There’s no point trying to quote it, so instead you can read the article here, read more about Bill Joy here, or read responses and criticism of the article here.

Won’t it be great when the military can send in the tanks without having to put crews in harm’s way?

Yes and no. The fewer casualties, the better. But what becomes of our reluctance to send the military galavanting around the sordid parts of the world once American casualties are taken out of the equation? We have almost no restraint as it is. I shudder to think of how easily Presidents and legislators will make the decision to go to war when the attitude of “We can just send robots to do it!” becomes entrenched. We saw what the advancements in design of cruise missiles in the 1980s did to the Executive Branch; if someone’s acting up, just lob a dozen Tomahawks at them from a few hundred miles away. It became the easy way to intervene without actually making a commitment or putting Americans at risk. Collateral damage isn’t much of a deterrent to our political class. UAVs are another step in that direction, a step toward a future with more remotely operated and even autonomous means of doing the dirty work.

It’s great that technology allows more American soldiers to come home alive and in one piece, but if we remove the U.S. body count from the decision-making process the only restraints on waging war will be common sense, morality, and logic. Yeah, let’s start taking bets on how well that works.

One of my favorite hacks at last weekend’s Music Hack Day is Tristan’s Swinger.  The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing.  It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half.  It has quite a magical effect.  Some examples:
Every Breath You Take (swing version) by TeeJay

Sweet Child O’ Mine (Swing Version) by plamere

You can find more examples in the original blog post. The results really are truly impressive. I’m looking forward to playing with Tristan Jehan‘s code, and also having a look at his PhD thesis:

Machines have the power and potential to make expressive music on their own. This thesis aims to computationally model the process of creating music using experience from listening to examples. Our unbiased signal-based solution models the life cycle of listening, composing, and performing, turning the machine into an active musician, instead of simply an instrument. We accomplish this through an analysis-synthesis technique by combined perceptual and structural modeling of the musical surface, which leads to a minimal data representation.

Fascinating stuff!

The script makes use of pyexiv2 – the 0.2 branch – for metadata editing, mechanize for grabbing pages and submitting error reports, the very handy unaccented_map() class (included) for unicode trickery and of course the wonderful XML parser, BeautifulSoup.

Naturally, it’s available from the Big Picture Cataloguer’s page in the Code section of this site.

Given how much The Big Picture galleries’ HTML format has subtly changed over time, and the fact I wrote this in a rush, it’s quite messy, but it does the job.

Today’s update is of version 0.3, which has an optional “quiet mode” to enable users to schedule the program to run frequently. Enjoy!

Now, I’m happy that the application is stable enough to release to the world in the Code section of my website.

Since I don’t want people to be hammering The Boston Globe’s servers, I’ve made the script wait a fraction of a second between each request, and since I don’t want people to be able to disable this functionality, unfortunately only binaries will be available for the time being. Windows binaries are available already, OS X and Linux binaries to come in a few days.

Indeed, if those at The Boston Globe have a problem with how the program operates, they need simply contact me and we can come to an agreement, but I’ve worked hard to make sure that the program contacts their servers as little as possible.

Bug reports will be automatically submitted through this website too, but if you have any unforeseen problems (e.g. a crash or a hang), email me with as much information as possible (text describing the “Traceback” printed before the crash, what album/photo the program was working on, etc).

What can you do once you’ve got the entire 2GB collection of photos downloaded? Well, you can simply look through them at your own pace and comfort, or indeed choose to create a montage screensaver from them (although be warned – a screensaver that fades from a beautiful Antarctic landscape to a bloody photo of a victim of the war in Afghanistan might not be exactly what you had in mind.)

But in any event, hopefully it’ll be of some use. Enjoy!

In any event, having gone through the blog-post he had linked I decided to share some of my new discoveries here myself:

• Building Maker: A Google app I was unaware of, which lets you add the 3D element to Google Maps. For all bored architects out there (since this is just what they want to be doing in their time off.)
• Ikea Hacker: Neat stuff done with bog-standard Ikea furniture.
• Strange Maps: A blog of, well, old and interesting maps. I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say strange…
• Newseum: The front pages of newspapers from 78 countries around the world.
• Cooking For Engineers: This one reminded me of my father, a pragmatist who insists on weighing pasta before cooking it, in order to make sure he’ll be doling out the correct amount. Nothing wrong with approaching cooking as a science, as opposed to an art!
• GetHuman.com: An excellent idea for a website. This one tells you which keys you need to press in order to get an actual human operator on the line when calling a large company, saving you the time of listening to and trying to interact with a computerised system.
• PDFGeni.com: Another great idea — a repository of PDF documents such as old technical manuals, academic texts, and so on.

I feel I must write a disclaimer, saying I haven’t used or read these sites extensively, having just discovered them a few hours ago, but from first impressions they do look like they deserve a bookmark.

Not only is there to be a secret list of blocked websites, such as exists in Australia, but the government is pushing for more data to be collected from citizens and retained for a long period of time.

A video which caught my attention a while back was entitled Du bist Terrorist (You are a terrorist). With soft ambient music playing, and deceptively pleasantly designed imagery, the two-minute video parodies the Du bist Deutschland ad-campaign with a soft, reassuring voice informing you of what the German government has in store for you, in terms of heavier and more invasive surveillance — because You are a terrorist.

Earlier this week I found that the same people had created a new video in the same vein, entitled Rette deine Freiheit (Save your freedom). The video focuses much more on the coming internet censorship in Germany than just data retention and physical surveillance.

Since there was no English translation available, I decided to translate it and re-upload to Youtube. The result is below:

The translation is by no means perfect, but at least it’s something. There were a few tricky problems with it:

• Einfach wegschauen: Literally “simply look away”, the video describes this as the method tried-and-tested by members of families with a history of domestic abuse. I was going to translate it as “simply look the other way” in its first instance, since this is the closest phrase in English that pertains to such a situation. However, this doesn’t exactly capture the double-meaning employed in the video, since it implies wilful ignorance which isn’t quite applicable to what the government is doing, so I decided to settle on “simply block it out”. I’m not sure I’m happy with this, however. Suggestions?
• In the sentence, “In Prävention, Therapie und Personal investiert hätte dies vielen Opfern helfen können: Reinste Verschwendung”, the meaning that is sarcastically implied is that the money that could be invested in preventative measures, therapy and personelle is much better spent on building an internet block. I don’t think I captured this very well.

In any event, there’s likely to be an official translation soon (I just saw an “Englisch (bald verfügbar)” notice at the top of the official page now — perhaps my emailing asking for a transcript of the video got them in a rush) and these issues will cease to be.

One last thing — if you are interested in learning more about the situation in Germany regarding internet freedom and the child pornography scare, I’d not only urge you to visit the links above, but also this shocking, but morbidly fascinating account of one techie’s work in the murkiest of subcultures. Thankfully, he doesn’t go into detail about actual child abuse, but instead details exactly how child pornography rings work, using the internet and computers.

Put simply, it proves what anyone with a clue already knows: current proposals for internet censorship will have absolutely no impact whatsoever on paedophiles and child pornographers and will only serve to infringe the rights of normal, law-abiding internet users.

Thanks to Áine and Patricia for help with one or two minor parts of the translation.

The computer performs a frequency analysis of the sound spectrum, aided by Ablinger himself, which is then fed into the piano player and out comes the child’s voice.

(Video in German with English subtitles)

While I wouldn’t have much hope for people trying to work out what the piano is “saying” without the aid of seeing the words as they’re heard, I think it’s a pretty interesting experiment. The auto-player in itself is something to be marvelled at. Neat!

Worth the read!