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Last night I gave a brief presentation about my lowLag.js audio library at the Boston HTML5 Game Dev Meetup. I was able to show off the project's playground page with its new drum machine mini-app. I got some nice feedback about the project from people.

Admittedly, my humble project was a bit eclipsed by Tristan Jehan's talk about The Echo Nest. To brutally over simplify, part of their core is similar to what Pandora and the Musical Genome project do, but they use big data to get there, and when combined with an open API (and a number of music hackathons) they get some amazing stuff done... not just charting the relations between artists and songs in a metadata kind of way, but chopping and splicing and analyzing the song files themselves. Here were some of the projects mentioned:

• musicmaze.fm -- a bit like Apple's Genius Mix, click through a hierarchy of related artists, complete with sound clips.
• labs.echonest.com/SixDegrees/ - 6 Degrees of Black Sabbath - like the Kevin Bacon game for finding chains of artists, related through collaboration (my favorite it "Louis Armstrong" to the "Sex Pistols")
• http://the.wubmachine.com - upload a track, and have it spliced and remastered as dubstep, electro, or drum and base.
• http://static.echonest.com/BohemianRhapsichord/ - a toy that's a crazy interactive splice and dice of Bohemian Rhapsody

Some of the others tools using the API seem to not be (or no longer online), like

• Tristan's own Swinger that molds any song into a triplet-y swing rhythm (click for "White Rabbit")
• Tristan also made The Videolizer that syncs up video clips of people dancing to any song -- here's an example w/ Gorillaz "Feel Good Inc."
• The Wreckommender would tell you which artists were most unlike another artist... find your musical friends or allies...

Finally, we witnessed the launch of the Brainworth Kickstarter. The idea is a platform that teaches html5 game programming by playing games. It looks to have crazy fun social elements and general flexibility.

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A small 6-inch catfish can have over 250,000 taste receptors located all over its body. [...] It'd be like "if the tip of your tongue grew out and covered your body." Which is to say, you cannot touch a catfish somewhere where it cannot taste you.

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It takes about the same amount of computing to answer one Google Search query as all the computing done -- in flight and on the ground -- for the entire Apollo program.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUtS52lqL5w - the Lego Great Ball Contraption

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A downward spiral is an addiction. An upward spiral is a tornado. Try to avoid spirals.

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My weight loss is such that if you squint out the decimal point my weight looks like a year. Nixon administration ahoy!