Month: May 2008

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The Whitburn Project: 120 Years of Music

Using data from the Whitburn project, Andy Baio of Waxy.org just wrote an extensive entry about one-hit wonders and pop longevity.

For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they’ve created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. It’s 25 megs of OCD, and it’s awesome.

Did pop songs stay on the top 40 charts longer in decades past? Were there more one-hit-wonders in the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s? He’s done some great parsing of some really big data sets, and the results are very interesting.

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MoMA Kills Art

One of the senior curators at the MoMA had to end the life of a tiny coat built out of living mouse stem cells after it grew so fast that the cells began to clog the incubator.

From the New York Times article:

One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.

Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.

This is just a taste of the interesting kinds of developments we’re going to see from biological science in the near future.

(via)

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Family News – The Good and the Bad

Vaughn HutchinsonOn the morning of Monday, May 12th, my sister and her husband Glen added a third baby to the family — another boy. I am very excited for them as are the rest of my family. Jackie and Glen named him Vaughn Patrick Hutchinson. He was a little over 10lbs and his low blood sugar levels meant he needed to be on I.V. for a day or so until things stabilized. They are both healthy and happy to be back at home.

Meanwhile, in some less happy news, on Monday my Mom’s brother Rodger, went into the hospital as well and was put on I.V. because he was unable to eat. It was only a few months ago he was diagnosed with cancer, and though we all realized his time was short, it is still very hard. He died this morning at around 7am in his home.

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Jonathan Lebed the 15 year old stock trader

I came across this great article about Jonathan Lebed, and how he become one of the youngest stock traders to bring in a million. It also relates how the S.E.C. took $285,000 of it away—and that was after they tried to get more.

“Can you explain to me what he did?”

He looked at me long and hard. I could see that this must be his meaningful stare. His eyes were light blue bottomless pits. “He’d go into these chat rooms and use 20 fictitious names and post messages. . . . ”

“By fictitious names, do you mean e-mail addresses?”

“I don’t know the details.”

Don’t know the details? He’d been all over the airwaves decrying the behavior of Jonathan Lebed.

“Put it this way,” he said. “He’d buy, lie and sell high.” The chairman’s voice had deepened unnaturally. He hadn’t spoken the line; he had acted it. It was exactly the same line he had spoken on “60 Minutes” when his interviewer, Steve Kroft, asked him to explain Jonathan Lebed’s crime. He must have caught me gaping in wonder because, once again, he looked at me long and hard. I glanced away.

It’s a few years old now, but it’s still compelling reading: Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities.

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IATT Bulletin 1147

What would you do first with the ability to travel through time? Desmond Warzel shares some clever writing, with Wikihistory, a message board by time travellers.

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?

At 18:33:10, SilverFox316 wrote:
Easy for you to say, BigChill, since to my recollection you’ve never volunteered to go back and fix it. You think I’ve got nothing better to do?

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Gladwell on Innovation

A new Malcolm Gladwell article up at the New Yorker illustrates that inventions, scientific discovery, and ideas aren’t locked down in the minds of a few genius, rather they’re simply waiting for the initiated: In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?

In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies. He thought that if he brought lots of very clever people together he could reconstruct that moment by the Grand River.

The article focuses on a theme that his new book is going to cover (coming November 18, 2008), the difference in results between an individual genius working on a project and collaborative brainstorming by many intelligent people. It turns out, you don’t have to be a genius to come up with something brilliant, you just need to get in a room with a lot of other smart people and bounce the ideas around.