Posts Tagged ‘computer evolution’
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
Writing a song is a lot like writing a computer program. They both require clever management of control flow. The simplest sheet music reads as a straightforward top-to-bottom list of instructions. You start on measure one and read through to the end sequentially. That’s fine unless the music is very repetitive, which most popular music is. The loop is the basic compositional unit of nearly every song you could dance to.
Loops are easy to remember, but it’s tedious to write the same passage over and over. You can save yourself a lot of laborious writing by using repeat markers. They’re like the GOTO instruction in BASIC. Here are the first four bars of “Chameleon” by Herbie Hancock.
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Tags: chameleon, cold tech hot beats, computer evolution, computer science, computers, electronica, fractals, herbie hancock, improvisation, james brown, looping, mandelbrot, math, music, music notation, programming, recursion, visualization
Posted in math, music, software | No Comments »
Monday, May 25th, 2009
The most-sampled recording in history is probably “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” by James Brown and the JBs. Like many James Brown songs of the time, “The Funky Drummer” doesn’t have verses or choruses as in a normal pop song. It’s an open-ended one-chord jazz-funk groove, with extended solos by James Brown on organ and Maceo Parker on tenor sax. Four and a half minutes into the recording, James Brown tells the band: “Fellas, one more time I want to give the drummer some of this funky soul we got going here.” He tells drummer Clyde Stubblefield, “You don’t have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got… Don’t turn it loose, ’cause it’s a mother.” That last word will turn out to be prophetic.
Here’s a loop of Clyde Stubblefield’s drum break:
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Tags: algorithms, audio editing, black thought, cold tech hot beats, computer evolution, copyright, eminem, freestyle, funk, funky drummer, godel, hip-hop, james brown, looping, memes, mos def, music, programming, recursion, rnb, sampling, soul, susan blackmore
Posted in music | 1 Comment »
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke back in 1970 when they thought it up at Xerox PARC, but I feel like it has outlived its usefulness.
User interfaces are the first line of computer instruction, and for many people are the last line too. Not every interface designer does their job equally well. The problems mostly emerge from designers’ presuming implicit knowledge from the user that might not really be there. There’s plenty of computer science that seems like obvious common knowledge to programmers and engineers that remains opaque or esoteric to the population at large. For example, the general public uses the terms memory and storage interchangeably, even though they refer to different computer components that function in very different ways.
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Tags: computer evolution, computers, desktop, interface, metaphor, recursion, super mario bros, windows
Posted in software, video games | 6 Comments »
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
I’m a humanities guy, but I’ve never lost my childhood love of math and science. I’m looking forward to the Large Hadron Collider being fired up next year the way normal male Americans look forward to the NBA playoffs. I like to be an informed fan, and since Einstein is the Michael Jordan of scientists, I wanted to know what it is exactly that he figured out, and why it’s so important. Beyond the physics, I wanted to know what put Einstein into the pop pantheon alongside Bob Marley and John Lennon. You never see dorm room posters of Henry Clerk Maxwell or Neils Bohr. The only other scientist who comes remotely close in pop stature is Darwin, but aside from his dramatic beard, Darwin the person doesn’t register much beyond his theories. Why is Einstein such a rock star? (more…)
Tags: computer evolution, einstein, electromagnetism, music, physics
Posted in music, science | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Why do computers crash? What can you do about it? It’s very rare for your computer to physically break. Most of the routine glitches you experience happen at the software level, as different running programs compete for your computer’s finite memory resources. To understand and hopefully avoid crashes, it first helps to know a little something more about how memory works, and how it differs from storage. Imagine your computer as the Dunder Mifflin paper company. Think of memory as the office, and storage devices like the hard disk as the filing cabinets, storage closets and warehouse. (more…)
Tags: blue screen of death, computer evolution, computers, fail, hardware, memory, storage, the office, tv
Posted in hardware, software | 3 Comments »
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
When you learned division in school, the teacher probably brushed off the issue of dividing by zero in one sentence: you can’t do it, moving on. You might feel like you got shortchanged by that explanation. Why not? What happens when you divide by zero?
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Tags: anxiety, blue screen of death, buddhism, computer evolution, computers, crashes, fail, math, meditation, zero
Posted in math, software | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
When the computer crashes, it hasn’t stopped working. It appears to be stuck because it isn’t responding to you, but it continues to hum along as fast as usual. The computer is too busy to take input because it’s in a loop, executing the same short list of instructions over and over.
It’s hard to get a feel for looping failures, because computers have become so fast that you can’t see what they’re doing on an instruction-by-instruction basis. Fortunately, Super Mario Bros has a famous bug known as the Minus World that lets you study an infinite loop in an entertainingly interactive form. (more…)
Tags: blue screen of death, computer evolution, computers, crashes, fail, looping, nintendo, recursion, super mario bros, video games
Posted in software, video games | 1 Comment »
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
Do computers think? Is the brain a computer? We use computers as metaphors for the brain and vice versa. Is the comparison apt? Brains and computers can imitate each other in limited ways. Deep down, how much similarity is there? (more…)
Tags: algorithms, biology, computer evolution, computers, evolution, logic, neuroscience, transistors
Posted in science | 1 Comment »
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
The parts of the computer that do the “thinking” are mostly made of little electronic switches called transistors. If you connect two wires to a transistor, you can use the voltage on one wire to control the voltage on the other. What’s especially handy for engineering purposes is that the presence or absence of a small voltage on one wire can control a wide range of voltages on the other wire. When voltage on the control wire changes, the transistor opens or closes the other wire to the flow of electricity in much the same way that a faucet controls the flow of water in a pipe. (more…)
Tags: computer evolution, computers, electromagnetism, eniac, math, physics, transistors
Posted in hardware, science | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Technology keeps getting better. Do our lives get better as a result? In certain specific ways, maybe yes, but in general, I would say, not really. How is that possible? I think there are two big things at work. Technology is evolving semi-independently of the humans that produce it. We don’t control the evolution of our tools any more than we control the evolution of our gut fauna or infectious diseases. Also, the pace of technological change is a lot faster than the pace of our genetic evolution. Our brain anatomy is having a hard time keeping pace with the changes in the world that we’re making inadvertently with our tools. (more…)
Tags: computer evolution, depression, evolution, happiness, jared diamond, memes, monkeysphere, progress, stone age, technology, work
Posted in science | 2 Comments »
