6 More Wheels on Mars!

I decided to go to bed rather than wait for Curiosity's planned 1:30 a.m. landing, but without setting any alarm, my wife and I both woke up at about 1:20, and we used the iPad to watch a video feed from the Planetary Society's  Planetfest in Pasadena. We tuned in just after cruise stage separation, and both the Planetfest crowd and the JPL control room teams were already going wild. It was very exciting and emotional, and it all went perfectly, including the almost immediate display of a couple of low-res "hazcam" photos showing that Curiosity was indeed safe and sound. Awesome. I was glad I had watched the Eyes on the Solar System EDL simulation earlier in the evening so I could really picture each event as it was called out. We watched for about 20 minutes then went back to sleep.

This morning I checked the Planetary Society Blog where Emily Lakdawalla reported that there appeared to be a "puff" of something on the horizon in the very first hazcam image that was not there in a later shot after the transparent lens cover was opened. Her thought was that this might have been a dust cloud from the impact of the descent stage, which was programmed to fly off, run out its fuel, and crash far from the landing site. If so, that would be really cool. Imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will probably confirm that and also show us exactly where Curiosity landed.

Eyes on Curiosity

I've been a very bad Solar System Ambassador the last couple of years. Other parts of life (job, family, music) have intervened, and I just haven't been keeping up with space developments and doing outreach events. My bad. I haven't even fired up Orbiter in probably 9 months. But I'm still really interested in this whole business of exploring the solar system (see my recent review of Kim Stanley Robinson's new book 2312 - he really makes the solar system come alive, 300 years in the future).

But of course the solar system is alive now. Mostly here on earth of course, but our latest robotic emissary to a neighboring planet is going to land there in less than four hours from now. That is of course NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), otherwise known as Curiosity. Today I have been reviewing the mission and the all important EDL (entry, descent, landing) phase, the famous "7 minutes of terror" that will start in just about three and half hours for us (Curiosity will experience it about 14 minutes before we hear about it, the time that light-speed radio signals from Mars will take to get here).

I have been watching the progress using JPL's very cool "Eyes on the Solar System" 3D visualization web application which includes a detailed simulation of the EDL phase. You can watch this as a preview (including controls to speed up, slow down, reverse, and pause the events) or you can watch it live. Right now the live view shows the cruise stage slowly spinning with its solar cells pointed to the sun:

But if you run the preview mode (or wait for the landing), you can watch all the more terror-laden steps like aero-shield heating, descent stage separation, and the grand finale, the special-forces-like "sky crane" landing (there is also a very cool JPL video about the EDL phase here):

I wish the landing weren't happening at 1:30 am in my time zone, but I plan to try to stay up even though it's a "school night." I was lucky enough to see Curiosity when it was still a bunch of parts in the JPL clean room back in May 2009, and I feel a special attachment the the not-so-little six-wheeled fella (gal?) - here's a picture I took of the descent stage at JPL that day:

KSR's 2312 is Very Cool

Although I'm only halfway through it, I am really loving Kim Stanley Robinson's latest science fiction novel, 2312. It's an impressively detailed work that imagines human civilization expanding to nearly the entire solar system over the next 300 years (with Earth itself still suffering a lot of problems stemming from climate change and other factors). There's a city called Terminator on slowly-rotating Mercury (the city itself rides on huge rails in sync with the rotation to stay just at the edge of the transition between the dark side and the deadly sun-lit side of the planet, propelled by solar-heating expansion of the rails!). There are some 19,000 inhabited "terrariums" which are hollowed-out asteroids that rotate to create artificial G. Many different climates, biomes, and social systems are implemented in these asteroid worlds, some of which are in orbits that take them across huge distances in the solar system. So to transfer from Earth to a moon of Saturn, you would first ride a space elevator to orbit, and then take a shuttle that would transfer you to a suitable Saturn-bound asteroid world. Instead of spending weeks in a cramped spacecraft, you might spend those weeks in a 1G beach resort, or in an endangered animal preserve, or in an agricultural world growing food for export to Earth, or even in a low-G "flying world" where you might live something like a bird. Hundreds to thousands of people live in each of these small worlds.


There are a lot of powerful technologies assumed to exist, starting with fusion power, space elevators, self-reproducing assemblers, and quantum computers (personal versions are called qubes). But there is no magic here. While it's not inevitable that these technologies will become practical or widespread, they are physically possible. As usual (from having read Red Mars and Green Mars), KSR is at least as interested in social possibilities as he is in technical ones. And there are some weird ones in 2312. There's also a mystery and a love story or two buried in this book.

