My friend Joshua Kriegshauser, with whom I worked at Electronic Arts, has posted a magnificent video of his assembly of the 5,200-piece Millennium Falcon lego kit over the span of 11 days. Be sure to watch for the outfit changes!
Tremendous work, Josh!
NOTE: This is an audience participation post. See the bottom for how you can help!
The other afternoon, I was listening to WNYC’s Radio Lab, a show from a New York public radio station. Radio Lab always has really interesting shows, where they take a topic and run with it wherever the curiosity of the inquisitive hosts leads. The topic du jour was Musical Intelligence, and the major chapters of the program included tonal language as it relates to perfect pitch, our tendency to use baby talk as a surrogate and supplement for touch, and a music composition program that uses human composers’ scores as input.
(Interesting fact: people who grow up speaking tonal languages, such at Mandarin or Vietnamese where the pitch at which one speaks a work alters its meaning, have a 75% incidence of perfect pitch, whereas the rest of the world has 10% or less.)
One of the topics the show discussed was how the brain deals with unfamiliar sounds. Since our gray matter likes nothing better than recognizing and ordering patterns, there’s a dedicated group of neurons that spring into action whenever a new sound intrudes upon your ears. These neurons try to process and catalog the incoming noises. If they fail, they dump out some dopamine, a neurotransmitter that can affect one’s mood.
Now, I have a rather curious quirk: I hate being in noisy places. Being in a restaurant with lots of people and hard surfaces becomes almost physically uncomfortable for me after a mere 5 minutes or so. But playing in or listening to a loud band doesn’t bother me in the same way — my problem seems to be mostly with unstructured sound.
When I heard about this pattern-recognition center in the brain, it occurred to me that perhaps the reason for my aversion to noise is that my brain is unusually aggressive in its attempts to recognize patterns, and when it can’t do so, gets fatigued quickly. This theory would seem to be supported by the fact that I have good relative pitch, and can transcribe a melody I’ve heard more easily than most people. (This, by the way, is my sole gift as a musician, and is the reason I tend to like learning new instruments more than mastering old ones.)
So, to help me corroborate my theory, I need your help! I’d like to find out how people’s skill at recognizing musical patterns correlates to their level of discomfort with noise. If you could help by rating yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 in each of those areas, I’ll compile the results and see if there’s any statistically significant correlation between the two numbers.
To help out, here’s what the scales will be:
So, for my own assessment, I’d give myself an MPR of 8 and a ND of 8 as well.
So, if you’re willing to help, leave a comment with your rating of yourself in these areas! I’d love to have ratings both from other people who are musical and who aren’t so that I can have data on both sides of the equation. Thanks in advance for your contributions, gentle readers!
UPDATE: Early results are coming in. There’s a definite clustering at one corner of the graph. Come on, non-musical and/or noise-loving people, we need to hear from you!
UPDATE 2: More data, and a trend line on the graph now. There is a bit of a trend emerging, though Barry skewed the far end, which may put the lie to my theory. We need some non-musical people to help fill in the gaps for us!
UPDATE 3: You guys rock. Thanks for all the good data. I’ve plotted the additional information, and the correlation I expected look less and less strong. It is interesting that there seems to be an inverse bell distribution on the noise tolerance taken by itself — people seem inclined to be either bothered not much or a fair bit by it. I’ll keep gathering data for a week to gather any stragglers and then post final results.
While shopping for Maggie’s birthday, I stumbled across a copy of Loot, a pirate-themed card game I remembered having read good things about. Noticing the various award stickers plastered across its box, I decided it was worth dropping a few bucks to try it out.
After I spent a couple minutes scanning the rules, Liam, Abigail and I played through one round with our hands down on the table in front of us to help learn the game, and then another the proper way with our cards hidden. The play is fairly straightforward and easy to pick up — no trouble for our 8 year old, and I think our 6 year old could have kept up with a little coaching — but the strategy becomes moderately deep once you don’t know what resources your opponents have at your disposal.
Some other reviewers suggest putting in chocolate treasure coins and having everyone talk like pirates for the duration to enhance the fun, but we really enjoyed it even without the additional pirate trappings and in spite of (or because of) the fact that the kids walloped me both times. Good, approachable fun. I give it a 2.5 on a scale of -7 to π.
