your hit-parade

There’s a very clever robotic oracle called Jukedeck that isn’t even coin-operated that will serve one up a signature tune, a jingle, a strain of incidental music that’s unique and to specifications for one to use forever however one sees fit.
From an algorithmic base, the artificial intelligence scores tunes of whatever mood or style instantly, and while presently (not as of yet as the program is still learning) none are arguably terribly catchy or timeless standards, they are fun to try on for size. I’m convinced it’s at least very good at muzak for the waiting room or holding the line and bombastic news intros. Give it a whirl and share what you get in return.

5x5

sprockets: historic, confrontational Nazi disc-jockey booth at a gramophone expo prompts a discussion on propaganda, via Messy Nessy Chic

populuxe: lone surviving prototype of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion kit home, via Nag on the Lake

the story of the hitchhiking bride: fraudulent “ghost drivers” vexing ride-hailers in China, via Super Punch

babel fish: in an on-going series of Icelandic monsters of the month, the Sögusteinn, the tale stone, a sort of egg that when inserted into the ear can answer all questions

curated: the New York’s Museum of Modern Art has made tens of thousands of images of their past exhibitions available on-line, via Kottke 

yodel-ay-hee-hoo

Via our ever-faithful surveyor Nag on the Lake, we find that some helpful soul has installed a telescopic mountain finder in the Swiss Alps. I’m sure in the midst of all that grandeur, it’s easy to misjudge distance or mistake one peak for another, but a peek through these angled tubes, labelled with the summit in your sights and the distance away, works like a sextant. Not all of us have the vocal skills to navigate, like the yodelers, with echo-location. Read more about the installation and find more fun stuff at the link above.

megabit, metabit

To my peril but also to my subsequent delight and emendation, my love-letters from Brain Pickings are usually dog-eared and set aside for reading that I always promise to get to at soon point, but that pile in my inbox is seething and threatens an avalanche. Happily, I was able to return to an intriguing sounding review of the life and times of a young mathematician who’s pioneering work in circuitry demonstrated that all logical operations could be reckoned by switches and relays and the just invented transistor, leading Claude Shannon to quickly and intuitively conclude that all information in the wilds—its natural habitat could be corralled and tamed, with data emerging as information thanks to the transfiguring exchange between the observer and the observed.

Corresponding with contemporaries that included Alan Turing and Vannevar Bush, Shannon was able to appropriate rather vague and generic terms, as had Isaac Newton in his mission to redefine physics in a disciplined and predictive manner, and furnish the world with Information Theory complete with a grammar that’s intelligible to both the mediator and the immediate. The bit is a metric, a measure of state (coined by Shannon as a portmanteau of binary digit) conveying either true or false, yes or no, but scalable out to any degree and precipitated the limning of communication and experience into a digital analogue that is accessible and exploitable by computer systems. Although we think of programmes as limited to the confines of simple logic, Information Theory also provides brute computing somewhat of a reprieve, showing that rather unique data-sets that encode unique and familiar data can be elided over, somewhat like the End-User Agreements that computers ply us with as instructive (although mathematical in nature, it is pretty human to skim), aiding in speed and compression. Moreover, as apparently as discreet and incompatible as Nature chooses to impart information, there is always a measurable threshold that computers can harness, from bar-codes and magnetic-strips to more custom parameters.