I’ve been learning a lot about a cool new tool I found called
Yackpack.
So if you want to talk to me, you can go here:
Lisa Rein’s Yackpack Channel
I’m using this tool to communicate with my development team at Mefeedia, and it occurred to me that it might be fun to just talk to my readers in real time too.
It works like a walkie talkie. You press to talk and release to listen.
Anyone at this webpage can join in:
http://www.yackpack.com/walkietalkie/?lisarein
See you there!

I’m starting to find Tailrank‘s meme pages very useful.
They have a nice one going now about the
ABC 911 propoganda film controversy.
A couple weeks ago, I appreciated catching up on the
Amanda Congdon leaving/getting fired from Rocketboom controversy.

Speed of Gravity To Be Measured

Astronomers at the world’s largest radio telescopes are gearing up to measure the speed of gravity.
It is the first attempt to verify a key prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which says that nothing, not even the influence of gravity itself, can travel faster than light.
No one has ever tested this prediction, even though the assumption that gravity travels in waves or gravitons with a finite speed underpins much of theoretical physics. The difficulty is that if light and gravity travel at the same speed, how can you hope to see evidence of gravity’s speed?
The answer, says Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri, Columbia, is by watching a distant quasar as the planet Jupiter moves in front of it and its gravity bends radio waves from the quasar. This event is due to happen over the weekend of September 7 and 8. “When I first gave a talk about the idea everybody got excited and said we have to do this,” says Kopeikin.

Continue reading →

If you can manage to hum a few notes of a song you heard briefly into the telephone, this new student-based software will find your song for you.

Read about it in an article Joanna Corman for the LA Times:
College seniors fine-tune music search
Computer program designed in a for-credit course identifies songs by just a few notes.

This is how it works. You sing a few notes of a song into a microphone or the phone. The software converts the notes into a wave and then extracts the notes and their duration. A database has snippets of 500 melodies. The computer calculates the pitch and rhythm and then compares that data to songs already stored. The top 10 closest matches pop up. Only the “main theme” or melody of the song is stored because it is most recognizable, said Yelinek, the team leader and a computer science major.
The program accounts for various versions of the song, including those in different keys. Songs can be hummed, whistled, sung or played.

“You might harmonize it differently. You might have a club mix, but still it’s recognized,” said Huang, a computer science and music major.

The students’ project was part of a program that dates back to the early 1960s. It allows companies, government agencies and nonprofits to approach Harvey Mudd students with problems to solve. Companies give the students, mostly seniors, upward of $30,000 for their research. There have been about 1,000 clinics since the program’s inception and it covers computer science, engineering, physics and math.
The software, which Seet said should be available later this year, has several uses, including copyright protection. It can be used for karaoke, which Seet called a “huge market.”

Cool. I just generated a Bitzi Ticket for my song “Wander” using Bitzi’s XML/RDF Ticket service.