Slashdot Mirror
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.
This is an obvious attempt by RIAA blackhats to get everyone to buy new CDs while simultaneously destroying computer CD-RW. Time to grep for a good lawyer.
This is another good example of how beer benfits our lives. First I found out if I drink a beer a day it somehow helps my heart, but now... now.. my life is complete.
Paint.NET, a Free Image Editor, with Source Code Available!
news.google.com:optical+biocomputer
As long as the fungus is on the cd and not actually ON Britney Spears, I'm fine with it. I need my baby to be tip-top for her man.
Coating CDs in beer, wine, whiskey, or any other hard or malt liquor/liquer is a violation of the DMCA.
Allowable liquids:
Windex
Water
Pepsi (One, Blue, Vanilla)
Beer, is there anything it can't do?
It's precisely beer o'clock down under (17:18 Friday), so while this article is otherwise a complete waste of 1's and 0's, at least it's aptly timed.
It would have to be an Australian
to mix beer and CDs..
Now finaly we can prove which
beer is the best musicly..!
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Aussies don't have any beverages that could be regarded at beer.
As the Monty Python Joke goes:
What is the difference between making love in a canoe and Austrailian Beer?
Nothing. They are both fucking close to water!
since when has an artist been required to make art on purpose. Some of the greatest music ever were created by accident... its knowing that your accident is cool is the real talent!
Beer--the cause of and solution to all of life's little problems.
COPYRIGHT BEER! Yes, 12 year old girls are not enough! Now they want to sue us for drinking beer!
Those SOBs! If only Rainbow Brite were alive. She would know what to do.
Well, back to my beer...er, research. *hic*
...I've had Beer on my AOL coasters for 10 years now.
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
I was expecting to see what the fungus looks like, and whether it could survive the high-speed spin in the CDROM drive, however all I found was a lame stock photo.
the more interesting question would be:
can you influence the fungus that it does something useful and not only distort the data randomly...
might be useful for encryption if you could find a way to restore the original data with a secure "key"/method/anti-fungus-spray/whatever.
".Sig Stealer" was here
Haven't you heard of progress through experimentation? Do you really think ANY musician in the world comes up with a perfect song off the top of their head?
Consider Jimi Hendrix trying to compose a song... He hits a few chords, and it sounds cool. He created something artistic out of random attempts, by using his artistic mind to discrimate between interesting sounds and uninteresting sounds.
If THAT doesn't fit in your definition of 'art', then your definition excludes half of Mankind's works of art.
Is this where our research dollars are going? :)
I'm Australian, and I don't like beer. Is there something wrong with me?
Yes, you probably drank Foster's.
Hmmmm ... gives new meaning to the term, "Moldy Oldies".
Caution: Be aware that beer contains a lot of female hormons. If you drink too much you start takling nonsense and you're unable to drive a car.
No need to wonder about who will reap the next IGNobel prize in biology... :-)
Thomas Miconi
=============
- [...] the way fungus and bacteria [grow] can shape the sound in weird ways.
Tosh. It's flipping some of the bits in a bitstream which represents audio encoded with an arbitrary codec. Dude - there are more interesting ways of flipping bits, and ones that might just tell you a bit more about bacteria, fungi, music, life, the universe, and everything.What's this guy on? I want some.
/beer, you say? Good. I can do that.
yes, we have no bananas
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?
Stupid like a fox!
"A student and teenager in Australia whose research is in the area of communication
through pick-up-lines, serendipitously created an 'optical biocomputer' when he spilled
beer on down his throat and left it there for a couple of hours. The resulting drunkeness
that formed distorted the sound of his voice in interesting and meaningful ways. Here's
some of his research, media samples which include mp3s of the distorted "music" coming soon."
Yes, the term biocomputer is used in the loosest sense.
You'll also need a supply of the beer itself. While most Australians would drink tray slops if that's all that was available, it takes many years of practice to achieve this level of sophistication. I'd suggest you start out with something more mainstream but only the good stuff. I'd recommend Boags Premium or Coopers Pale Ale. Get the full strength stuff. Light beer is un-Australian and vaguely suspect.
Once you have your gathering the tough work begins. Start drinking. Push on through the taste for the first half dozen and you'll be there! If you are completely unable to start drinking beer then you may have to start with some other girlie drink for the first couple of hours and then move on to the nectar of the gods later in the evening (afternoon or morning depending on when the support group gathered).
A couple of sessions such as this and you'll be able to stand proudly at the bar at your next public engagement and say "Beer thanks mate".
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Formal music created through random, pseudo-random, or mathematical processes is almost a century old at this point. Check out some Schoenberg or John Cage. It may not be your kind of thing (I'm not really into it myself), but it is an interesting branch of art.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Seriously, though, I cannot be alone in having stumbled upon these effects by accident myself.
Although it was interesting to learn the difference in growth patterns between fungus and bacteria, I can in no way see what is "pioneering," or even interesting, about this.
A computer, bio or not, is a system that takes input, performs specific and predictable calculation, and produces output.
An artist, DJ or otherwise, is a person who through talent and skill creates deliberate and specific sensory effects that stimulate the audience in interesting ways.
What we have here is neither art not science, and the article sounds like something from April 1st. Allow me to translate the text again:
A bus driver and part-time juggler in Milton Keynes whose research is in the area of communication through flaming torches, serendipitously created an 'golden pussycat' when he spilled beer on his shirt and left it over night. The resulting fungus that formed distorted the shape of the shirt in interesting and meaningful ways. Here's some of his research, and some t-shirt samples which include opinions of psychotics of the distorted garments."
