Although I have not made any posts in a while, I still continue to follow a large number of blogs. So, just how large you may ask?

The Baby Name Wizard is a book, a blog, and — the factor that pushes it to blog post level — is an interactive visualization representing how common a name is. I’m not going to read the book, or the blog, but the visualization was fun to play around with for a few seconds. The interface is actually quite smooth, very nicely done. It updates as you type each character of the name, and displays data covering 1900-2003 in an easy to interpret format.

For example, when entering my name:

In this first image, I have only typed the first two letters of my name, ‘Ja’, and you can see that it represents a fairly big chunk of the pie. I posted this in two pictures because it illustrates the cool interface they use, which is quite fluid between each change in data. Interesting to note that my middle name, James, has also been quite popular, peaking in the 40’s as the most popular name of the time. It is still quite popular.

This second image is my full name, Jason, which we can see peaked in the 1970’s as the 3rd most popular name. My parents caught the tail end of that popularity when they named me in the early 80’s, by which time it had dropped to 11th in popularity.

Designer Onkar Singh Kular has created a simple yet effective innovation in the ever exciting field of tea! Seriously though, such a simple idea could end up paying off huge when it produces happy customers day in, day out. And it would cost relatively little to implement in many coffee shop environments. Any tea house with the space available for such a display of mugs, and a dedicated tea-drinking customer base who will actually appreciate the upgraded liquid storage and consumption device, umm, mugs, could use these.

Onkar has created a set of 128 tea mugs in a Pantone shade of brown, which allows people to pick out the mug that matches the way they take their tea. Depending on which one they pick, the server can judge how much milk to put in.

Maybe not all 128 are needed, but how about using just 5 or 10 shades?

via Design Museum via Josh Rubin’s Cool Hunting via near near future

Just one day after I post an older link to a Nature.com story, they publish another article about sonoluminescence. See yesterday’s post for more details.

Looks like some promising results are coming to the table.

Now the first detailed measurements of the phenomenon have shown that the molecules in the gas really do create a pinpoint of plasma, the energetic soup of ions and electrons found in every star.

The research raises hopes that the effect, called sonoluminescence, might one day be used as an almost limitless source of energy.

Check out the Razorback piantball tank via engadget. Quite amusing, although it would have been oversized for the field I ran a few years back. I used to be a certified paintball nut! After playing only a few times, I decided the game was for me, and opened my own field. If I remember correctly I was 16 when I started Maximum Paintball.

For three years I played paintball with friends and friends of friends almost every weekend on my own 2 acre speedball field. I ran the business so that we could all get gear and supplies for way less money than other local fields could offer — the joys of wholesale accounts with no minimum orders. It was great experience in so many different respects, I loved it. My dad let me use the land (for next to nothing), and there was all kinds of equipment, tools, and obstacles around the farm which were used to construct a tournament quality speedball setup, perfect for 3-on-3 or 5-on-5. Straw bales, oil drums, pallets, a multi-level fort, and an old schoolbus, we had it all.

Good times :)

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of a couple of books that have received rave reviews from many in the blogosphere (The Tipping Point and Blink). I have not had the chance to read either yet, but I did just finish a great essay he has available on his site, The Naked Face. In it, he talks about research results in the area of perception, specifically in regards to what we can figure out based on other people’s facial expressions.

“The face is such an extraordinarily efficient instrument of communication that there must be rules that govern the way we interpret facial expressions. But what are those rules? And are they the same for everyone?”

It seems researchers have mapped it out in pretty good detail (took 7 years apparently). As I would have expected, much of it is going on at the subconscious level, and generally not under control. Sometimes elements are only expressed for small periods of time and are thus not detected except by those who are looking for them, and, they say, who believe what they are seeing.

The best thing about this essay is that nothing in it really surprised me in the least, which is to say, it simply confirmed many of the ideas I already had about how our perceptual system works.

Research involving some advanced Buddhist meditators has also produced significant results. Once again, no surprises, but it is still quite interesting. A recent post at Crossroads Dispatches notes “If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, Blink, or seen any of the excerpts or reviews, then this next section will definitely catch your eye.”

Dr. Ekman had previously developed a test of how well someone can read other people’s emotions from rapid, subtle changes in facial expression (the test involves watching a video-tape of these fleeting expressions and attempting to identify the correct emotion). Most people do poorly on the test, but when Dr. Ekman tested two advanced Buddhist meditators, they got nearly perfect scores. This suggests meditation may actually sharpen perception and enhance empathy.

Using a process that transforms sound waves into flashes of light Professor Rusi Taleyarkhan focuses sound energy into a tiny flickering hot spot inside a bubble. In doing so, he claims to produce a controlled fusion reaction.

The scientific community is still skeptical, and some recent tests have not been able to reproduce his results.

Will we see the ‘tipping point’ innovation in fusion-based power in the coming years? Much time, money, and resources have been devoted to the field thus far, when will it pay off for the world? Only time will tell.

via BBC News
via Technically Speaking

Just passed by this article about an invisibility shield proposed by two scientists at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Previous attempts at invisibility have generally focused around the chameleon principle: a screen is coloured to match its background, so that the screened object is camouflaged. But the invisibility shield proposed by Alù and Engheta is completely different, and more ambitious than previous attempts.

