Month: January 2012

Are Stradivarius Violins Really Worth Millions?

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Is beauty in the ear of the beholder? A new study suggests that the classic (and expensive) violins such as those made by Stradivarius aren’t so remarkable in producing their magical sound. Is it, then, all in our heads?

Claudia Fritz, an expert on the acoustics of violins at the University of Paris, has arrived at a different explanation for the secret. Despite a widespread belief in the old violins’ superiority and the millions of dollars it now costs to buy a Stradivarius, the fiddles made by the old masters do not in fact sound better than high-quality modern instruments, according to a blindfolded play-off she and colleagues have conducted.

The conclusion of her experiment:

Despite a general belief among violinists that Stradivari and Guarneri violins are tonally superior, the participants in Dr. Fritz’s test could not reliably distinguish such instruments from modern violins. Only 8 of the 21 subjects chose an old violin as the one they’d like to take home. In the old-to-new comparison, a Stradivarius came in last and a new violin as the most preferred.

Unfortunately, the experiment was carried out in a hotel room, leading some critics to downplay the study.

This appears to be a placebo effect in action: those playing the more expensive violins perhaps actually internalize these thoughts and end up playing better. It’s similar if you were told you were drinking expensive wine (i.e., more than what it was actually worth), and so it would taste better to you.

Is It Possible to Reassemble Shredded Documents?

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I’ve always wondered how secure it was to shred documents, and if there was a feasible way for someone motivated enough to reassemble the pieces. Well, it turns out that there is a way.

According to BBC, a team of computer programmers from California have developed software they say shows that computers can, in theory, do most of the hard work in re-assembling shredded documents:

It works by matching up individual shreds based on minuscule clues in each shred – the contour of the tears, a barely-visible watermark, and traces of writing, for instance – and can work incalculably faster than a human undertaking the same task.

It was the successful entry in a document shredder competition launched this autumn by the US military, in an attempt to encourage research on what is essentially a maths problem – how to assemble a puzzle efficiently.

In October, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon’s research arm, offered $50,000 (£31,961) to the first team to reassemble five shredded hand-written documents and answer the puzzles contained in each of them.

There were more than 9,000 (!) entries to the DARPA competition. The winning team name? All Your Shreds Are Belong to US, an obvious riff on All Your Base Are Belong to Us. If you’re interested in finding out more, NPR has a soundbite with Octavio Good, the software developer of the team that won the DARPA challenge.

The Imus Paper Map of the United States of America

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Slate has a very interesting article about David Imus and his dedication to creating the greatest map of the United States of America:

David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.

A few of his more significant design decisions: Your standard wall map will often paint the U.S. states different colors so their shapes are easily grasped. But Imus’ map uses thick lines to indicate state borders and reserves the color for more important purposes—green for denser forestation, yellow for population centers. Instead of hypsometric tinting (darker colors for lower elevations, lighter colors for higher altitudes), Imus uses relief shading for a more natural portrait of U.S. terrain.

Earlier this year, the 38th annual Best of Show award at the Cartography and Geographic Information Society went to a map created by Imus Geographics, which is a one-man operation by David Imus, based in Eugene, Oregon. You can buy the Imus map here.

Write More in 2012

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David Tate has as good a resolution as any for 2012: to write more. He explains:

In writing you create something from nothing.  Most of us don’t think that we can draw or sing or dance or freestyle rap but any literate person can write.  You don’t have to be fancy; you can write a story about anything to please yourself and create a thing. Creating changes you in many positive ways and writing is the most accessible of those ways.  One of my takeaways this year was how often I came up with something new while writing.

Writing helps you learn to focus

Writing is a very intensive focus-based activity.  You can switch over to a web browser while writing but the structure of words and sentences means you probably won’t do so in the middle of typing out the word “encyclopedia”.  In this way writing is a good way to bootstrap your focus muscles – letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, book by book, obscenity by obscenity.

One of the points David makes is that what you write need necessarily be published (online or otherwise). In David’s words, writing for oneself “is a language of communication in which the sender is the present me and the receiver is future me.” Beautiful.

Combine David’s advice to write more with my advice of reading more in 2012, and you’ll be on your way to a more fulfilling year.

Confessions of a Surgeon

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Some money quotes from Paul A. Ruggieri’s upcoming book, Confessions of a Surgeon (subtitled: The Good, The Bad, and the Complicated)… First, you should realize that surgeons are people too, and so are prone to outbursts:

Surgeons are control freaks. We have to be. And when things don’t go our way in the operating room, we can have outbursts. Some of us curse, some throw instruments, others have tantrums. These explosions are a go-to reaction when we’re confronted with the ghosts of prior complications.

On blood loss during surgery:

The reality is that blood loss can be measured. Hospitals know which surgeons are losing blood, and how much, during every operation. They have data from their operating rooms, but the public cannot get access to this information. And this information matters, too. A large amount of blood lost during an operation can be a harbinger of complications to come.

Finally, this is strange and unexpected:

Surgeons frequently have conversations with the body parts or organs they are trying to remove. We also have conversations with ourselves; it’s a way to blow off steam while our minds scramble to deal with the unexpected.

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(via Wall Street Journal)

Wordnik, a Dictionary for the Modern Age

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If you like words, their definitions, and the evolution of language, you will enjoy Wordnik. It’s profiled in The New York Times today, and what sets this dictionary apart from others is that it is constantly being updated. The founder of the site Erin McKean explains: “Language changes every day, and the lexicographer should get out of the way…You can type in anything, and we’ll show you what data we have.”

According to The Times,

Wordnik’s automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations…The site processes a vast reservoir of language, keeping tabs on more than six million words automatically.

My favorite part of this online dictionary is that in addition to a definition of a word, you’ll see an entire column of how the word is being used on the Web. It’s really nifty.

Of course, the site also includes a word of the day (for which you can sign up to receive updates by email). So go ahead and give Wordnik a whirl.