In the early 80s Scientific American had one of the first articles I ever read about fractal mathematics and music. It talked about a statistical value called Spectral Density, which varies from white noise to "brown" noise. In white noise the signals have no relation from one moment to the next, as in hailstones randomly falling on a piano keyboard. In brown noise they are strongly related, as in a mouse walking up and down the keys. Fractal patterns have a spectral density somewhere in the middle. Neighboring signals stay around each other for a while, then there's a jump to a different area and it stays around there for a while. The jumps themselves show the same pattern. The article said that almost any piece of music that as wide popular appeal, regardless of the genre, has a fractal Spectral Density. Popular pieces of abstract art were also said to have the same property.
Anyway, I wonder if songs that are similar in the subjective terms Coons uses would be similar in spectral density or some other mathematical way? It would be really interesting to make automated measurements of songs and see if you could get similar clustering.
Unrelatedly... the article went on to say that the human peripheral nervous system produces white noise, but as you probe closer to the central nervous system the signal becomes more and more fractal, as if the nervous system itself is filtering our raw perceptions and passing a fractal version to our brain. In an experiment with radar scans of a college campus full of people moving around, they found that any one scan was predominantly white noise, but the difference between two scans a second or two apart was fractal noise. They speculated that this might be a key to our ability to process the complex, changing world around us and notice subtle but important details, for example when we immediately notice "something odd" about a person. Fascinating stuff.
Thanks for posting those thoughtful comments! There are plenty of things that can cause real or potential financial losses -- arson, vandalism, murder... but we don't call any of those things "theft" and the law doesn't treat them that way. Copyright and other "intellectual property" issues are not nearly as clear cut as the simple concept of a physical thing being mine or not mine, but the recording industry has done a great job convincing the public that copyright is property and that infringement is theft. This makes it easier for record companies to play their favorite role as the poor little old lady chasing the evil purse snatcher, as if to disagree with their position is to attack the whole concept of private property. Of course, it's not. The recording industry is doing whatever they can to dodge the central issue that the basis for their business -- making and distributing copies of other people's work -- has become so simple that it's not worth very much anymore. Nobody "stole" that from them, it's just progress.
If you're interested in the subject of snipers in general you might want to read this story (and elsewhere) about a WWII Russian sniper named Vasily Zaitsev, and his duel with a German sniper sent to eliminate him. Various versions have the two adversaries stalking each other through the rubble-strewn streets of Stalingrad for days or weeks. The tale is often disputed and could have been Soviet propaganda, but it's a good story. I think it was also the basis for the movie "Enemy at the Gates."
The headline was the funniest part of the article:
"Microsoft invents a 'one-play only' DVD to combat Hollywood piracy"
First the big threat to the survival of the movie industry was crappy-ass copies of mini-camcorder tapes shot in theaters. They solved that problem with night vision goggles, stiff fines and jail sentences. Still ignoring the fact that 80% of unauthorized copies come from originals leaked by Hollywood insiders, the new danger to the industry now comes from the DVD buyer's ability to watch a movie more than once.
Go to the major cities in China and India and you will see piles of copied book in the streets all sold for 1/10th the original price without giving anything back to the authors. The pirates can say that they are doing a favor to the authors by driving them out of obscurity.
Interesting. Except for the cut-rate pricing, this is how the recording industry has been operating for a century.
Google maintains its scanning represents "fair use" allowed under the law because it only allows Web surfers to view excerpts from copyrighted books.
Soon after Google Mail was introduced, somebody created a SourceForge project that lets you use Google Mail as a database. How long until somebody releases a "Bookripper" app that assembles a whole book from search extracts? As I understand it Google displays two pages at a time (or wait, that's Amazon, but I bet they're similar). All you would need to know is a quote from a book's first page as a seed, and you should be able to grab the whole book by doing a series of searches using text from the second page returned by each search. The trick would be to knit the pieces together and eliminate the overlapping text. Seems almost trivial. Another possibility would be to search for random words and look for overlaps between the results, assembling them like a linear jigsaw puzzle until there are no gaps.
Yes, but all of his wonderful technology could be used by people that want to preserve their own power and wealth.
You hit it right on the head. EVERY technological advance that we enjoy today is here because somebody figured out how to make a lot of money from it, and nobody squashed it because it was a competitive or political threat. The article isn't the book of course, but it makes no mention of politics, business or economics. I wonder if Kurzweil gives them any attention.