It's also interesting what a writer like Robinson can do with a very specialized piece of science - such as the braided or perhaps kinked F-ring system of Saturn (pictured above). Doesn't that look sort of wave-like? And where there are waves, surely you will have surfers, right? Some residents of the cities on Saturn's moons like to fly to one of the "shepherd moons" that give the F-ring its gravity-sculpted structure, and from there, they have figured out how to surf these narrow waves made of ice blocks! Yes, they wear spacesuits with thruster rockets, and they surf the F-ring. He even makes it sound sort of plausible. This is shown in one incidental scene between two of the main characters, Swan and Wahrom.


A funny thing about Swan: She is from Mercury, and she is an impulsive risk taker who has tried all sorts of bizarre things in her young 110 year life (most "spacers" live to around 200, with periodic DNA repair and other longevity treatments). She is really a wild character, an artist whose whole life seems to be a sort of over-the-top performance art. Just when I started reading about Swan, I happened to start listening to the new Fiona Apple album, and I watched her bizarre video for "Every Single Night." From this coincidence, Swan and Fiona have fused in my mind. So I picture Fiona when I read about Swan's latest odd adventure.


Although some reviewers are bothered by certain devices that KSR uses in this book, such as lists and excerpts of supposedly technical or historical documents (from the future), I think these brief inter-chapter devices allow KSR to fill in the back story and set the many scenes in a relatively compact way so he can cover the whole solar system and multiple characters and story lines without drowning the reader in too much detail (it's about 570 printed pages, though I am reading it on Kindle myself). Highly recommended if you like imaginative hard SF. There's a cool interview with Robinson from June 2012 here.

Languages As Toys

I was thinking about the fact that I spent quite a few hours reviewing my very rusty (30+ years old) university Russian language skills before my recent trip to St. Petersburg. I have even continued to spend a little time on it since I got back. Why? I probably won't spend much time in Russia in the near future, and even if I do, I could probably get by just fine with English, as most tourists do. There's very little chance of achieving fluency or even minimal competence at this point in my life, though I'm confident that I could do it if by some bizarre circumstances I ended up living in Russia for a while (I feel the same way about French and Japanese). Was it worth the effort for just a few brief interactions in Russian?

Oddly enough, yes, and I figured out the reason. For me, languages are toys or puzzles, fun to play around with in themselves.Consider if the first person on the Moon had been Russian, and he or she had said the same thing that Neil Armstrong had said with his first step, but in Russian. According to Google Translate, that would have been это один маленький шаг для человека, но гигантский скачок для всего человечества. Now anyone can do that with Google, but since I can still read Russian and understand a bit about the grammar, I can see that this is a plausible translation. I can also speculate that the well-known confusion about Neil's statement (did he say one small step for man, or for a man?) would likely not have happened in Russian, since для человека "dlya chelovyeka" (for person) and человечества "chelovechestva" (mankind) are quite distinct, while "man" (with no a) and "mankind" are roughly synonyms. Russian also doesn't have articles (a vs. the), but the forms (cases) of nouns usually make the meaning clear. 

I consider that sort of thing entertaining enough to buy books on subjects that interest me in other languages, as a stimulus to learn more of these odd bits. I don't buy as many as I used to do in French and Japanese, and I tend to buy children's books, since I am not very advanced. I found one cool one in St. Petersburg, a children's book called simply космос ("kosmos," space). I was disappointed that I couldn't find such a book with more focus on Russian spaceflight (it's a translation of a British book). But this turned out to be useful, since I was able to buy a cheap used copy of the English version on Amazon, greatly helping my study efforts.

Once a nerd, always a nerd? Yup.

SpaceX Dragon to ISS: Highlights

Cool video from SpaceX with highlights of the recent successful flight of their Dragon spacecraft (unmanned cargo version) to the International Space Station. This happened in late May when I was in Europe, so I didn't follow the mission at the time, but it's a great milestone for private space.

New Fiona Apple - Wow

Fiona Apple's new album has an odd name (The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, a.k.a. "Idler Wheel"). The music and lyrics are even odder. And the video for "Every Single Night" is perhaps oddest of all. Definitely hallucinatory stuff (see above).

But I can't stop listening to it. It has really grabbed me like very little of her previous work. It is powerful, strange, raw, intimate, and somehow very real feeling. Wow. Her songwriting blows me away. She writes some amazing and disturbing lyrics, with incredible imagery, and her piano playing and use of percussion can be almost hypnotic.

The Act of Creation

The feeling is, you know, it is really exhilarating, it's like some kind of serotonin rush in your brain, you know, and you really feel great, and you want to go on and do it again, and again, and again. Later on you'll probably change your mind about it, about how well you succeeded.  But at the moment that you finish and you're satisfied or you're more than satisfied, that's an extraordinary feeling, and that feeling is so powerful, that it makes you willing to go through the process and the frustration of trying to write again, write anew each time, just to get to that feeling, because there's a lot of frustration before you get there. But the feeling is good, and the act of creation is very pleasurable on a physical level. 

