Spectrogram to Sound

I'm still vaguely searching for a good free spectrogram-to-sound program, but this Sound to Graph to Sound Java applet is a good start.

The default resolution is pretty low, but if you're not interested in any of their demo sounds and just feel like doodling, you can hit the reset button to adjust some of the parameters. You can increase the resolution to MxN = 448x448, and to get the frequency bounds closer to vocal range I'd set FL to 10, keeping FH at 4000 (or possibly changing to 8000). You can also increase the value of NFRAME, which lets you store multiple sounds which you can navigate through with the arrow keys, or check the animate box to play them in sequence.

Mostly so far I have succeeded in making lots of drawings that all sound like frogs. Curious.

Protein Vaults

Vaults are the Protein Data Bank's molecule of the month. Nerdy, yes, but these sound kind of cool:

Vaults are composed of many copies of the major vault protein, which assembles to form a hollow football-shaped shell. The one shown here is from rat liver cells (PDB entries 2zuo, 2zv4, and 2zv5) and contains 78 copies of the protein. Inside cells, the vault also encloses a few other molecules, which were not seen in the crystal structure because they don't have a symmetrical structure inside the vault. These molecules include several small RNA molecules, a protein that binds to RNA, and an enzyme that adds nucleotides to proteins.

23 Questions

Darpa's 23 mathematical challenges in modern scientific efforts, with a distinct emphasis on computational biology.

Larry Abbott's 23 questions in computational neuroscience.

23 is a reference to the father of all such lists, Hilbert's 23 problems posed to the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900; these problems shaped much of 20th century mathematics, and some remain unresolved to this day.

Photos of Decay in Detroit and Chernobyl

Like the title says. Here's:

A flikr photoset of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository (read the backstory in the blog post here)

and Kiddofspeed.com, photos taken from a motorcycle trip through the dead zone of Chernobyl. (Looks like there's some argument over whether it's real, but it is an interesting site nonetheless.)

Morgenrot

Code2HTML

Code2HTML converts a program source code to syntax-highlighted HTML. Helpful if you, um, write a lot of programming tutorials or post code to forums and want it to look pretty?

Also Perl is so good at strings, oh my goodness. Of course, next to Matlab anything looks good at strings.

Visualizing Music and Looking for Patterns

Found this and many other impressive videos on one Stephen Malinowski's YouTube channel. I really like the way the colored bar visualization separates out the different voices in a piece, especially the fugues.

The opening to Gödel, Escher, Bach has a fun discussion on the structure of the fugue-- the gist of it is that the composer develops the piece out of one short theme (a few measures of some simple melody), carried by a fixed number of voices. Starting with one voice expressing the theme, each additional voice chimes in repeating the theme until all are present. The theme is further explored and varied throughout the piece via transformations of the original melody: inverting, reversing, transposing, compressing. Soooo the video above is really cool, because the visualizations make it that much easier to pick out all the transformations that are taking place. Yay!

I wonder if you could make other visualization methods which help you pick out recurring themes in a piece, and are robust to transformations from the original theme (or measure distance from the original). It seems like a problem that crops up a lot, in problems from network analysis to predicting structural motifs in proteins. For instance, all integral membrane proteins will have a hydrophobic region which crosses the lipid bilayer-- this requires an extended sequence of hydrophobic amino acids, which will be reflected in the genetic code. There would be variation in sequence (not all membrane proteins would have the same arrangement of hydrophobic amino acids), but there might still be trends which might be picked up. Fourier/Laplace transforms can break a signal down into its periodic components; is there some way to transform a signal to visualize it in the space of its recurrent themes and their variations?

Machine with Wishbone

"Caught in a symbiotic relationship, both the wishbone and the machine are unable to manifest fully without the other. We drag our pasts with us and move according to unseen forces. More and more, we interface with the world through our mental and technological creations."

View more of Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculptures on his YouTube channel.

Kurzweil Reading Machine

Huh, I never knew this: according to a profile of Ray Kurzweil in Wired, the LexisNexis database-- now an enormous resource with extensive corporate, legal, and academic use-- grew out of a late 70's venture using Kurzweil's recently-developed character-recognition algorithms to scan legal documents and news articles.

Said character-recognition algorithms are a part of a text-to-speech tool Kurzweil continues to refine; its current incarnation is a software package for Nokia phones which will read aloud to you when held above a page.

The Wason Selection Task

The Wason Selection Task, a fun little test of logical reasoning commonly used in experimental psychology.