For its latest cool project, the merry pranksters of Improv Everywhere arranged for hundreds of people to stand along the Brooklyn Bridge at night and fire camera flashes in sequence, capturing everything on video from a fair distance away. I love the increasingly larger scale of Improv Everywhere’s missions.

But I thought I should note that on two different occasions back in 1999 and 2000, a group of my friends organized a very similar project at the top of the Empire State Building. Led by my pal Tom Igoe, a world-class tinkerer who teaches at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, a group of several dozen people gathered on the skyscraper’s southern observation deck to do waves of sequenced camera flashes.

The New York Times ran a story about the 2000 event a couple of weeks later. Both Flash-a-Thons were captured on video, the second from two locations downtown: one at the Tisch School of the Arts on Broadway and Waverly, the other from an apartment on East 18th Street. In the low-res compilation video below, the flashes go left to right and then right to left, and then there’s some assorted mayhem at the end.

You can read more about the 1999 and 2000 Flash-a-Thons on Tom’s site.

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After living with thwarted technolust since last June, I finally got myself an iPhone on Monday. Verdict: amazing, beautiful, world-historical. I quickly got tired of the generic wallpaper, so I poked around in my files and found a scan of a gorgeous music score by the avant garde American composer George Crumb, whom I posted about two years ago. I spent a few minutes turning the score into a 320x480 graphic, and now it greets me each time I pick up my phone. Even though it’s too small for the details to be visible, it still looks super-cool on the high-res iPhone screen. (I’ve uploaded a much bigger copy of this score so you can see it in all its glory; you can view it here.)

You can download this and use it on your own phone:

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categories: Art and Design, Music and Audio, Science and Technology

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Check out this astonishing TED presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the development of an amazing visual technology called Photosynth. As Arcas’s bio on the TED site explains:

Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or “fly” in for a (much) closer look. Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.

This is a revolution.

[via NewsDesigner.com.]

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Ever since I started this site, a year and a half ago, I’ve been wanting to post about the young British musician Stuart Wyatt, a classically trained electric violinist who plays solo live shows using foot-controlled loop samplers, a technique known as live looping. Wyatt used to have a robust website with plenty of free mp3s, but health problems and financial difficulties forced him to abandon the site in 2004 or 2005, and it eventually disappeared. I was happy a few weeks ago to discover that he now has a new site up with lots and lots of his music.

I do live looping with guitars and electronics, and I first became aware of Wyatt’s music in 2000 or 2001 through his participation in the Looper’s Delight mailing list. At the time, Wyatt was living in Paris and making money by bringing a rechargeable amp out to the Place des Vosges and creating elaborately layered instrumentals with the help of a battery-powered 14-second loop sampler (the classic Line 6 DL4):

Wyatt typically starts a piece by sampling himself playing a four-, eight- or sixteen-bar melody or rhythm. As the initial phrase repeats itself over and over again, he plays melodies and harmonies over the top of the loop, occasionally tapping the record button with his foot to add new phrases to the existing loop. In the right hands (and feet), such as Wyatt’s, live looping is mesmerizing to watch: Over many minutes, you watch and listen as a single musician slowly builds a simple musical phrase or section into a fully formed piece of music, often with harmonies, rhythms, drones, and counterpoint. A lot of the time, looping is simultaneously a composition and a performance, where a musician is reacting to what he or she has just played.

Here’s an excellent track called “Thursday Piece,” which Wyatt improvised live at home in 2002 with an Electrix Repeater—one of the best music gadgets ever. (I own one and am obsessed with it.) “Thursday Piece” is about 12 minutes long, and it builds and develops slowly but beautifully. A lot more mp3s are on Wyatt’s main music page. If you like what you hear, you might drop him a little money through PayPal—he’s apparently having a rough time these days.

