notes
Sunday, 22 December 2002How real is this? I love a glowing filament as much as the next person. I'm keen to know what a warm sound is.
Rediscovering a Secret of 60's Sound: Vacuum Tubes. Vacuum tubes lend music a warmth and body that solid-state circuits cannot, audiophiles say. [New York Times: Technology]
Are we associating digital with arctic northern european precision, and analogue with the fiery temperaments of the mediterranean???
And then I'd like to get a grip on the body that eludes solid-state. I always thought we were talking about electrons which we can make do all sorts of things, hot or cold.
This fetish for valves is up there with a product I discovered with a laugh this afternoon in one up-market lifestyle shop in Queen Street Woollahra. For a mere A$59 you could buy a small packet (about the same size as a packet of cigarettes) of small colour co-ordinated sea shells and pebbles ground smooth. Nature did the work; Estaban add value via a precious aesthetic and Orson & Blake delivers a compact one-ness with nature that fits in your pocket - but looks better in the little dishes they sell...
I have to confess I love the look but just as I don't want to pay $59 for pretty pebbles, I'm loathe to hand over $1,000s for an amp simply because it uses valves! I also have to confess I do share Tony Hancock's Radio Ham character's sentiment - "Oh what a work of art is a 6V6GT radio valve! You can keep your sistine chapel - I'll take the inside of a wireless set anyday!" (My favourite is the 807.)
"The prevailing yet highly arguable theory is that while all stereo components introduce some distortion to music, tube circuit distortion is itself musical. "Vacuum tube circuits produce almost exclusively even-order distortion," said Lou Johnson, a partner in Conrad Johnson Design, a company in Fairfax, Va., that manufactures both tube and solid-state music components. "Those tones are essentially one octave apart." So tube distortion is basically in pleasant harmony. "A traditional transistor circuit produces odd-order distortion, so it tends to be discordant," he said."
Blogmapping - lighting up the map in more ways than one... At last a timely proposal to make blogging visible. In the olden days of radio the tuning dials of more elaborate domestic short wave radios tried to present an interface along the lines of a world map as tuning dial. They got close with names of cities spread across the dial, often nowhere near where the signals actually were, but you got the message even if you couln't hear the signal.
What if a major US paper or TV network decided to invest in 1,000 webloggers throughout the Middle East before the war kicked off. Bloggers on the street in Cairo, Haifa, Damascas, Riyadh, etc. Mapping them all with a tool like this (with a red dot indicating new content). Original reporting, digital pictures, and digital video/audio (this would be distributed via P2P) from the people on the scene. Very much like what Miguel is doing with his weblog on Venezuela. Different points of view for each weblog, but all biases disclosed in an "about" page (so there is no confusion). Would it be worth $100k a month? No doubt. This could be as big a breakthrough as the CNN news reports during the last Gulf War. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
A couple of years back when I enrolled at an evening course in beginner's Latin, I wasn't totally surprised to learn that there were about 60 people doing the course while the university faculty teaching it had only a handful of students majoring in the language.
A beginner's guide to the Latin language, part 1. In a world that was better governed than the one in which we are forced to dwell, Latin was the foundation of the educational system, and the fountain of literacy: to know how to read and write was to know how to read and write Latin. Knowing Latin, you could speak to anyone else who had been educated under the same régime. Knowledge of the Latin language remains a matter worth pursuing. For speakers of English, Latin offers more than most others of the valuable intellectual exercise that comes from the study of foreign languages. It opens a door to the classical, mediæval, and renaissance worlds. The Latin language has a solemn beauty and cultural resonance that few others share. It enhances your appreciation of the greatest music written in Europe. In this article, which your interest or lack of same may turn into a series of several, we consider the grammatical structure of Latin and how it contrasts with English. [kuro5hin.org]
Another step in the history of writing? Scripts > graffiti > digital pens? This WIRED piece pulls together the companies developing the technology.
DigiPens Search for Write Market. Some observers believe digital pens will make traditional writing on paper obsolete by 2020. A Swedish company is at the forefront of pushing the technology. Michael Stroud reports from Stockholm. [Wired News]
A total rebirth for radio after too much tweaking. And a clean new theme to play with.
Trying to re-trace steps to re-install active renderer and live topics, and hardest of all retrieving paolo's coffee cups to replace the clunky mug!