I find myself saying that a lot recently. Here's why.
February 10, 1999
Jung and Dancing Hamsters
Okay, so this one is just for fun.
Have you seen the VW Jetta TV ad? It's the one where a couple is driving around in their Jetta and the whole world around them is weirdly, perfectly synchronized to the music on their radio. Really neat ad, and very cool music. (You need to be familiar with MP3 to hear this stuff. If you don't know about MP3, go find out, then come back quick.)
Anyway, there's a very silly site getting ready to supplant the infamous, evil dancing baby: it's www.hamsterdance.com. Go look at it, then come back.
Back already? How'd you like that music? I don't know about you, but when I heard the VW Jetta Music, then heard the Hamster Dance music, I was gripped by a mad inhuman need to hear them together, synchronized.
I spent some time tweaking and tugging and editing, and am pleased with the results. Here's what they sound like together.
Jan 2000 Update: Here's a cool techno tune someone created around the hamster music.
January 27, 1999
Preservation
Imagine: paper has been used for thousands of years to pass information and knowledge across generations, across civilizations. Paper's durable, it's cheap, and it can last an awfully long time. Only in the last hundred years or so have humans developed new methods for preserving information: phonographs, film, magnetic tape, CD, and so on.
Here's the trouble: now we're relying on these new methods to store stuff we want future generations (and future civilizations) to be able to view: Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, The Beatles' White Album, astronomical data. And we're finding that these nifty storage methods can hardly survive the rigors of being stored for a single generation, let alone millennia. The original prints of Citizen Kane are dissolving in their canisters, Lennon's voice is literally falling off the master tape it's stored on, and the computer systems which record priceless scientific and astronomical data will be obsolete by time you finish reading this. (You remember when they said CDs would last forever? Think again.)
Imagine you're NASA. You've got warehouses full of computer data. It's all on magnetic tapes. And it won't be long before all of these tapes are as useless as a canister full of dust. What do you do? Embark on a mission to copy these tapes, transfer them to newer tapes. But there's too many tapes! By the time one 28 terabyte NASA archive has been relocated onto modern tapes, the oldest of the new tapes will only have six years left before they too have to be replaced!
And it strikes close to home. The 1988 movie which inspired the name for our son can't be had anymore. Made just a few years ago, it's now out of print, not available on DVD, and could be gone forever in as little as ten years.
November 16, 1998
Steganography: the science of secretly hiding one message inside another message.
Security features on the checks you write and the documents you sign are a form of steganography, and so is the copyright information that will be silently embedded into music you download over the net.
Okay. Now it turns out that the computer screen you're sitting in front of right this minute is giving off electromagnetic radiation, and you've probably heard that this may be dangerous to your health. Did you know that these emissions can also be used against you?
Enter Bill Gates! He's recently invested $20M in Cambridge's computer science lab, to fund research into monitoring these emissions from a van driving up and down your street to see if you're using pirated software.
And it's not a crazy idea: the U.S. Military has a classified program called "Tempest" whose function is to study the possibility that devices can be constructed which can analyze these emissions and recreate an exact replica of that which is displayed on a monitor. Under the right circumstances, it is possible to do so over a distance of several hundred yards.
The end result: Windows 2001--or whatever--could be equipped with steganographic technology that hides its serial number in the electromagnetic emissions of your monitor, to be picked up by the monitoring equipment driving past your house. Computer virii of the next millenium could send out your password, your files, your banking information the same way, to be picked up and used by the bad guys.
Maybe I'm watching too much The X-Files.
September 24, 1998
Dialectizers and Postmodernism
So get this: there are a lot of computer people out there looking carefully at human language and whether computers are capable of understanding and/or generating it. Heard of the turing test? It's a way to measure the progress of computer science, posing the possibility that someday a computer might be able to do things--like play a game, or conduct a conversation--so magnificently as to be indistinguishable from a human being.
Computer geeks have long been aware of a little computer program that slurps in a file of text, and spews out a version that has been "dialectized" into ebonics, or pig latin, or whatever. It's pretty amusing stuff, and Samuel Stoddard has recently unveiled his "Dialectizer," a web page that will translate any page (including the one you're now reading) into any of seven dialects.
Okay. Now on to some separate, but related research. Andrew C. Bulhak at Monash University has built "The Dada Engine," a computer program that generates "random text from grammars." One example of the Dada Engine's capabilities is available as the Postmodernism Generator. It produces page after page of such choice material as "If subsemanticist theory holds, we have to choose between Sontagian camp and textual conceptualism."
Upon discovering these two linguistic second-cousins, I was gripped by a mad urge to introduce them to each other. Click below for the results: a postmodern dissertation recited by...
| a moron | a redneck | Elmer Fudd | the Swedish chef |
| a cockney Brit |
ebonics
(not for those with P.C. hangups) | pig-latin |
(These links are likely to be slow, because there are two computers chewing through this text, and they're a world away from each other. If you prefer, a sample of each is available.)
Will Irace / will@irace.net / http://irace.net/