Live looping dates back to the early 1960s, when the minimalist composer Terry Riley developed the Time Lag Accumulator, a dual reel-to-reel system that let him record and loop a simple musical idea and then overdub dozens of improvised parts. The result was a massive, hypnotic, and ever-growing wall of sound. In the early 1970s, with help from Brian Eno, Robert Fripp began experimenting with a Riley-style reel-to-reel system that he later named Frippertronics. (“There it was,” Fripp later said, describing his discovery of this technique, “a way for one person to make an awful lot of noise. Wonderful!”) After years of experimenting with looping in the studio—on albums by Peter Gabriel and Hall & Oates (!) as well as his own—Fripp took the setup on the road in the late 1970s and early 1980s for a series of solo guitar-and-tape-delay concerts. Here’s some more looping history. These days, inexpensive digital technologies—both software and hardware—give both amateurs and pros a remarkable amount of looping power: There are now tons of great cheap looping devices on the market, almost all of them much more powerful and versatile than Fripp’s 1970s reel-to-reel system.

Because looping is a technique, not a genre, it is used in a wide range of music styles. The singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur plays solo live shows using two loop samplers and a stageful of effects devices, which allow him to create the sound of an entire band: He’ll start a song by tapping and slapping a beat on the neck and body of his acoustic guitar, and then he’ll layer arpeggios, strums, and backing vocals to accompany his own voice. It’s pretty incredible to watch. (The singer-songwriter Howie Day has apparently used looping in a similar way, though I’ve never seen or heard him do it.) This guy does tight, intricate beatboxing with the help of a great software program called Ableton Live. And this fairly technical Guitar Player article explores how various prominent guitarists incorporate looping into their playing.

On my own music page, you can hear a few tracks where I use looping extensively, though not in a live, real-time way. For those tracks, I built up a bunch of loops and then remixed them in my studio.

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Earlier this month, Britain’s Channel 4 aired The Root of All Evil?, a two-part exploration of religious faith hosted and narrated by Richard Dawkins, the eminent Oxford ethologist and author who is one of the world’s most outspoken proponents of the theory of evolution. He’s also an aggressive critic of religion. The Root of All Evil? follows Dawkins as he travels to some of the world’s religious centers—among them Jerusalem, Lourdes, and Colorado Springs—to observe services and to interview leaders and followers of various faiths.

Tipped off by a thread on Echo, I bittorrented both episodes a few days ago. From the vantage point of the United States, the program is remarkable: You simply would never encounter such a brazen denunciation of religious faith on this country’s airwaves, because the outcry from the religious right would be deafening. Dawkins’s narration drips with contempt; as he goes about his rounds, it’s as if he can hardly restrain himself from shouting, “I’m surrounded by IDIOTS!” The smoke coming out of his ears leaves a trail behind him wherever he goes.

In the seven-and-a-half minute clip linked through the image below, Dawkins visits Colorado Springs to attend a sermon by an influential but proudly ignorant pastor. In a conversation with Dawkins after the sermon, the pastor likens the event to a rock concert. Dawkins suggests that it was more akin to a Nuremberg rally—a comparison that the pastor appears to be too uneducated and ignorant to be offended by.

[I found the two torrent files on a members-only site. You can download the torrent for the second of the two parts here; the first episode is surely available on other torrent sites, too. For information about bittorrenting files, see this item I posted in July.]

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In 1979, when I was 10, my father bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 for my family. The TRS-80 was an attempt by Tandy, Radio Shack’s parent company, to enter the burgeoning home-computer market. It was a rickety, cheaply made little thing that totally earned its derisive nickname, “Trash 80.” But I was fascinated by what it could do. Those were the days of Asteroids and Space Invaders; my friends and I were part of the first generation of children to grow up obsessed with videogames. When my dad brought the TRS-80 home, I was convinced it would be like having an entire arcade of awesome videogames in my bedroom. That was not, um, the case. My version of the TRS-80 had something like one kilobyte of memory—no joke—and didn’t utilize a disk drive; you loaded programs into its memory using a standard audiocassette player. But I still had fun with the thing. I remember programming it to play back a funk-free rendition of “The Hustle” comprised entirely of staccato eighth-note ticks and bleeps. God, I was so fucking cool.

