I Love Symposia!

Time for another TED talk… Psychologist Nancy Etcoff gave a fairly entertaining talk about happiness. Mostly it’s a bunch of “we’re gonna figure this out, we promise, here are some clues”, but there are a few nuggets in there that I found worth sharing.

First, most interesting to me, is a little bit of scientific evidence on the cliché that selflessness equals happiness: if you run language metrics on the works of suicidal poets, you find an excess of self-centred words, such as “I”, “me”, “my”, when compared to other poetry. Focusing on things other than yourself will make you a happier person.

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I recently finished writing a paper (will add link once it’s published—cross your fingers!). I would have used LaTeX, but under certain circumstances, one must revert to good ol’ .doc format. Now, MS Office on the Mac is a Mess (with a capital M)—your choices are Office ‘04, which runs on Rosetta and is therefore dreadfully slow, or Office ‘08, which is—in short—a giant pile of garbage. So to write this paper, I went with the Pages app from Apple iWork.

Pages, on the whole, is a fine piece of software. There’s lots of little touches that make it stand out from MS Word, as well as Google Docs. For one, it’s very snappy. My paper is loaded almost instantly, where Word takes several seconds. Word even takes several seconds to scroll past an image! (Ugh.) And Pages plays well with Spaces. If you’re a Spaces user, this advantage cannot be overstated—Word ‘04 was already painfully clumsy with its Spaces compatibility, and ‘08 only turns up the pain to 11. (more…)

Although I can’t quite find a reference right now, take it from me that it’s well documented that we have much more trouble waking up from deep sleep (a.k.a. slow wave sleep) than from light sleep or from REM sleep. You’ve probably experienced this often enough: sometimes you’ve had plenty of sleep, but you still feel hopelessly groggy when the alarm wakes you up, and other times you’ve only had three hours but you feel amazingly alert! And you’re like, whuuu?

Well, at least some of the time, the reason is that you woke up between sleep cycles rather than during slow wave sleep. So, in 2002, I had the idea of an alarm clock that would monitor your sleep cycle, and would only wake you between cycles, never during slow wave. Since cycles are regular and last about 90 minutes, if you absolutely needed to be up at a particular time, the alarm would calculate whether there is enough time left for another full cycle, and if there wasn’t, it would wake you early.

It was, of course, a brilliant idea. But, as they say, you snooze, you lose. By the time started to begin to think about maybe talking to someone about developing a product, it was 2005, maybe even 2006. A quick Google search turned up Axon Labs, a startup created in 2003 solely to develop just the kind of system I had envisioned.

Missed opportunity? Maybe. But I was more excited than disappointed, because it meant that the dream (I’m just on fire today!) of better waking was closer to reality than I could have imagined. I signed up for their newsletter to be kept up to date.

All this to say, finally, earlier this week I got an email from them, saying that they are going to come out with a limited release by the end of this year! Woot! The email just made my day, and it should make yours too. Head on over to the Axon Labs website to sign up for their updates. Alternatively, do subscribe to this blog (or bookmark it, if you live in that era)—you’ll certainly be reading a review from me the moment I can get my hands on one.

(Well, ok: the next day.)

Last month, I jailbroke and carrier-unlocked my first-generation iPhone. I followed this iClarified tutorial. Near the end I got an “error 1600,” which I was able to rectify by following the instructions found near the end of this MacRumors post.

No biggy. I can’t say I wasn’t a little nervous, but each time something went wrong, I just turned my phone off and on and it was back to where I’d started. After a few restarts, I became reassured that I wouldn’t end up with a brick on my hands, so long as I was careful following the instructions.

After my eventual success, I became a staunch advocate of jailbreaking and unlocking (the latter currently only available on the first-gen iPhone, though the folks over at iPhone-dev appear to have finally broken through the 3G’s defenses). For the coders among you, you get a cool terminal:

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In one of the best papers in computational biology that I have ever seen, Greg Stephens and colleagues have analysed the movements of nematode worms, and found that they can be decomposed into just four fundamental shapes: virtually any shape that the worm can take is a combination of these four shapes.

I’m surprised that no one at ResearchBlogging.org picked up on it. I suppose the title seems innocuous enough: “Dimensionality and dynamics in the behavior of C. elegans.” I suppose that, had I read just that title, I too would have overlooked it.

Thankfully I subscribe to Faculty of 1000, the world’s largest journal club. This paper was marked “Exceptional,” the highest rating available, by Leonard Maler, of the University of Ottawa. I’ll reprint the first sentence of his review because it sums up the paper (and what makes it so brilliant) so nicely:

In this intriguing paper, the apparent random wiggling of a worm (C. elegans) was decomposed into a small set of invariant “wiggles”, whimsically termed “eigenworms” by the authors.

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Time for another great TED talk, this one more about art than science and policy.

Ever since I tried out first the Bose Tri-port headphones, and later the Shure E5c’s, I’ve been convinced that we would all come to regret our current obsession with low-bitrate, high-compression audio files. 128kbps mp3 is often called “CD quality,” which is a blatant lie. 128kbps AAC (.m4a files, as created by iTunes) comes closer but is still fairly high compression. 256-320kbps AAC files match CD quality and should be the default setting in all CD ripping software. (Of course, that would require Apple to cut the number of songs that they claim fits in an iPod by half, which is a big no-no.)

But in fact, even CD quality is nowhere near the limit of human perception. The end credits for the videogame Metal Gear Solid 2 feature a jazz piece titled Can’t Say Goodbye to Yesterday that is fairly good, but really, nothing special. The recording, however, was in Dolby Digital 5.1 channel audio, and on my surround sound system it was a stunning experience—you are literally placed in the middle of the band, surrounded by the instruments, with the singer right in front of you. Keeping all of our music in CD and CD-like formats is short-sighted. Neil Young recently lamented the dominance of CDs and mp3s in an era in which digital storage and powerful computers are increasingly cheap.

Which takes us to John Walker’s TED talk. Think of all the extraordinary music performances of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, before digital recording technology existed. John Walker has analysed those performances from analog recordings and (for piano only, so far) recreated them on a computer-controlled grand piano (built by Yamaha), to record with whatever new and sophisticated recording equipment is available currently. He has decoupled the performance and the recording.

Now, of course, this technology is limited to piano, and likely will be for a long time. It’s one thing to determine which piano keys were pressed from a recording, and another entirely to do the same for an entire orchestra, or, worse even, to reconstruct a singer’s vocal cords. Playback in those cases will also require some new technologies that are not quite ready for prime-time. But, for now, we can enjoy some timeless piano performances with arbitrarily good recordings.