Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Resonance and Harmonies

John Winkelman

While driving around yesterday I caught a show on PRI called The Next Big Thing, a weekly exploration of New York…sort of. I caught the tail end of the show, just in from the beginning of an essay by Bruce Odland on a project he and partner Sam Auinger have been working on for almost fifteen years: turning cities into musical instruments.

The tool they use is an aluminum pipe of a specific length – similar to an organ pipe – which resonates at a specific frequency; in this instance, a low B-flat. Microphones are mounted at specific distances along the inside of the pipe. They pick up the overtones generated by the vibration of the pipe. This data is sent to concrete speakers which feed the note and overtones back into the environment.

The result is something extraordinary.

Traffic becomes a chorus of Tibetan and Franciscan monks backed by cello and didgeridoo. Rough edges are smoothed and the crude instruments of industry become bellows in a gigantic pipe-organ.

There is a sample .mp3 at the bottom of this page .

The audio from The Next Big Thing is here . The Odlund piece is at the end of the hour.

A little digging at the O+A site uncovered a link to some more audio clips of their experiments in Germany (German site).

Flotsam

John Winkelman

It appears that the brain-busting work I did with cellular automata experiments is attracting a bit of attention. This fella has graciously linked to my site; an act I consider high praise indeed, considering the amount of Mojo he wields.

In other news [DEVELOPERS – you know who you are!!] someone with a Big Brain has figured out how to run multiple versions of MS Internet Explorer on Windows platforms (scroll to the bottom of the page for the standalone downloads). This one simple act suddenly makes cross-browser testing vastly easier. And on that note, I have two things to say to users of IE5.0 and 5.5: [1] Sorry about the glitches in my site, and [2] Upgrade your damn browsers to Mozilla or Firebird .

This development in no way lessens my loathing of IE5.0 and IE5.5. In fact, by installing them on my computer I feel like I am somehow now in league with the virus-writing 15-year-olds of the world.

Hearken Unto Me

John Winkelman

1. Across the ocean from Europe, there was a place called North America,
2. Which was discovered by an Italian explorer in the employ of the queen of Spain,
3. Colonized extensively by the Spanish and the French,
4. Developed into a rich nation by the labor of African slaves supplied by the Dutch,
5. And thus became the largest English-speaking nation on earth,
6. Namely, the United States of America.
7. The inhabitants of the United States decided to call themselves Yankees,
8. For some reason,
9. And eventually noticing that the rest of the world was there,
10. Decided to rule it.
11. This is their story.

The Book of Damn Yankees
(Otherwise known as the Book of Manifest Destiny)
Chapter I
Verses 1 – 11
of The Boomer Bible , by R.F. Laird

mallard-duck

Something New

John Winkelman

Today I went to my second yoga class, ever. The first was last week.

This class is the first genuinely new thing I have started in about five years. Sure, I have had many new and unique experiences in that time, but none of those were pursuits; they were discrete events and experiences. Yoga is the kind of thing I will keep.

Because it is a new thing my ego took a little self-inflicted bruising. I am not used to not being good at what I do. No; that is not quite right. I am not used to not being accomplished at what I do.

So having come to terms with that and getting it out of the way, I am free to enjoy it. I like not having any authority. I like having the luxury of practice and contemplation.

I love just being a student again.

November Check-in

John Winkelman

Damn. Been so long since I updated this thing I almost forgot how to work the admin screens.

Two quick notes:

The over-talented and under-employed Bock has redesigned his site, so head on over and check it out. It is a beautiful thing.

Friend and classmate Craig Marks has written several articles for Martial Talk Magazine , and I have just finished converting the first to HTML for Master Lee’s website . Craig has done a superb job with the research, and the article should be an interesting read for practitioners of all styles of martial arts.

Some More Book Stuff

John Winkelman

Readers of McSweeney’s already know this: William Vollmann’s new book Rising Up and Rising Down will be released in a couple of weeks. I have read very little of Mr. Vollman’s work; before today, actually, no more than an excerpt of Rising in McSweeney’s 9.

