Fri, 6 May 2005 00:00:00 UT

Earth Songs

My interest in music has extended into an interest in sound and all sorts of wavelengths. Recently I've become interested in listening to radio signals. Tonight I found NASA's Earth Songs article by that the INSPIRE project. I've been happily listening to their collection of audible VLF and wondering how to make music with this.
The most unusual signal I've found yet is the Russian Woodpecker. I found an audible version on one of the many websites that claim that the woodpecker is actually a mind control device. (Yes seriously, ask google)

While distracting myself from real work, I found the Cool Tools website. I am so going to spend some serious cash on this stuff.

I recently posted a link to Richard Hamming's You and Your Research on lambda-the-ultimate.org. One part of Hamming's talk that interested me was the notion that you can't research the same subject for more than a few years before you run out of useful contributions, and it's time to change your field of interest. I think he's right, and there's some related research that supports this conclusion: Dream teams thrive on mix of old and new blood.

The sudden dearth of amusing images on my blog comes from a large number of html message board weenies linking to only the images. I've renamed the most popular images, and will completely remove them if necessary. The text portion of my blog is the important part, the pictures are just for fun.

I spent about ten minutes working on Fermat's Last Margin so far. Even though it's nearly finished, I'll have to do better than that if I want to get it out this weekend. SandglassProgramming with Sanduhr is a great help for me, I set it on fifteen minutes increase the timeout if I'm working when it rings, or decrease the timeout if I'm not.
Any great suggestions for a logo for Fermat's Last Margin?

Today's Haskell source code goodies are by the recently mentioned Einar Karttunen, also known as musasabi on the #haskell irc channel. He has several original works including:

SerTH - Binary serialization library (this is especially cool since it uses Template Haskell to automatically derive serialization)
Codec-Compression-LZF - binding to liblzf
network-alt - alternative networking library (includes IPv6!)
hs-fltk - a FLTK GUI binding

Go Einar! w00!