Paul Simon (2007) 
Excerpt from "The Songwriting Process," an interview segment included with the album "iTunes Originals - Paul Simon." 

This interview segment came up in iTunes the other morning, and I hadn't heard it for a while. Paul Simon is one of my favorite songwriters and has always been an inspiration to me as a writer. It hit me that while I don't otherwise have much in common with him as a songwriter or performer, I have also experienced "some kind of serotonin rush" in my brain when I have completed a song or a recording, or even when I have created an interesting riff or fragment and saved it as a rough recording on the Voice Memo app on the iPod Touch. The act of creation is indeed very pleasurable, even if it doesn't lead to a successful or even a complete song or recording. It certainly leads to trying to write more songs (and to starting many more than you finish - at least that's my experience).

This struck me as a really cool explanation for why I do a lot of things. It's pleasurable to solve problems. It's pleasurable to experience new things. It's pleasurable to read a book and find out how it ends. It's pleasurable to read a book or watch a movie that you really enjoyed the first time again, even though you know how it ends. There are lots of pleasurable things (or maybe not, if this is true, which I think it is - as Fiona Apple replied to a guy in her song "Paper Bag" who said "It's all in your head" -- "so's everything!"). Even finishing a blog post gives some kind of serotonin rush, albeit a very tiny one (judging from my recent low rate of repeating this behavior).

My Delayed Love Affair With Russia

I have long been fascinated with Russia. I even took four semesters of Russian in college (back in the mid-seventies - almost all forgotten except for reading and writing the Cyrillic alphabet). But I never made a trip to Russia until earlier this month, when I attended an optics conference in St. Petersburg. I naturally added a few days to the trip for some sightseeing. St. Petersburg really is a fantastic city, and I was fortunate enough to have excellent (hot) weather and "white nights" for the whole week I was there. Everything was great. Here are a few highlights.

Space Museum - There was a small space museum on Peter & Paul island with a lot of interesting artifacts of the Russian space program. I used my small amount of Russian to chat briefly with a guard (I was the only one in the museum - all sensible people were out on the beach). We couldn't discuss much but it was fun. And he took my picture.



Helicopter tour - The space museum was inside Peter and Paul Fortress on the small island where Peter the Great established the city. I didn't know there were helicopter tours, but when I saw and heard the low-flying MiL Mi-8's, I figured it out. It cost 3,000 rubles (about $90) for a 14 minute flight on the 16 passenger Soviet-era helicopter, but it was awesome. Check out my YouTube video here and here (YouTube smoothed the vibration-induced shakiness, but this caused my captions to get all jittery - oh well). 

Subways - The St. Petersburg metro system is excellent. Built mostly during the Soviet era, the tunnels are bored through bedrock 75 to 100 meters deep (they also served as very deep bomb shelters during the Cold War). The escalators are VERY long. 

Boat Tour - There are many boat tours on the Neva River and through the many canals of St. Petersburg, "the Venice of the North." The hour tour took 20 minutes more due to tourist boat traffic jams. Although the river portion was great, the canal part of my tour was not the best in terms of passing close to major sights. Check the route before you book one.
 

The Hermitage - I spent about five hours walking the many rooms of the immense Hermitage, perhaps the best art museum in the world. Simply awe-inspiring. I used a wonderful and free iPhone guide app on my iPod Touch to navigate. I later bought inexpensive virtual tour upgrades to this app. It's really great (especially on the iPad, even though it's only an iPhone app). I took a lot of pictures too (you can pay extra to allow this). A tiny piece of the Hermitage can be seen on the left in the photo above and in one of the many rooms below.

There was much more. Interesting people. Great borscht. The Swan Lake ballet. Lots of Russian signs to practice reading. Beautiful parks, gardens, and churches. I really want to go back. 

Deep, Light, and He Can't Help It

I tried to not write this blog post, but I couldn't. Of course you could, you say! You've got free will!

Nope. It sure seems that way sometimes, but I think this is an illusion. A very convincing illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. My friend Craig Collins explains this heavy concept with his usual light touch in this excellent blog post. Not that he had any choice in the matter.

Cool Sounds (John & Lisa)

In addition to the "movie music" mentioned in my post about driving Europe, I've written a few other songs in the last few weeks, but nothing is quite ready to post. I need to get into my basement studio and finish some of these songs! It's too easy to start new songs and do partial demos on the iPad with GarageBand and all the various cool synths and other music apps now available. I shouldn't complain about too much inspiration, but the problem is not enough time and discipline to finish things. The good news is that thanks to these tools on the iPod Touch and iPad, I can write and record even when I travel, which was never very practical before.

