Complexification
This week Chris and Russ talk about how the universe should really be very simple. And how it really is not.
We also talk about Chris' guilty pleasure: the graphic novel Black Hole by Charles Burns.
Our opening music is Them Say Piano by the The 3 am Association
Our closing theme is Since I've Been Loving You by Scomber.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Sunday, December 6, 2009
AG027: About The Size Of It
This week Chris and Russ talk about the size of things, starting with a box like you might get from amazon and going up to the distance between starts.
The guys also talk about Chris' latest guitar project. Chris is trying to bring a much abused Fender Electric XII, a solid body 12 string electric guitar.
Russ
The guys also talk about Chris' latest guitar project. Chris is trying to bring a much abused Fender Electric XII, a solid body 12 string electric guitar.
Russ
Monday, November 23, 2009
AG026: National Hockney Month
This week Chris talks about David Hockney and Russ looks at National Novel Writing Month.
David Hockney is an English visual artist and one of the most influential artists of our time. His book on the use of optical devices by some of the Old Masters is Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters was published in 2006 and goes for about $42.
November is National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write an entire novel in the month of November. The idea is to get a lot of people writing a novel, a whole novel in 30 days. It's a bit late to get started now, but any month can be Your National Novel Writing Month.
Russ
David Hockney is an English visual artist and one of the most influential artists of our time. His book on the use of optical devices by some of the Old Masters is Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters was published in 2006 and goes for about $42.
November is National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write an entire novel in the month of November. The idea is to get a lot of people writing a novel, a whole novel in 30 days. It's a bit late to get started now, but any month can be Your National Novel Writing Month.
Russ
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
AG025: Creatively Common Star Trek
Creatively Common Star Trek
This week Chris and Russ talk about Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization which encourages people to share their creative works with out simply putting those works into the public domain. The bottom line is that Creative Commons offers a number of licenses that you can apply to your works.
There are a whole family of creative commons licenses. For example, if you don't mind if someone else modifies your work, and makes a profit from it but you do want the credit for anything they do with your work, you can use this license:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Alternatively, you might want to give your song or book or picture away, as long as there is no money involved:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Or you might want to restrict users of your work from changing it:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
The Creative Commons licenses is a tool for you to control what people can do with your work.
The book of the week is All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek by Dave Marinaccio. If you like Star Trek but don't particularly like Star Trek books, try this one. It is a fun romp through the 'philosophy' of everyone's favorite sci fi show.
Russ
This week Chris and Russ talk about Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization which encourages people to share their creative works with out simply putting those works into the public domain. The bottom line is that Creative Commons offers a number of licenses that you can apply to your works.
There are a whole family of creative commons licenses. For example, if you don't mind if someone else modifies your work, and makes a profit from it but you do want the credit for anything they do with your work, you can use this license:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Alternatively, you might want to give your song or book or picture away, as long as there is no money involved:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Or you might want to restrict users of your work from changing it:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
The Creative Commons licenses is a tool for you to control what people can do with your work.
The book of the week is All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek by Dave Marinaccio. If you like Star Trek but don't particularly like Star Trek books, try this one. It is a fun romp through the 'philosophy' of everyone's favorite sci fi show.
Russ
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
AG024: Patent It!
Patent It!
Techies and artists seem to have so little in common. We manipulate electrons and bits with manic precision. They fling paint and images like maniacs. We dream of being the soul of a new machine. Their souls machine new dreams. We write code. They write kōan. But when it comes right down to it, we are all in the business of creating ideas, concepts, schemes, designs. We do have some things in common though: Both artists and techies want to get our due for our work, if not in money than in credit.
The law provides for three ways to make sure that you get the benefit of your ideas, your work and your brand. In fact, if you live in the U.S., some of that protection is built right into the most basic law of the land, the Constitution. Article I, section 8 says that Congress has the power...
