Tag: web software

DarwinTunes: Watching Music Evolve

Take randomly generated sound waves (using sine curves for example), mix them together to get beats, and then let people decide which ones sound best. Let the best ones mate — add in small mutations — and wait a few thousand generations for the sound patterns to evolve into music.

That’s what DarwinTunes does, and they let you participate in the artificial selection process (artificial as opposed to natural selection).

The details are included in their article: Evolution of music by public choice by MacCallum et al. (2012).

Translation: The economy still sucks.

Jeremy Singer-Vine has cute little tool for translating economics jargon from the Federal Reserve meetings into plain English. The Planet Money Program on NPR used it to translate the FED’s latest plan into something much more readable without, I think, loosing much of the meaning. The design of the tool is quite nice but it must be pretty tricky to implement unless the FED’s statements are much more formulaic than I hope they are.

For example:

FED: Longer-term inflation expectations have remained stable, but measures of underlying inflation have trended lower in recent quarters.

Translation: Inflation has gone from low to super low.

My favorite part of the translation:

FED: Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in September confirms that the pace of recovery in output and employment continues to be slow.

Translation: The economy still sucks.

Imagemaps with the GIMP

I’m just testing out a simple image map created with the GIMP. The GIMP is a free image manipulation software, a bit like Photoshop, not quite as sophisticated, but free. I used GimpTalk‘s very helpful guide. I though it would be easiest if I used something from a previous post as a test.

You should be able to click on the cell walls, chloroplasts, vacuole and nucleus. The links take you to the associated Wikipedia pages, but that’s just because this is a quick and dirty example. Image maps have been around for a long time, but I believe this is the first time I’ve ever created one. Now I just need to animate it a bit.

Unfortunately, this image is not easily scalable, though it should not be too hard to find (or write) a script to do just that.