Category Archives: Thoughts

Thoughts

The Mohammed caricatures

I was listening to NPR as I drove home today, and heard yet more news about embassies being torched in response to the Mohammed caricatures. That’s in addition to the feverish demonstrations that have been going on for days. I’m not even going to discuss whether publishing the caricatures was right or wrong, or whether the Arab response is correct or not. What I want to say is this: where do these people find the time?

Every time something bothers them, they demonstrate. Don’t they have jobs? How can they get time off? Have they nothing better to do with their time than to tie up the streets in violent protest, chanting till their throats go numb? Have they nothing better to do than to burn flags and shoot bullets in the air?

Honestly, what kinds of people are these? Anybody with that much free time on their hands obviously isn’t working enough. No wonder most Middle East economies aren’t in good shape. Oil is the only thing propping them up (if they have it), and their countries, technologically and socially, are caught somewhere between the Middle Ages and the present. If they spent more time working and less time demonstrating, they might get somewhere.

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Thoughts

ComeAcross Podcast 7

➡ Download ComeAcross Podcast 7

Summary: A 330 MPG uber hybrid, viruses cause obesity, some of the worst things you can do to your body, the invasion of the bed bugs, ultra-efficient air conditioner, new standard keyboard, do not worship false idols.

Links of interest for this podcast:
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Thoughts

ComeAcross Podcast 6

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Summary: The state of our public school education, recycling water through rooftop gardens, the UK will spy on all motorists, GM crops cross-fertilize with weeds, the NSA’s spy program more widespread than thought, generating electricity from the ocean’s natural thermal gradient, and the plight of megayacht owners.

Links of interest for this podcast:
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Thoughts

ComeAcross Podcast 5

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Summary: Caviar exports cancelled, Citizen and E Ink’s bendable clock, China’s tyrany uses American hi-tech, Chinese healthcare is not there, GOP cause for most corrupt government in history, government can track your cellphone at will, Apple to drop firewire, nano armor 5x stronger than steel, new PC design, swimmer does 26-mile stretch, snowkiting catching on.

Links of interest for this podcast:
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Thoughts

A novel way to search music or movie files

I was in the bathroom, whistling a tune I’d heard in a movie last night (“Anchors Aweigh”, with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra,) and wishing I could find out its title, when it occurred to me. Why shouldn’t I be able to search for it?

I should be able to whistle that tune into my computer’s microphone, and have it search the audio and video files on my computer for similar sound patterns. It wouldn’t have to give me an exact match, a few possible matches would be fine. A desktop search engine, like Spotlight, or the Google Search Engine, or the Microsoft/Yahoo flavors, or whatever, brand isn’t important here, could index sound files for sound patterns – in its most basic form, it would search for inflections, and could then expand to more complex characteristics such as pitch, tone, timbre, human/instrument, etc. Wouldn’t this be an amazing thing?

Similarly, this could be expanded to movies. I could speak a phrase I remember from a movie into the microphone, and it would then search my movie files and find the movie and scene where that phrase is spoken. I know this is probably more difficult than a simple inflection in a sound file, but it is possible.

Just brainstorming… a possible offshoot could be searching movie scenes based on descriptions such as: male character dressed in a white shirt and grey pants, black shoes, hair parted from the right, in his 50’s, holding onto the side of Mt. Rushmore, bad guy stepping on his hand. This isn’t hard, it’s… Cary Grant in “North by Northwest”. The computer should be able to do that, too. I realize this may be some years away, but again, I think it’s possible.

Realizing that most people haven’t got extensive movie and music libraries, and sometimes the things they want to find aren’t on their computers, an Internet site could be set up with a large library of movie and music files. People could then whistle a tune into their microphones while they’re on the site, and could search its extensive library for the song where that snippet is found. They could choose to purchase that file afterwards. In a similar fashion, they could do all these other things I’m talking about here, eventually. Wouldn’t this be an amazing use of processing power? I for one look forward to this!

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