Beer-Coated CDs are Optical Biocomputers

commodoresloat writes "A DJ and scientist in Melbourne whose research is in the area of communication through biological cells, serendipitously created an 'optical biocomputer' when he spilled beer on his CDs and left them over night. The resulting fungus that formed distorted the sound of the CDs in interesting and meaningful ways. Here's some of his research, and some media samples which include mp3s of the distorted music." Yes, the term biocomputer is used in the loosest sense.

Comments

Doesn't seem all that impressive

[AaronStJ]

Ok, so this sounds a lot like a troll, but...

I don't see that this is terribly impressive. I mean, he's done a fair bit of research, wrote several papers, and uses big words like "nanoscale chemical filter" and "Boolean string re-arrangements," but in the end, all he seems to have done is pour chemicals on CDs and make them skip. I could do the same with a brillo pad. Why is that impressive? He makes a lot of noise about computing, but is any usefull computing actually going on? What are the practical applications of this "technology"?

Taking a look at the media samples, it doesn't strike me that he's stumbled on a cool new artistic technique at all (it should be mentioned that the artist Oval has been scratching up CDs in the name of art with much better results for years). This is the same thing anyone has gotten when they accidently scratched up a CD or DVD. There's no art to it, and frankly it sounds terrible.

I can understand why this would be important if his techniques yielded predictable, useful results, such as achieve a specific, desired audio or visual effect. But basically all that he gets in a broken file. The same could be done by randomly flipping an arbitrary number of bits inside a mp3. Nothing usefull is being computed or done at all. So why is this important, or even relevant?