One good example of superior technology we DON'T have is hemp (fibers, not marijuana). For centuries hemp was the cheapest and most widely used fiber for cloth and paper. In the 1830s Eli Whitney invented a machine that revolutionized cotton processing. Between that and North America's vast forests being available for cheap paper pulp, hemp fell out of favor and was used mostly for rope. Then around 1930 somebody invented a hemp processing machine that would have done for hemp what Whitney's machine did for cotton. Unfortunately the DuPont company had just finished a decade of expensive R&D to produce nylon and rayon, and they were beginning to market the first synthetic fabrics. The last thing they needed was another cheap natural fiber. DuPont convinced William Randolph Hearst that hemp was a threat to him also, as Hearst owned not only his publishing business but also numerous paper mills and vast timberlands to supply them. They put together the large "reefer madness" publicity campaign that convinced everybody in the U.S. that marijuana was a major threat to society, even though in reality it was virtually unknown at the time, used mainly by the rural southern poor. With this pretense they used their financial influence to have a law written and passed, prohibiting all hemp production and effectively killing the new processing technology. Although hemp is known to produce cheaper, superior, longer lasting cloth and paper, current efforts to legalize the farming of non-THC-producing strains to revive the hemp industry have been foundering for decades.
I don't see why this scenario couldn't happen with stunning new utopia-generating technology, especially that is scary to the public and threatens to make other lucrative businesses obsolete. Look how hard the recording industry is fighting file sharing, and is close to dictating the capabilities that computers and consumer electronics can and can't have.
Microsoft got a free ride from IBM to their current position; I can't see MS doing the same favour for Google, can you?
They're doing it right now. Microsoft is getting ready to release a monster-hog OS that will cost a lot more than the last version and will require people to buy a colossal new PC. Google could release a thin, self-installing, self-updating Linux distro relying heavily on Google services, that would let someone with a decent connection do more on their current 600MHz PII than they could do with the default version of Vista.
Why would anyone want to rely on a net connection to be able to write a letter, or trust a remote company to hold their data, or basically use any of these web-technologies pundits keep claiming are the next big thing?
Because it's free. The stripped-down "Internet appliances" of a few years ago didn't sell because they were way too expensive for what little they did. If Google can deliver the right functionality through the web to turn an existing computer into a better computer at no cost, many people will be more than happy not to buy a new PC or a new Windows, even if means spending money to upgrade their connection.
My official prediction is that Google will offer a downloadable, self-installing Linux distro that uses Google online services to replace the most important functions of Windows and Office. It will use your old Windows partition as a datasource. At this point Microsoft will dry up like a prune, and it will happen amazingly fast -- faster than Ballmer can throw a chair across the room.
The more complicated something is, the more opportunities for those who can figure it out. If the Internet becomes fractured, think of the market for clever ways to interoperate seamlessly across the fractures! Mr. Crusher, ahead frac factor five!
Both sides in this equation (file uploaders and the RIAA) are in the wrong. You simply can't decide that you don't have to follow the law because you 1) don't like the law and 2) that technology allows you to violate the law easily. Moreover, the RIAA is continuing to alienate its customer base by using heavy-handed tactics on fairly low-level criminals. In addition, by continuing to violate the law and thumbing their noses at the industry, the file sharers themselves are forcing the lawmakers into strengthening IP laws.
You might want to consider that Congress is also wrong here. Every time they extend copyrights they break a contract between copyright holders and the public -- a contract that the public has been keeping faithfully by paying for copyright enforcement year after year, expecting material to become public domain at a specific time. If you have been making house payments for 29 years on a 30-year mortgage, and Congress suddenly declares that it's a 60-year mortgage, are you "wrong" to refuse to move out of the house? When Congress makes laws for hire, it's hard to respect either them or the laws they write, and even more difficult to respect the righteous posturing of the recording industry and other entities that buy those laws.
Nobody actually "owns" copyright or the copyrighted material itself. There are only copyright "holders" who have specific rights for a limited time, granted and enforced by the government. It's not a divine right, it's a contract between copyright holders and the public. The public agrees not to infringe for a length of time and to pay for the enforcement of the copyright, and in return the material becomes public domain when the copyright expires.
When Congress extends copyright terms on existing material they break this contract with the public. It's as if they decided to turn all 30-year mortgages into 60-year mortgages with the stroke of a pen. Nice if you're a bank, but not if you're the one who has been faithfully making payments for years and years. The Bono Act of 1998 not only extended copyright terms to 95 years, it also retroactively reimposed copyrights on old audio recordings. All recordings made prior to 1979 are now copyrighted until the year 2067. That includes every sound ever recorded, all the way back Edison's wax cylinders made in the 1890s. Isn't that great??!!