"Interesting and meaningful" to whom exactly?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Losing Karma. Oh well, that is what it is for. (At least I get to sleep easy at night because I speak up for what I believe in.){=Original and not a bad sig.
/.
/. logo.
/. so why not some Quid Pro Quo?
Two issues with this story, one is the fact that if you indeed get the 'perfect' mold grown on your disk it is very difficult to freeze the err, data in a static way.
The number two thing is why are people researching this 'Fungus-effect' rather than say, rubbing crayons onto cds with a far more reproducable effect?
Bio-cds perhaps?
Not to mention the health hazards are also greatly reduced with crayons. Of course you will still have to deal with the issue of the foreign matter of your choice clogging up your CD drive.
Also the offbalancing in that 100x drive you picked up at costco for twenty bucks. is going to cost you a trip to the return line.
It's your hardware, please do as you wish. (Just let us know what happens) Visions of mold based prior art dance through my head sorta like the SCO executives.
Personally I vote to wait and see what the community will come up with the 'New Mold sound' and then start a fund to blast it from afar into BG's compound.
The Karma Killer: This was indeed posted on Fark.com a day ago. To be fair. Fark takes great pains to acknowledge any scoops from
They even show the
It kinda ticks me off that we can't even acknowledge a odd story news gathering site with a tech bias. Fark is zero threat to
Slashdot is depth. Fark is popcorn.
Sometimes popcorn needs to be chewed in depth.
And sometimes depth has to be chewed by popcorn.
Thank you for reading my semi-off topic rant that I am sure to pay for in the morning.
The last possible shield for my slim castle of karma: I showed this article to a fellow co-worker when we were both under a very tight deadline (He moonlights as a DJ, Biggest cd collection I have ever seen. 5000+ collection)
He just started laughing and laughing. I know that is sorta creepy but it was a relief sort of laugh, not one of those ones in the very scary under-reported storys thread.
That kind of stuff is hard to refute.
I work in the Media and that thread gave me great pause.
One nice thing I really like about Slashdot is the fact that I might take a verbal tongue lashing from the literati, I don't usually get my lug nuts pried of my car because I think different. I am using a metaphor for having my car stereo ripped off a long time ago. What I learned was don't keep expensive stuff in your car. (Basic knowledge 101)
Any professor with Nine Inch Nails in their music collection is worth supporting.
Maybe we can get him to spill other beverages and mixed drinks onto CDs and record the results.
A government grant should also be in the works.
Actually it is a bit older: Mozart (1756-1791) did a Dice-Sonata: he composed 176 bars of music, of which you choose 16 by playing dice. This gives 11^16 different sonatas!
These kind of musical dice-plays where in fashion in Mozarts time, the oldest known is from 1757: "Johann Philipp Kirnberger: Der allezeit fertige Polonoisen- und Menuettencomponist, Winter. Berlin 1757.".
You can find more info (in german) on this page. There is quite a list of pieces and books...
Did anyone else picture Yahoo Serious doing this as they read the summary?
I have listened to every mp3 and watched a pair of videos... but it's really obvious that what you get is a random inability of the error correcting code of the sound/image interpreter. It's all because of the pseudorandom distribution af data on the surface for error correction purposes!
If the guy tried something on a vinyl it should be much more interesting because the sound is not digitally treated and is perfectly sequential...
Yes... but the result of course would be a low frequency filter and a destruction of the pickup!!!
Really non interesting research. IMHO.
I'd like to try letting a cellular automata on a WAV file and to see what I can get from this. THIS would be science.
There's a difference, in mainstream art, between "music" and "a fucked up cd". Yes, you might have some sort of deconstructionist or dadaist who could defend this work as art, but who really listens to them anyhow? I don't know how this could be considered "cool". I didn't hear anything interesting when I listened to the mp3's. It sounded like he hocked a loogie on a CD, wiped it off with sandpaper, and then tossed the CD in a player. Wow. I could do that, just leave a CD on my desk for a few weeks. I understand that you can call whatever you want "art", but in this case I really don't think the end result is meaningful in any way other than to scratch up a Jay-Z cd.
cat /vmlinuz > /dev/dsp
:P
The sound of Linux.
What's this Submit thingy do?
i don't think he's claiming to be the endpoint of experimentation on this issue.
you may have heard of thomas brinkmann, who frequently uses the sounds from slices cut into vinyl records in his music. as far as i know, no-one has tried to really manipulate the actual cd media to find what sounds it makes because merely scratching up the surface doesn't produce much.
now here is a method of modifying cd's without making them unplayable. let's see what can be done with this before we reject it entirely.
If you spill beer on a copy protected CD (you know, the kind with induced errors on it), does the fungus distort the errors so they disappear?
If so, will the fungus be sued under the DMCA?
Please, people... This isn't science. This just shows how a CD's error correction copes with relatively mild distortions. It's little more than gadgetry.
Didn't we have story a year or so ago about some Aussie boffins researching the physics of the "fall" of bubbles in Guinness? (Do the bubbles go up or do they go down?)
I'm beginning there might be some connection between Australian scientists and foamy malt beverages. But, YMMV.
SCO commented that it allready holds a copyright on part of the source code (ingredients)for this Beer. SCO claims that Miller, Budweiser, etc., illegaly obtained this code (known has Higher Open Protocol Syntax or HOPS), and must pay a licensing fee in order to remain legal in production.
"Examples are given for both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cellular interference with optically stored data. Differences in cellular parameters such as organelle density, refractivity, and gross morphology (branching versus aggregation) are shown to impact on error correction using the Cross Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code."
Holy crap. You could have just said, "Hey, when I grow shit on my CD's it sounds funny."
If it's not one thing, it's Steve's Mother