News You Can Bruise for 2006 February 22

"Salivator Action"

Car #1 wants to turn left. It is blocked by car #2, which is trying to go straight in the opposite direction but is blocked by traffic all the way to the next light. Car #2 can't move, and it's blocking the intersection. So of course car #1 honks at it. Cars behind car #1 honk at it because its deadlocked desire to turn left is preventing them from going straight. Honk honk.

The occupants of cars #1 and #2 now roll down their windows and begin to argue. Who knows what about.

This argument continues long after the light in front of car #2 turns green, and the cars in front of it have moved on. Now car #2 could move too, but the driver's still arguing with the driver of car #1. Everyone loses! Honk honk. Thats's New York.

I submitted a set of constrained constraints to Jack Masters of Flag on the Moon, and he wrote a comic incorporating my constraints! Awesome! Not sure why I think it's so awesome since that's basically what he said he'd do. Oh wait, it's the comic itself that's awesome. (The constraints on my constraints are listed here).

I think Crow is made out of a nickel alloy, but I can't find a source for that. All I could find was a non-canon Bill Corbett saying Crow is "some strange gold alloy". But the inclusion of Crow in the comic makes up for any inaccuracies. Anyway, clearly he should be made of chromium. Chroooomium.

I'm done with my Cookbook recipes (the rest are contributors' or Lucas's), so I'm writing some additional recipes about really cool things. This because 1) such things are, by definition, really cool, and 2) I hope that their very presence will make people want to buy the book. They will leap out at you from the table of contents and say "I am awesome! Buy this book at once!". That's the plan, anyway.

Today's cool thing is Ruby's midilib, the... wait for it... Ruby interface to MIDI files. I did a recipe that shows how to visualize data as a MIDI file, and how to compose algorithmic music (sample composition).

While learning about midilib I came up with an observation about MIDI, which is that it's good for accurately representing what happens when you play a real instrument. It's kind of frustrating and unnormalized if you need to programatically compose music. I ended up taking a tip from the excellent MIDI Scripter project, and showing how to write a little wrapper on top of midilib that makes composition easier.

The experience gave me a huge number of ideas for musical programming projects. With my near-total lack of theoretical training, I will be unencumbered by traditional notions of "harmony" and "taste". For one, I plan to get into fractal music, though probably not the way the author of that web page defines it. Hard to tell, with that color scheme.