XmlHttpRequest is a for client-side script to submit an http request and receive the results as XML or text. It's pretty cool because you can make a web page behave like a little client-server app, eliminating the need for page refreshes and session state maintenance. The name AJAX was made up recently, but the technique has been around for years, ever since IE4. Microsoft implemented it as an ActiveX object, but Mozilla now supports it natively.
Forget about the 10 shareholders. The major players in the world of "Intellectual Property" have always been people who create nothing but merely buy rights from others. I don't fear the Eolas shareholders as much as I fear somebody else with a few hundred $million who might buy their rights and start systematically going after people for a few thousand or tens of thousands of dollars a pop. And all the while they'll be making self-righteous proclamations about protecting "their" technology.
Even if the Eolas claim is valid, it's pretty sad that the government can let somebody sit on something like this for years while other people innovate, and then dive in and claim they own it. This news illustrates the need to place a time limit on "sleeper" patent claims.
One spacecraft (Hidalgo) will impact an asteroid, the other (Sancho) will arrive earlier at the target asteroid, rendezvous and orbit the asteroid for several months, observing it before and after the impact to detect any changes in its orbit.
Obviously a second probe would be useful for taking pictures and measurements of the impact, but how does being near the asteroid provide better measurements of its orbit than simply watching it from Earth? I don't get that part.
Simultaneous release of DVDs will pretty much make movie piracy by hidden camcorders obsolete, along with the movie industry's expensive campaign to detect or jam the cameras. Instead of industry insiders being responsible for 80% of illegal copies like they are now, it'll be closer to 100%. Then maybe the movie companies will have no choice but to stop blaming their problem on the public and clean up their own act.
Slashdot Mirror
In the early 80s Scientific American had one of the first articles I ever read about fractal mathematics and music. It talked about a statistical value called Spectral Density, which varies from white noise to "brown" noise. In white noise the signals have no relation from one moment to the next, as in hailstones randomly falling on a piano keyboard. In brown noise they are strongly related, as in a mouse walking up and down the keys. Fractal patterns have a spectral density somewhere in the middle. Neighboring signals stay around each other for a while, then there's a jump to a different area and it stays around there for a while. The jumps themselves show the same pattern. The article said that almost any piece of music that as wide popular appeal, regardless of the genre, has a fractal Spectral Density. Popular pieces of abstract art were also said to have the same property.
Anyway, I wonder if songs that are similar in the subjective terms Coons uses would be similar in spectral density or some other mathematical way? It would be really interesting to make automated measurements of songs and see if you could get similar clustering.
Unrelatedly... the article went on to say that the human peripheral nervous system produces white noise, but as you probe closer to the central nervous system the signal becomes more and more fractal, as if the nervous system itself is filtering our raw perceptions and passing a fractal version to our brain. In an experiment with radar scans of a college campus full of people moving around, they found that any one scan was predominantly white noise, but the difference between two scans a second or two apart was fractal noise. They speculated that this might be a key to our ability to process the complex, changing world around us and notice subtle but important details, for example when we immediately notice "something odd" about a person. Fascinating stuff.
Thanks for posting those thoughtful comments! There are plenty of things that can cause real or potential financial losses -- arson, vandalism, murder... but we don't call any of those things "theft" and the law doesn't treat them that way. Copyright and other "intellectual property" issues are not nearly as clear cut as the simple concept of a physical thing being mine or not mine, but the recording industry has done a great job convincing the public that copyright is property and that infringement is theft. This makes it easier for record companies to play their favorite role as the poor little old lady chasing the evil purse snatcher, as if to disagree with their position is to attack the whole concept of private property. Of course, it's not. The recording industry is doing whatever they can to dodge the central issue that the basis for their business -- making and distributing copies of other people's work -- has become so simple that it's not worth very much anymore. Nobody "stole" that from them, it's just progress.
My first computer didn't have an OS installed.
But then, it didn't have a hard drive either.
If you're interested in the subject of snipers in general you might want to read this story (and elsewhere) about a WWII Russian sniper named Vasily Zaitsev, and his duel with a German sniper sent to eliminate him. Various versions have the two adversaries stalking each other through the rubble-strewn streets of Stalingrad for days or weeks. The tale is often disputed and could have been Soviet propaganda, but it's a good story. I think it was also the basis for the movie "Enemy at the Gates."
