Whitney Music Box

I’m always interested in discovering new ways of manipulating sound, not to mention examples of the ways music and math converge, and this is one of the coolest I’ve seen in a long time: Whitney Music Box.

The spinning dots move at speeds governed by various predefined ratios, resulting in cool swirling patterns that converge in different ways over time. Each dot is also assigned to a tone, and when the dot crosses the horizontal line, its tone is produced.

There’s even a variation where you can control the motion with a hand crank. Very cool!

(This is what we call “good Flash.”)

Wow… Ask.com just became a serious contender (again?)

It’s been around for years, but frankly I’ve never given Ask.com much serious attention. There never really seemed to be anything wrong with it; it just wasn’t anything special. So I used Yahoo!… then Hotbot (remember that one?)… then AltaVista (known today only for its notorious offshoot, Babelfish)… then Google. Ah yes, Google… the end all be all of search engines.

Well… maybe.

Check out Ask.com. Not only is it glossed up with Web 2.0 goodness, it actually has some really cool features. Of course the search box has AJAX-based auto-complete. But it’s the results page that’s really impressive. I did a search on John Coltrane (of course… but not solely out of narcissism) and here are the results.

Everything fades in nicely as the results come back. The main column is your typical search results list. The left column gives a bunch of suggestions for narrowing or expanding your search, as well as searching on similar or related topics. The right column is what’s really cool though: different sections feature images, audio, an encyclopedia (well, Wikipedia) entry, and YouTube videos.

Sure, all of that stuff on the right side reeks of “synergistic” partnerships between Ask.com and the source sites. But whether they’re all throwing money at each other or not, the sources are well-chosen, and the overall effect is very cool.

Big thumbs up to Ask.com for their efforts on this. The big question, of course, is how good are the results? I am going to make this my primary search engine for a while, and put it through its paces.

Highway 34 Revisited is ready to… uh… revisit!

Room 34: Highway 34 Revisited (front cover)

I’ve finished my new CD, Highway 34 Revisited (with all due respect to Bob Dylan).

The CD will be “officially” released on the Room 34 Online Store on Tuesday, May 15 so watch for an update then. In the meantime, you can view the cover art and listen to full-length streaming audio of all 14 tracks on the Highway 34 Revisited page!

Year Zero and Number Spirals

After a coworker and I spent some time today discussing the viral marketing campaign surrounding tomorrow’s release of the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, he mentioned number spirals to me, which led me to discover this fascinating site. Fascinating, at least, if you’re the variety of geek such as myself, constantly manipulating numbers in your head.