LJWorld.com

By the way this picture was taken with my cell phone as I was walking to my office...no SLR camera with me today. I find that even when I have my SLR its often useful to take a picture with my cell phone as well. It forces me to really frame the image. I wonder if other folks use their cell phone cameras in the same way.

poised for fish

the reflection still

like nothing else

I hate year end reviews, which will probably be doubled in number this year since people have this idea that years that end in nine or zero are somehow important. For those that LIKE year end reviews the NY Times has done all the work for you with the 9th Annual Year in Ideas. This review includes semi serious stuff such as the epidemiology of zombies, and the latest in high fashion "Stiletto Claws", to sobering ideas such as the notion that evolutionary innovations in the biosphere have led to mass extinctions "Life's Greatest Hits" to "Lithium in the Water Supply".

Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/projects/magazine/ideas/2009/

They did miss a few such as iPhones as musical instruments but nobody's perfect.

This is as close to a year end review you will get from me. I promise.

Click on each picture to see better views from my photo stream...

Join the great Wolfram Tone Jam!

Here's the link:

http://tones.wolfram.com/

Give it a try even if you are not musically inclined! Tones is easy to figure out even for the musically or computer challenged.

Just go to here to generate your "Tone"...play with the controls!

Once you have your cool tone, save it in a collection just as I did. Near the bottom of the mytones page is a line that says "Public URL for this collection:" with a URL. Post that URL as a comment this blog entry and tell me what worked for you, what control settings etc. And of course comment on other people's sure to be great tones.

By the way, once you have saved a tone, you may be able to download a tone as a ring tone for your cell phone depending on your phone and carrier. Surely anyone can make a ring tone that is better than 99% of the ring tones out there.

Lots more is explained in the FAQ..

It's here! Wolfram Research, best known for its Mathematica software just launched Wolfram Alpha. According to Wolfram Alpha's website, the goal of Wolfram Alpha is to "...make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone". Immediately everyone wants to compare this system to Google but they are really quite different. Google crawls the web and spits out what ever web pages match your query.

Wolfram Alpha doesn't search the web but rather relies on curated data sets which it then uses to compute a distillation of that data related to the query. Right now it is strongest in doing straight out mathematical queries. For instance typing "logistic equation" into Google's search window nets you about 269,000 potential sites. Doing the same thing in Wolfram Alpha right now, nets you nothing except a message that WolframAlpha isn't sure what to do with my input.

Now granted that is not too unusual-most people don't know what to do with my input so why should a program be any different?

warning geek attack

Ironically one of the first sites that pops up on Google is from Wolfram's Math World, so exploring that I decided to use some of the equations from this site as input to Wolfram Alpha. So I entered the math expression for the logistic equation into Wolfram Alpha: dN/dt = rN(k-N)/K and Wolfram/Alpha dutifully gave me the solution to the differential equation...but not a whole lot else. Ah so maybe it wants a specific logistic equation.

So I entered dN/dt = 5N(1000-N)/1000 and got some output that looked right including some pretty logistic equation plots. But this only worked if I entered the equation with the proper lower case d in on the left hand side.

end geek attack

This illustrates the computational nature of Wolfram Alpha and how it differs from Google. Google does no computations, Wolfram Alpha attempted to compute something. Even when given my general logistic input, Wolfram Alpha computed the general solution for the equation. Furthermore it provided me with a Mathematica notebook, that if my computer had Wolfram's Mathematica software on it, I could have used it to explore the logistic equation to my heart's content.

One thing I found a bit disturbing is Wolfram Alpha's claim that it can be cited as primary source, like a scholarly research paper. For some of what it can do that may be perfectly valid- for instance mathematical calculations and graphing where the routines are well known or can be followed. But much of Wolfram Alpha relies, or will rely, on curated information and unless the information trail is explicitly laid out I would be really leery about relying on Wolfram Alpha as a primary reference. Otherwise Wolfram Alpha could turn out to be the worlds biggest garbage in, garbage out generator.

But be patient. Right now Alpha is really very much undeveloped and will probably appeal immediately to people needing to do calculations. However, if you think about it, we all do calculations whether we realize it or not, whether we are artists or poets or musicians, so perhaps as Wolfram Alpha's curated data sets and and computational routines get more sophisticated Wolfram Alpha will be a useful tool along side Google.

I wonder if we will use alpha as a verb.

By the way, the Wolfram Alpha site also has links to other cool stuff. For instance I had lots of fun with Wolfram Tones, which generates synthetic melodies you can save and modify. Some of the results are quite interesting and I bet Wolfram Tone melodies will start cropping up as samples. Here is a link to some of my efforts including my soon to be famous hit: "Accordion R & B":

my tones

Back when our government ousted Manual Noriaga from Panama, as I recall, rock music was used in an attempt rattle him. I suppose that sort of military use of sound is appropriate. But in a civilian setting? Consider this article about a New Zealand mall's attempt to deal with a bunch of allegedly unruly teens.

Their solution? Pipe Barry Manilow music into the area.

"The intention is to change the environment in a positive way ... so nobody feels threatened or intimidated," Central City Business Association manager Paul Lonsdale told The Associated Press. "I did not say Barry Manilow is a weapon of mass destruction."

Positive way? Did they consider that Manilow's music might be disliked by other mall visitors and bad for the brain? Is this really some evil plot by the Hulu aliens?

One teen said...we'll just bring a stereo and play it louder. I'm with the teens.

Manual Noriaga on My Space