I’ve been intrigued by the One Laptop per Child initiative for several months. Some of my interest is philanthropic, though part of me suspects that if we’re really interested in helping the youth of the planet, these funds might better go toward clean water, health care, and more traditional education. The bigger reason that it has caught my eye is technological: in order to meet their goal of creating a flexible, low-maintenance, hackable laptop that can be manufactured and sold for $100, the initiative is doing a lot of really interesting work on both the hardware and the software. If you’re interested in the details, this tech talk is a good starting point.
So, when I heard on NPR that they were going to have a Give One Get One promotion starting in November, my inner philanthropist held hands with my inner technologist and skipped together up to my brain and kicked the living cheese out of my inner spendthrift.
The deal? You plunk down $400. They send you one laptop, and send another to a child in some far-off place.
“Wait a minute!” I hear the more mathematically astute of you shout. “That’s $200 per laptop! What’s up with that?” Well, that’s the rub. There haven’t been enough governments placing orders for the computers to get the economies of scale up to the point where the costs drop to the $100 target. So, by allowing people in the US to place orders, they increase manufacturing volume, causing prices to drop as the expense for specialized components is spread over more units.
I’m really interested to see how this works out for them, as well as to get my hands on one of the little laptops and see what their capabilities are like. At the very least, I expect it to be decent for typing papers and doing Internet research — two vital tasks with 5 students in the house currently!
More to come in December when we get our hands on one of these things and put it through its paces.
Dear Internet:
I am currently in the process of moving this weblog from one server to another. The old server was having troubles that my hosting service was unable to figure out how to fix, so I’m relocating to one of their shiny new boxes with Solaris on it. Things may be slightly bumpy while I work out any kinks, but I should be a more cheerful blogger once the dust settles, since I won’t have to deal with the scourge of comment spam any longer. Hooray!
Your friend,
Sean
UPDATE: A big thank you to Greg Pierce, who pointed me to the excellent Bad Behavior plugin to help keep the comment spam in check.
Over the weekend, the three youngest kids, Kathy and I met up with Chris, Becky, and Mom McMains for a long afternoon at Pedernales Falls State Park. We enjoyed a picnic overlooking the falls, nibbling from each other’s collections of goodies and catching up on the goings-on in each others lives. Floating through the falls looked as if it would both be an immense amount of fun and also quite likely fatal, so we contented ourselves with drinking in the view from a distance.
Once sated, we did a quick hunt for a geocache and then set off for the swimming area. As we paddled around, the swiftness and force of the water assured us that we had made the right decision in not jumping into the falls upstream. After enjoying the water for a while, it occurred to me that there was ample raw material to try rock stacking, something I’d been keen to try for a while. My initial efforts were gratifying:
I quickly learned a few things by experience:
Kathy picked up on the idea, and being the overachiever she is, quickly took it to a level I’d not even approached, creating 6′ tall stacks over in the sand. She assembled a small crowd of onlookers rather quickly:
Great stuff. As I wandered around later, I noticed a few rock stacks that other people had created and saw one fellow trying his hand while perched on a giant rock in the middle of the river. It was fun to see people enjoying that so much!
As a final bit of fun, Chris pulled out a couple of bottles of Coke and some packages of Mentos so that we could reproduce the now-classic “science experiment.” Note: we used regular sugary coke instead of the diet variety that some folks insist is required. It worked just fine, though I’d be interested to do a controlled experiment sometime to see if one produces higher blasts than the other. You can see the video over on YouTube.
The weekend after the L.A. Bachelor Party, I returned to Los Angeles for Ross & Johanna’s wedding. This was a quicker trip than the last, but was a huge treat as well. Ben Mengden, his wife Emily, and I came in Friday morning and headed to the Tuxedo shop to pick up our formalwear. Fortunately, after the last weekend’s ineptitude, the shop had things well in hand for the actual wedding weekend, and we were able to pick up all of our uncomfortable and unfamiliar bits without any fuss whatever.We spent a bit of time wandering about the Third Street Promenade, a nice pedestrian-friendly shopping district, before scooting off to the rehearsal at Bel Air Presbyterian Church, a beautiful edifice sited on a hillside with a miles-long view of the valley stretched out below. The sanctuary featured a fantastic pipe organ along with a less-traditional JumboTron, on which I presumed the church staff replays successful conversions in slow motion. Once everyone had a good grasp on what was going on, we retired to Anna’s Italian restaurant for a marvelous evening of drink, talk, drink, toasts, drink, food and drink.
