i've been scouring my old hard drives for salvageable files lately..  for some reason, linux can still mount most of the damaged vfat filesystems which windows gave up on years ago.  there're still plenty of corrupt data, but i was able to retrieve about a dozen of my old impulse tracker songs intact!  i've posted some of the better ones on the music page.

most of them are only available as .it files right now, but i'll try to get mp3/ogg versions posted over the next week or so.

so the mission theater here in portland has been playing episodes of 'buffy the vampire slayer' every tuesday night, for free.  it's pretty great.  abby and i went last tuesday for her birthday, and enjoyed it enough that we've decided to make it a tradition, even though they're already in season seven and we're not sure what's going to happen when it's over.

they just play the show off of the dvd, which means everyone can see them navigating the menus between episodes.  but at the showing last night, the dvd player started acting up and the girl running the projector couldn't get it to switch episodes.  the title menu had appeared after the first episode ended, and the option to return to the main menu was on the right side of the screen.  but for whatever reason--  my guess is a stuck button on the remote--  the cursor wouldn't stay there.  she'd move it right, and it would bounce right back to the left.  after trying a few times to no avail, she started searching for a different way to navigate there, but nothing seemed to be working.  by this point, the audience was already giggling a bit, and one guy started yelling 'just hit the menu button!', which she tried, but which only reloaded the title menu again (is there no standard behavior for menu buttons? it seems like different dvds do different things).

so after a minute of this, she just stopped the dvd and restarted it.  the whole audience got to sit through the fbi warnings (and wonder about the 'no unauthorized exhibition' clause), and then the main menu finally popped up.  and that should've been it..  but it wasn't! (...)

yesterday, in the middle of a discussion about aliasing with a friend, i stumbled upon this passage in wikipedia's article on the wagon-wheel effect:

Rushton (1967[3]) observed the wagon-wheel effect under continuous illumination while humming. The humming vibrates the eyes in their sockets, effectively creating stroboscopic conditions within the eye. By humming at a frequency of a multiple of the rotation frequency, he was able to stop the rotation. By humming at slightly higher and lower frequencies, he was able to make the rotation reverse slowly and to make the rotation go slowly in the direction of rotation. A similar stroboscopic effect is now commonly observed by people eating crunchy foods, such as carrots, while watching TV. The crunching vibrates the eyes at a multiple of the frame rate of the TV. Besides vibrations of the eyes, the effect can be produced by observing wheels via a vibrating mirror. Rear-view mirrors in vibrating cars can produce the effect.

now, this sounds ridiculously cool in theory..  in ideal conditions, it would mean that you can get spinning objects to appear to rotate along with a melody you're humming, with varying speed and direction depending on the pitch of each note, perfectly synchronized, and in such a way that only you can see it.  but i've been humming at passing car wheels all day and all i've been seeing are lots of odd looks from strangers at the bus stop.  i'm not giving up yet, though;  i'm going to try again tomorrow, after doing some math to try and figure out the frequency ranges i need to be targeting in order to get the effect at various typical car speeds for various typical wheel sizes.  i'm not stopping until the hubcaps dance for me.

i've been pondering this one for a while.  for the past few years, on tv and in film, i've been noticing a lot of lines like "we just can't leave her here" or "you just can't pretend it didn't happen".  this sounds utterly wrong to me--  i'd expect it to be "can't just" instead.  a cursory tally of google search hits seems to justify my preference, but in hollywood, convention appears to go the other way.

i think this is more than just a regional speech pattern, though..  there's a pretty clear difference in meaning between the two.  but what's weird is, while i can't discern anything semantically nonsensical about "we just can't leave her here", to my ears it sounds almost as silly as, say, "i can't just get enough".

if anyone has any insight to offer, i'm dying to hear it.

a few years ago, i nodded off while watching a ds9 dvd, and woke up the next morning feeling completely refreshed and rejuvenated--  which is extremely rare for me.  before long, i discovered that it was actually the background noise from the title menu on the dvd that was responsible.  there's no music--  it's essentially filtered noise, some low-frequency hum, and some intermittent blips and bleeps.  it fades out and back in at the loop point, which makes it feel like some sort of long, drawn-out ocean wave or something.  it's one of the most relaxing noises i've ever heard.

i haven't made much use of this knowledge since then, as it didn't seem worth the price of the dvds..  but last night, i got hold of one of the discs again, and was able to record the audio.  so here it is (mp3, 942kb)!  if you decide to try it, be sure to let me know how it goes!