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Show Notes!

Things You Will Like In The Future

1. Amazon Prime (Sign Up For it!)
2. March Madness! NCAA fever! (Check out President Obama's bracket!)

2nd Break Music: Black Dice "Cloud Pleaser" (Album on Amazon)

NBA Betting Update: Mike is sad.

Smoke Cigars and Prognosticate

• Notes on the trade embargo. (H. Upmann cigars)
• Mike predicts that whatever replaces the HMMV, hopefully the ULTRA AP, will eventually be civilianized.
• Our special guest predicts you will not be able to own video games in the future.

The first annual CivicApps Challenge is now open! This unique innovation event recognizes and rewards the best ideas and apps from the community. Join this growing community of innovative thinkers! Help us identify and recognize the best ideas and apps in the region. Share your own ideas. Submit an app to make life easier for everyone. So get your thinking caps on, share your ideas, and show us what you've got.

Technology is changing our relationship with government. Not so long ago government made decisions with little public input. Those days are gone. Today, information technology has redefined the structure and authority of government. The problems our communities face are beyond the capacity of government to resolve alone. Cooperation, collaboration and openness are no longer questions of opportunity; they are essential means of conducting our community's business effectively. Every citizen can be an active participant in reshaping their world. WE are the government. The CivicApps.org site aims to encourage every citizen to be an active participant by putting the data in their hands. The CivicApps.org site was developed to source, profile, and accelerate innovative ideas using Web and mobile technologies. The aim is social change. The path is regional collaboration. The focus is local.

When Atari undertook the design of the game, they expected wild commercial success. The whirlwind development process was designed to capitalize on the incredible popularity of Steven Spielberg's movie. Unfortunately, it also lead to an extremely poor level of quality in the final game, which was boring, confusing, and featured abominable graphics:

The result was millions of unsold cartridges that the company had no way to dispose of. Eventually, the hit on the solution of burying the cartridges in a dump outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico.

I first heard of the dumping from Nick Montfort's excellent history of the Atari 2600, Racing the Beam. For more on the topic, see the Wikipedia and Snopes articles on the topic.

This 3D modeling project is the first step towards building a diorama depicting the full dump with millions of cartridges, the concrete slab that covers it, and the New Mexico dessert and sunset above.

To start out, I searched out high quality scans of the Atari cartridge online. I ended up finding them on Atari Age. Here, for example, is the front of the cartridge:

I used these high resolution scans and some other research to figure out the dimensions of the cartridge and set about building a basic rectangular solid that matched these dimensions.

I used Blender as my 3D modeling tool of choice on the recommendation of Scott Wayne Indiana. With lots of help from Scott, I managed to get going with the basics in Blender and, eventually, I had a rectangular solid with the right proportions:

(Note, both Scott and I found Super3boy's Blender tutorials to be incredibly useful in the process of getting started with this complicated program. It's both humbling and really helpful to learn by listening to a bunch of tutorials narrated by a kid who sounds like he's about 7.)

After I had that down, I started working on adding the cutaways for the stickers on the top and front. Using Blender's "add difference marker" functionality, I was able to use separate rectangles to carve those out from the original slab. Then, finally, I added a bevel to the edge of the cartridge to simulate the roundness of the original:

Writing down this process in a few simple sentences makes it sound linear and straightforward. It was actually difficult and somewhat challenging. Without Scott's help, the entire endeavor would have taken significantly longer.

Once I had the basic shape of the cartridge worked out, it was time to try to add the graphic stickers to the top and side. After an initial attempt to navigate Blender's nest of menus (aided by this tutorial on textures in Blender) I eventually managed to map the image all over my entire object:

This was not quite what I wanted, but it was exciting to see an image actually appear for the first time. Eventually, I found the Blender wiki tutorial on multiple materials which explained how I could apply an image to just one specific surface of my object. This also made the Blender menu system start to make sense to me for the first time (by explaining the way selections made in certain menus modified the options available to you in others.) The result was a cartridge that was really starting to look right:

The end cap should have the ET logo image on it — which isn't working for some reason I don't understand — but otherwise this is really starting to be what I was aiming for. I even added an additional gnarled black texture to emulate the molded plastic of the non-sticker part of the cartridge. I'll probably include that texture in the final print, but I'm not showing it here because it made it very hard to see the details of my 3D modeling in Blender's preview images.

