Want to know what a Helmholtz siren sounds like? Now you can. and here’s some information about them.
Category Archives: Technology
Gadget Report
I promised one and I’m delivering. I’ve made three big gadget purchases recently, though I’ve only really explored one to its fullest. The two I won’t say much about are 1) the Edirol R-09 voice recorder, which is amazingly light and easy-to-use. I bought it and promptly lent it to Erin, a doctoral student of …
Back from DC — more family gossip
Wow. I don’t know if we’ll do that drive again. It was over 14 hours there because of traffic jams. When it’s already a long trip, a few traffic jams can really mess you up. I have a major gadget report coming your way, but in the meantime, the family history discovery of the year …
A Brief Gee-Whiz Post
As I may have mentioned before, my mp3 project has a bit of an oral history dimension to it, since may of the people involved in developing the technology are still alive and happy to talk about their part in it. I’ve done a couple of these interviews by telephone now, as I’ve been travelling …
The point being made. . .
I just finished reading a comprehensive exam answer in which the student refers to Lewis Mumford’s notion of “biotechnics,” which he elaborates at the end of The Myth of the Machine. For Mumford, biotechnics is an attempt to subordinate technological development to the rules of life instead of the rules of math, an attempt as …
Ten Things that happened or that I learned on our 8-day trip to Seattle
1. I wrote a sentence in my book about how depending on what country you’re in, you get a totally different view of the psychoacoustic research leading up to mp3 coding (though the concepts — masking, critical bands, etc., are all the same). Then Lucent (the fools who closed Bell Labs) won a suit against …
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Rock Patent
This showed up in my mailbox courtesy of Kembrew McLeod. You must must must click on the picture. It’s on an actual patent.