I've also enjoyed music from other people, most notably the new John Mayer album "Born and Raised," which is great. Last week I saw cool concert in Boston, featuring Lisa Hannigan, an Irish singer-songwriter I've admired since I first heard her singing with Damien Rice some years back. Lisa was co-billed with an American singer-songwriter, Joe Henry. I was not familiar with his work and really didn't enjoy his part of the performance. But Lisa was wonderful. She performed most of her recent second album, "Passenger." I took a few videos, three of which are posted on YouTube: "Knots," "Little Bird," and "Passenger." The picture above is from Lisa's performance on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts (pictured with her guitarist John Smith, who was also quite impressive at the Boston concert). We were in the fourth row at the Paradise, pretty nice seats but not quite as intimate as NPR's library.

Driving Europe

Wow, my last blog post was April 29. I guess I've been busy. I've been on a couple of business trips since then (Taiwan and a trade show in Frankfurt), and the trade show trip was followed by a fun vacation with my wife, driving from Frankfurt to the south coast of France, then along the coast to Monaco, then through Italy and Switzerland to Interlaken. Finally we drove back to Frankfurt with a stop in Berne for lunch. We did about 8 days of driving. The (literal) peak of our adventure was the Jungfraujoch, heavily promoted as "the top of Europe," with a train station, observation center, and restaurant close to 12,000 feet above sea level. The weather was great and the view was magnificent (example above).

We took a lot of pictures and video clips, and on the flight home from Frankfurt, I used GarageBand on the iPad to create some instrumental soundtrack music for three short "slide show" videos that I later edited with iMovie on the iPad. You can see these videos on YouTube (note: choose HD or 720p in the YouTube settings to view these with full resolution):

Driving video - the whole trip in 2 minutes 20 seconds with fast music.

Europe sights - a bit longer and more relaxed with pseudo-classical music.

Jungfrau "Top of Europe" train ride - a pseudo-Romantic adagio. I was going for majestic to try to match the Alps. Almost 3 minutes.

New Song: Blue (Monkey Butt)

It's weird what sorts of things pop up when I play around with the many sounds and options in GarageBand on the iPod Touch or iPad. Often an instrument sound, automatic pattern, and rhythm will lead to a new song. This new one sounded bluesy (not surprising since the progression is like Em Bm C F#dim), so I started using the word "blue," and before long I had a demo. Although most of the things I mention are not actually blue, monkey butts sometimes are. So there. Like much of life, this song is something of a joke, but not completely.

Music in Space

This video was posted by NASA about a year ago, but I somehow just stumbled on it. Among many other things, astronaut Cady Coleman is a flute player, and when she was on the International Space Station last year, she carried several flutes with her, including one belonging to Ian Anderson (best known as the leader of Jethro Tull). Last April, as a tribute to Yuri Gagarin on the 50th anniversary of his first spaceflight, Cady performed a flute duet with Anderson - she on the ISS, he on the ground. The song was a version of Anderson's "Bouree" which is in turn an adaptation of a Bach piece.

I really like Cady Coleman. She is one of the few astronauts I've had a chance to meet. She visited my space flight simulator demo booth at a Space Expo at the New England Air Museum a few years ago, and we spoke for a few minutes about educational outreach. She struck me as incredibly down-to-Earth (when she's not in space). I didn't realize at the time that she is also a musician.

iPad Rationalization

I swear, it wasn't my fault! I was simply helping to configure an iPad 2 bought for my mother-in-law. I never expected to fall in love (who am I kidding - of course I did). For the few decades that the iPad has been available (allegedly only two years), I've thought about getting one, but I managed to convince myself that it was really just an overgrown iPod Touch, which I have been using for centuries (since fall 2008). Pretty much runs all the same apps, right? Besides, I travel a lot, and the iPod Touch is so handily pocket-sized, while the iPad is nearly laptop size, right? Another thing to lug around and keep charged. Who needs it!

Well after I spent a week or so setting up that iPad 2, I could feel my anti-iPad rationalizations cracking under the strain of a nearly life-size HUD on my simulated space shuttle and the large instrument and control interfaces in GarageBand (yes, I was testing out a few apps my mother-in-law wouldn't need). I tried out a few magazines like WIRED, Newsweek, National Geographic, and Discover Magazine, and they were definitely much more enjoyable than on the pathetically tiny screen of the iPod Touch.  Mainstream apps like web browsing, email, YouTube, and the like are easier to use too. FaceTime and Skype are wonderful on a face-size screen. My willpower was crumbling...

