Green Comet

Let me be the first to offer best wishes and a bon voyage to Canada’s scientists. The government has told them to forget about their normal enquiries and concentrate on things that will help business. Yes, this government thinks that it can mandate made-to-order science. And they seem to think that our best and brightest will be happy in their new role as civil servants doing the bidding of politicians and business people. Politicians and business people. Who better to point the way to new scientific discoveries?

How could Canada be so foolish, you ask? Well, in this country we have a political system where a party can get 39% of the vote and form a majority government. Then this “majority” can dictate to the 61% who voted against it. It’s in this welter of irrationality that politicians think they can choose the science they want.

Here are some examples of their hubris:
Scientist calls new confidentiality rules on Arctic project ‘chilling’
Harper Government Stifles the Truth

Here’s what some scientists think of it:
How Science Can Help the Feds Save Face
Open for business: Refocused NRC
Outcry Grows Over Canadian Govt’s Undermining of Climate Science
Is Canada giving up on science?

Here’s what a Canadian commentator thinks of it:
Rick Mercer Says Scientists ‘Muzzled’ In Canada Again (VIDEO)

If I were a talented young scientist, I think I’d be looking for some place I could do real science. Some place where they believe in fundamental research, exploring the unknown. Some place outside of Canada.

rjb

OpenStreetMap is an online collaboration of people who are interested in creating free and open maps for anyone who wants them. Whether you’re a bicyclist planning your route for the weekend or a corporation wanting to sell maps to cyclists, you are free to use OpenStreetMap data. That’s right. You can come in, having contributed nothing at all, paying nothing at all, and use other people’s work to make money. But that’s not the point of it. The real point of OSM is people working together to make ever-improving maps available to all.

The way they make the project and its data open and free is through the use of a special copyright license, the Open Data Commons Open Database License. It’s similar to the Creative Commons Attribution and ShareSlike license used by Green Comet. To quote from their FAQ: “You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence.”

OpenStreetMap is built in the way of a wiki. Anyone can become a member and contribute to the database. If you know of a road or a trail that you think should be included, you can put it in yourself. In this way OSM grows. Lately there are even apps for tablets and phones to help make it easy, and OSM provides an editor that you can use right in your web browser. With GPS, what could go wrong?-)

rjb

May fourth is the international day against digital restrictions management, led by the organizations Defective by Design and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others.
Defective by Design – “This is a critical moment in the fight against DRM. A proposal currently being considered by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) would weave DRM into HTML5 — in other words, into the very fabric of the Web.”

EFF – “DRM software restricts the way users can interact with content, which hits close to home for an organization like EFF. Even worse, “anti-circumvention” laws that regulate whether users can bypass DRM, like section 1201 of the DMCA, effectively give that software the force of law.”

Here’s how to identify DRM, according to the EFF.
“Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies attempt to control what you can and can’t do with the media and hardware you’ve purchased.
-Bought an ebook from Amazon but can’t read it on your ebook reader of choice? That’s DRM.
-Bought a DVD or Blu-Ray but can’t copy the video onto your portable media player? That’s DRM.
-Bought a video-game but can’t play it today because the manufacturer’s “authentication servers” are off-line? That’s DRM.
-Bought a smart-phone but can’t use the applications or the service provider you want on it? That’s DRM.”

Another definition from DRM.info.
“Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is any technology that is built into an electronic product or service with the aim of limiting its range of uses after purchase. It is designed to prevent customers from using digital technology in ways that do not correspond to the business agenda of a content provider or device manufacturer.”

Here’s where you can find products and artists who are against DRM. And of course here on Green Comet. All files made available for download here are guaranteed DRM-free.

rjb

Foter has posted an infographic on their blog that explains how to attribute CC photos on your own blog. They also provide access to hundreds of millions of Free Stock Photos that you can download and use, complete with a simple way to apply the attribution to the creators of them. This infographic has a CC-BY-SA license, the same as Green Comet.

Foter has a WordPress plugin that they say simplifies using and attributing photos, but I haven’t tried it and can’t comment on it.

rjb

A whispering gallery is defined as “a space beneath a dome or arch in which sounds produced at certain points are clearly audible at certain distant points,” in the Free Dictionary, a free online dictionary.

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, defines a whispering gallery similarly: “a gallery beneath a dome or vault or enclosed in a circular or eliptical area in which whispers can be heard clearly in other parts of the building.”

There are many examples of whispering galleries around the world, some natural, some artificial constructions. The viewing areas in planetariums generally have a projection dome on top of a circular wall. The whispering can be heard around the inside of the wall. Sometimes you can hear people on the opposite side of the room better than you can hear your neighbor.

Large buildings and public spaces dominate when it comes to finding whispering galleries in human structures. Buildings that serve more than a utilitarian purpose, where the costs can be justified for pride or beauty, are good candidates. Churches and other large public buildings often have superfluous structures in them, like domes and arches. Large, curved surfaces make the best galleries.

