The Minus World and the Blue Screen Of Death

When the computer crashes, it seems like it’s frozen. Actually, it’s still working as fast as usual. It only appears to be stuck because it isn’t responding to you. The computer is too busy to take input because it’s in a loop, executing the same short list of instructions over and over.

Computers have become so fast that you can’t see what they’re doing on an instruction-by-instruction basis, so it’s hard to get a feel for what’s going on in a looping failure.  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. Continue reading “The Minus World and the Blue Screen Of Death”

Brain vs computer: which is better?

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? Continue reading “Brain vs computer: which is better?”

Inside the black box

Engineers describe a system whose input and output behavior are known and whose inner workings are otherwise mysterious as a black box. Bruno Latour describes the black box as:

the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become. Continue reading “Inside the black box”

How transistors think

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.

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Is technological progress good or bad? Yes.

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.

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No one has ever written an original song

Sampling, remixing and mashups make some people angry. A lot of people think that repurposing existing ideas is bad, that it’s lazy, or a form of stealing. We value originality highly. Should we? My own experience of music making is that there are no original ideas. There are novel combinations of old ideas, but it’s neither possible nor desirable to make a genuinely new and unprecedented piece of music. If you want to hear truly original music, bang randomly on a piano keyboard. You’ll be playing something new and unprecedented, but it probably won’t be something you’d want to hear twice.

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Twitter, jazz and moving music forward into the stone age

So the other night my friend Jesse played at the Shorty Awards with his Tin Pan Blues Band. Because it was an awards ceremony dedicated to the best of Twitter, they were projecting people’s tweets about the event itself onto a screen in real time. Some of those tweets were comments about the band. The musicians, in turn, were reading and responding during the performance. Continue reading “Twitter, jazz and moving music forward into the stone age”

In the sequencer, the notation is the performance

In my laptop band Revival Revival, we use Reason for all of our instrumental sounds and sample playback. The newest version has a handy color-coding feature in the sequencer, which makes it easy for me to be able to keep track of which part of which song happens in which order. Having all the tunes under my eyes all the time has revealed new wisdom to my ears about symmetry and asymmetry, and isn’t that what music is all about?

The color-coding system started as a simple information-management technique, but it ended up improving my ears. Spending so much time looking at these colorfully abstracted representations of so many songs, I couldn’t help but notice some patterns. I’ve done enough tracks now that I can lay something out in the sequencer and know that it’ll basically work without having to listen to it first. Classical and jazz musicians get to the point where by glancing over a score, they can hear it quite clearly in the mind’s ear. The Reason sequencer has a much shorter path into the brain’s deep sense-data processing centers because it’s dynamic, animated, and responsive to my thoughts in real time.

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Robot counting for humans

When you delve behind the scenes with the internet, you immediately come face-to-face with a lot of threatening computer gibberish. The most menacing codes are the ones that stand for colors, random-seeming strings of letters and numbers like #99CC66 or #4F102A. Sometimes you see colors described verbally: “black”, “white”, “blue”, etc. That’s fine for simple colors, but no good if you want exact hues. The web system for describing colors is daunting at first, but once you find out what the codes mean, they reveal themselves to be elegantly compact. If you’re willing to follow me through a little math and physics, you might find some geeky fun here. Continue reading “Robot counting for humans”

Fun facts from the usage logs

Ethanhein.com has had 465,689 hits so far, mostly distributed among my blogs and mp3 pages. A single blog post about Family Guy generates a disproportionately large percentage of that traffic. October 2008 represents a typical month, with 40,611 hits total. That’s around 1,310 a day, 54 an hour. A large percentage of those are from robots, but still, neato. These numbers don’t include hits on my Flickr photos. My various sets have had 228,155 views so far, with anywhere between 500 and 1,500 hits a day.

Flickr in particular breaks your data down with exceptional granularity, making it easy to assemble the images of mine that the internet cares most about. Continue reading “Fun facts from the usage logs”