WAV to JPG to WAV

Lisp person Lemon Odor, apropos his interesting experiment to see how MP3 compression would affect images, threw the gauntlet: how would JPEG compression affect audio?

The answer is slightly interesting.

Sound was turned into a grayscale image that was 16 pixels tall to minimize discontinuities at the edges. An excerpt from the 19778x16 image:



You can get the resulting audio files here (850 KB). "q99" contains the lowest quality compression, which unsurprisingly is a bunch of noise with the original sound faintly audible. "q01" is the highest possible quality of JPEG compression; interestingly, it comes off as sounding pretty close to the original. The distortion seems to mess slightly with the harmonics, and that's about most of the difference I can make out.

A side-by-side graphic spectrum analysis of the high-quality JPEG and the original source reveals how poor my ears are at detecting background noise:



I know I'm getting a digital camera that can save to raw RGB.

Kampf um Norwegen

This 1940 German documentary on the invasion of Norway was only recently unearthed in an online auction. Now that it's on official hands, its ownership status could be disputed; a representative of the Norwegian Film Institute hinted that it could be considered a "spoil of war" as it may contain some footage shot by Norwegians in wartime.

First impressions:
The need for invading Norway is established primarily by an "if we don't do it, the British will" argument. The happy ending is the liberation of Norway from the Allied threat. The mismatch between this and the fact that Germans are shown fighting the Norwegian army in animated flowcharts is simply not addressed.

The German Navy is made to look like the underdog by parading the numerical superiority of the British Navy (always "die Englender"). The film quietly elides the relative numbers of submarines and seaplanes.

The Norwegian government and king are not mentioned at all, nor is there a word about Quisling. Presumably this would have been a passable rhetoric for the film's intended audience.

On the first mention of taking British and French land troops prisoner, ominous hints are dropped of captured plans for a British invasion on the 8th of April — the day before the German one. So you see, it was necessary after all. Watch for this tactic in an attack on Iran near you.

The German troops seem ridiculously ill-equipped and untrained for winter conditions. Soldiers can be seen trying to "walk" while wearing skis when they should be gliding instead; snowshoes are few and far between.

Their other big moment are the much-vaunted paratrooper drops; in the scenes pictured, the soldiers have a choice between landing on mountain-goat-leg-breaking rock, deep snow, or in a frozen lake. The voiceover brags about troops jumping with only a few days practice while the footage shows why this is a very bad idea, soldiers dangling precariously from their parachutes.

I didn't know you could actually land a Stuka on a timber runway.

..."Drontheim"? Where the hell did that come from?

This is pretty high budget, and so it ends in raising one of those goddamn flags over Narvik or wherever accompanied by a grand original score. My stomach is still turning.

Three movies in six hours! Mon pouvre brain-meats!

Capote: Philip Seymour Hoffman in the main role, for once.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really work, despite the fact that he performs a heroic portrayal of an utterly unheoric character. The film showing his own self-obsession actually works against it — in the first couple of reels, there are numerous cuts from Hoffman being in focus to him being in focus again. For the audience to tire of him is perhaps realistic, but it's still tiring.

Also, the film's music appears to infringe on Arvo Pärt territory without paying the attention to detail that's required to pull it off: often, you'll hear three notes that veer close to something good only to be ruined by a sloppily placed fourth one.


The Libertine: Johnny Depp in a wig, fingering ladies while rhyming, drinking and pillaging. The entire film appears to have been shot on high-speed stock in candlelight alone, and that includes exterior scenes.

The most important difference between Depp here and Withnail in Withnail & I is that The Libertine has no I to act as a straight man for the carousing rascal. Also, Depp's character actually has money, some status and luck with zee ladies, which makes him significantly less funny. Midway into the movie, I'm suddenly subjected to a bunch of half-baked morals about Art and Theater and Love and The Sea, strangling any joy I might have left.

(Though, I still have no idea which part was played by John Malkovich. Now that's acting.)


Finally, Transamerica is the endearing story of transsexual Bree, who, one week before her sex change, finds out she has a teenage son being held on bail in New York. She winds up presenting herself as a missionary of a fictional church, and they somehow get tangled into driving together back to LA.

Those are just the first ten minutes of the film. Even watching it so far, you might be forgiven for thinking this was either vacuous and/or carnivalistic à la Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Interestingly, Transamerica escapes the category by growing more corny, not less. The end has to be the most fucked-up thing I've seen that could still qualify as a happy one.

"Click to go to page pages"

Spotted in this Zelda tribute comic, this amusingly strained overload on the HTML "page" and the comic page.

Death to 1997

One good thing seems to have come out of all this "blogging" nonsense. Remember how headers used to be half the time in the late nineties, as a rendered graphic in some fancy font?

Apparently the need to churn out text at a daily rate to keep the pundits happy put that to death soon enough, as the newsprint-like lust for breaking thoughts took over for the magazine-like fetishization of "articles." Which at least makes the web less painted into a corner.

Star Wars 3: The Marxist market analysis

So it's been half a year since I posted this silly little thing to get Star Wars III out of my head. Let's tally up the Google placings for the search strings that've showed up on the logs, in decreasing order so I can pretend anyone cares:

#500-something: Marxist analysis
#40: osb
(Still a ways to go before I've got the Order of St. Benedict beat. RAAR! Smash monks!)

#31: star wars analysis
#20: flaws of capitalism
#6: star wars 3 analysis
#5: marxist film analysis
#4: star wars revenge of the sith marxism
#3: star wars historical analysis / marxist analysis film
#2: Marxist analysis of Star Wars / marxist critique reading of star wars
#1: star wars marxist analysis / star wars 3 (ideological values) / "Marxist dream"

I also rank #30 for "dream analysis", but only when searching exclusively within the UK — otherwise, it falls off the end of Google's thousand-return limit.

In closing, I hope I've demonstrated that the internet is a glorious pile of arse where even some snotty brat like me can outrank serious dialectic-materialistic analysis of pop culture. Thank you and goodnight.

Spotted: flagrant counting of chickens prior to hatching

A group of fine young lads on the row in front of me. One of them was wearing a WWJD wristband.

While the poor lecturer was trying to get the point across about disjunct sets and their applications to computer algorithms, this modest Christian was pointing out an ad to his friends: 37" flatscreens on sale. And it wasn't even in the newspaper, it was from a mass mailing.

For once, I'm glad to see the attendees thinning out as the semester progresses.