Posted by Jerry on May 12th, 2004 — Posted in Journal, New media, Technology
Now here is a site you have to check out! It’s a search engine showing links between musicians. the interface is great! it displays results like a 3D fly-through so you get the sense of being inside the data. The site is called musicplasma – you just enter the name of a musician or band and up come the results, along with all the other musicians that have been associated with that band. It’s real six degress of separation stuff 🙂
The interface looks as though it owes something to an early alternative interface design called HotSauce, developed by Ramanthan v. Guha while he was at Apple Research in the early-mid 1990s.
An example of the HotSauce interface
Guha’s aim was to produce a feeling of flying through the data stream to provide a visual representation of web pages in space. I remember having a go with it – must’ve been about 1996 – when a version was released in MacFormat magazine on a 3.5″ floppy disk. It was great fun, but I found it tricky to get back to places I’d been to once I’d flown past. Somehow HotSauce never quite caught on, but it clearly laid some important groundwork for data visualisation and interface design. The latest iteration of Guha’s concept is actually quite useable – check out Map Net which uses more of a terrain metaphor. It is certainly easier to become oriented in the information. Guha is a technical adviser on Antarcti.ca – who have developed the map net technology.
Cheers
Jerry
Comments Off on Musicplasma – the music visual search engine
Posted by Jerry on May 10th, 2004 — Posted in Music, Technology
Phew what a night!
Another night another track down – this time it’s a set of Irish jigs: Freize Britches and Lark in the Morning
You can find the music for these in http://www.thesession.org although the versions we use are from the Adelaide Celtic Music club repertoire from about thirty years ago – the same source as Suzette Watkins and Chris O’Conner’s “Begged Borrowed and Stolen” tune book.
Fairly happy with the result – and the Tracktion software is a breeze to use! I highly recommend this application. It accepts VST filters and is truly drag and drop. And everything you need is on the desktop – not hidden behind layers of menus.
Still have to put the bass tracks down, but we have three or four quite useable tracks now, and that with probably three or four songs should give us a fair demo CD for the festival crowd and to generally secure us a bit more work.
Must get some sleep now.
cheers
Jerry
Comments Off on More recording
Posted by Jerry on May 9th, 2004 — Posted in Journal, New media, Technology, Writing
There seems to have been something of a debate regarding a shift in assumptions about how cuneiform scripts were to be read, whether left-to-right or top-to-bottom in columns. Some argue that top-to-bottom makes more sense given certain assumptions about the way the stylus would have been held.
According to Madelaine Fitzgerald of UCLA (see the short paper in the link above) there does appear to have been a protocol to allow readers to identify the direction of reading. This involved the use of holes in the clay tablets to allow them to be held on a string – and if the tablet were raised on the string it would fall in a way that would indicated the reading direction, thus distinguishing between the earlier cuneiform scrpts of the Old period Babylonians (which ran in vertical columns) to those of the later period which ran horizontally.
And then there remains the question of why the Babylonians changed direction of their script from columns to lines. Fitzgerald gives a tantalising hint that it may have been because of the international climate of the time – ie to bring Babylonians in line with contemporary practices in other (more economically powerful) neighbours. What this seems to indicate is the application of an internationally agreed interface standard to facilitate ease of communication.
Comments Off on Cuneiform – the birth of an interface standard?
Posted by Jerry on May 6th, 2004 — Posted in New media, Technology, Writing
Well I’m skipping around the place – it’s that time of year again – another royalties cheque from my publisher Routledge (UK). The book is called: Virtual States: The Internet and the boundaries of the nation-state – and yes it’s about the impact of the internet on society.
But the word “royalties” is a curious word. There are of course all the prosaic definitions but I wondered about the royal connection, so I went to my trusty Compact Oxford and found a raft of references. The relevant one appears to be that of a “royal prerogative granted by the sovereign to an individual or corporation” granting jurisdiction or rights over something, such as mining rights, or rights over an invention or work of art or book. It dates back to at least 1483 where there is a reference in the Rolls of the UK Parliament to the siezing of, among other things, the royalties belonging to a hapless lordship and manor of Coverton. It seems somehow strange and anachronistic that even in the staunchly Republican US, there is so much litigation over “royalties” where there is clearly no regal sovereign to grant such rights…
And amidst all the clamour about internet piracy, there seems to be at least some evidence that piracy on the internet does not harm CD sales. According to research published in New Scientist, researchers from the Harvard business School and the University of North Carolina have found that in a statistical study tracking millions of music files downloaded over the internet, and comparing them with sales of the same music on CDs, the study found that the most heavily downloaded titles suffered no decrease in CD sales. In fact among the most popular, those that sold more than 600,000 copies over the study period appeared to sell better when downloaded more heavily.
Moreover, unless the work is selling fabulously, my own experience suggests that the authorial benefits are derived more from externalities, such as paid trips to speak at conferences and experts forums in the US and UK – that and the great people I’ve met as a consequence, than from the actual money earned by sales. I reckon we could all learn a lot from the Clue-train Manifesto philosophy. It still holds true regardless of the dot com tech wreck!
Cheers
Jerry
Comments Off on Royalties: Virtual States
Posted by Jerry on May 5th, 2004 — Posted in New media, Technology, Writing
I was recently reading Rudy Rucker’s excellent book: Mind Tools and was struck in particular by his lucid explanation of why we only need five bits of information to identify any letter of the alphabet. Computers use eight bits to the byte as a minimal identification of specific characters. But using binary logic, Rucker shows that the alphabet has only FIVE degrees of separation! I have often wondered if the same applies to Akkadian cuneiform text, but haven’t had it confirmed one way or the other.
Anyhow, how can English be described as having five bit depth when there are 26 letters to the alphabet? For Rucker, it works like this:
Lay out the alphabet in a row. I am looking for the first letter of my first name, Jerry. Now, with five questions, demanding a yes or no answer locate the specific letter.
First, is it between M and Z? No. That’s level one.
Is it between G and L? Yes. That’s level two
Is it between J and L? Yes. That’s level three
Is it L? No. That’s level four
Is it K? No. That’s level five. So the answer must be J
Check out the diagram to see how this works:
Cheers
Jerry
Comments Off on English is a five bit-depth language