So today I went out to Schuler Books and Music and picked up a copy of The Ice-Shirt. Using the first few chapters therein, and a quick re-read of the McSweeney’s excerpt, I will decide within the next week or so if owning Rising is worth $120.00. A 3,500 page, seven-volume treatise on violence, seventeen years in the making. It would be an awesome, monstrous thing to have in the house, but would I ever read it?

Only time will tell. Right now I have another new book to read, this one a third the length of Quicksilver, which I finished this past Saturday, and will review as time permits.

Some Book Stuff

John Winkelman

Thanks for the help everyone; the puppy was delicious.

Sunday’s book give-away went better than expected. Of the 220 or so books put out for relocation, over half were taken. The rest I am leaving in the window so visitors over the next couple of weeks can browse through them. Visiting Barnes and Noble was discouraging, as they are currently only buying Fiction hardcovers and paperbacks; so whatever is left over at (say) the end of November is going to the public library .

So as I was plowing my way through a breakfast of Donut Holes and Goldfish Crackers I glanced over at the pile of books and one in particular caught my eye: The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee. In hardcover.

I stared at it for a little while, wondering why that name seemed so familiar. So I looked him up on the internet.

Oh yeah. He just won the Nobel Prize for literature . Guess I’ll be keeping this one.

I opened it, wondering when the book was published, what it was about, etc., and discovered that it was a signed first edition. Hardcover. Nobel Laureate. Etc.

Let me say that again for all the search engines: A signed, first-edition copy of The Master of Petersburg, by the 2003 Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, J.M. Coetzee.

To all the people who stopped by on Sunday, I offer a heartfelt “Thank you”.

And a very quiet “Ha!”

A Personal Ad

John Winkelman

White Male, 34, athletic, extremely well read; into poetry, martial arts, photography; completely burned out; LOOKING FOR cute fluffy puppy – preferably in 4 to 6 pound range- for kicking.

On the Acquisition of Chinese Text

John Winkelman

My last few days at work have been filled with the thrills of non-Latin character sets; specifically, getting Chinese and Japanese text into an XML-driven flash movie. It was in interesting trip, so I figured I might as well publish my findings as an exploration.

One caveat: Doing this required the downloading of a lot of language packs, both from Microsoft (for Windows) and from Mozilla (for the Mozilla browser). Visiting any of the following sites will probably bring up “install language pack” dialogues, but since it is not certain that your browser(s) will be able to view the text, I have placed all non-Latin characters in images.

First I went to Babelfish and typed in Ecce Signum .

Hmmm. Apparently Babelfish doesn’t automatically do English-Latin-Chinese translations. Let’s try “behold the evidence”

Closer… let’s try one more: “witness the evidence”.

There we go! Now for the verification, I copied the Chinese text from Babelfish and went to Mandarin Tools ; specifically the Unicode Character Dictionary , and pasted the characters into the text field titled “Search By Character”, while making sure the select box to the left of the text box was set to “UTF-8”.

Apparently it doesn’t translate very well… but is appeared to be close enough. But now the characters were not of a good size to make images of. Printing the screen and resizing the image was, to say the least, not very good. So I whipped up a little web page to display the characters, while making VERY SURE that I saved the page as Unicode, and not ISO-8859-whatever. VERY IMPORTANT for the display of Unicode characters. So now I had this:

Hmmm… little squares where I once had Chinese characters… So I looked at the page in Mozilla anyway. This is what I saw:

Perfect! Now the hard part is over. The rest was simply taking another screen capture, isolating the text in the screen capture, turning the image into a .gif, making it black text on a transparent background, and importing it into Flash to do a Trace Bitmap.

Before-and-after of doing a Trace Bitmap in Flash.

So there it is: my first experience in making Flash play nice with non-Latin characters. I am sure there are many many ways to do this that are much more elegant, and I am sure I will discover them the day after this project launches. But right now, I am kind of happy with what I have.