Fiestafy Music Web Portal

Background

1:01:58 EDT: So we won the Mobile Week NYC hackathon at Spotify's offices a little while back with Fiestafy, and are still chugging along getting the iOS app ready for release after missing a few planned release dates starting on July 4, 2014. Spotify's Android SDK is still a little way from ready, and I really want to use this product we've built, so I'm jumping into a web-based version RIGHT NOW.

Step 1: Review the Web API

1:02:39am Sweet. RESTful JSON, with what appears to be decent documentation. Time to dig deeper.

1:22:38am Took a break, but now have my app set up on Spotify's server and have my registration url redirect rolling

1:52:33am Knocked out the redirect_uri and session logic, moving along nicely. The dudes from the gay club down the block are partying in the street. It's Friday night. Who can blame them?

2:02:05am Looks like the only way to actually play the music after callback would be to open the song in play.spotify.com, which means my interface may be in the background and not able to queue new songs, etc. May have to rely on adding the song to a playlist that we create for the user.

Step 2: Break.

After 1hr, time to table for the night and sleep on it...data science learning to do...

Projection Tablet

After seeing Iron Man 2, I was terribly inspired by the technology that was displayed. Namely, the projections onto non-existent screens were thought-provoking. I came up with a silly idea and just wanted to document it here.


Here is a side view:

O_______________


This is a projection tablet where the "O" is a projector/camera that projects onto a transparency ("___") in a manner similar to the keyboard in this video. It's really nothing compared to the OLED technology that will slowly make every other type of display obsolete, but it would be fun to try to make. That is all.

What if God was one of us?

If I created intelligent, self-replicating robots whose programming included a function that recognized what a human is and then removed all traces of humans from the robots' "cognitive senses," would I be their God? Would they "feel" my presence in them? Mwahaha....

5. Chasin' Paypahs

So, I've recently found myself reading a lot of technical papers on Arxiv.org dealing with whatever subject that I'm fleetingly interested in at the time. As I currently have an office job, I am able to read intermittently throughout the day. However, if I haven't finished an article by the time I've finished the work day, I either have to put the pdf on my tiny mobile screen or plan ahead and print the entire article out over the course of the day. Even with a laser printer printing on both sides of the sheets, printing an article that's a few hundred pages takes quite some time.

Thus, I began searching for alternatives. Kindle-style readers are available with pdf compatibility, however the cheapest ones still top $250-300. While it's not exactly breaking the bank, paper still remains cheaper.

Today I found myself in the all-too-familiar predicament of wanting to discretely print out an article to read on my 2 hour train commute home, when I had an idea. What if I could somehow print all the sheets to one piece of paper? Sure, it may take some time getting the data from the computer to the printer, but the time-consuming mechanical process of feeding the sheets in and applying the toner would be taken out of the picture.

The idea I have is based on the party game "Outburst." The popular game had cards with a series of words that the clue-giver had to get people to guess. To avoid cheating, the cards were patterned such that they could only be read after they were placed inside of a "filter" container. It was basically like a giant version of those red and blue 3d glasses - a red plastic-wrap style filter would get rid of all the red camouflage, revealing the bluer words.

Expanding upon that idea, I would like to design an adjustable filter that would allow a user to insert their sheet of jumbled letters and reveal just one page of a book at a time. To accomplish this, each sheet would be either printed in a slightly different color (impractical), or would be broken up such that either rotating or sliding the high-resolution striated filter would reveal another sheet (more practical). This would have the ability to be applied to almost any printer. And as far as being efficient, at worst it would use the same amount of ink as printing all the sheets while using less pieces of paper.

4. Saving the Economy, One Penny at a Time

Pennies these days are something like 95% Zinc with only 5% copper that makes up the shell. Pennies these days are only worth 0.4 cents (source) and cost 1.2 cents to make.

Pennies from before 1983 are something like 95% Copper with only 5% zinc.
Pennies from before 1983 are worth about 1.8 cents.