Anyway, getting to the point: I was assigned an oral report in my sixth-grade English class a year or so after we got the computer, and I chose to talk about my TRS-80. I still have the notecards from that oral report—see below—and they’re pretty hilarious, and not just because my handwriting is totally freakish. In the last few years, I’ve re-created this speech in front of New York audiences three or four times, most prominently at a 2003 installment of my brilliant Upper West Side neighbor John Hodgman’s Little Gray Book series. I read two oral reports from my childhood and adolescence that night; the other one was my 10th-grade Led Zeppelin report, which I posted about here.

The main column of this site isn’t wide enough to accommodate legible scans of my seven original notecards, so I’ve created a special page to hold everything. The link is below. I’ve posted a full transcript at the end of the page, in case you find my freakish handwriting unreadable.

(For the record, my computer-geek period only lasted a year or two. By 1981 or 1982 I had lost interest in computers—though not videogames—and I didn’t really start using them again until the early ’90s, right after I graduated from college. During my undergrad years I wrote my papers by hand in notebooks and then stayed up late typing them on my electric typewriter while listening to every Van Morrison LP in my collection—and reaching for Liquid Paper when I made a mistake. Ah, good times.)

Here are my two favorite lines from the report:

[Y]ou can buy a line printer that prints the information on the screen onto paper, which can be quite useful if you don’t want to copy something by hand. […] Another way to save and/or load in programs is with floppy disks, which are square disks that are floppy.

Here’s the page where I’ve posted all the full-size notecard scans. You can also get there by clicking on the image below.

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At the end of the night on Wednesday, after drinking here with this person and this person and this person, among others, I worked my way to the 14th Street 1/2/3 stop to wait for the train to take me uptown. After peering south down the express track and seeing no evidence of an approaching train, I reached into my man purse for my iPod … and it promptly slipped from my fingers and down onto the tracks:

I wasn’t about to jump down to retrieve it without being absolutely sure I’d be able to get back up again very quickly. I’ve seen the occasional news stories about New Yorkers who’ve jumped down to the tracks to fetch a dropped cellphone only to be crushed by several thousand tons of high-speed metal. I don’t want the end of my life to serve as a cautionary tale about modern man’s dangerously misguided worship of technology. I just like listening to music on my iPod.

So I stood there for a few minutes pondering what to do. I decided I’d wait until right after the next express train left the station and then recruit a couple of strong men to spot me as I jumped down. I waited five minutes, then ten, before realizing that all express trains were apparently being routed to the local track. And then I spotted my opportunity: A very tall man, maybe six-foot-six, walked by with a burly friend. I approached them and sheepishly asked if they’d help me up from the tracks after I’d retrieved my iPod. But without any prompting from me, the tall guy simply jumped down to the tracks, grabbed the iPod, and hoisted himself back up. I thanked him, and as he and his friend started to walk away, I pulled out my wallet so I could give him a twenty or something. But he refused. Thanks, iPod Man, whoever you are.

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Last year my excellent writer pal Rebecca Skloot wrote a funny and enlightening feature story for The New York Times Magazine about fish doctors—veterinarians who treat fish for infectious diseases, cancer, buoyancy disorders, and other medical problems. Becka, whom I hardly see these days because she’s finishing her book, recently reported a piece about fish vets for the PBS show Nova. Her segment aired last week, and it’s now online. You can watch it here. The sight of a fish on an operating table is pretty bizarre.

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My pal Clive Thompson, a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Details, and other mags, has an excellent piece in the latest Wired about “the ‘fab revolution’—the advent of cheap, easy-to-use tools for crafting physical objects, such as laser cutters and 3D milling machines,” as Clive puts it on his first-rate science-and-technology blog, Collision Detection. “Essentially, I argue that the physical world is about to become as flexible as information. Just as computers and the Internet made bits infinitely malleable, precision-guided fab tools will make atoms easy to tweak.”

To immerse himself in these new technologies, Clive used them to create the body of a one-of-a-kind electric guitar. He enlisted the services of eMachineshop, a New Jersey-based company whose website and proprietary software allow customers to design a wide range of physical objects—everything from furniture and toys to sporting equipment and medical devices—that are then manufactured by eMachineshop and sent to the customer.

The first graphic below is Clive’s design as it existed it in the software; the second is Clive rocking out at home with his new guitar.

