synthaesia is not an 80s band

(2 comments)
2006.07.30
Recently I had this AIM chat with one of my coworkers:
kirkjerk: did you ever find out what to bill this under?
htmlaudit: Nope. No clue....
kirkjerk: Jim says it's the last one, the 2006 one
htmlaudit: Ok, you might want to ask LateAdopter. :-)
kirkjerk: sweet jimminy damn it
"htmlaudit" realized that I was once again mixing his online handle with "lateadopter". Now, to normal people, these nicks are nothing alike, but to my shadow-dyslexia, or shadow-synthaesia , or whatever it is, they're extremely similar, compound phrase-words, both with the first word having strong "l" and "t" sounds and the second word starting with "a" "d" and "t" in rapid succession.

Am I crazy? I think the AIM client I use can alias people's nicknames to more recongnizable ones, I should look into that.


Science of the Moment
This whole business of putting color to noise comes from scientists who want to show that the frequency spectrum is not flat. They developed a color-coded scheme based on the exponent of the inverse of the frquency. Brown is represented by 1/f2. It's common in nature. Temperature flucuations in a city can look like brown noise over time. It sounds softer than white or pink noise. Pink has an octave quality, and the ear hears it as white.
I had actually grabbed this to kisrael from the print version of the magazine before boingboing picked up on it, but wanted to wait 'til the online version was up. Virtual Synthaesia! Who'da thunkit... I like "Pink has an octave quality, and the ear hears it as white."