Lawyers generally interpret this to mean that Congress has two separate powers, one to grant patents and a second, different power to grant copyrights. A patent is the right of an inventor to prevent others from using his or her invention. A patent is a kind of a bargain: The inventor gets the exclusive right to profit from their invention for a limited term (20 years in the U.S). In return, society as a whole gets the invention when the patent runs out. The idea behind patents is that it will be better for inventors to get a patent than to try and keep their invention secret.
Getting a patent is not easy, nor should it be since a patent is a very broad monopoly. If you hold a patent on some invention, I can't use that invention without your permission, even if I thought of it independently. In order to get a patent, you need to come up with some invention that is really novel, novel in the sense that no one has thought of it before. Recently there has been a lot of criticism of the U.S. patent system for granting patents on fairly obvious 'inventions'. One of my particular favorites is U.S. patent 6,004,596 which provides a exclusive monopoly to the inventors of:
Good thing this patent wasn't around when my mother used to stamp out sealed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by making the regular kind and then using a coffee mug as a sort of cookie cutter.
In contrast to a patent, a copyright is easy to get. In fact it is automatic. Simply by typing these words as I am right now, I am magically creating a copyrighted work. Copyright protects the authors of any original work, be it prose, poetry, music, art and even computer programs. Copyright means that the author has exclusive ownership over the work for some period of time. For new works copyrighted in the United States (this article for example) the copyright lasts the whole life of the author, plus 70 years. Although copyrights are easy to get, they are a much weaker protection than a patent. A patent means that you more or less own the invention, the idea. A copyright means that you own your expression of the idea. Thus, while I own this article and could sue you if you turned the first few paragraphs into the lyrics of a Country and Western song, I would be helpless if you simply went out and wrote your own Country and Western song about patents and trademarks.
Although copyrights are automatic, you can register your copyright. Registration is mostly a processes of sending a copy or two of your work to the copyright office and paying a small fee. Even though you automatically own the copyright on whatever you create, registration strengthens your hand if you do need to sue over that Country and Western song.
Finally, there are trademarks. A trademark is a name or a symbol that you use to identify your business or product. The idea of a trademark is that you should be able to stake out some kind of symbol or name or catch phrase that uniquely identifies your product or business. Like copyrights, trademarks are pretty easy to get. In the U.S., you can register your trademark with the government in pretty much the same way that you register a copyright and for pretty much the same reasons: If someone violates your trademark, you are going to have an easier time in court if you took the trouble to register it first. Interestingly, different companies can use the same trademark, as long as they are in very different businesses. Sometimes this leads to interesting collisions, as when a small computer company founded in the 1970s took the same name, Apple, as an existing music publisher. After all, what could personal computers have to do with music? The rest is, as they say, legal train wreck history.
You can find all sort of further information at the web site of the patent and trademark office and also the copyright office.
Our intro music today was My Friend by our friend Jason Dale. Our bumper and exit music was
Forever, also by Jason Dale. You can find out more about Jason's music over at his web site.
Thanks for listening!
Russ
Techies and artists seem to have so little in common. We manipulate electrons and bits with manic precision. They fling paint and images like maniacs. We dream of being the soul of a new machine. Their souls machine new dreams. We write code. They write kōan. But when it comes right down to it, we are all in the business of creating ideas, concepts, schemes, designs. We do have some things in common though: Both artists and techies want to get our due for our work, if not in money than in credit.
The law provides for three ways to make sure that you get the benefit of your ideas, your work and your brand. In fact, if you live in the U.S., some of that protection is built right into the most basic law of the land, the Constitution. Article I, section 8 says that Congress has the power...
...To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Lawyers generally interpret this to mean that Congress has two separate powers, one to grant patents and a second, different power to grant copyrights. A patent is the right of an inventor to prevent others from using his or her invention. A patent is a kind of a bargain: The inventor gets the exclusive right to profit from their invention for a limited term (20 years in the U.S). In return, society as a whole gets the invention when the patent runs out. The idea behind patents is that it will be better for inventors to get a patent than to try and keep their invention secret.
