From New Scientist, someone has developed software that can take English language statements and turn them into machine language. Creator Bob Brennan won’t reveal details about the system, called “MI-Tech”, until his patents come through. The key to it apparently is knowledge of the role of context in English. I wonder how significant his developments really are. One could picture a simple system that does what he claims, but then you start dealing with ambiguities and it gets complex quite fast. And I sure hope the patents aren’t going to cover obvious tactics.

A NY Times Magazine article on Charlotte Church revealed this tangential bit of information on the classical recordings industry: “When CD’s became available in the 80’s, classical music aficionados began going through their records and replacing them, album by album, with digital versions. The result was a decade of vigorous sales, during which labels merely repackaged the same music into ever more expensive collections and sat back to count the revenues. But now the changeover to disc is largely complete, and sales are down by nearly half, according to some estimates.” The result of this trend is the use of pop music marketing tactics. To me this means selling the fluff instead of the substance, which often also means appealing to the masses. But it also seems to take more money to push the fluff, leaving even less to spread around to those who aren’t a flavor of the moment. Anyway, classical music sales were probably saved by the release of CDs and would have dived sooner without them. Perhaps it will take a new technology to spike it up again (and that won’t be Napster). But if the fluff gets more people interested in the classics, more power to the ’em!

A co-worker was researching glass harmonicas (invented by Benjamin Franklin) and discovered the website for an actual manufacturer of the instrument. “In Europe?” I asked. No, to my surprise, they are in Waltham, Massachusetts. G. Finkenbeiner Inc. specializes in scientific glassblowing (lab equipment), but also makes glass harmonicas. You may have “played” on wine glass rims yourself. It’s harder to do on the cheap stuff you get at your everyday restaurant (and probably very bad etiquette when you are at nice restaurants with the expensive crystal). But you can often get a decent glass to “ring” with the right amount of pressure. An odd sidenote: the founder, Gerhard Finkenbeiner, has been missing since May 1999. His Piper Arrow is presumed to have crashed and they have yet to find the remains.

The Invisible Library catalogues books that have been referenced inside of books. Indexed by real author, real title, fictitous author and fictitous title, there is an eclectic mix of sources. The Harry Potter series is of course referenced with all of his schoolbook titles. Also, there’s the lovely self-referential “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

Via MediaNews, the Chicago Tribune’s restaurant critic writes about keeping his identity safeguarded so he can dine anonymously. He goes over the tricks: using credit cards with his dog’s name, making reservations on a phone without recognizable Caller ID, making sure the baby sitter can still reach you when you’re dining under an assumed name. Ruth Reichl, the former NY Times critic, gave a Salon interview a few years ago that goes into even more detail on what life is like for a high profile restaurant critic. “I change my credit cards every six weeks or so. But, you know, they fax the names of the credit cards around to each other.”

I have fond memories of gleefully reading Byte Magazine‘s April Fools jokes way back in the ’80s. But the only specific one I could remember actually was not a joke. It was a real product that people assumed was a joke. The MacCharlie, reported on by Byte in 1985, was a device that you plugged onto your Apple Macintosh (now you have to picture one of those old boxy Macs, not the new fruity ones) in order to run IBM-PC applications (well, DOS actually). Externally it looked like a set of two 5.25″ floppy drives that plugged onto the Mac box and a keyboard extender that sat around the Mac keyboard to provide function keys and a numeric keypad. Internally, it had that good ol’ 8088 processor. I don’t know how well it worked, but it certainly was a creative concept for the time. Some actual Byte April Fool’s products that I’ve hunted up were the MacKnifer, a knife-sharpener that fit into the Mac hard disk drive, edible floppy disks made out of soybeans (sensitive data? eat it), and a 5MB hard disk for the Timex/Sinclair 1000. Yes, 5MB was considered a very big joke back then.

Oh my goodness, there’s finally an image file on this site. Whatever possessed me to do that? Seems that when I have no time for them, the creative urges strike. And when I’m (rarely) unoccupied, I can never think of anything to do, or the lists I have of things to do don’t appeal. By the way, though I did write it, that’s not my actual handwriting. Oh, and there are now only 14 days worth of posts on the main page.

Iridium Satellite, LLC relaunched phone service on Friday. Old handsets will still work and new phones and features are available. An interesting fact from the press release, there are 7 in-orbit spares for the 66 satellites, and they plan to launch 7 more next year. As I reported in December, the Pentagon is getting the best deal in saving Iridium from crash & burn: $3 million a month for unlimited airtime for 20,000 users.

One of my favorite albums is The Juliet Letters which is a collaboration between Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet, a classical string quartet. I had always wondered if/when sheet music for it would be released and it looks like Schirmer has obliged. That makes me wish I was still in college so I could easily grab a few friends and a practice room and have at it (not that it is completely impossible for me to get a quartet + vocalist together now, but the logistics and timing are significantly more challenging). Via Robot Wisdom, the Irish Times has an article on Elvis’ latest collaboration with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie Von Otter. They’ve released an album called For The Stars.

If you had problems accessing this site (or sending me email), it’s because “the box” was sitting on a Northpoint DSL line (thanks to some very nice friends). Northpoint had filed for bankruptcy in January and pulled the plug on Thursday, taking many by surprise. Since then, the state has told Northpoint that since they are a utility, they have to give customers 30 days notice (Mercury News article), but I doubt they can quickly and smoothly manage getting everything back up. “The box” has been moved (well, strictly speaking, the contents of the box have been copied to a nicer box in a different location, which had kinda been the plan anyway, so the timing was almost right) and when everything propogates I hopefully will be completely back in business. Thanks to all my nice friends!