One of my favorite authors, Sir Terry Pratchett, died today at age 66 from complications due to Alzheimer’s Disease. His death was announced (beautifully) with appropriate humor on Twitter.
For those of you who haven’t read the 40+ Discworld books, Pratchett’s Death character always speaks in all caps.
A brilliant music hack using the equally brilliant Echo Nest API:
What is this?
For when your favorite song just isn’t long enough. This web app lets you upload a favorite MP3 and will then generate a never-ending and ever changing version of the song. It does what Infinite Gangnam Style did but for any song.
It never stops?
That’s right. It will play forever.How does it work?
We use the Echo Nest analyzer to break the song into beats. We play the song beat by beat, but at every beat there’s a chance that we will jump to a different part of song that happens to sound very similar to the current beat. For beat similarity we look at pitch, timbre, loudness, duration and the position of the beat within a bar. There’s a nifty visualization that shows all the possible transitions that can occur at any beat.
I’ve been a big fan of WolframAlpha for several years now. The sheer amount of data in the system, as well as the functions that can be applied to the data, is staggering. Well, Stephen Wolfram and his team have outdone themselves with Wolfram Language. This is real next level, game changing tech.
I can’t wait to try this!
This is a brilliant idea if it actually works.
Our team is proud to present the Yuni — the first headphone offering true stereo sound for individuals with unilateral deafness or hearing impairment!
Since most headphone manufacturers ignore the needs of unilaterally deaf listeners, the options have been limited. Either miss half the music, or find a way to collapse the two stereo channels into a single channel and listen with one ear. But the interference between the two channels coming from the same speaker will boost some frequencies and cut others, resulting in a messy, cramped sound.
The Yuni gets around this problem with a revolutionary new stereo technology (patent pending) that places both stereo channels in a single earpiece, but with two separate speakers instead of just one — one above, and one below the ear opening. This design takes advantage of our ear’s natural shape, which functions to help us localize where sound is coming from. With the Yuni, you can hear and distinguish the two channels, identifying which sound is coming from which speakers. Even better, the music will sound truly spacious, not squished, and you can finally hear true stereo panning as the sound moves from one channel to the other! If you’re a unilaterally deaf music-lover who has never experienced these effects through headphones before, it may be difficult to appreciate how much your music will open up and come alive when it’s played the way it was meant to be enjoyed…in stereo.
I have been ~75% deaf in my right ear ever since I suffered nerve damage from a viral infection 15 years ago (who knew you could go deaf from sinusitis‽). I can still hear music decently well if I use headphones, so I’m not sure if I need a Yuni. It would be great to try a pair and see if the quality of the listening experience improves significantly.
Check out: Yuni: A Headphone for People With Single-Sided Hearing Loss by Daniel Glass — Kickstarter
Ever wonder if the news story you’re reading is a product of real journalism or just a spin off of another story posted elsewhere? Discover the journalism you can trust and what you should question.
A very exciting discovery by NASA:
Scientists announced Thursday the discovery of three planets that are some of the best candidates so far for habitable worlds outside our own solar system — and they’re very far away.
NASA’s Kepler satellite, which is keeping an eye on more than 150,000 stars in hopes of identifying Earth-like planets, found the trio.
Two of the planets — Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f — are described in a study released Thursday in the journal, Science. They are part of a five-planet system in which the candidates for life are the farthest from the host star.
The host star — the equivalent of Earth’s sun — takes the name Kepler-62, where the individual planets are designated by letters thereafter.
The third planet that’s potentially habitable, but not included in the Science study, is called Kepler-69c. Liquid water could theoretically exist on the surfaces of any of them, researchers said.
“With all of these discoveries we’re finding, Earth is looking less and less like a special place and more like there’s Earth-like things everywhere,” said Tom Barclay, Kepler scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Sonoma, California.
1 in 10,000,000 vs 1 in 135,145,920
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