special, but the idea of using a winch instead of a boat, and having the cojones to do it in such a narrow space, impressed the hell out of me (especially after one dude missed the canal entirely and landed on the bank, rolled and walked away). They invited me to give it a go. And I would have, for want of a wetsuit. Flickr images

Watching An Inconvenient Truth last night, amazed to learn about vast pockets of methane trapped under permafrost in Siberia — pockets that are increasingly being released into the atmosphere as the permafrost melts due to global warming. Since methane is a greenhouse gas, the releases are yet another “vicious cycle” contributor to global warming: more warming = more permafrost melting = more methane released = more warming.

Talking later about this cycle, Dad alerted me to theories about methane’s possible role in the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. When methane pockets beneath the ocean floor are released (by excess pressure or the ocean floor being broken by seismic activity) they bubble up in huge columns. The column of bubbles have far less buoyancy than normal water, and a ship sitting atop one of these columns could literally plummet to the bottom of the sea (indeed, ships have been found at the bottom of the sea nestled into craters that could be explained by methane releases).

In addition, concentrations of less than 1% methane in the air has been shown to be capable of stopping piston engines in their tracks, due to oxygen starvation - which could account for the downing of airplanes in the area of a methane release (not sure how this would play out for jet engines).

There seems to be quite a bit of credible accounting for the theory out there, but also a fair bit of debunking. Not ready to call this one solved, but it is an intriguing theory.

Nice productivity tip for geeks with time-sucking surf habits.

via mandric

Last August listened to a great conversation between Sims designer Will Wright and composer Brian Eno, after which Eno announced he’d be creating a generative music soundtrack for Wright’s new game Spore. Six month later, apparently, the online gaming community is reporting the coupling as news. Hooked on Spore quotes Birdhouse as the source - which is weird since I have, like, zero involvement with the gaming world. And all I did was listen to a publically available podcast that anyone from the gaming community could have listened to themselves. Anyway, still very excited to wander through the game (assuming there’s a Mac version - and time).

Old friend-turned-professional-semiotician (wait, that didn’t come out right) Scott Hamrah interviewed by n+1 about the transformation of the Payless Shoe Source logo from halloween garish to an exercise in tubular blandness:

Well, that’s true. Shoe shopping is like gathering tubers. Shoes are like potatoes … But I see it more as a sublimation of eating and of sex. I like women’s shoes a lot, personally. I’ve always said that if I could do it all over again, I’d be a women’s shoe designer … or a Nascar driver. Shoes are like cars; you slip into them. Anyway, as far as the colors of food go, I don’t buy that. I don’t believe in any of these neurological approaches or evolutionary ones either. These brain and gene studies that attempt to isolate why we “naturally” relate to phenomena the way we do — you can figure these things out by sitting around and thinking about it. You don’t need electrodes. Anyway, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but we can firmly believe today that buying shoes is like gathering tubers, and in the future people will be like “Oh yeah, right. That was back when people thought shoe shopping was like gathering tubers!”

Dave Winer, on how to buy Bush out of office early:

I just got off the phone with Sylvia, who passed on a great idea that just might work, to help George Bush leave office early. Here’s how it goes. We all contribute to a fund, that hopefully would contain a lot of money, say $150 million. If Bush resigns on the first day, he gets the whole $150 million. Every day he waits, the fund goes down by 10 percent, so there’s a real incentive for him to act quickly. On Day 2 it’s worth only $135 million. On Day 3, $121.5 million. And so on. It’s kind of a simplified version of Deal or No Deal.

I love the idea! I’d kick in $5K.

Cooltools on the Solarcone Green Cone: “Regular composters are notoriously picky: no bones, no meat, no oil, no avocado pits or shells, no citrus peels, no dairy products. The Green Cone happily devours all that stuff, which means that pretty much all your kitchen waste can go in it, right now. File and forget.”

This kind of thing should be standard-issue equipment on all new home construction. Downside (or upside, depending on your needs): Its breakdown of organic waste seems to be total - you don’t get any yummy composted soil out the other end (but click More to read the company’s response to my question on this).

(more…)

Robert Anton Wilson, author of the Illuminati trilogy and 32+ other great books on thought, existence, hallucinogens, conspiracy, epistemology, being, etc. died a few days ago from post-polio syndrome. After G. Ford and J. Brown, I was wondering who would complete the triad (don’t great people often die in threes?)

Read a lot of RAW in my early 20s, and he had a big effect on me - he was the anti-philosopher foil to the academic stuff I was immersed in back then. Malcolm points to a fairly obscure piece of his on the difference between religions and cults, In Doubt We Trust. Reading his piece on Doubt reminds me why I liked him, though it feels fresh now.

The function of religions and cults, including the political or ideological ones, is to short-circuit the normal “common sense” process of doubt, investigation, further doubt, further investigation, further doubt, etc. The person with BS* knows the “right answer” at all times and knows it immediately. This makes them very happy, and very annoying since most of their “right answers” don’t make sense to the rest of us. Common sense and/or science require investigation and revision, etc. BS only requires a Rule Book — sacred scripture, Das Kapital or whatever — and a good memory.