The next morning, Ben and I met up for a tasty breakfast with Ross, where we swapped stories and jabbered enjoyably for an hour. Once fed, we bid the groom farewell and headed off to the reception hall where we were conscripted to help put up decorations.
If I had sat down with the mission to come up with the most labor-intensive decorations possible, I could hardly have done better than what Ross’ mom had devised: lengths of real ivy, wrapped around strands of Christmas lights and festooned over the crown molding in giant swags. She had apparently gone around her neighborhood and swiped ivy from any source she could find, stuffed it all in two suitcases, and brought it all out (along with wasps and spiders, as we discovered) to California with her.
Once the decorating was more-or-less complete, we struggled through figuring out how all the parts and pieces of the tuxedos went together and headed to the church for the main event. Ross had procured sunglasses for all of us, so we did lots of Reservoir Dogs poses for the photographer before squirreling away into the back room to wait for things to kick off. The photographer was William Innes, who did a beautiful job capturing the highlights of the day. Here’s one of my favorites of Ross and I, in which I, against all odds, kind of look like a [note to my children: please avert your eyes now] badass:
The ceremony itself was lovely. Both Johanna and Ross were actually there, which caused some of the groomsmen to lose a bit of money. Johanna’s father, a minister from North Carolina, conducted the ceremony, obviously very happy for and proud of his daughter. Various family and friends read scripture, and everything went off swimmingly. Looking around at the people assembled, I was delighted to be a part of the constellation there to support the couple as they started a new chapter of life together.
We wrapped up the evening at the reception hall, dancing, eating, talking, drinking, and enjoying the ivy once more. I began to realize that I really was in a different world than the one I was used to when I started talking to some other people at my table. To my left was Brian. He was a writer for CSI: Miami. On my right was Ethan, who wrote for Eureka and now has a movie in production. To his right was his wife Deedee, who writes for Saving Grace. It was quite a different social milieu for someone used to being surrounded by programmers, though in some ways equally geeky.
Among the other interesting folks I got to meet: Andy Cosby, Ross’ production partner and creator of Eureka, Mark Waid, extremely prolific comic writer and extraordinarily nice guy, Michael Alan Nelson, notable comic writer and snazzy dancer, and Colin Ferguson, one of the stars on Eureka who earned my respect by chatting with Jordan (Ross’ 10 year old nephew) for 15 minutes or so at the reception. Ed Quinn, another of the leads on Eureka, was also at the wedding, though I didn’t have a chance to talk with him.
So, once again, congratulations to Ross & Johanna! May your marriage be richly blessed, and may you ever be support, encouragement, blessing, love and entertainment to one another.
In our continued branding extravaganza, I bought 5,000 temporary tattoos featuring our Gato Project logo, suitable for handing out in training classes, distributing at parties, etc. We used tattoofun.com, who did a superb job creating them. Here’s me proudly modeling one of them:
In other work news, we’re starting up a technical weblog where we’ll be detailing some of the technical aspects of our work. If you’re interested in technical stuff, especially web application development, come on by!
THEN: Elderly shoe salesmen would attach themselves to you as soon as you entered the store. They would sit you down, measure your foot, bring you various shoes to try on, provide a shoehorn (and socks, if necessary), extol the virtues of various shoes, make sure there was enough room for your toes, have you walk around with the shoes on, ask you how they feel, and be attentive and persistent until you marched to the counter with a shoebox or two in-hand. It was a bit creepy at times, but at least you felt like there was someone who knew shoes on your side.
NOW: Young shoe salesperson grudgingly shows you where the shoes are, offers ill-informed and unhelpful advice only when pressed, and scampers away, leaving you to your own devices, as soon as possible. She’ll resurface only to take your money while scrupulously avoiding eye contact, making one wish one had just bought shoes from Amazon after all.
POSTSCRIPT: Yes, I know I sound like a grumpy old man who starts every sentence with a quavering “Back in my day…” Tough berries. If I have to look my 40 year birthday in the eye soon, I’m at least entitled to some of the crotchety pleasures of the older set, including blogging about young people and their hula hoops, soda pop, pokemon and rock and roll. Later, for an encore, I’ll tell those dern kids to stay off of my yard.
