3D Scanning as Dense Microphone Array

Sound is the displacement of matter over time.

A microphone detects sound at a single point, either via direct physical coupling, or using optical methods (as with Laser microphones).

3D scanning can also detect displacement of reflective matter over time. Using a 3D scanning setup with a very large angle between the camera and projector, very minor displacement variations can be detected. Using a high framerate camera, this displacement can be measured at audio frequencies. Every pixel then corresponds to a virtual laser microphone: instead of the usual microphone at a point, a fringe analysis microphone is comprised of N points as determined by the camera resolution.

The Best Hack

Fold a single piece of paper down the center, length wise. Open it up, and fold two corners from one short side to the center, so that the short side is parallel to the center line. Fold the two corners this creates to the center in the same manner. Repeat this once more, but folding in the opposite direction. A section of the structure should create a T shape. Throw the piece of paper with the smallest end facing forward, and it will glide.

This is the most elegant repurposing of an everyday object I know: the paper airplane.

The Eternal Questions

I've had a text file by this name sitting on my desktop for a while. It's a big list. Here's an excerpt:

• love and hate. how do you explain them? what inspires them?
• humility and selflessness, and evil, sin, and pride
• knowledge, and wisdom
• what is god? christianity, spinoza/buddhism, hiduism, taoism and pantheism
• faith as something reassuring
• free will and determinism
• redemption and salvation
• suffering and misunderstanding
• epistemology: what is the foundation of logic? does every epistemology making a negative claim contradict itself? what axioms do we start with? do we take in everything, or a subset?
• desire
• can we overcome confirmation bias?
• what can we do? for the starving? the hurt? the egotistical?
• interdependence and independence: is one an illusion?
• do we have an essensce? why do we feel like we do?
• morality/shoulds/"supposed to". origins and humanism
• the nature of time. cosmological origins and the present (is time an illusion?)
• evolution
• the brain and consciousness
• government and anarchy
• originality and newness
• naivete and optimism
• sincerity
• do people change? what causes people to change?

Change

Coins are conductive. There are lots of them. There must be something else we can use them for (involving electricity). Can money be a signal processor? Can we use coins as capacitors? Two pennies with a some malleable material between as an FSR? Can we make a coin-operated coin-computer? An evolving automaton that eats change in order to grow?

Symbolically Guided Science

Einstein's famous equivalence e=mc² is a fairly simple symbol sequence. Given basic constraints such as unit agreement it could be discovered quickly using random search. The hard part is interpreting — the semantics. Assuming that some grand unified theory exists, one that's elegant, perhaps we can develop an automated search for it constrained by simple requiremenrs like unit agreement and some formal semantics describing observed behavior? The few theories that match observations but make unexpected predictions could be presented for further consideration by humans.

Improvised Listening

Free improvisation is a musical movement from the 60s that developed as a response to the almost academic air of precision jazz had adopted. In "Quantum Improvisation", Pauline Oliveros offers a straightforward definition of free improvisation: "nothing is known in advance of making the music".

If the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is valid, then all possible universes necessarily exist. Therefore, every sound that has ever sounded or will ever sound already exists in some world. This makes the listening, rather than the sounding, the improvisation.

Oddly enough, Pauline's comments are preserved. When she talks about "Finding new sounds and new sound relationships", the "finding" only has to be interpreted as "listening to" rather than the natural interpretation, "creating". Her definition of free improvisation is preserved as well — the musicians don't know the music until it happens. That is, until they hear it.