Fascinating. This sounds exactly like granular synthesis.

@schmawy: It's 100% real -- they got a $2.6M research grant for it too.

www.scientificamerican.com/articles/voice-synthesis-lab-creates-singing-robot

"I personally didn't think an 8080 was capable of doing this."

It's using an FM chip for the music synthesis, so the 8080 is mostly concerned with text mode screen updates, and sending the correct notes.

"Remarkably, here is a nearly identical setup."

Same guy.

That was fun.

There aren't many twenty-three minute videos that I'd sit through, but this was one of them.

And he's very right about how we can't measure or predict the future based only on what we know today.

Progress is a synthesis, and the seedlings of unimaginable technology are all around us, right now, waiting to be put together like jigsaw puzzles.

Norway is #2 on their Peace Index and listed as 72% atheist. A quick wiki search reveals that "According to the most recent Eurobarometer Poll 2005, 32% of Norwegian citizens responded that "they believe there is a god", whereas 47% answered that "they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force" and 17% that "they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, god, or life force"," and "Nominal religion in Norway is mostly Protestant (Evangelical-Lutheran) with 78.9% belonging to the state Evangelical Lutheran Church of Norway."

Regarding Vietnam: "The majority of Vietnamese people classify themselves as non-religious, although they visit religious temples several times every year. Their everyday behaviours and attitudes are dictated by the synthesis of philosophies which can be traced from many religions, especially Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. Those religions have been co-existing in the country for centuries and mixed perfectly with the Vietnamese tradition of worshiping their ancestors and national heroes. That special mix explains why the people there find it hard to say exactly which religion they belong to."

>> ^EndAll:
Have any of his ideas actually been accepted by the modern evolutionary synthesis? I know, for example, that his work on memetics is largely considered pseudoscience.


Dawkins is widely regarded as a thinker and explainer, While his ideas aren't groundbreaking in themselves, he is among the finest to express them clearly, not only for the general public, but also fellow biologists. in this sense he has much more in common with Huxley than Darwin. Memetics is a field/subject brilliantly coined by Dawkins in the last chapter of The Selfish Gene, but Dawkins himself seems not to spend much time exploring the concept. His purpose of introducing it, seems to have been to suggest that natural selection, or Darwinism, did not have to be constrained to traditional biology (genes), but could apply to any mechanism capable of copying information with modification. Memetics is not regarded as pseudoscience nor science, it is an abstract concept meant to illustrate a point. It is pretty self evident that some ideas are better at surviving than others, and it is also pretty clear that this doesnt have to correlate with the idea's truth value. I could easily make up two sentences now that are clearly false, or atleast complete and utter nonsense that almost definately is false, yet I can make a good guess on which one gets passed on:
1. "All elephants will turn into pink bats with feathers by the end of 2009"
2. "Unless you pass this sentence on, your mother will most likely die within the hour"
If you honestly, truthffully cannot see which sentence I am guessing, and if you do a test with comptelely ambiguous results, then yes, maybe memetics has nothing to it. or maybe there is another explanation at work, btu i think its pretty clear that there is lots of evidence that memetics works, and little to suggest that it doesnt. Modern genetics, for instance, is actually increasingly SIMILAR to memetics, because our DNA is actually just genetic information. "Pseudoscience" is a word we reserve for bogus nonsense lik "homeopathy" and "faithhealing", not memetics.

Have any of his ideas actually been accepted by the modern evolutionary synthesis? I know, for example, that his work on memetics is largely considered pseudoscience. And isn't he a zoologist?

I agree more-or-less with the common sense/logic based arguments against the existence of God, but I hate seeing him cast in such a glorious light, as if he's some super-scientist. He seems more like a storyteller, but a good one. Sells lots of books. You want a real scientist to look up to? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson

The problem with Real News is that they're only interested in academics who share their temperament, which means their ability to process knowledge is a fraction of what it could be.

One of the reasons productivity went up is because the workers who don't contribute as much were let go during the recession. For those who believe folks should all be compensated equally regardless of how hard/smart they work, that's not a victory for that viewpoint.

If those points are the thesis and the antithesis, however, it seems like the synthesis would be to advocate economic fairness, but also to not neglect encouraging everybody to do what they can to increase their productivity and contribute more to the economy.

>> ^blankfist:
The frowny face, FYI, is because to most people I'd hope watching this video isn't about getting your rocks off, but rather an educational process. Not all education is about result. A lot of it is about processing and reevaluating.


Wikipedia's description of education:

Education in its broadest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another through institutions.

Propaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'RNA, DNA, copy, pbs, double, helix, synthesis' to 'RNA, DNA, copy, pbs, double helix, synthesis' - edited by xxovercastxx

Tags for this video have been changed from 'dna, copy, pbs, double, helix' to 'RNA, DNA, copy, pbs, double, helix, synthesis' - edited by mauz15

Westy, actually the software front on music synthesis is pretty piss poor, with PC based wavetable midi pretty much extinct. You can still grab lots of sound patches from downloads, but they pretty much get put back into hardware wavetables and the pianos themselves now.

Btw the Atelier line of organs runs over 20k.

>> ^gorillaman:
You'll notice at no point do either of them talk about human rights or freedom. They're discussing the most efficient way to run a slave camp. Cohen, everybody's hero, feels we should be allowed any form of recreation that doesn't impact our productivity; while Mueller is concerned that a little freedom now will lead to an expectation of more in the future. That's what the gateway theory is really saying, that people who understand it's their right to put THC into their own body if they choose also understand it's their right to do the same with other substances.

Good job reading between the lines, although, Mueller's fears are unfounded and backward. Right now as it stands, since a lot of drugs are illegal, somebody who were to try marijuana and realize it's not dangerous might assume the same of other drugs. If we were to be honest and classify drugs properly, people might take heed in the government's decision to make certain one's illegal.

Also, I've done many drugs and been a slave to none (except for maybe alcohol). However, I will never try heroine, crack, or meth (minus the synthesis of the substance in ecstasy). I don't want those monkeys on my back. That is my own decision. Law has never been a factor when considering which drugs to use and which to not use.

>> ^rottenseed:
does anybody know if we use actual opium for opiate synthesis like in Oxycontin, Hydrocodone or Morphine?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphine
"the vast majority of morphine is derived from the opium poppy by either the traditional method of gathering latex from the scored unripe pods of the poppy, or processes using poppy straw, the dried pods and stems of the plant"

does anybody know if we use actual opium for opiate synthesis like in Oxycontin, Hydrocodone or Morphine?