soapbox

So, it looks as though my current work computer has bitten the proverbial dust. I was having overheating problems all last week, and even before then the fans would spin up excessively – and this is a G5 tower, mind you, so 5 cooling fans at 3000 rpm made my office sound like an aircraft hangar.

So now the question comes to the replacement machine. Assuming I can get the “corp” to pay for it, what features are necessary and what can I do without? I’m tempted go for a bare-bones 8-core tower and then add RAM and hard drives separately, especially since being able to run calculations on 7 processors in parallel would be only/almost half as efficient as running on some of the “slow” 16-processors-per-node NAVO machines. Anyway, here’s hoping, and I welcome any insight/suggestions.

So, another item that was stuck in draft purgatory for a month or so before I was able to actually post it…. a circle of iPhones that are both listening to and playing a very abstract kind of “music.” Each one picks up ambient sounds, runs that through a series of software filters to make it sound more musical, and finally plays the result back (with rhythm).

As each iPhone is picking up the tune from the other iPhones it’s playing it back through the same filters, and so on and so forth. All while the software is “judging” each “cell” of sound, to see if it’s interesting or loud enough or so forth, and cells will live or die based on that criteria — in essence, a musical organism.

a warning: it’s not exactly friendly to the ears, especially the first one – don’t use headphones.