There are two next steps forward for me on this project. One of them is to get a 3D print made of this cartridge, mainly to gain experience with 3D printing. The second step is to make a model of the ET box and start combining multiples of that box and this cartridge into the limitless pile that sits under the Alamogordo sand.

Way back during orientation week, a few of us were talking about music, as you do when you're just getting to know a new group of people. Specifically, Marko Manriquez and I shared our enthusiasm for Aphex Twin. We talked about the incredible variation and detail that shows up in the drum programming in pieces such as Girl/Boy Song and wondered whether such intricately constructed music could possibly have just been made by hand or whether some kind of algorithm helped out.

I speculated that you could accomplish something like that style of non-repeating linear invention by using probability. You would just declare a set of allowed pitches and metric values to be assigned to each instrument and then allow the computer to randomly choose between those over-and-over to compose the piece. That would allow you to shape the aesthetics of the output without having to go in and make all the tiny micro decisions required to through-compose something with as much mind-boggling detail as the drums in Girl/Boy Song. (For the record, I don't believe that this is actually how Aphex Twin works; I think he actually writes all of that stuff by hand.)

Having had this idea, I sat down during the Tisch Convocation and wrote Whoops, a Ruby library that uses probability to generate scores for bloopsaphone, _why the lucky stiff's 8-bit music generator. Bloopsaphone uses a very simple text-based score system where, for exaple, "4C" would mean "play a quarter note on C", etc., which made it very easy to implement this idea in an environment where I could get instant feedback in the form of listenable music.

This was all back in late August of last year. I haven't touched Whoops since.

So, yesterday, for 4-in-4 I decided to actually use Whoops to create a piece of music. I started by defining a bunch of bloopsaphone sounds: hi-hat, snare, bass drum, lead melody, and bass. Next, I started using Whoops to define what I wanted the drums to do.

If you look at lines 53-57 of that ruby script, you can see the Whoops commands that generated the drums. I'm always having them play C since they're a percussive instrument anyway and their pitch doesn't matter. For the bass drum and hi-hat, I mostly want quarter notes (this is Aphex-inspired IDM, after all) so I give "4" as the most common value in the duration array. I want the snare to feel like it's largely on the 2 and 4 so I mostly give it half notes in its duration array. And then, I added one more sequence for the hi-hat, "hat_detail", that plays spastically on small duration increments (16,32, and even 18 and 9 for 16th and 8th note triplets). I gave that sequence mostly rests (the empty string) as its pitches so that it would only play occasionally; I wanted it to be decorative, not totally take over.

Once I had the drums starting to sound how I wanted, I figured out a chord progression for the melody and bass to follow and wrote down sets of notes that they should be playing for each chord. Then, I followed the bloopsaphone API to play the resulting music and also made sure that my script would spit out the actual notes generated for each instrument. That way, each time I ran the script, I'd get a different musical result and if I liked one, I could copy and paste the score for it so I could reproduce it and even modify and improve it if I wanted to.

After lots of runs, I had a few versions of things that I liked. The melody was the weakest. Some runs would have bits of compelling melody in the patterns that happened to come out but it was rare also not to have bits of weird dissonance or just melodic incoherence. So, I went in and edited the melodies I liked best to tweak them into a more compelling shape through classic melodic rules such as repeating patterns that were already there or adding sequence and series. The results sounded like this, for example: whoops_demo_2.mp3.

Here's the score for that fragment:

Once I had a couple of bits that I liked, I outputted the instruments one at a time to AIFFs using Soundflower and GarageBand and then brought the resulting files into Logic to mix. I was surprised at how easy and fun it was to mix these 8-bit sounds. I wasn't sure how well they'd take reverb, compression, and the other normal tools of music mixing, but I ended up pretty happy with the sounds that I got.

I didn't have time to put together a long-scale composition, but I did finish a sketch for a song. I'm calling it "And He Built A Crooked House". Listen to it here: And He Built A Crooked House.