Youtube to MP3 Converter
August 19th, 2008 Filed Under code, portfolio, projects
My mom found some of her favorite music on Youtube. She’s been looking for some of these songs for a long time, and now that she’s found them, she’s scared that Youtube will pull them and then she won’t have them again. She wants to download them so she can listen to them whenever she wants. The CDs are out of print. There are several torrents of this artist’s music that were around in 2006, but now they have 0 seeders (and 3 leechers). legalsounds.com has them for 10 cents apiece, but I cautioned her against giving her CC number to the Russians.
I know the quality of audio on Youtube is pretty bad, but she doesn’t care. She’s excited that she can finally listen to these songs again, and she’d be content with just having an mp3 constructed from the Youtube videos. In fact, she’d be ecstatic.
How hard can this be? I’m learning some jQuery myself–it’s all the rage, what with the mashups and the AJAX–and I thought I could make a simple client-side webpage that AT LEAST just gets at a user’s favorites from youtube and prints the URLs of each .flv for download. Youtube has a nice little API, you just GET from a sensible URL, and it returns XML. jQuery has some nice functionality to get elements from the XML and I would just add a few rows a table with the right information. No problems anticipated.
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Stumble it!Sustainability MMORPG
August 17th, 2008 Filed Under games, sustainability
I recently read this blog post entitled Sowing the Seeds of a Future Society (emphasis mine):
Given that I believe a major environmental crisis is unavoidable, how might we ensure that genuinely sustainable communities could become a reality? Firstly I believe we should use the most powerful tool of the current age to design exactly how future communities should look, what technologies and system of government would be most appropriate, and how to ensure that such communities remain sustainable over time. Computer games already exist which allow users to design cities and societies. It would be a relatively simple undertaking to design an on-line computer game which would allow interested parties worldwide to refine the details of exactly what such a future society should look like. Remember that if communities develop in a haphazard manner, it is likely that they will fall into many of the traps that our current society has.
This, along with my current interest in educational science games, inspires me to reimagine Spaceship Earth Beta, my ongoing imaginary platform for exploring issues and strategies of sustainability, as a massively-multiplayer computer game.
First, there must be two competing goals which different players are working towards:
- To develop a society proven to be sustainable over a large time-scale;
- To be selfish or violent or “evil”, taking advantage of loopholes for personal wealth or power or ego, which ultimately leads to making the whole society unsustainable.
The first goal must be concretely measurable. Concrete definitions of a small number of metrics must be defined such that, if they can be maintained or improved over several generations of players, they would indicate that the society as a whole is sustainable. These metrics would at least include:
- energy consumption and reserve
- cultural preservation and distribution
- tolerance for error (human, software, external catastrophe)
Playing the game through multiple generations of players, with different personalities and each generation being more detached from the start of the project, is important; cultural values are not transmitted by default to the next generation.
The second goal, while perhaps irritating to the larger community which devotes itself to the first goal, is nonetheless vital and the players which achieve it must be revered, even as the players who attempt it must be reviled. All systems which are composed of humans with individual volition will have members who desire to destroy the system, even if they must sacrifice themselves. The system must be resilient against any single point of failure, or any small-scale collusion against it. The exile or incarceration of citizens for what amounts to this “treason” must be enforced; their murder must carry the same emotional weight as it would in reality.
I do not believe that we can plan from the outset a completely sustainable system; the “metarules” that are in existence from the outset of the project, and the texts which define its culture and values, are all we can really control, and their ramifications can only be understood from playing them out to a reasonable conclusion. Now, the results of a computer game are obviously not the same as the results of the same experiment conducted in reality. However, we can work to create and refine the starting set of metarules to have the greatest probability of success.
This simulation will have to be run many times with many different people. This makes it different from existing MMORPGs which run continuously, with game designers (”GDs”) modifying the game rules to maximize fun and membership. Many variants will be obviously flawed, others more subtly so, but they should be aborted if and when they are irretrievably broken, and the system analyzed post-mortem to find the flaws that led to its demise, and a new system started with the modified meta-rules.
On the Eternal Battle between Science and Religion
August 12th, 2008 Filed Under saulism, science, writing
Math is science’s search for God. Science always begins, “We have constructed assumptions which predict results, but what is the basis for those assumptions?” So it delves deeper. It says, “If we assume these assumptions are ‘God’, then our search is effectively over, so we assume there is a more basic explanation.” At some point, even if there is a grand unified theory whereupon a SU(7) gauge space with these constraints and such and thus would in all probability of eternity spring forth universes…still, why is it SU(7) at all? What is special about that?