Getting a patent is not easy, nor should it be since a patent is a very broad monopoly. If you hold a patent on some invention, I can't use that invention without your permission, even if I thought of it independently. In order to get a patent, you need to come up with some invention that is really novel, novel in the sense that no one has thought of it before. Recently there has been a lot of criticism of the U.S. patent system for granting patents on fairly obvious 'inventions'. One of my particular favorites is U.S. patent 6,004,596 which provides a exclusive monopoly to the inventors of:
A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling ...
Good thing this patent wasn't around when my mother used to stamp out sealed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by making the regular kind and then using a coffee mug as a sort of cookie cutter.
In contrast to a patent, a copyright is easy to get. In fact it is automatic. Simply by typing these words as I am right now, I am magically creating a copyrighted work. Copyright protects the authors of any original work, be it prose, poetry, music, art and even computer programs. Copyright means that the author has exclusive ownership over the work for some period of time. For new works copyrighted in the United States (this article for example) the copyright lasts the whole life of the author, plus 70 years. Although copyrights are easy to get, they are a much weaker protection than a patent. A patent means that you more or less own the invention, the idea. A copyright means that you own your expression of the idea. Thus, while I own this article and could sue you if you turned the first few paragraphs into the lyrics of a Country and Western song, I would be helpless if you simply went out and wrote your own Country and Western song about patents and trademarks.
Although copyrights are automatic, you can register your copyright. Registration is mostly a processes of sending a copy or two of your work to the copyright office and paying a small fee. Even though you automatically own the copyright on whatever you create, registration strengthens your hand if you do need to sue over that Country and Western song.
Finally, there are trademarks. A trademark is a name or a symbol that you use to identify your business or product. The idea of a trademark is that you should be able to stake out some kind of symbol or name or catch phrase that uniquely identifies your product or business. Like copyrights, trademarks are pretty easy to get. In the U.S., you can register your trademark with the government in pretty much the same way that you register a copyright and for pretty much the same reasons: If someone violates your trademark, you are going to have an easier time in court if you took the trouble to register it first. Interestingly, different companies can use the same trademark, as long as they are in very different businesses. Sometimes this leads to interesting collisions, as when a small computer company founded in the 1970s took the same name, Apple, as an existing music publisher. After all, what could personal computers have to do with music? The rest is, as they say, legal train wreck history.
You can find all sort of further information at the web site of the patent and trademark office and also the copyright office.
Our intro music today was My Friend by our friend Jason Dale. Our bumper and exit music was
Forever, also by Jason Dale. You can find out more about Jason's music over at his web site.
Thanks for listening!
Russ
Sunday, October 18, 2009
AG023: Design Matters
Design Matters
Good design is all about making something that just works, that does what people want it to do with no fuss and perhaps with a little bit of style. Think about a plain old hard cover book. You buy a book because you want to read it, to get at the information or the story inside. You don't have to turn it on, you don't need a password, you don't even need to read the instructions. To get at the information inside a book you simply start reading and the data flows. Look away and the flow stops. Look back at the page and it starts again. Now that is great design.
Old traditional land line phones worked the same way: You never actually turned them on. To use a traditional phone you simply lifted the handset and the phone turned itself on. You could tell from the dial tone. Again, simply. Again, a great design.
The iPhone doesn't turn itself on automatically, but it is still a great design. The wonderful thing about the iPhone is that it just wants to be that little portable computer that you have with you all the time. But the iPhone doesn't aspire to spreadsheets and complex documents: Instead it simply does the stupid little computing tasks that need to be done. So the iPhone helps you figure out where you are and where the nearest pizza place is. The iPhone is computing in the small, at it is superb at it.
So what is good design? It is doing one thing really well: Be the repository for a certain chunk of information, or the always there voice communications conduit or the little computer that you always have with yout.