The headline was the funniest part of the article:
"Microsoft invents a 'one-play only' DVD to combat Hollywood piracy"
First the big threat to the survival of the movie industry was crappy-ass copies of mini-camcorder tapes shot in theaters. They solved that problem with night vision goggles, stiff fines and jail sentences. Still ignoring the fact that 80% of unauthorized copies come from originals leaked by Hollywood insiders, the new danger to the industry now comes from the DVD buyer's ability to watch a movie more than once.
Absolutely Pathetic.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaah!!1!
Yikes, you're right! /hiding under desk until the all-clear
I just started a contract job at MS. Which building does Ballmer work in?
Sell Microsoft stock.
Yesterday.
D'oh!
Go to the major cities in China and India and you will see piles of copied book in the streets all sold for 1/10th the original price without giving anything back to the authors. The pirates can say that they are doing a favor to the authors by driving them out of obscurity.
Interesting. Except for the cut-rate pricing, this is how the recording industry has been operating for a century.
Google maintains its scanning represents "fair use" allowed under the law because it only allows Web surfers to view excerpts from copyrighted books.
Soon after Google Mail was introduced, somebody created a SourceForge project that lets you use Google Mail as a database. How long until somebody releases a "Bookripper" app that assembles a whole book from search extracts? As I understand it Google displays two pages at a time (or wait, that's Amazon, but I bet they're similar). All you would need to know is a quote from a book's first page as a seed, and you should be able to grab the whole book by doing a series of searches using text from the second page returned by each search. The trick would be to knit the pieces together and eliminate the overlapping text. Seems almost trivial. Another possibility would be to search for random words and look for overlaps between the results, assembling them like a linear jigsaw puzzle until there are no gaps.
Yes, but all of his wonderful technology could be used by people that want to preserve their own power and wealth.
You hit it right on the head. EVERY technological advance that we enjoy today is here because somebody figured out how to make a lot of money from it, and nobody squashed it because it was a competitive or political threat. The article isn't the book of course, but it makes no mention of politics, business or economics. I wonder if Kurzweil gives them any attention.
One good example of superior technology we DON'T have is hemp (fibers, not marijuana). For centuries hemp was the cheapest and most widely used fiber for cloth and paper. In the 1830s Eli Whitney invented a machine that revolutionized cotton processing. Between that and North America's vast forests being available for cheap paper pulp, hemp fell out of favor and was used mostly for rope. Then around 1930 somebody invented a hemp processing machine that would have done for hemp what Whitney's machine did for cotton. Unfortunately the DuPont company had just finished a decade of expensive R&D to produce nylon and rayon, and they were beginning to market the first synthetic fabrics. The last thing they needed was another cheap natural fiber. DuPont convinced William Randolph Hearst that hemp was a threat to him also, as Hearst owned not only his publishing business but also numerous paper mills and vast timberlands to supply them. They put together the large "reefer madness" publicity campaign that convinced everybody in the U.S. that marijuana was a major threat to society, even though in reality it was virtually unknown at the time, used mainly by the rural southern poor. With this pretense they used their financial influence to have a law written and passed, prohibiting all hemp production and effectively killing the new processing technology. Although hemp is known to produce cheaper, superior, longer lasting cloth and paper, current efforts to legalize the farming of non-THC-producing strains to revive the hemp industry have been foundering for decades.
I don't see why this scenario couldn't happen with stunning new utopia-generating technology, especially that is scary to the public and threatens to make other lucrative businesses obsolete. Look how hard the recording industry is fighting file sharing, and is close to dictating the capabilities that computers and consumer electronics can and can't have.
Microsoft got a free ride from IBM to their current position; I can't see MS doing the same favour for Google, can you?
They're doing it right now. Microsoft is getting ready to release a monster-hog OS that will cost a lot more than the last version and will require people to buy a colossal new PC. Google could release a thin, self-installing, self-updating Linux distro relying heavily on Google services, that would let someone with a decent connection do more on their current 600MHz PII than they could do with the default version of Vista.
Why would anyone want to rely on a net connection to be able to write a letter, or trust a remote company to hold their data, or basically use any of these web-technologies pundits keep claiming are the next big thing?
Because it's free. The stripped-down "Internet appliances" of a few years ago didn't sell because they were way too expensive for what little they did. If Google can deliver the right functionality through the web to turn an existing computer into a better computer at no cost, many people will be more than happy not to buy a new PC or a new Windows, even if means spending money to upgrade their connection.