Apple delivered the final blow with the "new iPad" ("3G") announcement - super-high-res screen, faster graphics processors, and a better camera for the same price points as the iPad 2 (though they did drop the price of some iPad 2 models). I was sold. So I gave in and ordered one (wifi only) - telling my wife that this would be a family iPad, not my iPad. I can share (sometimes). I promised I would still use the iPod Touch for travel. And so far I have not taken the iPad on a trip (so far haven't taken a trip...).

The new iPad is really great. Many apps have already issued updates to take advantage of the 2048x1536 retina display, including F-SIM Shuttle (above). Gorgeous rendering of my still less-than-perfect landings. Music creation apps are wonderful on the larger screen. Apple's free movie trailer app was upgraded and the HD previews are amazing. One surprising fave is the NPR Music app (also free). With more room for interface controls and graphics, and plenty of video, it makes it a pleasure to explore new music. I really appreciate that many of the apps I had bought for the iPod Touch are "universal" apps that also work great on the iPad. I've only bought a couple of "HD" apps specialized for the iPad.

Who knew that apple flavored kool-aid could be so tasty?

Too Cool: Driven to Fly!

This is incredibly cool (7 minute video here). A flying car! The Terrafugia Transition® is more like a drivable airplane. It's very light for an airplane or a car, something like a two-seat smart car with wings. It's considered a Light Sport Aircraft.

Terrafugia's FAQ has some useful info including this comment:

The Transition also reduces the cost of ownership of an airplane by burning automotive gasoline, parking in your garage at home instead of renting a hangar, and nearly eliminating ground transportation costs.

Good points! So OK, I have a private pilot's license and a two-car garage that's within a 25 minute drive of at least three airports. I would love to have one. But aside from gasoline, hangar charges, and various insurance issues, a key factor in "cost of ownership" is the price - $279,000. Maybe not this year.

Elon Musk on 60 Minutes

There was a great segment on 60 Minutes last night on Elon Musk and SpaceX. I share his belief in the importance of humankind becoming a space-faring, multi-planet civilization, but Musk has taken this vision and run with it. Big time. The introduction to the interview says:

In the history of space flight - only four entities have launched a space capsule into orbit and successfully brought it back to the Earth: the United States, Russia, China and Elon Musk.

It's impressive and inspiring to me. I wish I were a 30-something engineer again. I would move back to Los Angeles and get a job with SpaceX!

The text version of the interview is here. The video of the whole show (including commercial breaks) is here (there was also a fascinating story on the neurological condition of face blindness). This appears to be just the SpaceX video segment. I don't know how long CBS keeps these 60 Minutes videos on-line.

Music Animation Machine

This is very cool. This small program will play back any MIDI music file and display any of 14 different animations based on the musical content of the file (things like note values, intervals, part movement, and others). To use the free Music Animation Machine MIDI Player, you have to download, unzip, save, and run it on a PC (the .exe file runs directly - it doesn't require an installation program). Windows includes a default wave-table synthesizer, so it should work on any Windows machine with a sound card (if you have hardware or software synthesizers or other MIDI playback devices, it should also work with those).

Many of the animations look best when playing classical music which tends to have more distinct moving musical lines than most popular music, and it comes with several sample classical pieces. You can find tons of classical (and other) MIDI files all over the internet. Bach is especially visual (and sounds good too). The space bar starts and stops the playback.

Matt Bors Wins Cartooning Award

My favorite editorial cartoonist by far is Matt Bors. So I was happy to learn that Matt has been awarded the 2012 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning (check out some of his work on that page, or look through his blogged archives). He is fearless and funny. Nobody gets a pass from Matt Bors - not Obama, not God, not even Steve Jobs! Though like me, he does seem to have special feelings for Rick Santorum. Matt really deserves this award. Congratulations!

Unexpected Facts

London-based HSBC is one of the largest banks in the world, and they advertise a lot in airports. On my recent trip to China, I noticed some of their current advertising posters which feature interesting or surprising facts with the tag line "We find potential in the most unexpected places. Do you?"

One that especially caught my eye was, "Of all the people in the world who have ever lived to be 65, two-thirds are alive today." I guess that makes sense given that during most of human evolution, life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (at least according to Thomas Hobbes). Here are a few others I like, found in this article:

•  0.3% of Saharan solar energy could power Europe.
• Only 4% of US films are made by women, compared to 25% in Iran.
• Right now, there are over half a million people traveling the world by air.
• Over 138 million people work outside their country of birth.
• There are five times more people learning English in China than there are people in England.
• The U.S. has more Spanish language newspaper readers than Latin America.
• Recycling one tin can saves enough energy to power a TV for three hours.

