Yet another Earthquake

This morning, right after I got up. As all my California readers are certainly aware, sometimes very large earthquakes have foreshocks. These are a bunch of minor (or major) earthquakes that precede something really big. Not all really big earthquakes have foreshocks, but almost all have aftershocks, some of which are nearly as big as the major quake itself.

FEMA, the now-defunct US Emergency Management agency, made a list several years ago of the top three disasters likely to befall the US. The list included a terrorist attack in New York, a major hurricane hitting New Orleans and a large earthquake in the San Francisco region. Wouldn’t it be great if Bush went 3 for 3? I’m sure Bay Area residents can expect all the same support, help, aid and relief that was offered to people struck by Katrina and all the transparency and honesty of the response to the Twin Towers disaster.
I don’t live in a rich neighborhood. I’m screwed. Oh, and why is FEMA now defunct? Because it’s part of homeland security. The Bush Administration doesn’t care about disasters unless it means they get to start a war afterwards.
Ok so what’s the deal with earthquakes? Ok, you know how continents slowly drift around over really long periods of time? They do it in little leaps and bounds. If you are on the border of the movement, you get shaken up when the movement happens. That’s an earthquake. The surface of the earth is covered with really big puzzle pieces called “plates”. The places where the plates touch each other are where earthquakes tend to happen. There are cracks and stuff along those borders. Those are called faults. They’re what shakes. The whole Pacific Rim is covered with faults and therefore with earthquakes and volcanos. This is sometimes called the Ring of Fire.
The San Francisco aera is covered with tons of fault lines. Some are big and some are little. The big quake in 1989 was centered over 100 km south of Berkeley and was on the Loma Prieta fault. The big fault that goes very close to me is called the Hayward fault. It has not had a really big quake in a long time and thus is due for one. Sometimes in the next century. There’s a reason the phrase “geological time” exists. Sometimes a bunch of little earthquakes is just a bunch of little earthquakes, but there’s no certainty.
Everywhere in the world has risks. Low-lying areas flood. Some places have scary storms. Here, the ground shakes. But, my gods, the scenery is beautiful.
Links: USGS: Earthquakes, Disaster Preparedness

Earthquake!

Yikes!

3.7 on the Richter scale, very near my house. There was another one of the same size in the same place just a couple of days ago. Foreshocks? I wanted to come home for the holidays, but not for the Big One.
In possibly related news, today is/was international orgasm for peace day. Maybe a bunch of last minute procrastinators actually made the earth move.
I really hate earthquakes. I was in the big one in 1989. That made elevated highways near my house now collapse despite being well over 100 km south of here. The Hayward fault is much closer and due to go. I hope it waits until I’m out of here.

Pre-jet lagged

I never sleep well the night before flying and I seem to enjoy procrastinating, so now it’s 5:00 am and I’m not packed and every dish in the house is dirty. And, I forgot about garbage day. And, while putting the (potted) xmas tree outside, I flung mud all over my bathroom (by which I mean bathing room). The upside here is that I’m all pre-adjusted to CA time, except if I don’t sleep on the plane, I’ll be a major mess tomorrow.

Let’s see . . . I went to Amsterdam a while ago to see some sort of art opening. There’s a German guy who runs a really, really tiny night shop out of just a shop window display. It’s one of those life-as-art projects, where it’s art because it’s just a bit odd, and the artist embodies it. He was having a small showing of another artist in the shop. The other artist does nothing but pictures of sausages. He handed out tiny real sausages to everyone present. I read the program notes and they were truly insane and mentioned something called the “wurst club.” It’s a real club. I joined it and got a membership certificate which is actually a watercolor painting of a bunch of sausages. I’m the 6th vegetarian to join.
The next weekend, I went to Amsterdam again to go to STEIM’s open weekend. They had a bunch of interactive toy instruments out for folks to play with. They were cool. then some STEIM folks improvised. I went and got my haircut. I really like my hair cutter (Cuts and Curls) because they never argue with me or try to talk me out of things. I say, “make it short and square” and the guy just nods and does it. He talked me into buying some product. I haven’t gotten the hang of using it yet. I look like some sort of cross between an overly-enthusiatic-for-the-wax teen boy or the covermodel for the Amsterdam Gay Guide.
On Monday, I went again to Amsterdam to go to something called “Upgrade.” There were two guys speaking about degradable art and then a couple of guys played sounds and fed them to a video projector via a video aD converter. Destruction of stuff, like data or old photos is fine, I mean, if folks don’t want it anymore, it has to go someplace. But shredding old slides isn’t really getting rid of them. It’s just breaking them up so nobody can use them. In once sense they’re destroyed, but in another they’re not. Somebody with way too much time could probably reconstruct them. What’s more, the amount of space they take up has not diminished. They have not transformed, only been broken into pieces. Degradable art is not biodegradable art. Contrary to audience suggestion, shredding computers is not a good idea. Our leftover technological scraps from forgotten tools and memories are toxic. They might be broken into bits, but those bits will stay around forever, unusable.
Maybe I should go pack or do the dishes or something. I wish my laundry were dry. I’ve been adding labels to my oldest posts and eventually hope to tag everything I’ve ever written here. It seems to be screwing up the feed on lj. Sorry.
Oh yeah, I’ll be in CA starting tomorrow until Jan 4th.

