Bullets

• Why are microphones with a really narrow pickup pattern called "Shotgun" mics? Shouldn't they be rifle mics? The NRA has a lot of work to do in the sound design community.
• Yay! 500 hits
• For those of you keeping score at home-- the appliation is no longer online. Now the truly painful waiting begins.

and...

• HAPPY BIRTHDAY DANA!!!

Wine Snob

Fun fact for today:

AP - Paris "Critics who praise the "complexity" of red Burgundy and Champagne are on target.

A team of French and Italian researchers has mapped the genome of the pinot noir grape, used to make bubbly and many red wines from France's Burgundy region and around the world — and it has about 30,000 genes in its DNA. That's more than the human genome, which contains some 20,000 to 25,000 genes."

The Boys from Syracuse

Today I start assisting at the Public on Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. It's a play about a guy from Syracuse lost in a strange place...... hmmmm, fitting.

In other news, last night there was some enjoyable craziness. Tequila and Wii were involved... okay-- Tequila, Wii, and one REALLLLLY drunk friend. It was spectacular.

Long Distance Dedication

I wonder if it makes me extremely odd that I can look back on certain events, some seemingly minor, and note that they were a major turning point for a part of me.

Case in point-- the last day of my freshmen year at college Chris Rummel (shout-out) gave me his sound design mix-CD for the show The Shape of Things along with another CD, simply titled The Inspiration. Tonight I shared some of my favorites from those CDs with a friend and realized that those CDs changed my taste in music. It didn't happen all at once, or even noticeibly, but that's clearly where the inflection point lies in what I listen to. Another small change happend a couple years after that when Talene (shout-out) less then subtley began a music education program for me.

It probably has something to do with my unique blend of nostalgia, snap-shot memory, and overly cognitive personality. What I do know is this, there's something special to me about music I've gained through my friends. From "New Music Delivery" in the middle of a Syracuse winter to "SU Mix" on the long journey back from UMass Amherst, I have a photo-album of music and the memories of the close friends I first heard it with.

Bullets

• Fortune Cookie yesterday: "Be prepared to be spontaneous tomorrow." Now, I ordered the food at 10PM but didn't open the cookie until 12:30AM, so does that apply to today or Monday?
• Does anyone else find it really strange when people 'come out' via the Interested In line item on facebook? What kind of society are we living in?
• I finally got to re-watch Gattaca. Great movie.
• Immediately after Gattaca, to get in the Halloween mood, we tried to watch Open Water 2 on FEARnet (Comcast's free horror movies on demand). Needless to say it was horrible, we ended up watching the majority of it in fast-forward, only stopping long enough to watch the hecklible parts. If you've never seen anything on FEARnet it's truly incredible how much of the screen is taken up by gigantic branding graphics every 7 minutes.
• I reread part of a book I have, Modern British Playwrights, which includes the sentence: "Both playwrights are indebted to the groundbreaking contribution to world drama that the Irish playwright and Nobel Prize-winning Samuel Beckett made in combining existential philosophy-- an ontological vision of life as solitary, random, and absurd-- and an antinaturalistic concept of dramaturgy, the prime example of which is Waiting for Godot (1953)." Which clocks in at 51 words. Damn.
• Google's spell-checker doesn't recognize the word dramaturgy . Sad.

Salvation lies within

Great quotes from Shawshank Redeption

"Andy Dufresne, who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side."

"Same old shit, different day "

"I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it."

"You could argue he'd done it to curry favor with the guards. Or, maybe make a few friends among us cons. Me, I think he did it just to feel normal again, if only for a short while. "

"I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright and when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice, but still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend. "



Shout-out to Goose (even though you don't read my blog)-- I miss ya buddy.

AutoCAD Audio

So I'm sure someone who knows more about sound than me will tell me that either a) this is a completely rediculous idea or b) they thought of this 15 years ago... but until then I want to believe that I've stumbled upon something mildly brilliant.

Today in Sound 1 we were going over sampling and bit rates, and how they're basically the x and the y, respectively, of a plotted line graph of a waveform. Having gone over this before my mind drifted to the work I have left for my AutoCAD class. At a certain point I was thinking about a 3D extrusion path I have yet to draw and the spline I would have to make for it.

It was at this moment that I realized the way we currently capture digital audio is no longer efficient. Imagine a spline in AutoCAD, the spline is constucted by certain specific points and a "curve of best fit" between them. So-- what if instead of a matrix of positional values (x,y) to replicate a sound wave we use vectors instead? Gone would be hard, articifial caps on frequency response as well as the course jumps between values because now a true unbroken linear waveform has been created based on a mathmatical model. Better still, we can enhance the model based on decades of work in calculus, which for those of you (ok, all of you) who aren't as dorky as me is the study of the rates of change of curves.

Okay, let the flamming begin. In a related story, the "J.Read is a huge nerd" t-shirts go on sale soon.

For the Record

Just for the record, for those of you who made fun of my, uhhhhhh, bachelor-lery eating habits at SU (especially you folks from back at 1021 Madison)........

Last night a friend of mine made himself a grilled cheese AND hot dog sandwich.

That is all.

LOTR Marathon

I finally got around to rewatching the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I've seen the first two enough that I didn't pick up on a lot of new things, though I did change my opinion on what a few small things might mean. I did discover a lot in the third film, however, and though it continues to be my least favorite, it grew on me a little.