I assume these statements are more or less true, though I don't know the assumptions or calculations involved. I just find them thought provoking.

Love/Hate With Apple

I've got this love/hate thing with Apple (I'll admit it's mostly love).

The hate part: today's new iPad announcement that has finally made me really want one. It's hard to explain why. Better screen, faster processor, better camera? I don't exactly know. But it seems like it's ready and would be really great to have for recording and other things.

The love part? A new GarageBand update (v1.2 for iOS) that addresses my two biggest complaints. There's a "piano roll" note editor for MIDI parts (now if they would only add MIDI export!). And they added "smart strings" that sound really good based on my limited playing with them. There's also a multi-device "jam" feature that works over Wifi that might be cool. Best of all, immediate gratification: I downloaded the free update this evening. It seems to work well on my iPod Touch, but it also contributes to the hate part: now that I've really figured out how to use GarageBand efficiently, I want to use it more for songwriting and making demos, even when I'm home. If only that iPod screen were just a little bit bigger... wait...

Brand New Tune: "Maybe Not"

I just got back from a business trip in China. Nothing much to report besides a very busy schedule, but since I had some 40 hours of time on airplanes, I managed to work on some songwriting, thanks to music apps on my iPod Touch. The one I'm using most these days is Apple's GarageBand (GB). I wrote about this app last month, but since then, I have really figured out how to use it effectively. The interface design is absolutely brilliant (OK, it's Apple, I know). It really is the ideal interactive sketchpad for creating new music (at least music that is based mainly on keyboards, guitars, drums, and vocals, though you can also record any acoustic or electric instrument you like - unless you're on an airplane). The "smart" instruments are able to generate various instrumental riffs and patterns based on the chords you play. You can also play manually though the tiny keyboard and guitar simulations are tough to use on the iPod Touch's small screen (still resisting buying an iPad). Semi-automatic is also possible (e.g., a palette of chords is presented with buttons that are easier to play than the conventional keyboard but still offer some expression and inversion features).

On the way home yesterday (13 hour flight from Shanghai to Toronto), I wrote a new song and made a rough demo, pretty much complete except for vocals which I did today. This song is called "Maybe Not," and the lyrics are pretty strange. But I mostly like it, and even though the demo has some quite rough edges, I uploaded a version to SoundCloud just now, for comparison with the studio version (TBD later this week I hope). A work in progress and a sample of my songwriting process and what is possible on a mobile device these days (with a powerful app like GarageBand).

At the start I inserted 4 bars of the bare bass riff that inspired the whole song. This was an "autoplay" option that GB offered when I chose upright bass, 3/4 time, 92 bpm, and a G minor to D minor chord change. I just started scatting to this as a loop and the song was born. I used "smart drums" and "smart bass" (automatically following the chords, key, tempo, etc. I defined) and played the electric piano chords manually from the "smart keyboard" chord palette.  I'm thinking the bridge may not work. The transition (to a G major chord) is too abrupt but Roger can help me fix that, or I will rewrite it. The last verse probably should get its own lyrics too (and a proper ending). I will post a studio version when it's done, maybe later this week.

Cool Optical Technology

A couple of years ago I attended a technical talk by Dr. Ren Ng, now the CEO of a company called Lytro. He talked about some aspects of the optical and mathematical methods now incorporated in Lytro's "light field camera." It's a pretty amazing technology now available as a product. Roughly speaking, by capturing additional information about the direction of light entering the camera when the picture is taken, digital images can be focused and zoomed after they are captured. This "Shoot Now, Focus Later" article from NPR explains the basics and includes a couple of interactive examples. Dr. Ng's Stanford Ph.D. thesis (PDF) explains a lot more.

New John Mayer Music

I really like John Mayer's songwriting, guitar playing, and most of his recordings. He's written a number of songs I wish I wrote. He's got a new album in the works called "Born & Raised," set for release on May 22, and the first single is a gentle, confessional-sounding ballad called "Shadow Days" (streaming from his blog post). It didn't really do much for me on first listen until about two-thirds through when there's an instrumental bridge with a nice George Harrison-like slide guitar lead. It's a decent song but I wouldn't say it's one of his best, though some of his recent tunes have taken a few listens to really grow on me.

I have to admit that the songs from his first three albums still work better for me. He really blows me away on many of these recordings, and I have spent a lot of time listening to, analyzing, and learning some of these songs. One of my favorites is 83 (video), a nostalgic look back at the innocence of childhood. Simple and moving.

American Taliban?

