Month: May 2020

If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there….then I never really lost it to begin with.
–Dorothy Gale, The Wizard of Oz

It turns out that a technology that was originally used to help search for intelligent life on other planets, has developed into a technology that allows people to share their PC’s idle time to help research treatments for  COVID-19.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life  

The SETI Project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) was founded in 1984 with the goal of detecting intelligent life outside earth. It had its roots in the beginning of radio technology.

Although most people would  say that is would be great to know if there was intelligent life on other planets (and most people have probably wondered about it at one point or another) it is the type of thing that tends to lose funding during budget cuts. 

When SETI started to lose funding, scientists looked for ways to continue their research. They could not cut the cost of renting radio telescopes time or funding arrays of radio telescopes — this is how they collected their data. However, they could think of  different ways to  listen to and analyze the data. 

You have to listen to a lot of signals over time to find one you can prove is being generated by intelligent life. The easiest way to do that is to have computers look at the signals and tag the ones for researchers to look at. 

Scientists could purchase a supercomputer to do this, or they could use a group of smaller computers to do this using parallel computing. Both solutions are expensive.  Not only do you have to cover the cost of the equipment,  SETI would have to house the computers, cool them, and supply power to the CPUs and the massive cooling system to  cool off the heat generated by that many computers.

About SETI

The roots of SETI began with radio technology. In 1899 Nikola Tesla heard what he believed to be radio signals from either space, Venus, or Mars. 

The signals were probably just naturally occurring radio signals or interference.  We might scoff at Tesla and others for thinking they might be able to receive radio signals from Mars or even communicate with Martians via a two-way radio.

In fairness, at the end of the 19th century, humans had not been in space. It is only in the later part of the 20th century that we have been able to go beyond the telescope and explore space with manned and unmanned missions. 

World Community Grid, which supports cutting-edge research into important global humanitarian causes, is looking for volunteers to donate spare computing power to help find treatments for the COVID-19.
Learn More:

• Worldcommunitygrid.org  
• Open Pandemics – COVID-19
• About World Community Grid

Distributed Computing

In 1999, the SETI project based at U.C. Berkeley created a volunteer distributed computing project, known as grid computing, called SETI@home. Volunteers loaded a program on their home computers to process radio signals when they were not using their computers.

The idea was that most of the time PCs are idle. Even when they are being used, the central processing unit (CPU) is  being utilized at a fraction of its capacity.

SETI@home sent files to volunteers’ computers to be processed on a user’s machine during the idle time.  Because the program was written to use idle time and not to interfere with what the user was doing, it could be run in the background without users even noticing it was running, adjusted to only run when the user was not using the machine,  turned off entirely by the user.

The current program (client) allows volunteers to  specify times of day when to run, the maximum percentage of CPU time it can use at once, the maximum about of disk space it will use, and when it will do file transfers.

Beyond E.T.’s:
BOINC

SETI@home was so successful that the University of California, Berkeley created BIONC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.) This expanded the client to include other science projects.

BOINC  is open source which allowed others to adopt the technology. In 2004, World Community Grid,  IBM’s philanthropic initiative, developed grid computing software to power scientific research on health, poverty and sustainability. 

Currently one of the projects at the World Community Grid uses computer time to help find treatments for the COVID-19.

It is hard to find a radio signal in space that you can prove is being generated by intelligent life. It takes time, and people are impatient. Why do it? This article explains reasons why research projects may sound silly, but are actually very valuable.

Shrimp on treadmills? Some science only sounds silly

Experiments that may seem odd almost always have a valuable purpose
Science & Society article from ScienceNewsforStudents 

Did you know that electronic music started in 1928, with the invention of the Theremin?

You might think that electronic music started sometime in the 1980s or 1990s with digital synthesizers and the beginnings of the personal computer.

Or you might imagine it started at the beginning of this century with the development of looping and sampling software on the PC and music production apps on the iPad. 

Or, if you are into the current modular analog synthesizer scene (or if you are a hipster into LPs, film cameras, retro analog technology, and nitro cold brew coffee) you are probably certain it started in 1964 with the invention of the first commercial analog synthesizer, the Moog synthesizer. 

What’s a Theremin?

A theremin is one of the first electronic instruments, predating the first commercially available electric guitar by a few years. It is hard to date it exactly. We can date it by patents, when it was commercially available, or when hobbyists, inventors and scientists began experimenting with it.  With electronic music technology, someone has to invent it and produce the technology before musicians and composers could to produce live and recorded music.

A theremin has two antennas that control tone and volume based on how close the musician’s hands are to each antenna. The musician never actually touches he instrument. The instrument can slide between notes and create vibrato effects similar to a stringed instrument or the trombone.