5.1 Podcast

I was late last night in the analog studio at school, until they kicked me out. I was busily running 4 channels of audio, 1 at a time, though the gigantic reverb plate which lurks in the attic of the conservatory. It’s easy to overdo it with the plate and also it has a distinct resonant frequency. When I was thrown out, I was considering my options for frequency shifting. AM, Ring Modulation, FM, Vocoding, waveshaping. So many possibilities, so little time. The nice thing about analog is that even when what you get is all wrong, at least you’re making sound, and that’s good.

So I played my work-in-progress in class today and the teacher decided to show us how to burn a DVD, because it’s a 5.1 (or really, 4.1, since I don’t use the center, but do have a sub track). He said it sounded done. He’s the expert. It’s done. I want, therefore, to post it to my podcast, but all I have at home is a DVD and no software that will rip the audio from it. Even when I go back to school, I’m not totally sure how to encode 6 channels of audio for podcasting. MPEG4? AAC? Is there a way to save the sub and send it quietly to left and right if and only if the listener has only a 2 channel setup?
I need to find some calls for multichannel works and drop this in the mail.

Image Sorting

I want to do a project where I sort images by color, more or less pixel by pixel. If a pixel in one picture is the same color as a pixel in the same spot in another picture, that would be a score of 1. If it’s a similar color, it’s a lower score. If there is the same or a similar color nearby, that gets a different score. No nearby matches or similarities gets 0. Images with hight relative scores would go next to each other, to try to get a progression of images that have a high similarity between each other in a sequence.

Obviously, scoring a large number of these images would be extremely computationally intensive, so I plan to not calculate all of them, but do a genetic algorithm to try out different progressions and get one that’s pretty good, even if not the best. The big problem, though, is the comparisons. There are Perl libraries for dealing with images and I can write some code to do it, but it’s fairly work intensive. I think some program that does this must already exist, but I haven’t found anything. Anybody out there heard fo anything that will do this? It doesn’t have to be 100% fully featured. Just knowing there’s the same color in the same spot is good enough. I could find similar colors vs the same color by first comparing the originals and then comparing reduced color versions. If the originals match, the score is 1. If the originals don’t match, but the reduced color versions do, then the score is 0.5. No match at all is 0. For example.

In unrelated news, I’ve just upgraded this blog to the new google blog beta. It seems to have support for tags built-in. We’ll see.

Happy Days

I have electricity again and the carillon near my house (in the shopping mall, I think) is playing The International.

So the electrician, who came here before the sun was up (which is to say before around 10 AM), spoke very little English and I speak very little Dutch. I described the problem over the phone to a coworker of his who told him what I said in Dutch. But then I realized I left out something important, so I waved my hands around a lot while repeating phrases in English, French and German. Most Dutch people understand German, although it tends to make them unhappy when I answer their Dutch with it. The languages are very close, so it’s confusing. Anyway.
There were sparks and stuff. It was exciting.
I created a profile for Other Minds on Myspace. The profile needs friends, but I’m worried about requesting friends because I don’t want to make people think they’re being considered for a festival as I have very little say in such things. So people should friend request OM and I’ll accept them as friends and good times will be had by all.
Speaking of OM, the festival is coming up tomorrow and if you are in or near the Bay Area, you should really go. I wish I could go.
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Electricty: not so fun

So the power went out in most of my apartment. After checking all the fuses (European fuses are weird), I called the landlord who double checked all the fuses and gradually revealed that he is entirely clueless about electricity and wiring. Finally, he called an electrician who will come around in the morning. The electrician said that we didn’t need to worry about fire if we didn’t hear sparks, smell smoke or sense heat. So we borrowed a long extension cord to get us from a working power outlet to the fridge and the heater and sat down for a nice evening at home in the one lit room.

