Author: Jeff Milner

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Happy New Year

It’s the end of the year! I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather over the holidays but I’ve had a wonderful time visiting my family in Medicine Hat.

I’m looking back over the last year and thinking about some of the things in my life that have changed.

In 2008:

Happy new year!

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Gizmo!

About 15 years ago, my cousin Mike got a copy of the movie Gizmo! for Christmas. He raved about how hilarious is was, but it was in black and white and released in 1977; I was sceptical.

Gizmo! is a documentary about some of the thousands of inventions that did things we never thought needed doing, or in ways we never considered doing them. A respectful, yet humorous tribute to the inventors whose vision, however far-reaching, was just a little off the mark.

After watching it, our whole family fell in love with it and to this day, my dad still occasionally impersonates Cecil from the first scene. “I don’t know, but I’ll try!”

Here is Gizmo!, embedded for your own viewing enjoyment.

Hit play or watch Gizmo! at YouTube.

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Donkey Auction

A city boy, Kenny, moved to the country, bought a donkey from an old farmer for $100.00.

The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.

The next day the farmer drove up and said, “Sorry son, but I have some bad news, the donkey died.”

Kenny replied, “Well then, just give me my money back.”

The farmer said, “Can’t do that. I went and spent it already.”

Kenny said, “OK then, just unload the donkey.”

The farmer asked, “What ya gonna do with him?”

Kenny, “I’m going to raffle him off.”

Farmer, “You can’t raffle off a dead donkey!”

Kenny, “Sure I can. Watch me. I just won’t tell anybody he is dead.”

A month later the farmer met up with Kenny and asked, “What happened with that dead donkey?”

Kenny, “I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece and made a profit of $898.00.”

Farmer, “Didn’t anyone complain?”

Kenny, “Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back.”

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Sine-wave Speech

First developed by Robert Remez and Philip Rubin at Haskins Laboratory, Sine-wave speech is a form of artificially degraded speech. Much like the “aha” moment one gets when one listens to music backwards with a suggested lyric showing, the sine-wave speech is easily recognizable once the listener has been primed.

Listening to the sine-wave speech sound again produces a very different percept of a fully intelligible spoken sentence. This dramatic change in perception is an example of “perceptual insight” or pop-out. We have argued that this form of pop-out is an example of a top-down perceptual process produced by higher-level knowledge and expectations concerning sounds that can potentially be heard as speech.

I picked up on a few of the lines without checking first, and it got easier as I went along.

Try the examples yourself at Sine-wave speech.

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