I went rummaging around the attic yesterday looking for something that as far as I can tell isn't up there. But I did find some other things, including the rabbit ears I was looking for a few months back, not that they'll do me any good anytime soon. I also found a couple old 'personal music players'. One was a cheapie GPX AM/FM radio and the other, to my surprise, was an honest to goodness Sony Walkman (WM-FX301 if model numbers have any meaning for you). It's no mp3 player, but it has AM/FM and the tape player is even auto-reverse. I had forgotten I had such a thing. I'm not even sure how I wound up with such a thing.

As if that wasn't enough, this has to have been sitting for oh, about 8 years I'd guess and the cells were still good. How did I manage to forget this, with a set of lithium cells in it yet? I don't know.

I used it last night while doing a few things about the house. The advantage is that I can listen and not disturb jmaynard. The AM band was full of noise, hardly a surprise in a house (or world) full of computers. FM didn't have as much noise, but aside from some of the programming on Public Radio, FM broadcast is pretty much junk. So I grabbed a tape. One that seems to have stuff on it from about 1984. I hadn't listened to it in some time.

One tune was Mark Russell singing about how "Fritz Can't Win Come Election Day" when it was plain a couple weeks before the election that Walter Mondale wouldn't get far. Another was Garrison Keillor going on about the loss, "We're Never Gonna Run For President Again." I suspect he'd be less than thrilled if Tim Pawlenty ran - and won. Another tune was about alternate energy and was clearly before the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hysteria as it belittled everything but coal - and fusion when it finally is made to work - and there was no concern at all about carbon dioxide. I'm tempted to copy down the lyrics of some of these to see what folks might have to say about them.

The Walkman seems big and clunky now, but it is mechanical and not all that much larger than the tape it plays. I'd still like to have a personal mp3 player, but I have something workable right now.

Current Mood: amused

Do you know what time it is? Are you sure? Will you know in a few hours? Are you sure?

Current Mood: sleepy

One of the neater things seen at ROFLThing was a single slide (well, the modern digital equivalent of a slide). The slide shown on this page. Jason Scott summed things up quite well in a very simple Venn diagram. That, or something very much like it, is apt to become a journal icon.

Current Mood: calm

I spend some time on a treadmill and watch TV to distract myself from the display that shows elapsed time, distance, and supposed calories burned (it also shows speed, incline, and pulse rate). Every once in a while I'd figure I didn't have much more to go and then, a bit later look again and see that I still hadn't reached the point I thought I was about to pass. The first time this happened I dismissed it as a fluke. The second time, as a coincidence. But it kept on happening. Flukes and coincidences don't keep on happening.

I eventually realized what was going on. I saw one number, or part of one number, and took it for another. Time and distance aren't counted the same way. Distance is truly decimal, so 1.50 means I'm halfway to 2.00 for whatever the distance measure is. Time is not truly decimal, but sexagesimal. 2:50 isn't halfway to 3:00, but 0:10 to 3:00. That's where the confusion came in. I saw X:50 and psychologically (wishful thinking, perhaps?) that became "I'm almost to the next marker." But I saw the distance indication and treated it as if it were time. Then later I'd see that the distance hadn't reached the next marker and was still further away than I had thought. Oops. Now that I know that was going on, I don't expect to have the problem anymore. I do wonder if I would had run into this issue had the display, which shows two numbers at once, had been set up to show time in one place and distance in another.

I've noticed that many microwave instructions now call for a heating time of 1 minute 30 seconds. I think this is fairly recent thing (last few years) as I recall seeing instructions calling for a 90 second time. It's not any big deal, but it is a curious shift. Is 90 seconds now somehow nonstandard? Is it like an improper fraction, being over a full minute but all in seconds? Or is it that a new generation of instruction writers or rather those who approve them, has decided that "1:30" makes more sense with numeric keypads than "90" which is one less keypress? They mean the same thing. All the microwave ovens I've encountered deal with 90 seconds just fine, so not only do they mean the same thing but they have the same effect. It's hardly as if 1:30 would have been a problem setting the timer on the older twist-knob timers of earlier microwaves. Or is there now an assumption that people have trouble with 90 seconds instead of 1 minute 30 seconds?

Current Mood: curious

Suppose you have a device that can display bits, or pixels. To make it simple each pixel can be only on or off, white or black, no grays and no color. If each pixel is a bit, the whole display can be represented, or is a representation of, one long binary number. If you make that number 0, display it, add one, display it, and keep adding one and displaying until the binary number has gone from all zeroes to all ones then the display will eventually show you everything it ever could.

Everything. It'd be in high contrast, but it'd be there. Every scene that could be, real or fictional. Every page of every book. Every newspaper headline of the New York Times.. and the National Enquirer.. and the Onion. Everything you ever did. Everything you never did. And the same for neighbors and strangers. Next week's winning lottery numbers. Next week's losing lottery numbers - all of them. There are a few problems. One is that most of things it will show you will be garbage. What isn't garbage will be impossible or at least very hard to distinguish from garbage. Supposing you do see tomorrow's headline how can you be sure it's fact or fiction?

But the real deal-killer of this is that there just isn't enough time to do it. If the display is a very modest 10 x 10 pixels, little more than the size of a character, already the binary number is 100 bits long. That's 2 to the 100th power combinations, or 1.267.. x 10 to the 30th. Supposing an add and display rate of 1000 times per second - too fast to see individual images - and then figuring in 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour, and 24 hours per day, and 365.25 days per year (on average - remember leap years) and 1000 years per millennium...that's still 4 x 10 to the 17th millennia. For any really usable size display, say 100 x 100 pixels, the time requirements are even more staggering.

( Preserved comment(s) )

Current Mood: geeky

Someone probably thought of this before, but even so, here is a bit of speculation probably loaded with wrong assumptions and horrible oversimplifications.

( Some thoughts on time travel... )

Current Mood: contemplative