* BS = Belief Systems

I’ve been asking people over the past year what they think is the difference between a religion and a cult - turns out to be one of those questions everyone thinks they know the answer to until pressed, at which point definitions crumble to dust. Wilson attaches the notion of religion to money and politics, which make religions part of the social game. Without money or politics, a group remains an out-lier, too formless in the eyes of society to be considered a religion.

Hail Eris, Goddess of Discordianism!

An unheard-of week at work - students gone, most staff gone, pushed aside half a dozen simmering commitments and immersed myself in a week of intensive Flash training. Flash is a skill I’ve wanted to pick up since forever, but have never cleared time for. It’s not the kind of thing you can pick up by dabbling - you have to throw yourself at it, give yourself over to its strange logic, swim in its strange waters for a while. Things that are trivially simple in HTML become nuttily difficult in Flash… but with juicy pay-offs.

Used two books as references, but spent most of my time at lynda.com - a site stocking more than 16,000 online training videos on piles of common software. Haven’t checked out their non-Flash coverage, but was blown away by the clarity and thoroughness of the Flash training. $25/month gets you access to all-you-can-eat, on any topic. Killer deal.

Anyway, great to finally have general comfort with the program after all these years. And before you ask, the answer is no — this doesn’t change my overall feelings about Flash. My caveats remain: Use it judiciously, use it only where standards-based development won’t get you where you’re going, be mindful of accessibility and search issues, etc.

McSweeney’s has apparently gotten their hands on an early version of the table of contents for the iPhone manual.

VIII. Using the iPhone to manage your calendar

…

XV. Using the iPhone to better understand the coming synergies between Disney and Apple, and the fact that no conflicts involving the Sarbanes-Oxley Act will ensue

…

XXIV. How to change the iPhone’s battery

Wikipedia has a list of inventors killed by their own inventions.

Thomas Midgley, Jr. accidentally strangled himself with the cord of a pulley-operated mechanical bed of his own design in 1944.

And a half dozen others. Izzat all? Must be more. Andre Torrez: “Thank god I can never be killed by a web app.”

Inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Peace Prize, Alfred Nobel:

“My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace.”

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, 1967:

When calculating the force required, we must be conservative in all our estimates of both a potential aggressor’s capabilities and his intentions. Security depends upon assuming a worst plausible case, and having the ability to cope with it. In that eventuality we must be able to absorb the total weight of nuclear attack on our country — on our retaliatory forces, on our command and control apparatus, on our industrial capacity, on our cities, and on our population — and still be capable of damaging the aggressor to the point that his society would be simply no longer viable in twentieth-century terms. That is what deterrence of nuclear aggression means. It means the certainty of suicide to the aggressor, not merely to his military forces, but to his society as a whole.

The principle of mutually assured destruction didn’t work in the dynamite age. Has it worked in the nuclear age? If so, will it continue to work? And if it doesn’t work … what?

Dangling participles left after today’s introduction of the iPhone. What exactly does Apple mean by “Runs OS X?” A stripped down version, or the Full Monty? If a stripped down version, where else might this “OS X Lite” run? Where is the SDK? What will it take to recompile existing OS X software for it? Has it got Java? Why GSM rather than CDMA? Will Widgets run as-is? Why have they hitched their wagon to a single carrier, rather than selling an unlocked phone? Does it include a corkscrew?

Sometimes it seems like Apple puts as much effort into deciding exactly how transparent / opaque they should be as they do into design. Negative information space surrounding a visible hub, carefully sculpted to encourage speculation.

Just switched to Sprint a few months ago, and am locked in for the long haul. Shame too, since Cingular offered a similar discount to UC employees; could easily have swung that way. Wearing a phone on one hip and an iPod on the other strangely seems much more awkward today than it did yesterday.

Two good reads:

Tom Evslin: Apple Fails to Reinvent Telecommunications Industry – Too Bad.

Imran Ali, with both dancing praise and concerns about openness (or lack thereof): Yay! iPhone!

oceana.org on shark fin soup:

Shark finning involves cutting off the shark’s fins while it is still alive, and then tossing the body back into to the sea, dead or dying. Finning only utilizes 2 - 5 percent of the entire animal, throwing away sources of protein and potential commercial and medicinal products. Up to 73 million sharks are killed every year to support the international shark fin market, threatening already overexploited shark populations around the world. Sharks are slow-growing and long-lived animals, and often their populations cannot bounce back from the incredible fishing pressure placed upon them for their fins. In fact, one-fifth of all shark species are considered threatened with extinction according to the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) 2006 Red List of Threatened Species.

Oceana’s campaign to convince Amazon.com to remove shark fin soup has apparently been effective. The two pages I found on the site selling shark fin soup are both marked “This item is currently not available.”

Interestingly, the campaign seems to have been two-pronged — the usual email letter writing, as well as consumers using Amazon’s tagging and rating features to weigh in. Both items are currently ranked with just one out of five stars, and include tags like these:

The read/write web in action. Of course Amazon isn’t the world’s only purveyor of cruelty-generated food, but it is an important one.

Robert Cringely on the devastating effect botnets are having on large ISPs:

Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn’t bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn’t mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain.

If you study the terms and conditions of your ISP’s service contract, you’re increasingly likely to find a caveat to the effect of “We do not guarantee the delivery of any email message.” AOL’s EULA has been saying this for years, but the practice is spreading.

The botnets are winning. There’s even a front-page story in the NY Times about the subject today.