To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.
I used this information to plot the brightest stars, and cause them to revolve about Polaris (the North Star) very slowly, as the stars appear to do. Like the night sky, this is a sidereal time clock — it takes nearly 24 hours for the stars to fully rotate. You’ll notice some familiar constellations, such as the Big Dipper in there. As the stars cross zero and 180 degrees, indicated by the center line, the clock plays an individual note, or chime for each star. The pitch of the chime is based on the star’s BV measurement (which roughly corresponds to color or temperature). The volume is based on the star’s magnitude, or apparent brightness, and the stereo panning is based on the position on the screen (use headphones to hear it better).
Basically, this is a very literal kind of “music of the spheres,” and is typical of my projects, which often involve circles and music. This idea for making a music box out of stars was a natural progression from some previous projects of mine, like the Whitney Music Box, and Musical Chess, which you might also enjoy.
If you’d like a large, high fidelity Wheel of Stars to project on the ceiling of your home, gallery or museum, contact me. I’d love to build you one, or provide you with plans and software.
I thought I’d post a few of my recent Aardvark answers here. Aardvark is a social network in which people ask and answer a variety of questions, using either instant messaging clients or email.
Q. If I weigh 225, is purchasing a Vespa still a good idea? Will it hold me?
A. As far as I know, the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards (it’s able to use its wings a bit like a helicopter).
Q. I was given the honor to officiate my friend’s wedding ceremony; I have to give a speech but don’t know where to start. Can anyone give any tips or web resources? Google hasn’t been too helpful in this regard.
A. Tips about speaking at weddings.
1) Keep your remarks short – no more than 5 minutes.
2) Make the audience laugh. One way to accomplish this is to point out the wedding party’s (less-important) faults. In other words, use the blunt truth as a tool for humor.
3) Make the audience cry. If you find yourself tearing up when you write something, use it. If you are worried you can’t deliver the whole speech without tears, you’re in the right ballpark. If you can make the audience run the whole gamut from laughter to tears in the course of 5 minutes, you will have done splendidly.
4) Keep your remarks focused on the wedding couple, yet make it personal.
Q. What if the hokey pokey is really what it all about?
A. I would find it deeply comforting to know that the Hokey Pokey was indeed what it is all about. It would mean life has a known meaning. A somewhat cryptic, but perhaps ultimately knowable meaning, as opposed to the indecipherable thicket we actually find ourselves in. One would merely need to put one’s right foot in…
I thought I’d have a little fun with it. Here’s all the photos, in sequence, with the President roughly aligned. It must be tough holding that pose for so long!
I recently built an experimental Interactive Mosaic Maker on my Coverpop website. It allows you to build Coverpop mosaics, standard photo mosaics, and composite images from Flickr photos. Prolific Flickrer Leo Reynolds has been playing with it and produced some nice work, including this mosaic of cemetery symbols!
You can see the latest creations made with my tool here:
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you took all the tracks from a Beatle album, and stretched them all to the same length and played them all at the same time?
At Craig Kaplan’s suggestion, I’ve tried the same technique with a bunch of covers of the same track. I chose 13 renditions of “Stormy Weather.” In this case, instead of warping the length of the tracks, I’ve lined them all up to end at the same time, which causes them to form a climactic “storm”.
The artists, in order of appearance are: Lee Morgan, Joe Sample, Tony Bennett with Natalie Cole, Frank Sinatra, Django Reinhardt, Billlie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald with Nat King Cole, Ethel Waters, Etta James, Joni Mitchell, Sara Harmer, and Zooey Deschanel with Samantha Shelton.
I’ve started a monthly open-mic event at Jones Coffee, in Pasadena, to be held the second Friday of each month. The first one on a memorable date – my wife’s birthday.
This open-mic is intended to be singer/songwriter focused, but other performers (poets, comics) are welcome – we can always use variety! There is an acoustic piano at this location, and I’m be available to accompany singers who bring music/charts.
The event has a Facebook page, which you’ll find here.
Hope to see you there on Friday, 9/11!
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We’re writing to let you know about an upcoming update in your AdSense account designed to help you generate the maximum revenue from your ad units. You’ll soon be able to allow multiple ad networks to show on your pages, which means that advertisers from external Google-certified networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers for your ad space.
Then, they started running these really ugly ads, like these:
So much uglier, than the old, tasteful, text-only ads, with the pleasant notice to remind me that I’m looking at an ad by Google. No notices on these new ads. And some of ’em are in Flash, and compete for CPU cycles with the lovely Flash I’ve written myself and am sometimes trying to demonstrate!
But then I look at what Google is now paying for these new ugly ads…
Almost twice as much! Yikes. Oh Google, you make it so hard to not be evil.
Sigh. I’m turning ’em off anyway. Can’t keep subjecting you to these ugly ass ads.
UPDATE: I’ve turned ’em off, but Google is taking a while to figure that out…
UPDATE: According to Google, the ugly ads and the recent policy change are unrelated. If you see an ugly or offensive ad, please let me know and I’ll pull it.
To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.
