free variable

Causation

Will Benton — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:31:24 +0000

Football season is blissfully close — and, with it, the only time of the year that I actually watch television. As always, I feel compelled to revisit the perennial question: have those NHTSA advertisements really cut back on the number of people driving around in vehicles shoulder-full of booze?

I’d appreciate any hard data on this question.

Revolting

Will Benton — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:58:15 +0000

I noticed (via the MF catalog) that Electro-Harmonix has just released something called a “Bass Blogger.” In addition to being a colossally stupid, already-anachronistic name, this somehow sounds really dirty. From looking at the product description, I can’t tell it apart from their other 74 bass distortion pedals, but whatever.

Augh.

Will Benton — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:44:24 +0000

I suppose that I either need to be less frugal with the “humor” and “snark” tags, or I need to start embracing more fully a new rôle as someone who will give the same story to get a bit of attention.

Spam etiquette

Will Benton — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:13:04 +0000

Here’s a quote from an actual unsolicited employment-bot email: “If you no longer wish to receive this email in [the] future, please contact XXX.”

Hey, what led you to believe that I wanted to receive this email in the present?

Clarity

Will Benton — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 02:26:41 +0000

I’m not sure what the UW Parking Office was trying to accomplish with the signage on this meter:

Exclusive Canon 50D pictures

Will Benton — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:18:32 +0000

This morning, a number of gadget sites drew attention to leaked specs for Canon’s rumored 50D DSLR. While I love my 40D, I can now disclose that I have been testing a prerelease copy of the 50D, and it is a remarkable camera. The most interesting new feature is support for extreme low-light photography, including an ISO 12,800 mode. Combined with the new 15.1 MP sensor, this can produce some truly astonishing images. While I’m unwilling to post these to flickr (I don’t want to be caught by an EXIF search), I’m happy to share some example pictures using this feature on this site:

First up, a picture of the night sky from outside of my house. Here’s a macro photograph of an ancient Roman coin (I post-processed this one a little). Finally, here’s an adorable one of Thomas.

I think that this new high-sensitivity mode will really mark the beginning of a creative revolution. Great work, Canon!

Munich (via Switzerland)

Will Benton — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:24:35 +0000

Graphic Design Goes to the Games: a very nice overview of Olympic branding from Khoi Vinh; scroll down to see some beautiful Swiss-influenced materials from the 1972 Munich Games.

The quotes are part of the phrase

Will Benton — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:10:01 +0000

Here’s your spot of D.C. nostalgia for the day: “The quotes are part of the phrase.” (See also here.)

Sorted by irrelevance

Will Benton — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:03:56 +0000

The ACM Digital Library should be useful. It is one of the largest single-site repositories of academic writing about computer science and holds almost every paper published within the last thirty years that bears an ACM copyright. Unfortunately, it does so behind an absurdly ridiculous interface.

Say you wanted to find Tom Knight’s classic 1986 paper “An architecture for mostly functional languages.” This paper appeared in an ACM conference (specifically, the ACM conference on Lisp and functional programming), so you’d be right to search the ACM DL for it. It would be reasonable to assume that searching for “knight mostly functional” would give you a good chance of finding the paper quickly.

If you did this, you’d be presented with a list of results “sorted by relevance.” The most “relevant” results, it appears, are a wide range of papers from the last ten years on speculative multithreading — from conferences, journals, and unrefereed newsletters — that cite Knight’s paper. The ACM’s search algorithm identifies Knight’s actual paper as the 46th most “relevant” search result for “knight mostly functional.” This would be risible if there were tens of thousands of search results for this string. Since there are only 48, it’s completely unconscionable.

Seek and ye shall find, I guess.

On quotation

Will Benton — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:56:47 +0000

Andrea (to Thomas): “Say ‘Thanks for letting me visit your house!’”

Thomas: “Thanks for visiting my house!”

LLVM talks

Will Benton — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:58:33 +0000

Unfortunately, these videos of talks about the LLVM compiler infrastructure and virtual machine were released at precisely the moment when I have the least amount of free time in recent memory. (But you might be able to enjoy them now).

On scrolling

Will Benton — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:38:40 +0000

Adam Engst points out that “you pull down on a Mac scroll wheel to scroll down, but push up on an iPhone/touch to scroll down.” This confused me for my first couple of days of iPhone use, but it makes a little more sense when you consider the underlying metaphor: on the iPhone, the idea seems to be that you are “grabbing” the paper and moving it under the window. Therefore, on the iPhone, your scrolling mimics moving the paper with your fingers under the viewport; on the Mac, you mimic moving the window through the document. (The latter behavior makes much less when I think about it, but I suspect it is an artifact of the first scroll wheel applications.)

(I remember being similarly confused when I first used the Sibelius music notation software on my Mac, which also uses a “grab the page and move it under the window” idea. It probably didn’t help that I was having to unlearn many years of Finale ninjahood….)

In which our hero laments supply, demand

Will Benton — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 18:34:24 +0000

Royalty-free “Love”

Will Benton — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:00:01 +0000

There was a lot of commotion a while ago when some overcaffeinated kid revealed that the beat for the ubiquitous Usher single “Love in This Club” is made up of royalty-free loops, specifically, some synthesizer lines from the “Euro Hero Synth” set in Apple’s GarageBand. (All of the Apple loops have these bafflingly creativity-destroying names like “Cop Show Clav,” “Glow Stick Anthem Acid Bass,” “Angsty Chorused Flannel Stratocaster,” and “Uzbek Tech-House Breakdown Balalaika.”)

Of course, I use and love Logic Studio (which comes with approximately 2.7 years of royalty-free loops, including all of those included with GarageBand), but I never install loops. If I had — and if, you know, everyone else in the world hadn’t already done it — I might throw down a quick and mildly droll remix. This would probably be even easier than it sounds, since it seems like much of the production for “Love in This Club” may have been done in GarageBand. In particular, you might notice the obvious application of the “Earbleed Squarewave Mastering” preset:

Usher may not “care who’s watching,” but he cares even less, apparently, about those who are listening. Who’s winning the loudness war now?

NB: some preset and loop names may be imaginary.

Love at first email

Will Benton — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:32:15 +0000

I’m finding it hard to suppress a big smile after reading Love At (Almost) First Email at Ben Brown’s site. (You might enjoy it even if you don’t know Ben.)