AtheistCult: March 2006

Open Pandora's... Music Genome Project?

OK, this is really cool... pandora.com

Basically, you create customized radio stations by telling the software what kind of music you like and it finds other stuff that is similar (beat, use of vocals, acoustic, electric etc.). You can keep telling it what you like and don't like (ala TiVo) and it continues customizing itself and adjusting to your tastes.

I'm not sure how many songs are in its library, but they seem to be partnered with iTunes so it could be as big as their whole catalog. It also gives you the opportunity to share the radio stations you've created. I don't plan on doing that because I don't see any need to reveal my predilection for 80's hair bands (apparently categorized by its mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, a vocal-centric aesthetic, extensive vamping, minor key tonality and electric guitar riffs).

Nattering

Do I natter? No, really. Tell me. I can take it.

Oh, what the fuck do you know?

I sent the wife a link to a neat little mac program that I found via Lifehacker today.

Well, she didn't open it until I was in the room with her and when she saw "Lifehacker" come up she said, "Oh, Lifehacker. That's that site you're always nattering on about."

Nattering! Me! Really!

Stunned, I was. Shocked even. Or at least that's the air I put on.

Here I go out of my way to go to all the trouble of diligently and carefully cutting and pasting a link into an email for her (that's at least 8 clicks of the mouse and a linear motion of the mouse that must add up to at least five inches) and that's the thanks I get. Nattering Indeed!

Anyway...

Apparently she'd had a pretty trying day today and at some point got a song stuck in her head. She asked me to knock her about a bit to see if I could dislodge it. I politely refused but asked what song it was. "Head and Shoulders," she said. "You know.. head and shoulders, knees and toes..."

Ah! That one! "Tell you what," I said, "I'll trade you. I'll take that one and you can have mine... This mailbox is mine, and this triagonal sign..." For those who don't know, that's one of the songs from Lazy Town which my daughter is completely enamored with. It doesn't matter what's wrong, if Lazy Town comes on, suddenly everything is right in her world.

Late Post for NTIF

A couple of weeks ago we went to the Nort Texas Irish Festival. I took a few pictures with the camera phone. Here they are:

Dee on the Chariot Carousel

Dee on the Chariot Carousel... again

Dee and Maggie in the flying... um... fish?
(Dee's the barely visible one on the right.

We all had lots of fun and did all the kid-friendly stuff. Didn't sit and listen to as much music as we usually do because the kids weren't really interested in sitting still. I'm still dismayed by the lack of ability for these festivals to accept plastic.

You can usually use plastic to pay for your ticket to get in and most of the vendors will accept plastic, but you've got to buy these stupid non-refundable coupons to buy food and drink and they weren't accepting plastic for the coupons.

People have offered all kind of reasons for these festivals to use coupons for selling food. Like... Preventing pick pocketing because people don't have to carry a lot of cash around (total BS) or ... preventing the wage slaves and volunteers from steeling from the till (more plausible) or... making you buy extra coupons because you don't really know how much you're likely to spend and therefor leaving the festival with several unspendable and non-refundable coupons (highly likely).

Of course, all of these could be alleviated (from the consumer's standpoint) by having card swipers at the food places and letting people use their credit or debit cards to pay for the food.

Given how sensible this solution seems you're not likely to see it implemented any time soon.

NASA Open Source

NASA has several Open Source projects available at: http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/.

I haven't looked at all of them, but one of the ones I find more interesting is called World Wind. It's an Earth and Moon mapping program along the lines of Google Earth but it's a lot more scientifically oriented. There's lots of features and data sets there to choose from (Blue Marble, Landsat 7, SRTM +L7, MODIS, etc) and you can even write scripts for it and generate animations.

I haven't had time yet to poke through all the features, but if you're a map junkie like me, you'll definately want to check this one out!

It has a very nice 3D engine that lets you zoom in, tilt and even do flybys.

It has the Blue Marble data set that Nasa put together. It's a spectacular true-color image of the entire earth that you can adjust for the time of year and even create seasonal animations from.

The Landsat 7 data set is a collection of 15m per pixel images from 1999 - 2003. There are different sets of data from these images that include things like infrared imagery.

SRTM is Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data. This, combined with the Landsay 7 images is used to create a realistic 3D virtual world that can be explored from any angle or altitude.

And this just scratches the surface. There are lots more things to explore. In fact, I think I'll go do that now.

Bumper Stickers

I have this Love/Hate relationship with bumper stickers. I love the pithy sayings. I love coming up with funny ideas that I think would make cool bumper stickers. But I loathe the idea of trashing up my vehicle with them.

So... Here are some of my current bumper sticker ideas...

From the nonsequitor cetegory...