We already have so many pieces of the puzzle, but even if the puzzle is ever completely solved and all the scientists become specialized mathematicians, there will still be the question, “why anything at all?” On one side will be the ones who say it must be constructed, and on the other side will be the ones who say it doesn’t have to be, that every time so far we’ve thought it was impenetrable, someone has shown that we can see even deeper. This debate will never cease, and unless some incontrovertible evidence comes along, I don’t think it ever should.
Religions worship Gods, Science worships Math.
Sherlock Holmes
August 12th, 2008 Filed Under books
For some reason–I think it was when I read that Dr. Gregory House’s name is a sly reference–I decided to read some Sherlock Holmes stories. I checked out from the library The Complete Sherlock Holmes, a giant compendium of every word Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about his brilliant amateur detective.
Dr. Conan Doyle started writing these stories as he waited for patients to come to his burgeoning medical practice. This first, a novel called A Study in Scarlet, introduces Holmes and Watson to us and to each other. The second half transports the reader away from London and oddly begins anew in Utah to tell a rather overcomplete backstory, but luckily I was compelled enough by the first half to trudge through. And it’s been worth it; the whole series is great fun.
The second story is also a novel (The Sign of Four), which opens with a description of Holmes’ left forearm pocked by needles: without a case to occupy his mind, he enjoys cocaine intravenously (”a seven percent solution”), several times a day for months at a stretch. I never knew that Sherlock is a total spaz; the calm persona and dry demeanor that I expected is only an act, a cover for the raw excitement he exhibits during a case as counterpoint to his natural morosity when he is bored.
Perhaps because of its unusual nature, I particularly enjoyed the singular Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton (from the Return of Sherlock Holmes collection). Unlike Dr. House, Sherlock rarely withholds conclusions from official detectives, and almost never actually steps outside the law, like he does in this cozy little story.
While reading these, I’ve been treated to a delightful battery of new vocabulary; so much so that, even as I could decipher the vague meaning of unknown words in context, I started writing them down so I could look up their more precise definition. Here’s a selection (many of which I plan on using assiduously):
| assiduously | with care and persistence |
| astrakhan | wool made from young lambs (from Russia) |
| baize | a material similar to green felt that covers billiards tables |
| barrow | a mound of earth or stones marking a grave |
| blackguard | an unprincipled contemptible person; a man who swears in front of women |
| chandler | a candle-maker |
| chevron | an inverted V as in insignia |
| claret | a dark-red color, like the wine |
| cruet | a carafe with a stopper or lid |
| dun | a light brown-gray color |
| fatuous | foolish or silly, especially in a smug or self-satisfying way |
| foolscap | yellow ruled writing paper (originally each sheet had a fool’s cap printed on it) |
| garrulous | Excessively or tiresomely talkative |
| hansom | a two-wheeled carriage with the driver outside, above, and behind the passenger cab |
| impecunious | lacking money |
| invidious | envious; offensively or unfairly discriminating |
| jemmy | a thieves’ crowbar |
| legation | a diplomatic representative office lower than an embassy |
| morass | A tract of soft, wet ground that sinks underfoot |
| obtrusive | noticeable; prominent, especially in a displeasing way |
| palimpsest | a manuscript that has been erased and written on top of again |
| parapet | a barrier at the edge of a roof or structure to prevent persons or vehicles from falling over the edge |
| paregoric | a camphorated tincture of opium, a medication known for its antidiarrheal, antitussive, and analgesic properties |
| philology | the humanistic study of historical linguistics |
| pince-nez | eyeglasses which pinch the nose instead of hooking the ear |
| portiere | a curtain hanging in a doorframe |
| rubicund | inclined to a healthy reddish complexion |
| russet | a dark-red color, like the potato |
| salver | a silver tray without handles used for serving food, drinks, and letters |
| stertorously | breathing heavily, like snoring |
| tarry | aromas and flavors that suggest fresh tar; a smoky aroma and taste associated with a smoked black tea |
| turbid | muddy, thick, or hazy, as water clouded with sediment |
| unctuous | Profusely and unpleasantly polite and insincerely earnest |
| valise | a small overnight bag for short trips; closes at the top with two carrying handles |
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
August 12th, 2008 Filed Under books, unfinished
I started reading Red Mars, the first in the Mars Trilogy, on a friend’s recommendation. After the first chapter, which tells of a complex ending full of political intrigue and backstabbing among the settling Martian colonists, he proceeds to start at the very beginning and carefully describe every plodding step along the way. I got half-way through the book, to the point where two characters occupy a zeppelin for a few weeks (months?) and accidentally start the unapproved terraforming process. The concepts were interesting enough, but the writing did not compel me to finish the book nor the series.