The theremin is probably most famous for producing the eerie music you hear in old classic 1950s Sci Fi movies like Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still, but it also has been used in recordings and performances by popular groups such as The Rolling Stones, Phish, Tesla, and Led Zepplin.

Leon Theremin

In 1928, the Russian inventor Leon Theremin invented the theremin. He was involved in the music scene in New York City until 1938, when he was kidnapped by Soviet agents and returned to the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union had other plans for him and he ended up inventing various devices for spies to eavesdrop, including a device that could record conversations by using an infrared beam to detect the sound vibrations in the glass of windows. There are more modern versions of this device that use lasers and are still in use today.

Good Vibrations

In 1966, the Beach Boys recorded a song called Good Vibrations, which is considered one of the most important recordings in rock music, because of the way it used multi-tracking techniques and placed the emphasis on studio production to create the music. It was not a merely a recording of a live performance. 

The recording techniques used in Good Vibrations and in songs by The Beatles in the mid-1960s were really when techniques like digital sampling, looping and layering used in music production today were first developed. Today computers and technology make using these techniques much easier.

The Beach Boys also used an electro-theremin in the song Good Vibrations. An electro-theremin is a bit different than a theremin, but it produces a similar sound, and was inspired by the Theremin.

Electro-Theremin

When Tanner could not perform live with them, the Beach Boys went to Bob Moog. Moog designed a ribbon controller for a keyboard, a strip above the keyboard that the musician could run a finger along to change the pitch of the note. It produces a similar sound to an electro-theremin or a theremin.

In the late 1950s, trombonist Paul Tanner and inventor Bob Whitsell invented the electro-theremin, which used a knob and a mechanical slider to produce a sound that mimicked the Theremin. In 1966, The Beach Boys hired Paul Tanner to play the electro-theremin on the recording of Good Vibrations.

Journalist: Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or a poet?
Dylan: Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know.

 

— Bob Dylan, press conference at KQED, San Francisco, Dec. 1965, quoted in: Joe Kohut and John J Kohut, eds., Rock Talk (1994)

Do you remember Bob Dylan? Have you ever even heard of Bob Dylan? I do not know for sure, but I am certain you heard his music because it has been re-recorded by countless artists including:

Adele – Beck – The Black Crowes – The Black Keys – Eric Clapton – Jimi Hendrix – Kelly Clarkson – Elvis Costello – Elvis Presley – Duran Duran – Grateful Dead – Red Hot Chilli Peppers – Kenny Wayne Shepherd –  William Shatner – Bruce Springsteen -U2 – UB40 – The White Stripes, and many more. 

Bob Dylan is not known for  dancing. The song and dance man quote was his joke. One of the things Dylan often comments on is that he does not like to be placed in a box. He has written songs that are considered folk and rock, and some that might be considered other genres, but the artist does not consider himself a “folk” or “rock” artist. We could argue the point on either side, but we would be missing his bigger point.

Dylan’s point is “If we put people in boxes, we label them, and we miss out on who they really are. If we put things in boxes, we miss out on seeing all their facets.”  Ok, to be clear, Dylan did not say that specifically, but that is what I have taken from numerous quotes and interviews when people asked him if he was a folk singer or writer.

People do like to put things in boxes, and even though we may resist, we end up putting things in new boxes even if we get rid of some of the old boxes.  Boxes are convenient, and they can be helpful to understand things. 

The same can be said for academic disciplines. It is useful to say: this is science, this is art, this is music, and this is math, but many things fit into more than one box. You know this if you have ever gone into a Walmart and realized you were looking for a product that could be in one of number of aisles or departments.

You also might realize this if you play the electric guitar, an electronic keyboard, or produce beats for Hip Hop on a computer. You may be making music, but you are using electronics and/or computer technology to help produce it and record it. In fact, if you are using a computer program or iPad program to produce beats to make your own Hip Hop song, you soon discover that by programming drum beats, you not only learn more about music, but you learn about math, because beats are fractions of a measure, and a measure is just a segment of time or a group of beats. A computer can help you make your own music without really understanding math or music, but as you get better at making music with a computer you will learn both music and math without even realizing it.

I have taken classes with a number of professors who I knew as experts in one subject.  I assumed that was all they were – an expert in X.  Then I discovered these people had interests and talents that I would not have guessed.

I had a drawing professor who was a professional sculptor — and also held a a master’s degree in physics.  Another professor who taught psychology turned out to belong to a number of departments including Performing Arts. My favorite perhaps is the sculpting professor from Austria who designed and built his own glider and piloted it. He taught me things about engineering and math as he taught art.

Music, art and other subjects can teach you about math and science, and math and science can teach you more about music and art. The key to understanding them is not to lock them in boxes. They are like puzzle pieces that interlock with each other.  Each puzzle piece you fit in one may show you where a new puzzle piece fits in another.

—–Dean McIntrye