Higgs boson Atlas remix

Shahram Ashkan shamed me into doing a proper ACID remix of the Higgs Boson data-set sonification. Much improved, with Steve-Reich-esque phase shifting, grunge guitar and George Bush mashed with (by) Public Enemy. Still has Ryan Holifield's disco Strauss. ;) The din in the middle section is supposed to represent the trillions of data in which the single Higgs boson is hidden -- plus the pop-media noise that drowns out epic scientific breakthroughs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBAeld2jH8Q&feature=plcp
and
https://www.dropbox.com/s/m7ekttspdovt0tx/Higgs%20Boson%20Atlas%20Remix.mp3

North Carolina = Nazi apartheid bigots

Overstatement?  Maybe — or maybe it’s just early.  Opposing gay marriage — opposing gay anything-legal, much less anything admirable, like wanting to make a life-long romantic commitment — is bigotry.  Enshrining bigotry in law is apartheid: legal, institutional bigotry.  No different than the early days of the Nazi regime — or Jim Crow — when bigotry, which is mere stupidity, was justified by appeals to Terdishin and Scrupshur.

 

And what about Scrupshur?  What about basing any moral decision, much less any public policy, on an appeal to ancient cult ravings?  It would be beneath contempt — if it weren’t the majority opinion of North Carolinians.  It’s clearly insane and stupid — but not to the majority of Amurkins.  No, the majority of Amurkins believe in angels and demons and, not understanding science, dislike science.  And this too recalls the Jim-Crow South and Nazi Germany: cultures in which religious magical thinking gave way all too easily, as of course it must, to baser and more compelling magical thinking, e.g. animalistic us-vs-them bigotry. 

 

It ain’t right how them quars do!  And they wants to make us all der lak them.  They wants our kids to der it!  Moogoo the rain god says it’s a sin.  He’ll bring plague and famine on us for our evil ways. 

 

Step one: a culture embraces religion, taboo and similar cave-man crap.  Step two: freely irrational, it justifies various base perversions.  Step three: it institutionalizes these base perversions in its social contract.  Step three is apartheid.  Step four?  There is no step four.  Step four is simply seeing how far said culture will carry their apartheid until their the culture dies or is out-competed or destroyed by less base, less vile, less animalistic cultures.  This is what Bill Clinton was trying to tell NC with his much more polite warning that passing this law would drive smart, progressive entrepreneurs away from the state.  In the long run, if the insane religious bigots continue to have their way in this country, it’ll do that and much, much worse.  If it continues, the US will end up like Iran: a former empire collapsed into a theocratic failed state.

 

Windows 8: a stick-shift automatic than runs off a lemon battery? Or worse.

I’ve been a life-long loyal Windows user on the PC side, and even stuck with Windows Mobile long after it ceased to be the only smartphone operating system — well, that and Palm — all of which was long before every 11-year-old mall rat and grandmother “discovered,” thanks to Apple, smartphones (which had been around for a decade).  Windows 7/8 Phone, with its tiled Metro interface, is a marvelous, fresh, gorgeous phone OS — that arrived too late to the mobile OS party it initially hosted: though not as novel in appearance, the Apple/Android mobile OS is identical to Windows Phone in its functionality, and the market share and developer universe — especially of Android — has killed MS’s attempts to pry its way back into the phone market.

 

The smartphone universe is the key sector of the consumer tech market.  Smartphones are the gateway drug, as it were, to more powerful and expensive computing devices. 

 

Windows 8 was to be MS’ last stand, wherein it would port its Metro interface from the phone to the desktop, thereby radically revolutionizing the look, if not the basic function, of the PC interface.  That might’ve been nice!  What Windows 8 is turning out to be is an epic fail, in which MS has committed neither to a full implementation of Metro NOR to a continuous improvement of the highly successful Windows 7 interface.  Instead, Windows 8 jams both interfaces awkwardly into one machine, each with its own logic and rules, and forces you to hop back and forth between the two.  It’s a great example of marketing trumping engineering: force users to use tomorrow’s skin to operate yesterday’s machine.  It’s like putting an automatic-transmission lever on the steering wheel of a standard-transmission car: you put the car in Drive with the lever — but then use the stick shift on the floor to change gears.

 

MS can’t — or couldn’t — afford to lose the smartphone war.  But its only remaining beach-head in the technology market was the residual PC market share it still holds there after decades of near-total dominance.  Windows 8 was supposed to force those PC users to take a good look at Metro, realize it was a desirable alternative to the Apple/Android smartphone OS, and run out and buy Windows Phones. 

 

But it won’t happen.  Windows 8 is a dog, a Frankenstein, an epic fail.  Users dislike it and developers don’t want to write for it.   Instead of driving the PC base to Windows Phones, it’s going to drive people (and developers) from Windows to the now-very-viable alternative PC OSes: Apple, Android, Linux.  It’s being called “another Vista,” but the situation is different this time.  Worse.  When MS rolled out its New-Coke Vista, it could afford to fail: its PC market dominance was secure and the smartphone/tablet market hadn’t yet fully matured as the new avant garde of the personal-computing market.  Both of those factors have changed. 

 

MS’ only hope now is to backpedal.  PC users are going to keep Windows 7 like they kept Windows XP, and MS needs to double down on its continued development of 7.  In line with that, 8 needs to be an incremental improvement on 7, and Metro, in 8, needs to be relegated to a sandbox where users can mess with it and leave it alone — NOT shoved in their face as an unavoidable obstruction to the Windows-7 OS that Windows 8 actually is. 

