{technology} – Page 53 – { feuilleton }

Old music and old technology

Clearing junk today turned up some obsolete artefacts one of which (the Kraftwerk) has been kept for purely sentimental reasons. It’s been amusing the past few years watching the vinyl disc refuse to crawl onto the scrapheap of history despite its death having been announced many times over by journalists who should know better. Several of the CD releases I’ve designed recently have also been brought out in vinyl editions. Meanwhile the audio cassette really is on the way out: “Sales of music cassettes in the U.S. dropped from 442 million in 1990 to about 700,000 in 2006” says Wikipedia. I certainly won’t mourn its passing; portability aside, I always hated these things. Music sounded shitty unless the tape was chrome or some other high-quality format, and whatever the quality they were all subject to mangling by cheap cassette players.

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The Corpus Clock

This splendid clock is unveiled by Professor Stephen Hawking later today at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. If it hadn’t cost a million pounds to develop I’d probably be demanding that someone find me one for Christmas. The mechanical monster perched at the top is explained by its creator:

“It is terrifying, it is meant to be,” said John C Taylor, the creator and funder of an extraordinary new clock to be unveiled tomorrow by Stephen Hawking at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. “Basically I view time as not on your side. He’ll eat up every minute of your life, and as soon as one has gone he’s salivating for the next. It’s not a bad thing to remind students of. I never felt like this until I woke up on my 70th birthday, and was stricken at the thought of how much I still wanted to do, and how little time remained.”

Unfortunately there are few decent pictures to be had of the device but the Telegraph has an article which describes its “grasshopper escapement”, while the Guardian goes one better with a video of the clock in action.

Update: Longer video at the university site with Dr Taylor explaining the clock in detail.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gold robots
• The art of Sergei Aparin
• The art of Almacan
• The sculpture of Christopher Conte
• The Bowes Swan

Textorizer

Textorizer takes a raster image in a format such as png, jpeg or gif, detects edges using a Sobel convolution filter and replaces them with supplied lines of text.

In a similar vein, you can Textorize a picture using a downloadable application. Flickr has a pool of examples.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Word games

Particle physics

It’s perhaps fitting that in the same week (almost the same day) that the Large Hadron Collider was finally switched on, Apple should release iTunes v. 8.0. The improved Visualizer for this application generates patterns not so far removed from the graphics created to explain quantum interactions or cosmic motion. (And while we’re discussing quantum events, let’s not forget this.)

I enthused last year about the Jelly setting of the Visualizer but these new graphics are a step—a quantum leap, even—beyond that, with a variety of spinning orbs and glowing lights which shoot out streams of sparks and flares of colour. Variations can be had by pressing the M key which cycles through the settings. The abstract fish and/or spermatozoa are especially impressive the way they charge around the screen while their world revolves in three dimensions. If Jelly makes you feel like you’re on drugs, watching these new effects reacting in time to some suitably contemporary music—Aerial by 2562, for instance—makes me feel for once that I’m living in the future I expected to find this side of the year 2000.

• Nature explains what the LHC has actually been built for.