As if the aptly named politician Rick Santorum were not already sufficiently stomach-turning (and he was), his recent comments about not believing in the separation of church and state combined with his toxic views on the rights of women have really pushed him beyond outrageous for me. What sort of country would Santorum like to lead if by some horrible fluke he were actually elected president?

I have a pretty good idea from a couple of amazing "science fiction" books I read and reviewed here in 2006. Octavia Butler's dystopian novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents present a near future America where white ultra-right-wing religious politicians have created a Christian version of Taliban society. It comes complete with Bible-sanctioned suppression of women and even slavery.

Despite the dark circumstances, these books are really wonderful, uplifting, life-affirming, and even spiritual in nature. But the starting point in 2027 is scarily plausible. As I wrote in 2006:

My biggest impression of this pair of books is that the environment within which the story takes place rings all too true. It struck me as the future “facts on the ground” of an America that continued to ignore “inconvenient truths” of global warming, poverty, inequality, and abuse of power until it was too late, and then gave even more power to religious fundamentalists, who blamed the problems of society on the victims, and on superstitious ideas along the lines of “these problems are God’s punishment for the wicked ways of people who are not enough like us – good, God-fearing, white, conservative Christians.”

Streaming My Google Music

Sometime last year, Google announced their Google Music (Beta) program and I asked to be a beta user. It was something of a pain to set up, because at the time, Google had not worked out deals with record labels to allow them to distribute central copies of MP3 files based on some evidence that you already own that music (Apple is doing something like this with their iCloud service). This meant that I had to upload all the music I wanted to have out there, and it took some effort and several days to do this (their music uploader application has since improved so this would be easier now). But I ended up with 19,767 songs on Google's server (it's free for up to 20,000 songs).

This is nice, but in practice it was not very useful because all these songs are also on my PC (on an external drive that I travel with), so it's easier to play them in iTunes if I'm using the PC. I didn't worry about because I thought that Apple's then-coming iCloud music service would solve all my problems since I'm an iPod and iTunes user anyway. But when that service launched, it wasn't as good, easy, or cheap to use as I had assumed (long story).

Cut to the chase, Bruce: I just discovered that there are several Google Music "client apps" for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allow me to access, search, and stream music from my online Google Music collection. I installed a free one called Melodies and it worked well on both wifi and on 3G on my wife's iPhone. So I spent 99 cents to upgrade to the "pro" version, mainly to get the shuffle feature.

This is really great, because even though I carry 4000+ songs on each of my two iPods, there are times when I want to hear something obscure that I haven't bothered to copy to the iPods (where I need to save room for recording and other apps). Here's a more detailed review of the Melodies app.

Obliviosity (New Song!)

I recently discovered a cool guitar chord I never knew before, Gmaj13. Sort of jazzy and major seventh-ish (major seven chords are a major favorite of mine). This song was the almost immediate result.  That often happens with a new chord, instrument, synth sound, music app, etc. - new sounds suggest new songs. It's a good thing.

As for "obliviosity," it probably should be "obliviousness" but that doesn't sound as good. Am I really that oblivious? Well, one person's obliviosity is another person's ability to focus on a task. So I don't know.

Obliviosity

You said, you were gonna be leaving  
But you wouldn’t say where to
I tried a little bit of reason
A little bit of “what the hell is going on with you?”

OK, so I’m a little bit clueless
It’s like I’m looking at the world through soda straws
But what I might lack in smoothness
I try to cover up with other flaws

Chorus
Obliviosity is my forté
You could even say it’s my specialité
Obliviosity is very very me
If you can figure out how I can get a clue
Could you help me out?
And let me know too?

Bridge
I know I drive you crazy
But I don’t mean to hurt you
I’d give the moon and stars to you
If I only knew where they were…

Words & music by Bruce Irving (c) 2012

Wow! Scale of the Universe 2 (Interactive Flash)

Yes, there are a lot of things that are "the coolest thing ever," but this is definitely in the running for that illustrious and ever-changing title. "The Scale of the Universe 2" is an interactive Flash activity with a slider that goes from a scale of 10**(-35) meters (ten to the minus thirty-fifth power, very small) to 10**27 meters (bigger than the known universe).

This "interactivity" was created by Cary Huang. It's similar to the famous "powers of ten" movie except you can control it in both scale and speed (about 13 seconds to go from smallest to largest at maximum scroll rate) and you can click on objects to learn more about them. It comes complete with spacy background music. Awesome! Thanks to Matt Bors for posting this on Facebook.

Garageband App Rocks!

You can have too much of a good thing, and I may be approaching that point with music making apps on the iPod Touch. I've got a bunch, some of which have already given birth to songs (or at least fragments of songs), which is their main purpose for me. I wasn't even going to try Apple's Garageband 1.1 app because I already have at least two recording studio apps that are working well for me. But for $4.99, I said what the heck. It's a huge app (over 500 MB), but that's why I bought a new 64 GB iPod Touch a few weeks ago.

