DATA-log

I’ve started to compile a semi-regular radio show, for the Intergalactic FM internet radio station, called the Unidentified Flying Oscillator. The focus is on unrecognized and obscure experimental electronic music.

In the first episode I’m going thru the work of the League of Automatic Music Composers from roughly 1978-1982. The show archive is at http://www.robotdj.net/?dj=biotek

Unidentified Flying Oscillator #1 (18.8.2010) tracklist:

the league of automatic music composers – radio air check
the league of automatic music composers – oakland four
the league of automatic music composers – finnish hall
the league of automatic music composers – oakland two
the league of automatic music composers – pedal with twitter
the league of automatic music composers – martian folk music
the league of automatic music composers – dense drone
the league of automatic music composers – 12-17-78

Episode MP3:
http://www.robotdj.net/getme.php?id=8279

How has the global mean temperature evolved in the past. This was a simple question I had that I couldn’t find a straight answer to. So, I set out to calculate it for myself; it would  also serve as a nice simple exercise in statistics.

I started out from some MATLAB code I found on a climate blog and modified it to my own needs. The data comes from the NOAA GHCN database http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-monthly/index.php.

The methodology behind the code below can be easily verified from http://stattrek.com/AP-Statistics-4/Margin-Of-Error.aspx or from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval for example.

http://www.punainen.org/~biotek/WORLD_MEAN.pdf

http://www.punainen.org/~biotek/hockey.m

Here’s something interesting from youtube..

Stumbled on this old looking science documentary on youtube by chance. Features nice handdrawn graphics and footage from bubble chambers.

I got into setting up a internet radio stream source for my linux box and did some googling on what’s available for linux in internet radio broadcasting. I stumbled onto http://savonet.sourceforge.net the homepage for liquidsoap script based audio streamer and I was immediatly hooked. This was exactly what I was looking for and was miles ahead of what’s available otherwise for linux.

I’ve been scripting for it the past few days and even then it feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. I’m now running a irssi client with a perl script interfacing with it on the #cbs and #electro channels on ircnet so that you can request tracks to be placed on the playing queue. It is very sweet, and works great (atleast after i got some small glitches ironed out). I’m still looking forward to do other neat features like adding speech synthesizer announcements for the requests.

One wonders what can be done with this sort of flexibility in the future. The system already does some form of bpm measurement and supports crossfading..