Posts Tagged ‘Technology’

There’s More To Pandora Than You Know

// May 3rd, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Science and Technology

If you haven’t heard of Pandora, which is the radio from the Music Genome Project, then you are missing out.

Song by song, the music-loving technologists at Pandora scrutinize and document hundreds of notes on characteristics ranging from melody, to arrangement, to instrumentation. They don’t care about genre or what the bands looks like, but only about the qualities of each individual song.

When you do a search for an artist or a song, they compare the database of hundreds of notes against all the songs in the database. Then, based on all of the commonalities and differences, Pandora puts together a playlist of songs and begins the show.

Example:
When I do a search for The Stills, it returns songs based on basic rock song structures, repetitive melodic phrasing, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, a vocal-centric aesthetic, minor key tonality, and many other similarities identified in the music genome project.

Radio has never been more advanced. Things get really interesting when you add multiple songs and artists to a single station and then it pulls results based on all of those. As soon as you get a chance, check it out at http://pandora.com. You can look me and my stations up by going here http://pandora.com/people/bradleyjond.

There’s no better way to listen to the music you love and be introduced to more.

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Science Brings Revelation, Nothing, Or The End

// April 30th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Science and Technology

The Cernier Company (CERN) will be turning on the Large Hadron Collider this summer of 2008.

300 ft underground in a 17-mile ring, protons will be colliding 30 million times a second at 99.999…% the speed of light in an effort to recreate energy that only existed when the universe was thousandths of a second old, which will supposedly enlighten us about many secrets of the universe. But, maybe it will do nothing or maybe it will destroy us.

There is no way of being sure that any black holes created in this process will decay. There is no way of knowing what will happen when this energy is suddenly reborn. There are so many unknowns, but we are pushing forward in the spirit of discovery. But never before has so much been at stake.

More than $8 billion has gone into the creation of this massive experiment, it involves a magnet 100,000 x the strength of the earth’s magnetic field, it’s 17 miles around, and it’s being run by 5,000 physicists.

Let’s hope all of their theories are correct.

Keep your fingers crossed this summer.

Large Hadron Collider Official Website

European Organization for Nuclear Research

Interactive Diagram of the LHC

CERN EXPLAINED IN 3 MINUTES

LARGE HADRON COLLIDER

YIKES!

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