Grand Central Station, a New York railway station built when monumental was the word, is such a building. In it is an oyster bar called the Grand Central Oyster Bar, which is entered via an arched hallway. People in opposite corners of the hallway can hear each other whisper.

Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London has a dome. The current Saint Paul’s does, anyway. The original one, built of wood by the Saxons and lost to fire in 675, didn’t. Neither did any of the many incarnations of the cathedral built over the next thousand years on the same spot. The present version, completed in 1708, was designed by Christopher Wren and is the first to have a dome. From ground level one must climb 259 steps before entering the dome. Once inside, the whispering gallery effect can be heard.

The Mapparium, in Boston, goes beyond arches and domes. It’s a stained glass globe, fully enclosed in all dimensions. All points share acoustical effects with at least one other point. It was built in 1935 and shows the Earth’s political boundaries in stained glass. People can walk on a glass sided bridge right through the center and look out through a map of the world all around them.

Physicist William Hartmann and his team have recorded many acoustical effects in the sphere. There is the classical whispering gallery, where people on opposite sides in the structure can hear each other. There are places where sounds are amplified or muted. A sound source moving away across the bridge can seem to flip back and forth from ear to ear.

I can’t think of a nicer place for an acoustically-inclined person.

rjb

I don’t think I have the kind of brain that can truly appreciate the deep intricacies of this. Maybe someone can help me out? The original is here if you’d like to go have a look. I don’t know. It just makes me dizzy.-)

rjb

The reading of Extension Two – Cloud City is complete and ready for download. The four chapters are individually recorded and encoded in OGG Vorbis format, then archived in a single file. It’s available on the downloads page, along with everything else. Please take it and enjoy.

rjb

I got a couple of baffling pingbacks on the ISBN post. You can see them there if you’re interested, but they look unusual to me, so you might want to be cautious. Two main things look unusual. First are the links to this site that they put on those sites, creating the pingbacks: there is no direct correlation to the original post, and therefore no rationale for the links. That makes me wonder why they’ve done it. Second is the presence of the term “warez” on those sites. That’s usually associated with fraudulently acquired commercial software. That makes me wonder what they’re up to.

Am I being overly cautious, maybe pathologically suspicious? Am I merely the victim of my own inexperience in blogging and pingbacks? Is there an innocent explanation for this, or are these people using Green Comet in some nefarious plan of their own?

rjb

PS, In both cases the link to Green Comet is in the word, “ISBN.”

Speaking of infrasound, have you ever wondered about the lowest sound? Is there a lowest sound? Is it even reasonable to think about a lower limit to the frequency of sound?

Definitions first. I will define sound as pressure waves in a medium. That is, sound is mechanical oscillations in an elastic medium. The medium, such as air or water or steel, is pushed in one direction by pressure, then falls back elastically in the other direction before being pushed again. The frequency at which it oscillates determines the pitch of the sound. When middle C is played on a piano, for instance, its string vibrates 261.626 times per second, pushing the air at that frequency and jiggling your earbones at the same pitch. In so-called scientific pitch notation, middle C is set at 256 Hz, which is much more convenient because it makes all Cs round numbers in binary arithmetic. We don’t need to worry about the difference. And for the record, yes, there is sound even when no one hears it.

An interesting note about sound is that it requires a certain minimum space in which to form. If a sound wave is ten meters long, it can’t form in a five meter room, so you won’t hear it. This gives us a clue about our original questions about the lowest possible sounds. If there is a limit, it will depend on whether or not the universe is finite in size. If it is then yes, there is a lowest possible sound frequency with a wavelength equal to the size of the universe.

The lowest note discovered so far was found ten years ago by astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a space-based telescope. They have observed ripples in intergalactic gas clouds surrounding the cluster of galaxies they call Perseus. They’re definitely pressure waves, alternating higher and lower pressure. If you had a big enough ear you’d be able to hear a B-flat fifty-seven octaves below middle C. That doesn’t sound like much until you realize that for every octave you go down, you double the wavelength. When you’re doubling like that it doesn’t take long to get really big. The frequency of this note isn’t measured in Hz, or cycles per second. It’s measured in cycles per ten million years, so you might get a little restless waiting for the concert to end.

Now that’s infrasound.

rjb

Who knew that an ordinary person could get an ISBN (International Standard Book Number?) I thought it was one of those things that magically appeared on books after they’d passed under the spells and incantations of lofty book publishers. But you can get them for books you’ve published yourself, even if they’re only in digital form, and never printed on paper.

So, Green Comet has its very own ISBN. Actually, it has several because you need a different one for every format. I got one each for the text version, the PDF version and the ePub version. Soon I’ll have one for the recording.

rjb