And then about 5 minutes ago, all the lights came back on. wtf? The power being flaky seems like a potential hazard to me, so I just went downstairs and switched all the breakers off except for one. And I discovered that some of the lights that were working all evening were on a circuit that was mostly out. So before two electrical plus and a lamp were working. Then everything was working. Now that I’ve switched off all the breakers that had faulty sections, only one outlet is working.
Um, is this dangerous? Is my house going to burn down while I sleep tonight? Can I just turn everything back on and tell the landlord to cancel the electrician? What is going on? I just bought a couple of smoke detectors from a store nearby, but the test button only flashes a light but doesn’t make an ear splitting squeal, so I have no idea if they actually work or not. (French and American smoke alarms squeal when you hit that button).
I am not happy. Also, tomorrow is a holiday.
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Fat flying dog

My landlord has agreed to let me have my dog here and Cola’s parents have agreed to give her to me. All I need now is a “Pet passport” and some paperwork and to book her to be shipped with me. Hooray! Cola’s parents are going to buy Xena a flying crate tomorrow, so I’ll talk to a KLM agent on Monday with the exact crate dimensions and weight.

Speaking of weight, Cola’s mom wrote back with Xena’s current dimensions. She weights 63 lbs right now (29 kil0s). She should be around 40 – 45 lbs (20 kilos) ideally. She has to lose about a third of her weight. I’m kind of annoyed. I used to be able just to leave her food out and she would self-ration how much to eat, but I’m guessing those days are over. She didn’t actually like that dog food very much. It was super-healthy expensive hippy dog food. It had rosemary and artichoke hearts in it. I wonder if I can get it here. I saw at my local natural food market that they sell vegetarian dog food. Normally, I’m against such things because more fiber for my dog means more work for me (eww). Maybe it’s a good idea for now, though.
she also has kennel cough right now. I used to get her vaccinated for that, but I guess the vaccine must have worn off. I’m guessing she picked it up at her last vet appointment. She should be over it before January and ok to fly. I need to email her (Oakland) vet and make an appointment for diplomatic paperwork and also to see when I should get her the kennel cough booster. Poor dog is taking antibiotics right now. I wonder if they screw up dog stomachs as much as they do human stomachs? Should dogs eat yogurt while taking them?
I should be able to bike with the dog on the front rack of my bike, even at her obese size, although I’m not looking forward to going uphill in the wind with her being 10 kilos overweight. Her weight right now is like the equivalent of me weighting 200 lbs. Every time somebody keeps her for a long time for me, she gets kind of fat. I need to find the dog food that I guess she doesn’t like.
Speaking of my local natural food market, I was happy with them because I saw that they abstained from putting golliwogs in their windows. But then I saw the wrapping paper they have on hand. bah.
Tomorrow, a local flyer promises folks in blackface hanging out at the Grote Kerk (in my neighborhood), but I’m planning on going to Den Bosch (pronounced “dane boss”) to retrieve Cola’s new camera from the gay bar where it got left two weeks ago. I’m sure there will be plenty of folks in blackface there too. bah. On the plus side, they have a regional specialty called Bosche Ballen (pronounces “Boss-uh Ball-en”) which are chocolate covered fried cream puffs. Yum.
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Time domain frequency tracking for voice and tuba

A voice-like waveform, lovingly rendered in drawing software
There are certain timbres which are most easily pitch tracked in the time domain, rather than the frequency domain. The tuba is one such timbre. It, like the human voice, tends to have one large impulse followed by several smaller impulses. The large impulse is the fundamental frequency. The following little hills are overtones and formants and what not. For the tuba, every large impulse is caused by a single buzz of the lips. Lips flap open, impulse happens, impulse echos, lips flap open again, another impulse, more echoes inside the horn. Similarly, your vocal chords work in the same way. The vibrate like buzzing lips and echo in your head. So the fundamental frequency of your voice is the frequency of the large impulses, not the smaller ones that follow.

So to know the pitch, all you have to do is know how often those peaks come. How do you recognize the peaks? Well, they certainly spike up above the average amplitude, while also raising the amplitude. A good amplitude following algorithm is the Root Mean Square. Since the tuba and the voice have low fundamental frequencies (220 Hz for a typical female voice and the tuba gets down around 40 Hz and possibly below), it’s important to have a long enough window length for the RMS. You want to get enough samples such that you don’t have false positives.
Then, you can subtract the RMS from the original frequency. All but the high peaks will drop below 0. Then count the zero crossings. You’ll have to divide by two, since each peak crosses zero twice: once on the way up and once on the way down.
If you suspect that all of your pulse energy is negative for some reason, you have two options: You can try multiplying your original signal by -1 before subtracting. Or you can take the absolute value of the signal and use that.
Here’s some sample code for SuperCollider. Use headphones to prevent feedback and then sing into your computer. If your voice is low, you may need to adjust the window size. Note that it’s given in samples.