Good design also means doing things with a minimum of fuss: Thus, even though your book may contain important information, books don't generally come with locks on them. A lock might keep prying, non-paying eyes out, but it would be a pain in the neck to the actual owner. In the same way, the old phones just worked, they were always there and they were always ready to deliver your voice. And the iPhone fits in your pocket.
The ironic thing about high tech devices like the iPhone is that if they are well designed, they actually make the world a more human place. Or at least they make it easier to find good pizza, which amounts to the same thing.
Our opening theme is Them Say Piano by the 3AM Association. Our closing theme was Since I've Been Loving Your by SComber.
Russ
Good design is all about making something that just works, that does what people want it to do with no fuss and perhaps with a little bit of style. Think about a plain old hard cover book. You buy a book because you want to read it, to get at the information or the story inside. You don't have to turn it on, you don't need a password, you don't even need to read the instructions. To get at the information inside a book you simply start reading and the data flows. Look away and the flow stops. Look back at the page and it starts again. Now that is great design.
Old traditional land line phones worked the same way: You never actually turned them on. To use a traditional phone you simply lifted the handset and the phone turned itself on. You could tell from the dial tone. Again, simply. Again, a great design.
The iPhone doesn't turn itself on automatically, but it is still a great design. The wonderful thing about the iPhone is that it just wants to be that little portable computer that you have with you all the time. But the iPhone doesn't aspire to spreadsheets and complex documents: Instead it simply does the stupid little computing tasks that need to be done. So the iPhone helps you figure out where you are and where the nearest pizza place is. The iPhone is computing in the small, at it is superb at it.
So what is good design? It is doing one thing really well: Be the repository for a certain chunk of information, or the always there voice communications conduit or the little computer that you always have with yout.
Good design also means doing things with a minimum of fuss: Thus, even though your book may contain important information, books don't generally come with locks on them. A lock might keep prying, non-paying eyes out, but it would be a pain in the neck to the actual owner. In the same way, the old phones just worked, they were always there and they were always ready to deliver your voice. And the iPhone fits in your pocket.
The ironic thing about high tech devices like the iPhone is that if they are well designed, they actually make the world a more human place. Or at least they make it easier to find good pizza, which amounts to the same thing.
Our opening theme is Them Say Piano by the 3AM Association. Our closing theme was Since I've Been Loving Your by SComber.
Russ
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
AG22: We Trip The Light Fandango
Download Episode 22
This week we talk about light - there's more to it than you think.
So what does the heat that seems to try to cook you when you get in a hot car, the radio that you play as you drive and the X rays that your dentist uses to find that cavity all have in common with a beautiful sunset? The answer is that the glow from your car, the radio signals, the X rays and the light from the sunset are all electromagnetic radiation, one of the fundamental forces in the world. They are all just different flavors of the same thing. You can think of the different kinds of EM radiation as different notes on a piano keyboard. The radio waves are the really deep, low notes down on the left end of the piano keyboard. The heat coming off your car are slightly higher notes and the visible light, the stuff that we can see with our eyes are higher still. Up the the really high end, the sharpest notes of all are the X rays. The different pitches - technically frequency - not only change the way that we perceive the radiation, but also affects how much energy the radiation carries. This is why you don't need to fearful of standing in the glare of a light bulb or next to a radio transmitter but should be very careful around the much higher frequency X rays.
Electromagnetic radiation is all around us - fortunately mostly the safer, lower frequency stuff. In fact, everything that is at all warm, (where warm here means anything above the coldest that you could be, which is -273 C ) naturally radiates electromagnetic radiation. That hot car is radiating EM that we perceive as heat. Turn up the temperature a bit, say on an electric stove and you get 'red hot' - the EM radiation coming off the stove is high enough frequency we see it as a dull red glow. Red light is the lowest frequency light that we can see. The other colors are all of slightly different frequencies with yellow somewhere in the middle and violet having the shortest. We call the EM radiation whose frequency is slightly less than red 'infra-red' and the stuff above violet, 'ultra-violet'.
