Wolfram Alpha is working on definitive answers to those really hard questions

Here and Here

I'm on a roll.

Same two patches, same chord progression more or less. Notice how playing the chords in a high register and shifting the Moog to a low bass completely alters the mood.

Still no video... Working on that. However, here's a short audio bit

"Windows uses Unix server at work, that's why Intel chips can work in Macs"

I'm fairly certain that the plists and binary blobs in ~/Library/Preferences are almost NOTHING like the centralized Windows Registry. This guy also claims there's a registry in Unix.

I could just let this go, but for a few details.

First, this guy is telling OTHERS that he is an expert on computers.

Second, he's telling them this in the context of helping them protect against Conficker-C.

Third, the basis of his expertise is that he works at Best Buy.

Sorry, but my head just exploded.

Later, his girlfriend was on, defending him, saying he really does know computers.

What is left of my head has ALSO exploded.

Everything
In your universe
Is a surface.

Your four dimensions of space and time,
The quanta,
Electromagnetism,
Gravitation,
All the surface of a great manifold.

And, if Hawking is correct,
and the universe has a wave function,
then as Feynman, we can sum over histories,
revealing the many worlds of Everett and Wheeler.

By what strange math is the manifold universe bound
That we should see the results of paths not taken,
And yet by decoherence, be forever unable
to retrace those steps and arrive
in that other world?

Shröedinger's Cat is not dead, not alive,
in one universe or another.
It is not God playing dice, but the flow and ebb
of higher dimensions.

Then to the sound of strings we vibrate, each with
our own function, summed over histories, decohering across
the manifold.

Consider it my personal economic stimulus plan.

Also, this is a followup to this post

Back in January, the folks at Moog Music announced that they were only making 200 more Minimoog Voyager Old School synthesizers. Already they're getting hard to find.

Now, there's no denying that it's a quality instrument, and worth every penny, but at the time I was reluctant to spend that much money. The window of opportunity is closing, however, and soon these will be just as hard to come by as the original.

So, it was time. I've ordered my Minimoog. It should arrive TOMORROW. I hope to have pictures, and maybe even some sounds up by the weekend.

I've had a DIY Vocoder project in the back of my mind for much of the last six months. I dredge it up now and again, and look at it, see if my thinking regarding the difficulty, or my ability to afford it has changed and then put it back. Finally, I've had enough of this, and it's time to start putting the idea to paper with a view toward building the thing.

Homer Dudley's 1930 invention of the Vocoder (a portemento of the words Voice Coder), was an answer to the need to conserve bandwidth on heavily trafficked long-distance telephone lines. By only sending the slowly changing voice envelope information (as a series of vocal formants), and then re-synthesizing the speech on the other end using a noise source, intelligible, if somewhat robotic-sounding speech could be heard. The technology had applications in cryptography, allowing the transmission of secured voice messages (and indeed completely confounded the Germans in WWII).

Dudley's design was, of course, fully analog, involving filters, peak detection, amplifiers and mixers. The model for how vocoders in general work is still valid, even with the advent of DSP techniques like phase vocoding and Multiple Excitation Linear Prediction (MELP) vocoding.

I'm not going to try to draw a diagram just yet, but here's how it goes in terms of Dudley's filter version.

The modulation signal (can be and usually is, a human voice), is passed through a fixed filter bank, with each bandpass filter having it's own independent output channel. Each channel is then passed through its own peak detection or envelope follower circuit. This represents the analysis portion of the device.

The signals from the analysis portion are then passed to re-synthesis. The vocal formant data in the form of envelopes is used to control the gain on a bank of voltage-controlled amplifiers. A carrier signal is fed through a second fixed filter bank, whose outputs and sent to the amplifiers. Each channel is then input into a mixer, and out comes speech at the other end.

It was none other than Wendy Carlos, in the late 1960's having seen vocoding in action, who realized that the carrier signal didn't have to be a fixed noise source, but could, in fact, be a musical tone, which would result in a "singing synthesizer". Carlos was perhaps just naive or silly enough to ask Bob Moog if he could make "something like a vocoder", using the standard Moog modules of the time, which Bob being Bob, he did. The results of this can be heard in all their glory on Wendy Carlos' "Timesteps", which was used in part in Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange", along with an except from Beethovan's Ninth, which now sounds rather dated, but nonetheless features among the first musical uses of the vocoder.