The key to the concept is to reduce light scattering. We see objects because light bounces off them; if this scattering of light could be prevented (and if the objects didn’t absorb any light) they would become invisible. Alù and Engheta’s plasmonic screen suppresses scattering by resonating in tune with the illuminating light.

It is a self-contained structure that would reduce visibility from all viewing angles.

I dare say it would be quite a feat if anyone is able to create practical applications of this theoretical work.

via news @ nature.com
Also, via near near future and Boing Boing and Crumb Trail and KurzweilAI.net and Technically Speaking and Marginal Revolution

I’m in reading week, and as such, I’m catching up on my un-read blog posts — more than 20,000 when I
started two days ago… now down to a few thousand. I’m subscribed to 264 feeds at the moment, and it is getting a little heavy on the reading, but there is just so much interesting content available! So, sorry for the lack of posts, but, all this reading means that there will be some great content coming in the coming days and weeks, as well as news about my summer co-op position and more, so stay tuned.

Since I recently got a great midi controller (an Edirol PCR30) for Christmas I’ve been busy making music. I’m having a lot of fun with it and really learning a lot about music and sound in general. The amount of control over sound that comes with software music production programs nowadays is absolutly amazing.

So, today’s post is about some amazing midi-controlled robotic instruments. From the NYTimes comes a story about a homemade robotic guitar.

The flier for his concert prominently displays a quote from the visionary Australian composer Percy Grainger: “Too long has music been subject to the limitations of the human hand and subject to the interfering interpretation of a middle-man: the performer. A composer wants to speak to his public direct.”

I would have to agree. Today’s technology can go beyond what a performer is physically capable of. But, as I have found out this weekend, the element of human touch cannot easily, or even ever be completely replicated.

The problem is resolution. A robotic instrument will always be playing within a finite range of values. Or in other words, it’s resolution and accurary will always be limited by a finite amount of accuracy that is built into the machine and its software. Now, this level can be made extremely good, depending on how much you are willing to spend, but I venture it will be some time before we see automated instruments that are able to express themselves as fully as one played by a virtuoso. The human mind can always get better and better, with essentially no limit on resolution. This is why the human still has the edge in some sense, even though the robot may be able to physically out-perform a human (such as playing more notes that is physically possible for a human player).

I experienced this first-hand playing an amplified bass for the first time this weekend. I sat down for a number of hours, and before long I was expressing myself better than I have been able to do with software music production thus far. It was the feedback loop, which was so incredibly rich. Extremely small changes in my hands would cause dramatic changes in the sound, leading me to use smaller and smaller movements to achieve the output I desired. Even in this short time I was able to create music with much more of a feeling of personality than I am typically able to using software. I can see how this process continues indefinitely in someone who dedicates their time and effort. I can now truly understand how some great musicians can make their instruments sound like voices.

And on that note — I want a bass!

Back to robotic instruments. How about a computer controlled turntable setup. Now that is just sweet.

Would it not be awesome to see a fully robotic symphony, playing the some great epic trance such as anything produced by BT. How about the work being done by Brendan Adamson at Juilliard in New York.

RoboRecital, a concert of mechanical music presented by composer J. Brendan Adamson, will include no human performers. It will instead feature four automated instruments: GuitarBot, a self-playing guitar; an automated fifty-seven rank pipe organ; a Yamaha Disklavier, a modern player piano; and ModBots, a collection of robotic percussion instruments.

Six of Brendan’s own pieces will be presented alongside works by Bach and Mozart. His transcription of J. S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080, Contrapuncti Nos. 2 and 3 will be performed by Guitarbot. W. A. Mozart’s Allegro und Andante (Fantasia in F Minor, K.608) will be heard on Paul Hall’s Holtkamp pipe organ, controlled by computer. Although several practical editions for human organist have been made, Mozart’s piece will be heard in its original form for self-playing organ on RoboRecital.

That is awesome, and even better, his shows are free!

via Engadget (GuitarBot), (Drum playing robot), (Electronic trumpet), (Digital accordion), (Robo-DJ)
via Robotic Concert @ Everything2

Oh, and I found a quiz with sounds produced by MIDI verses sounds produced by a virtuso. Not exactly related, but close enough to link to.

The biotech sector faces many tricky ethical concerns, including research using genetic information from multiple sources. Canada has already banned chimeras, but there are currently no U.S. federal laws that address these issues. A few days ago someone from my cybernetics class was telling me about the ban on chimeras in Canada. I just stumbled upon this story about chimeras via National Geographic.

Last year Canada passed the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which bans chimeras. Specifically, it prohibits transferring a nonhuman cell into a human embryo and putting human cells into a nonhuman embryo.

… creating human-animal chimeras—named after a monster in Greek mythology that had a lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail—has raised troubling questions: What new subhuman combination should be produced and for what purpose? At what point would it be considered human? And what rights, if any, should it have?