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On a related note (all pun intended), it would be interesting to synthesize the chromosome images to sound.
Perhaps fragments of interesting music might be lurking there. Something to listen to while jaywalking with your iPod anyway. It would add that extra dimension to a Darwin award :)

On a related note (all pun intended), it would be interesting to synthesize the chromosome images to sound.
Perhaps fragments of interesting music might be lurking there. Something to listen to while jaywalking with your iPod anyway. It would add that extra dimension to a Darwin award :)

The essay looked pretty strong to me until it started looking pretty familiar

Before you give editing advice, try following this link to...
something very similar

You kinky mathematicians...

First, as to the patents, that's really a very long complicated argument you want to get into that I quite simply don't have time to cover fully today, or any day soon. I'll try, but it will inevitably be merely a teaser, because I just don't have time to write a full thesis on the subject now. This is not my page and I may disagree on some details, but it's a start. If you read other posts in this thread there is one that discusses the importance of not enforcing patents to the progress of the industrial revolution in the US and Germany, and if you do a little research you will find that Holland and Switzerland in their economic heyday are similar stories.

At any rate, let's keep in mind that 'IP' is more than just patents, copyrights, and trade secrets - it's the combination of those conflated with property.

This last is a very recent phenomenon, and has lead to the excessive measures even reasonable proponents of patent and copyrights decry. That's the most important point I suppose - that these things are not property, they are privelege in the original sense.

Now beyond that, I have no problem with trade secrets at all, and I think that most everything good that could come from patents could be achieved in that way, without the violation of real property implied in a patent regime of any kind. Given that patents prohibit independent invention and prevent people from peacefully and honestly using their own property in any implementation I find them very hard to defend. And I think the notion that people would quit inventing without them is ludicrous. People invent for a great number of reasons, getting rich off patents is only one of them. Without a patent regime, an inventor who invents only for money (likely, in my opinion, to be not the most important subset, but be that as it may) will still have a profit motive, the difference will be simply in the details of how to get from A to B - rather than rushing to file a patent before anyone else, he would instead work to produce and sell actual product before anyone else, to take and maintain an early lead in the field through trade secrets and continual research and refinement. I think it is plausible that this would result in more, not less, invention. And even if that were not true, the bulk affect could easily still be positive simply from removing all the bad affects even reasonable patent proponents admit is implied in such a system, for reasons I've mentioned at least in part.

Copyrights, in essence, are more defensible, but again it must be emphasised that they are not property, that they are in fact monopoly grants which violate property by prohibiting peaceful and honest use of ones property in certain ways, and that there is a world of difference between the original Constitutional copyright system and the current 'IP' system. Authors, under the current system, are not getting rich from their writings. Authors in fact very rarely keep their copyrights, they usually have to give them up in order to get published. People write for many reasons, getting rich is rarely one of them and when it is it almost always leads only to disappointment. Without copyright people would still write, there would still be a market for books, and authors could still make some money, very likely as much or more than they make now in many cases, without them. Is it worth money to a publishing house to have a novel written that they can hold exclusive using simple secrecy long enough to make a full run of a book and have it on storeshelves around the world before the competitor can begin typesetting it? Of course it is. So, without copyrights, there would still be money in writing, and even if there were no money in writing, there would still be writers. We write for any number of reasons, and very few make any serious amount of money anyway. So I really think the chicken little arguments are nonsense. Creativity wouldn't be abolished because copyright a

Here is the old site at its new address: http://draves.org/electricsheep

But first a question: tell me how to mod anything! I don't know why but I no longer have the menu used to moderate anything. I have positive karma... Instead of the funny/interesting/stupid menu, i have something where i can make friend/foe choice. forget that!

Now this is the new official site, and the only place I can find that has a source download.

Bomb (http://draves.org/bomb/) - definatly fits into the "beautiful" category. From the site...

"Bomb is a visual-musical instrument. It uses alife, and is alife. It runs on your PC and produces animated organic graphics in response to the keyboard, audio music, or on its own."

I do a bit of VJing at dance parties, and this always goes down a treat. Linux and Mac versions avaliable as well.

Would there be any speed advantage to useing a reconfigurable chip vs. a programmable DSP for a very processor intensive task, like MPEG encoding or real-time full-screen graphics rendering? (think Fractal Flames as a music visualization plug-in) Assume that all your algorithm code can fit in on-chip cache or high-speed L2 so you don't clog up the memory bus)

kewl graphics.

with max, you can have either MIDI or digital audio (with the MSP extension) flowing along wires that connect boxes. the boxes are objects that you can write in C. It's really good for doing real time control & interactive things.

jMax is scriptable in tcl (no java here, despite the name), and looks like it has the same midi/audio capabilities.

lately i have just started working with pd, which is miller puckette's current software platform. it uses the same box/wire and midi/audio ideas. see his page. It works on linux and also has a OpenGL graphics package GEM, so you can do 3d graphics with music.

now i have to choose between pd and jmax! oh sorry day :)

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