  SynthDef("test-time-domain-freq-tracker", { arg in, out, rmswindow = 200;
 
  var rms, xings, inner, peaks, sin;
  
  inner = AudioIn.ar(in, 1);
  
  rms = (RunningSum.ar(inner.squared, rmswindow)/rmswindow).sqrt;
  
  peaks = inner - rms;
  
  xings = ZeroCrossing.ar(peaks);
  
  sin = SinOsc.ar(xings/2);
  
  Out.ar(out, sin);
  
 }).send(s);

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Recent Events in My Life

On November 18th, I went to Den Bosch to hear the world premiere of The Game of Life’s Wave Field Synthesis doo-dad. It has 192 speakers. Some of the pieces were quite interesting, but all tended to over-focus on how you can do really nifty panning with so many speakers.

On Monday, I played in the Composition department concert at the Korzo Theatre in Den Haag. I played jaw harp in a sort of piece by Jerimiah. It was an odd and long piece that ended with Jerimiah burning the hell out of his arm with dry ice. Jackass-esque. He had to go to the hospital to get bandaged up at the end. I don’t know about performances that involve the composer injuring him or herself. I also don’t know about that performance artist guy who had his friend shoot him in the arm. anyway, some of the pieces in the concert were nice. Many were boring, alas. Almost all were too long. 17 minutes seems to be the magic length for the composition department. You need 3 or 4 ideas to fill that length. Less than 6 ideas, though, unless they’re all closely related to each other. Most folks had too few ideas. Jerimiah had too many, but he was the only one to error in that direction. The concert lasted about 4 hours. It’s very nice that marijuana is legal here. I enjoyed the second half of the concert immensely.
On Wednesday, I went again to the Korzo to hear a concert that had been done also the previous night for the Gaudeamus Festival. Tom Thalim had a piece in it which I liked very much. Also enjoyed the piece of Barbara Ellison especially. (she was also the composer of one of the better Wavefront pieces on the Staurday previous). Overall, the quality of performance was quie high. It was a good concert.
On Thursday, a bunch of folks came over for Thanksgiving dinner. We had lots of food and fun. Also, we now have a an oven.
On Friday, the department of Sonology put on a little concert backstage at the Theatre at school. It was a short concert. Only 45 minutes. Hooray for short concerts. Also, the pieces presented were very good. Most especially impressive was the first one, which featured speakers having down overhead on hinged boards. Two guys with long polls set the speakers going in a pendulum motion. Audience members walked underneath the swinging speakers. the composer of the piece (I wish I remembered who that was) very wisely picked short sounds with high pitches for a lot of his material. This kind of sound is easier to localize and so the effects of the swinging were very apparent. It was quite nice.
On Saturday, Cola and I went to Amsterdam to hang out a bit. We took in the tulip Museum. The most interesting part was the section on the tulip market crash, when irrationally exuberant day traders bid tulip bulb prices up to astonishing heights. You could have a collection of castles for what one bulb went for. Then the market crashed and all the day traders were screwed. My dad told me about this when I was a little kid. I spent a lot of the dot com boom trying not to think about it, card houses or naked emperors, lest I be perceived as one of those who “just didn’t get it.” Aside from that, the museum was kind of boring and I don’t recommend it.
We also went to a store called “Female and Partners.” I have no idea why this place is world famous. Good Vibrations and Toys in Babeland put it to shame. I was disappointed. However, on the way back to the train station, I did find a really warm, nice jacket. It’s made of hemp and so has some silly features like a special pocket which can dispense rolling papers and a few hidden pockets. It’s got a faux fur lining and is water proof. My life is now that much better / warmer.
On Sunday, we went to Brussels. It’s a day trip to Belgium from here! We went to the Musical Instrument Museum there. The museum is one of the best I’ve been to. A very smart curator came up with the idea of giving people radio headphones. If you stand in front of a display case wearing the headphones, you hear typical pieces of music featuring the displayed instrument. Looking at instruments in glass cases is interesting, but it’s better to hear them too.
The museum has a complete set of Saxhorns. Adolphe Sax was the guy who standardized the tuba family. The actual horns made by Sax! I’d never seen them before. The also had Russian bassoons and something called a Monsterophecliede – a ophecliede with a dragon’s mouth. Think of a sort of bassoon-like instrument, but played with a tuba mouthpiece and instead of coming up like a stove pipe, it comes up like a monster.
Lurking hidden away in the basement, are 20th century inventions, like synthesizers and electric guitars. Also relegated to the forgotten floor are bells. Bells are great and deserved more space.
Anyway, the museum is great and should be seen. Don’t forget the basement.
We then wandered around town for a bit and saw the Hôtel de Ville, which is amazing. And then some overly hyped fountain called Manneken Pis. It’s a boy peeing. Across the street, Cola bought snails from a street vendor. We walked around a bit more and then came home.
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