 

Here’s what I don’t understand.  Instead of forcing developers to write apps “for” Metro, would it have been so difficult for MS to simply force regular apps to conform to Metro-esque functionality?  It’s not as if the differences are radical: Metro apps are full-screen (or fixed increments) and have hot control corners.  Surely MS could have found a way to rework regular apps on the fly, so that they’d all just “be” Metro apps — and not require new versions.  Not to mention two simultaneous operating systems. 

 

But for whatever reason, they didn’t.  Instead, they’re pushing a PC OS that says “Hey user: do you want to know what it’d be like if your PC was powered by a lemon with zinc and copper electrodes and had no buttons at all?  Great, because we’re going to force you to.”  They got the lemon part right.

 

Tasty.

 

by wrapping them carefully in foil and placing them gently in a nice hot oven.

Only you can prevent forest fires - by smoking pot.

 

Screen clipping taken: 2/6/2012 7:08 PM

 

It's so sad when federal agencies try to be cool.  Really?  "Get your Smokey on?"  Wrong in so many ways.

So tired of "libertarianism."

Since government (in the abstract/general sense) is simply the instantiation of the social contract, it's not possible to hate government (in the abstract/general sense) without being a masochist or a sociopath. One can hate a certain government, absolutely -- but it's incumbent upon whoever CLAIMS to do so (it's in fact quite rare, though claims to it are common) to first understand that government, as well as his and all his fellow citizens' legitimate interest in it. That's no small task. Nor is it one that I've found many self-proclaimed "libertarians" to have successfully tackled.

OCR on the Android: Google Goggles, Google Docs, Mobile OCR Free, Evernote

If you're an avid note-taker when you read, you know how useful OCR (optical character recognition) is. On the desktop side of things, Adobe Acrobat works brilliantly, though there are many cheap/free alternatives. If you're reading a printed book or magazine and want to grab a paragraph to add to your notes, you can always scan it and use powerful desktop OCR -- but what a pain! How nice if you could just snap the excerpt you wanted with your smartphone and boom, have the text (not some big photo of it!) ready to paste into a document or an e-mail. I tried a few programs & below are the results, worst (for OCR) to best.

Not actually OCR: Google Goggles, Evernote

I don't understand the fuss about Google Goggles as an OCR tool: it doesn't work well as one. Its OCR is so-so, but the real deal-killer is that, when Goggles recognizes the source of some text (e.g. the book it comes from), it doesn't OCR the text you're trying to capture; instead, it redirects you to that book's page on Google Books. Goggles is OK for running web searches on things you can snap pictures of, but it's not an OCR program. Evernote isn't either. While it will allegedly OCR text in photos you put into an Evernote note, you can't really get AT that text. It's used for making text in images searchable, and works only on images you copy to Evernote's server -- i.e. not on local notebooks.

Not-bad OCR: Google Docs

Google Docs is a true OCR solution. You install the Google Docs app on your phone, and it includes an option that lets you create a new online doc from a photo, automatically OCR-ing text that's in the photo. Its recognition accuracy is so-so. Below is what Google Docs did with a photo of a block of text from Sam Harris' 2010 book The Moral Landscape; I highlighted the OCR errors in red.

The framework of a moral landscape guarantees that many people will have flawed conceptions of morality, just as many people have Hgwcd conceptions of physics. Some people think "physics" includes (or validates) practices like astrology, voodoo, and homeopathy. These people arc, by all appearances, simply wrong about physics. ln the United States. a majority ofpeoplc (57 percent) believe that preventing homosexuals from marrying is a "moral" imperative." However. if this belief rests on a flawed sense of how we can maximize our well-being, such people may simply be wrong about morality. And the Fact tha: millions of pcoplc use the term "morality" as ai synonym For religious dogmatism, racism, sexism. or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

Near-perfect OCR: Mobile OCR Free

Mobile OCR Free is available here on the Android Market. A $5 paid version adds more languages and removes a splash screen. It had by far the best accuracy of any OCR program for the Android -- near-perfect. It has a bare-bones interface. The app has no built-in camera, so you can't de-skew or crop an image in it; you have to do that in your camera/gallery program, which isn't too hard. Like Google Docs, the app requires a network connection; it uses powerful servers on the web, and not your phone's puny processor, to do the OCR. Its OCR accuracy is much better than that of Google Docs, and it kicks back your result in a much simpler and more usable form: a plain block of text with a "copy text to clipboard" button, letting you paste it wherever you want. Here's how Mobile OCR Free handled the exact same text photo from that Sam Harris book (with the one error highlighted):

The framework of a moral landscape guarantees that many people
will have flawed conceptions of morality, just as many people have
flawed conceptions of physics. Some people think "physics" includes (or
validates) practices like astrology, voodoo, and homeopathy. These peo-
ple are, by all appearances, simply wrong about physics. In the United
States, a majority of people (57 percent) believe that preventing homo-
sexuals from marrying is a "moral" imperative. * However, if this belief
rests on a flawed sense of how we can maximize our well-being, such
people may simplv be wrong about morality. And the fact that millions
of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogma-
tism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should
not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

The photo these two programs were OCR-ing from was nothing special: medium resolution, so-so contrast, slightly uneven lighting and a decent bit of skew/warp. Here 'tis: