Archive for September, 2008
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Candy and babies
It’s hard to imagine 13,000 hospitalized babies due to the milk contamination scandal in China.
And even “big white rabbit” candy, which I’ve been eating since my first trip to China in 1983, has melamine.
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Adobe Soundbooth
Tomorrow Adobe will announce the next version of their video processing software (CS4, if you’re keeping score at home). It’s supposed to include AVCHD support (hurray!) and include Adobe Soundbooth, which will provide automatic speech to text conversion (hip-hip-hurray!). I just downloaded the Soundbooth beta and may play with it tonight to see if it might be a useable tool for us. Not holding my breath, but this is something that could be very far from perfect and still useful. Or not…
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Still not in my price range, but definitely getting closer…
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Google Audio Indexing
Now just for political video, but I’m glad to see that this is in development.
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Now we’ll see how RAID works…
My Buffalo Terastation network attached drive seems to have a broken drive. I’ve ordered a new one (or as close to the original as you can now get), and I guess I’ll have a chance to find if RAID 5 is all it’s cracked up to be.
I’d already been considering getting a DROBO, which has its own RAID-like setup (probably bad) and allows you to upgrade drives one by one (very, very good).
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A disappearing number
Last night I saw a very interesting play, “A disappearing number” by a theatre (they’re British) group called Complicite. It was loosely about the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy, along with another story about the star-crossed relationship between a British mathematician named Ruth and her mathematically illiterate Indian American businessman husband. It was very, very well staged, using blackboards and spatial dimensions in ways I haven’t seen before.
You can see a discussion of the play on YouTube here.
There was a weird math phobic vibe to parts of the production, particularly an introduction that included a few tricks and expressed wonder that someone might know the sum of the series 1+2+4+8+16.
In the relationship between Ruth and her husband much was made of the fact that the sum of the series 1 + 1/N converges on 2, and much was made of convergent and divergent series. It seemed odd to me that they didn’t just use the series 1/N, which sums to 1 as N approaches infinity, which could have an E Pluribus Unum vibe to it.
Well worth seeing if you get a chance.