Moog's original kludge implementation lays out all the details of how a vocoder works by constructing it in modules, and thus, understanding it becomes a wonderful tool for understanding vocoders in general. In terms of putting together a DIY project, building it as discrete modules, even if they're then placed behind a single panel, makes excellent sense.

After Moog and Carlos, the Kraut-Rock phenomenon of Kraftwerk designed and built their own vocoder, and audio pioneer Harald Bode designed a 16-band unit which later was sold under the Moog label. The absolute pinnacle of musical vocoder design was arguably the EMS Vocoder 5000, but these were large and expensive studio units. Dutch manufacturer Synton made much more affordable (still pricey) units, with great performance and intelligibility.

Of course, one can easily achieve the same effect nowadays in software using DSP techniques, and any number of software vocoders exist. But to me, that's just no fun at all. There is also a nice 8-band vocoder kit from PAIA, but again, it's not floating my boat. Give me a good pair of fixed filter banks, some envelope followers, some VCAs and a mixer, and let me toss them together and see what I get.

Winter 2009 NAMM is underway, which is always a fun time due to the many new product announcements.

At the very top of my list this year is this Moog Music Etherwave Plus Field Upgrade, which adds pitch preview, a headphone jack and headphone volume control, Control voltage outputs for pitch and volume, and a gate output for triggering events and controlling external synths (with the classic 1V/Octave analog signals).

Too bad I have to wait an entire month. I so want to fire up the soldering iron right now!

My Job: I work for a large Japanese mega-corporation, tracking down evil doers in cyberspace who would harm my employer's network.

My Entertainment: A massive, virtual-reality game, which I share with 11 million other people.

A Quixotic Quest of Mine: Recreating a nearly lost technology of the previous century.

Back in the 1980's when "cyberpunk" first started showing up, I read it, of course, but thought "This is just too weird". William Gibson's "Count Zero" with it's voodoo priests worshiping AI gods they summoned from cyberspace... But toward the start of this century, I encountered the mail administrator of a small Papua New Guinea ISP. Known only as Posopis Menaga (sound it out), he worked for Bigpela Bosman (again, phonetics people), at Wewak Intanet, and spoke only tok-pigin. Understanding him through the pastiche of mangled english and german words, which is now the OFFICIAL language of his country was a fun activity. But it was then that I realized just how close to reality Bill Gibson was.

Of course, we have no god-like AIs, but here was a Papua New Guinean, barely removed from real-life headhunters, with both the technology, and the skills to enter and move around in this "shared hallucination". He was participating in the vast electronic conversation, making a useful contribution.

Our chief adversary in those days was typified by one Alan Ralsky, a former two-bit con-man who'd learned like the rest of us to trip the vast network, and discovered the tools to set himself up a new scam. Ralsky, his Russian programmers, and his Chinese business partners... Let's just say he set the stage for things as they are now. Ralsky's been indicted. His Chinese partner has plead guilty and will turn evidence against him. The Russians? Never caught. Still out there, making tools for the new generation of cyber crooks.

As the economy crumbles around us, a woman in Maine embezzles $32,000 from her employer (a national donut-shop franchise) to send to a group of shadowy Nigerians.... In Nigeria, these guys are heros. They set up computer centers in remote villages and bring technology and jobs to some of the poorest people on Earth. The locals defend the con-men with thier lives against police raids. Are they evil? How do you explain that to a poor Nigerian farmer, who because of them, can rest easy that his children will have enough food and warm clothing?

The Nigerians are at the forefront of efforts to break technologies like CAPTCHA, meant to keep them from automating signups to free email accounts they need to perpetuate their scams. At first, they used a human-wave approach, hire locals to surf the signup pages and pass the limited "Turing Test" that the CAPTCHA represents. Now, there are AI tools that can break CAPTCHA (It was always too simple). Think about this. Advanced AI in the service of Nigerian crimelords. DAMN YOU BILL GIBSON!

PEBKAC "Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair" Russian "virus writers" haven't actually written "viruses" in ages. Even Microsoft Windows is now secure enough that traditional paths of infection don't work. Instead they focus on an old old trick pioneered by the ancient Greeks. The Trojan Horse. The typical end user is naive. When the computer says "click here", they click there. All the "virus" writer has to do is present a suitably appealing "click here", and the end user will gleefully subvert his own computer's security, and install the software turning it into the tool of the bad guys, part of a vast zombie network, churning out ads for all sorts of nefarious services.

Yes, my life is a William Gibson novel... At least on good days.

On bad days? Let me introduce you to Mr. Cyril Kornbluth...