Since electromagnetic radiation is a sort of wave - think of it as like ripples on the surface of water - you can make it interfere with itself. Interference is something that waves do. Throw a stone into a still pond and you will make a set of ripples, little circular mini-waves. Throw two stones in and you will get two sets of ripples. When those two sets of ripples run into each other something very interesting happens: In places they reinforce each other while in other places they cancel each other out. So when two waves hit each other you tend to get an interference pattern, the waves are alternatively stronger (as the two waves reinforce each other) and weaker - as the waves cancel each other out. You can see that kind of interference by looking at the back of a CD or a DVD. The rainbow that you see coming off the back of a DVD is produced by the light that is reflected off of the tiny dots on the back of the DVD. All those dots reflect a bit of light which then goes out and interferes with the other bits coming off of other dots and we get the rainbow. In the same way, scientists bounce X rays off of the atoms inside of crystals - which causes X rays interference patterns - to try and figure out how those atoms are arranged.
Electromagnetic radiation: The world would be a darker place without it!
The opening theme music for this weeks episode is called Walk With Me by our good friend Jason Dale.
The closing music is Air On A G String, performed by the Gardner Chamber Orchestra with soloist Paula Robison
Russ & Chris
This week we talk about light - there's more to it than you think.
So what does the heat that seems to try to cook you when you get in a hot car, the radio that you play as you drive and the X rays that your dentist uses to find that cavity all have in common with a beautiful sunset? The answer is that the glow from your car, the radio signals, the X rays and the light from the sunset are all electromagnetic radiation, one of the fundamental forces in the world. They are all just different flavors of the same thing. You can think of the different kinds of EM radiation as different notes on a piano keyboard. The radio waves are the really deep, low notes down on the left end of the piano keyboard. The heat coming off your car are slightly higher notes and the visible light, the stuff that we can see with our eyes are higher still. Up the the really high end, the sharpest notes of all are the X rays. The different pitches - technically frequency - not only change the way that we perceive the radiation, but also affects how much energy the radiation carries. This is why you don't need to fearful of standing in the glare of a light bulb or next to a radio transmitter but should be very careful around the much higher frequency X rays.
Electromagnetic radiation is all around us - fortunately mostly the safer, lower frequency stuff. In fact, everything that is at all warm, (where warm here means anything above the coldest that you could be, which is -273 C ) naturally radiates electromagnetic radiation. That hot car is radiating EM that we perceive as heat. Turn up the temperature a bit, say on an electric stove and you get 'red hot' - the EM radiation coming off the stove is high enough frequency we see it as a dull red glow. Red light is the lowest frequency light that we can see. The other colors are all of slightly different frequencies with yellow somewhere in the middle and violet having the shortest. We call the EM radiation whose frequency is slightly less than red 'infra-red' and the stuff above violet, 'ultra-violet'.
Since electromagnetic radiation is a sort of wave - think of it as like ripples on the surface of water - you can make it interfere with itself. Interference is something that waves do. Throw a stone into a still pond and you will make a set of ripples, little circular mini-waves. Throw two stones in and you will get two sets of ripples. When those two sets of ripples run into each other something very interesting happens: In places they reinforce each other while in other places they cancel each other out. So when two waves hit each other you tend to get an interference pattern, the waves are alternatively stronger (as the two waves reinforce each other) and weaker - as the waves cancel each other out. You can see that kind of interference by looking at the back of a CD or a DVD. The rainbow that you see coming off the back of a DVD is produced by the light that is reflected off of the tiny dots on the back of the DVD. All those dots reflect a bit of light which then goes out and interferes with the other bits coming off of other dots and we get the rainbow. In the same way, scientists bounce X rays off of the atoms inside of crystals - which causes X rays interference patterns - to try and figure out how those atoms are arranged.
Electromagnetic radiation: The world would be a darker place without it!
The opening theme music for this weeks episode is called Walk With Me by our good friend Jason Dale.
The closing music is Air On A G String, performed by the Gardner Chamber Orchestra with soloist Paula Robison
Russ & Chris
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