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Zachary Vex is a music engineer and electronics fetishist whose unique effects pedals and tiny amps have earned him the adulation of discerning music-gear fanatics around the world. His little company, the Minneapolis-based Z. Vex, is best known for its hand-assembled and hand-painted effects pedals, many of which are designed to produce beautifully sick low-fi sounds. A year or two ago Z. Vex expanded into the world of amplifiers with the Nano Head, the world’s smallest tube guitar amp, which fits in the palm of your hand. When coupled with a speaker cabinet, the Nano Head is capable of some excellent AC/DC-style crunch.

Now Z. Vex has announced its latest product: the iMP AMP, a stereo vacuum-tube power amplifier “intended for studio use, or with small sound sources such as iPods, mini-disc/cd players and laptops to power passive monitors. Perfect for your office or recording environment—you can put the iMP AMP right on your desk with bookshelf speakers and have a mini tube hi-fi setup for your iPod.”

Unless you have lots of disposable income, you probably won’t be buying an iMP AMP anytime soon: The retail price is $525. But I’m sure it sounds great, and the retro-futuristic design is beautiful. It almost looks like a discarded prop from the set of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Here are some more details from the e-mail Zachary Vex sent out last week:

It’s a hi-fidelity stereo vacuum tube power amplifier designed to power passive speakers (like old-fashioned bookshelf speakers or studio monitors like Yamaha NS-10s or JBL L100s, or even high-end audiophile speakers.) It’s one watt per side, with RCA input connectors, barrier-strip output speaker terminals, and adjustable sensitivity so the iMP is compatible with any standard level, from +4dB (studio level) to -20dB (consumer gear like the iPod.) It’s slightly smaller than the Nano head because it doesn’t have a fan. […] Its frequency response is nothing short of amazing, at +0dB/-2dB from 10 Hz to 22kHz. I’m really thrilled with this amp. I use it at my desk, where it takes up very little space and is plenty loud to fill my office with sound. I have another one driving my old JBLs at my lab bench, where we listen to all of the CDs we receive from players using our products! There’s one more in my living room with a Clearaudio Basic phono preamp feeding it, driving my Monitor Audio Golds. It makes my old Zep records sound just like 1971, man.

My favorite Z. Vex pedal is the Seek Wah, which functions like an array of sequencer-triggered wah-wah pedals. If you have no idea what that might mean, or you just want to see the Seek Wah in action, there is a video demo on the Z. Vex site, complete with charmingly geeky commentary from Zachary Vex himself. It’s an amazingly cool gadget.

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On Slate today, a brief slide-show history of the vibrator (some images not safe for work):

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An enterprising person on livejournal.com discovered that Google’s amazing new satellite mapping technology would allow him to access aerial photos of Area 51, the secretive government facility in Arizona that plays a major role in U.F.O. conspiracy theories:

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Simon Extreme, a free download for Mac OS X, is “a reinterpretation of the classic 1978 Milton Bradley game Simon, complete with authentic gameplay and sound samples from the original game.”

[Via Unbeige.]

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My very smart pal Peter Dizikes has a fine piece in The Boston Globe’s Ideas section about the way that popular representations of Albert Einstein—“the detached, elderly professor with unruly white hair, a lined face, sloping shoulders, and a contemplative gaze, occasionally given to bemusement”—have obscured the world-historical importance of the scientific work he did when he was younger:

Einstein’s has become the all-purpose face of genius. ”Like a logo,” says Peter L. Galison, a historian of science at Harvard and author of ”Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps” (2003). Used this way, adds Galison, ”Einstein is voided of any meaning at all. He’s just smart or wise.” A recent ESPN.com article wondering if New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick could be considered a genius featured photos of two people: Belichick and Einstein. This iconography, though it may seem harmless enough, obscures the Einstein who actually revolutionized physics. In this, the 100th anniversary of the year Einstein announced his Special Theory of Relativity, the disparity between the aging celebrity scientist and the formidable young figure upending our conception of the universe seems especially jarring. In 1905, Einstein was an intense, even feisty young man of 26 with many worldly concerns, including a wife and a job. He had dark hair and a solid build. ”A massive body, very heavily muscled,” the English writer and physicist C.P. Snow noted years later.

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