My official prediction is that Google will offer a downloadable, self-installing Linux distro that uses Google online services to replace the most important functions of Windows and Office. It will use your old Windows partition as a datasource. At this point Microsoft will dry up like a prune, and it will happen amazingly fast -- faster than Ballmer can throw a chair across the room.
Wouldn't these inventive types get a bigger charge out of doing something important? Like a mug that makes beer out of thin air?
The more complicated something is, the more opportunities for those who can figure it out. If the Internet becomes fractured, think of the market for clever ways to interoperate seamlessly across the fractures! Mr. Crusher, ahead frac factor five!
Both sides in this equation (file uploaders and the RIAA) are in the wrong. You simply can't decide that you don't have to follow the law because you 1) don't like the law and 2) that technology allows you to violate the law easily. Moreover, the RIAA is continuing to alienate its customer base by using heavy-handed tactics on fairly low-level criminals. In addition, by continuing to violate the law and thumbing their noses at the industry, the file sharers themselves are forcing the lawmakers into strengthening IP laws.
You might want to consider that Congress is also wrong here. Every time they extend copyrights they break a contract between copyright holders and the public -- a contract that the public has been keeping faithfully by paying for copyright enforcement year after year, expecting material to become public domain at a specific time. If you have been making house payments for 29 years on a 30-year mortgage, and Congress suddenly declares that it's a 60-year mortgage, are you "wrong" to refuse to move out of the house? When Congress makes laws for hire, it's hard to respect either them or the laws they write, and even more difficult to respect the righteous posturing of the recording industry and other entities that buy those laws.
Nobody actually "owns" copyright or the copyrighted material itself. There are only copyright "holders" who have specific rights for a limited time, granted and enforced by the government. It's not a divine right, it's a contract between copyright holders and the public. The public agrees not to infringe for a length of time and to pay for the enforcement of the copyright, and in return the material becomes public domain when the copyright expires.
When Congress extends copyright terms on existing material they break this contract with the public. It's as if they decided to turn all 30-year mortgages into 60-year mortgages with the stroke of a pen. Nice if you're a bank, but not if you're the one who has been faithfully making payments for years and years. The Bono Act of 1998 not only extended copyright terms to 95 years, it also retroactively reimposed copyrights on old audio recordings. All recordings made prior to 1979 are now copyrighted until the year 2067. That includes every sound ever recorded, all the way back Edison's wax cylinders made in the 1890s. Isn't that great??!!
XmlHttpRequest is a for client-side script to submit an http request and receive the results as XML or text. It's pretty cool because you can make a web page behave like a little client-server app, eliminating the need for page refreshes and session state maintenance. The name AJAX was made up recently, but the technique has been around for years, ever since IE4. Microsoft implemented it as an ActiveX object, but Mozilla now supports it natively.
Forget about the 10 shareholders. The major players in the world of "Intellectual Property" have always been people who create nothing but merely buy rights from others. I don't fear the Eolas shareholders as much as I fear somebody else with a few hundred $million who might buy their rights and start systematically going after people for a few thousand or tens of thousands of dollars a pop. And all the while they'll be making self-righteous proclamations about protecting "their" technology.
Even if the Eolas claim is valid, it's pretty sad that the government can let somebody sit on something like this for years while other people innovate, and then dive in and claim they own it. This news illustrates the need to place a time limit on "sleeper" patent claims.
One spacecraft (Hidalgo) will impact an asteroid, the other (Sancho) will arrive earlier at the target asteroid, rendezvous and orbit the asteroid for several months, observing it before and after the impact to detect any changes in its orbit.
Obviously a second probe would be useful for taking pictures and measurements of the impact, but how does being near the asteroid provide better measurements of its orbit than simply watching it from Earth? I don't get that part.
Simply MEPIS works right out of the box too, at least for me, a Linux noob. Totally painless install. I'm using it right now.
On the other hand, how much of an honor can it be if it puts you in company with Engelbert Humperdinck?
No geek shortage where I work, but for what it's worth the Babe Shortage is showing no sign of letting up.
Actually the article says 70s bands. But it would rule to have Martian features named Oingo Boingo, Wall of Voodoo, Bananarama and Dire Straits.
Simultaneous release of DVDs will pretty much make movie piracy by hidden camcorders obsolete, along with the movie industry's expensive campaign to detect or jam the cameras. Instead of industry insiders being responsible for 80% of illegal copies like they are now, it'll be closer to 100%. Then maybe the movie companies will have no choice but to stop blaming their problem on the public and clean up their own act.