I propose that the government recalls ALL pre-1983 pennies and reimburses the donors with 1.2 cents per donated penny. Why?

First of all, it would appease all the "death-to-the-penny" groups out there and satisfy all their reasons for ending the penny.

Next, everyone would make out. First of all, the big brother'd be buying copper at a 33% ((1.8-1.2) / 1.8) discount, which they could either use to lower the cost of producing new pennies, or resell the material to remelting plants and/or their consumers - the ailing auto industry, for example - at a 10% discount. Secondly, they citizens selling them would be making 20% on their "investment" ((1.2-1)/1). Everyone would make money.

Anyway, this isn't really fleshed out, or even fully thought out yet but right now it seems like a halfway decent idea.

3. Thoughts on Time

Once again, I unfortunately found myself at work yesterday. Luckily my coworker Ozgur and I tend to have stimulating discussion on a regular basis, which helps to break up the day.

As I remember, this particular conversation started with me showing him a video of a holographic display for Google Earth that has recently been developed by Japanese engineers. This sparked a conversation about what a waste of time typing things into google is, and how once the human brain is modelled on a computer we will just be able to think of something and immediately "know" the results. We would be basically all interconnected as one being, similar to how at one point the mitochondria in our cells were individual biological entities, and now they form us.

This eventually led to us attempting to define what it means for an object to be alive. Ozgur was explaining to me the video he had recently seen online that made him think about this. The basis of this film is to contrast the perception of time for a rock versus what a human percieves. From our perspective, a rock is standing almost still and is only occasionally moved by an outside force. However, from the rock's perspective, we are only a quick, almost imperceptible flash, while the rock percieves itself as a flexible, self-propelling object.

As always, this got me wondering. If a person were able to move extremely fast, what would they see and what would we see? Now this question could probably be analyzed and answered from the perspective of special relativity, but for now I just wanted a quick qualitative view of this.

First, from the slow person's point of view. We figured that in order to see the fast person, the fast person would have to stop for some amount of time, possibly years from their frame of reference. But how long? This should have to do with the refresh rate of the slow person's eyes. But what is that? I figured that since a 60Hz AC source lights a flourescent lightbulb with barely noticeable flicker, the upper limit for a refresh rate threshold should be 120Hz (60Hz means the current goes to 0 twice per cycle). This guy seems to agree, but is unsure due to the impreciseness of the definition of "refresh rate."

Next, from the fast person's point of view. Now the simple assumption would be to think that the fast person would see the slow person as a "rock" of sorts. Not really moving. But does that also mean that the electrons in the slow person would appear slow, thereby exposing the relatively enormous space between the nuclei and electrons in the constituent atoms? Would the person appear translucent as a ghost, or even invisible? At that point we became distracted by work. I'll have to ponder this another time, whatever that means.

Some other interesting blogs on subjective time:
Theory of Subjective Timer Perception
How the Brain Controls Time

2.2 Wireless Energy Transfer and Fractal Antenna Practicality (WET FAP)

So as some of you may know, last year I was a bit obsessed with trying to figure out a practical method of "long-range" energy transfer. The design that piqued my interest was the copper coils developed by MIT under Prof. Marin Soljacic, which was dubbed WiTricity. The idea is fairly simple: to transfer electrical energy (from a sending coil connected to an AC power source to a recieving coil connected to a load) via loosely coupled magnetic resonance. In this case, "long range" is defined as several coil diameters.

Anyway, after watching the section of the fractal special that dealt with fractal antennas, it got me thinking. The properties of these antennas are now used to simultaneously send and receive information on different frequencies in cell phones. Could this be applied to wireless energy transfer? From what I understand, due to the infinite nature of what I will call "scale symmetry," a fractal has an infinite perimeter. This means that the area is also technically infinite? Since there are an infinite number of sharp corners, can this area/perimeter not be integrated? Something to think about, I suppose.

LOTD:
Yes! Skip to 2:44...