And wow, is it amazing! Although it "only" has 8 tracks and lacks some of the features of Music Studio 2.0 and Multitrack DAW, it's really the ideal sketch-pad for developing song ideas. The biggest things for me are the "smart" instruments that can automatically generate drum, bass, guitar, and keyboard parts with many variations, based on the chord progression I play. Smart drum parts are based on a grid with loud/quiet and simple/complex axes, where you can drag various parts of the virtual drum kit. I set the tempo and then move these elements around until I get a drum part that sounds interesting. Then I choose a key and play around with the pre-defined chords for that key in the smart guitar, keyboard, or bass screens until a song idea appears (you can also define your own chords). I'll record a minute or two of these parts, then "scat sing" into the audio microphone - this will suggest melodies, rhythms, and sometimes words. Then I may switch to real guitar to work out the song structure. Et cetera.

The "smart" parts are all MIDI tracks, playing back with sampled instruments that sound pretty realistic even on the guitar parts. This means the file sizes are pretty small until you start adding audio tracks. One thing that is lacking is a "piano roll" view for editing the individual notes of the MIDI tracks (and there is also no MIDI export or copy/paste). But that's OK, since I don't expect any of these GB tracks to be parts of final recordings. If I do get anything that is so brilliant it needs to be used, I can figure out how to export that track as audio (or something).

Garageband for iOS has many more features. Here's a more detailed review of the 1.1 (iPhone) version. And here's an even more detailed review of the original iPad (1.0) app. While it would be nice to have more screen real estate to work with (i.e., an iPad), Apple has done a great job of adapting the user interface to the small iPhone/iPod Touch screen, and it's really quite easy to use, as well as supremely portable.

Optics for Mars

JPL's new rover "Curiosity" is en route to Mars, set to arrive in August 2012. A recent NASA press release describes an interesting aspect of the optical sensors carried on board the rover. A special test chart is installed to allow for calibration of camera systems for resolution and color. The chart includes a 1909 Lincoln penny (hey, it's Lincoln's birthday today!) as a familiar size and detail reference, more for public engagement than for any specific science or engineering need.If you zoom in on the above image, you can see that the black & white test chart resolution samples are labeled in cycles per millimeter, the typical unit used by optical engineers to define image quality. A "cycle" is a pair of black and white lines (cycling from white or bright to black), so 2.0 cycles/mm means that two black/white pairs will fit into a millimeter of width (so each bar will be 0.25 mm wide). Higher cycles/mm correspond to finer detail in the image (smaller pixels in a digital image). This chart will be used to calibrate the instrument called MAHLI (Mars Hand Lens Imager) that will provide close-up images of mineral and soil samples.

Happy Darwin Day!

February 12, 1809 was a pretty good day for humanity. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on that day, Lincoln in Kentucky, Darwin in Shrewsbury, England. I'm a big fan of both of these guys. In the U.S., Lincoln's birthday is now celebrated along with Washington's birthday on President's Day (or maybe not). While it may not be widely celebrated in the United States (where only 39% of people "believe in" evolution, more than in Turkey), today is Darwin Day, "an international celebration of science and humanity." So happy birthday, Charlie Darwin. I'm going to wear my "gradual change" t-shirt in your honor (picture above).

Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902!)

Today's Amazon MP3 Daily Deal is a new album by the French band Air for $3.99. Normally I'm not a big fan of Air's electronic/pop music, but this is an interesting special case. They composed a new soundtrack for the 1902 silent movie "Le Voyage Dans La Lune" which has recently been restored to its hand-colored original state (the video is included with the MP3 download). This 15 minute film is said to be the very first "science fiction" movie. Loosely based on Jules Verne, it depicts a trip to the Moon in a hollow artillery shell fired by a huge cannon.

The trip is fast and the shell hits the Man in the Moon right in the eye (so much for the science!). The band of intrepid French explorers soon encounters angry Moon natives and of course fighting ensues. They retreat to their capsule, which has been conveniently placed on a cliff with a rope attached to the nose, which one of the men uses to pull the spacecraft over the edge (I had always wondered about the return plan with an artillery shell spacecraft and no known cannons on the Moon). It quickly falls to Earth for an Apollo-like water landing, whence the explorers are rescued and hailed as heroes.

Considering this was made a year before the Wright Brothers flew, it's really pretty impressive despite a few liberties taken with the physics. For the price of a latte and 15 minutes, it's an amusing piece of space pre-history. And the music is OK.