One Step at a Time

I grew up a little bit today.



I applied to the job of my dreams and found out that my best friend since I was 15 years old won't make it home for Thanksgiving this year. Said job application included lots of much appreciated help from some new close friends here. Now I try to not think about it at all for a month.


Sigh. Whoever said the early twenties are really stressful was NOT bullshitting.

He Had Everything Except Desire

Great Quotes from the Movie GATTACA:

"I was never more certain of how far away I was from my goal than when I was standing right beside it. "

"You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back."

"There's no gene for fate."

"It's funny, you work so hard, you do everything you can to get away from a place, and when you finally get your chance to leave, you find a reason to stay."

Vincent: "A year is a long time."
Irene: "Not so long. Just once around the sun."

Fortune Cookie

The fortune cookie I got today at Lulu's (thanks ETC) read:

Now is a good time to expand your repetoire of skills and knowledge.


I've been on a run of good fortune cookies lately, the last one I got was:

Step away from the power position for one day.

Good advice for a lighting designer don't you think?

Weird Science

Today's little post is about something I've been really interested in for a while now, and decided its time to share this interesting combination of human behavior, collectivism, and the stock market. They're called prediction markets:

Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event (e.g., will the next US president be a Republican) or parameter (e.g., total sales next quarter). The current market prices can then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter. Other names for prediction markets include information markets, decision markets, idea futures, event derivatives, and virtual markets. (Wikipedia)

Okay interesting right? Trading stocks in future events. But here's the thing, the little fuckers are painfully accurate. Ever watch a school of fish? Notive how at a given time many of them are darting in different directions. But once in a while enough of them will dart them same direction until that hit some behavioral critical mass and the entire group will turn. Computers are very good at distributed processing, but here we have evidence that organic behavior can use that same principal. A little more from Popular Science:

The first and most famous prediction market, established at the University of Iowa business school in 1988, was designed to forecast the outcome of that year's presidential election—which it did, with remarkable precision. Anyone could join the market and buy or sell propositions such as "What percent of the popular vote will George H.W. Bush receive in the presidential election?" Traders who thought Bush would get 60 percent or more of the vote would buy the shares if they were less than $60. Traders who disagreed would sell. The market price reflected the consensus view, which turned out to be more accurate than any of the six polls released in the week before the election. But if predicting a landslide Bush I victory over Michael Dukakis seems like fish-in-a-barrel stuff, consider that the Iowa Electronic Markets have correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in every national election since then, and with greater accuracy than the Gallup poll in all but one of those years. It achieved this success by relying not on the oracle-like knowledge of a single "expert" or small group of pundits, but on the power of the market to efficiently gather the intelligence of traders and agglomerate them into collective wisdom.

So much for the "great unwashed." I've been reflecting a lot on this concept lately and considering what it means for us as social creatures and, in the micro, our own individual behavior and how that's effected by larger systems. If you'd like to read a little more on this phenonmemon, including more examples of its accuracy surf over to Popular Science's website. They've got their own predictions market, the PPX, and a great article about the science behind it (link).

Clever Publicity

London's Harrods hires cobra to guard $120,000 shoes

"LONDON (AFP) - To their high society owners, a pair of haute couture shoes can be a precious thing.

But to guard a 62,000 pound (120,000 dollar) pair of ruby- sapphire- and diamond-encrusted Rene Caovilla sandals at their London launch, retailer Harrods went to extreme lengths: bringing in a live Egyptian cobra to patrol the shoe counter.

Whether hiring a poisonous snake is, strictly speaking, the most effective means of guarding precious footwear might be a moot point with security experts.
But it makes for a pretty effective photo opportunity.

A spokeswoman for Harrods admitted that the cobra had been hired strictly for Monday's launch of the shoe collection.

"The snake has now been returned to its owner," she said.
So no need to fear snake bites at the shoe counter, then.

"Not unless you're a burglar," the spokeswoman said."

Bullets

• Yes, this is a knowing knock on a certain professors blog series titled "ellipses"... if I like this format it may contine.
• In related news I no longer link to said professor's blog, but I decline to comment on why.
• Another weekend another $2500 software program to learn. This time its ESP Vision, its just like wysiwyg except its totally different.
• Should I put WYSIWYG in ALL CAPS in my resume to acknowledge its acronymical state? Or should I call it wysiwyg as their marking department does? Note that all caps is much easier to see. Thoughts?
• I lit the seniors class's convocation show on Saturday, it was fun, plus now I can say I've lit naked people.
• After said convocation there was mucho drinko. How much drinking you ask? Let's just say that I ended the night at Dale's watching The Neverending Story at 3AM. Yeah.
• The NFL Season has officially started and the Brady-Moss combination is already paying huge dividends. It's gonna be a great season. LET'S GO PATS!!!

Back in the Saddle

First week has come and gone, went very well overall. We're having a memorial day BBQ tomorrow, partly to celebrate Joel's new 40" HDTV. This has brought in turn the purchase of a component video cable for the Wii along with 2new Wiimotes and Mario Party 8. Yep... gonna be some good times. Also on the horizon is a Pittsburgh Pirates game this Friday vs. the Cubs and lighting design for the CMU convocation festivities on Saturday. Quick shout-out to mom and dad who are at a Jimmy Buffet concert at Foxboro Stadium right now!

Latest WYG renderings: