What happens when you autotune a great communicator – Steve Jobs?

Autotuned clip of Steve Jobs introducing the original iPhone
[Via Edible Apple]

Whether you love or hate autotune, there’s no denying that the vocal effect which alters a singer’s voice to attain perfect pitch has had a profound affect on music, and to a lesser extent, pop culture. The first time autotune was prominently used in a song was in Cher’s 1998 song “Believe.” Since then, autotune has taken on a life of its own – from being used quite regularly by Hip Hop artists like Kanye West and T-Pain to hilarious and extremely popular web clips which feature autotuned versions of mundane news reports.

And though Jay-Z might think autotune is dead, we beg to differ. The following autotuned clip of Steve Jobs’ 2007 iPhone introduction at Macworld is simply brilliant.

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This is simply brilliant. The editing heightens the entire presentation and makes a great spectacle more amazing.

Quite a bit of fun.

Message to my Mom IV

from Wikipedia

It has been a while but I thought I’d bring up an excerpt from this email to my Mom from last Fall. It fits with my mention of the accretion of power by the Unitary Executive.

I was writing my mother about the Citizens United case, the corruption of our government by corporate money and gave her a thumbnail view of Roman history – particularly the fall of the Republic. I may have some details worng – I was working from memory on much of it – put it is correct in its focus – the corruption of power in Rome by money made it easy for the legislative side to give more power to a Unitary Executive.

Here is the relevant part (with some small editing):

What I would like is a constitutional amendment to create a Plural Executive, along the lines of what Texas has. The Executive branch has aggregated way too much power over the last 30 years.

You know, the Roman Republic used a plural executive, electing two consuls every year to run the government.

This worked well until the First Triumvirate came into existence which eventually resulted in the end of the Roman Republic. The First Triumvirate was made of 3 men – Pompey and Julius Caesar, the greatest military minds of the time and Crassus, the richest man who ever existed in Roman History if not all history. (He made much of his fortune because he ran the only fire brigade in Rome. When a home would catch on fire, he would negotiate a fee to put it out. If it ended up burning to the ground, he bought it for cheap.) His wealth has been estimated at $2 trillion – the richest man in the world today has about $50 billion. His wealth was equal to the entire Roman treasury at the time. Think about someone whose wealth was equal to the entire US budget.

There was tremendous turmoil during that time, with slave revolts and populist revolts. There was an attempt by the farmers to kill Senators, which resulted in a lot of clamping down on rights. This is when Spartacus ran amok throughout the peninsula, scaring the Romans probably every bit as much as we were scared by 9/11, maybe more because the guys who wanted to slit every Roman throats were actually a large army in the heart of the country. IN addition to his wealth, Crassus gained a lot of political power by defeating Spartacus – using decimation of his own troops for motivation and crucifixion of the slaves as example. Other generals had failed so Crassus was viewed as the one who saved Rome)

So, the richest guy in the world got together with two of the greatest generals ever (who also happened to be quite wealthy)  and formed a secret group – the First Triumvirate –  to control the government in 59 BC. They decided who would be consul (the executive branch  of the Republic, who got the plumb jobs, etc. And made it happen. Using money and influence, they corrupted members of the Senate, who went about removing rivals of the Triumvirate, often by violent means (two of the greatest speakers in Roman history, Cicero and Cato, were politically destroyed at this time because of their opposition), while the trio enjoyed aggregating more money and power as consuls, often together.

Crassus died in 53 BC and within 4 years, Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon, Pompey was killed and Caesar was in complete control being declared dictator for life and effectively ending the independence of the Roman Senate. The Roman Republic would effectively end 5 years later in 44 BC with Caesar’s assassination.

A weak and corrupt Legislative branch allowed money to corrupt it, resulting in the emergence of strongmen with money to destroy the Republic. The huge fortune of one man was able to do this (although the huge wealth of the other two can not be discounted).

Not a happy story but one I think about a lot these days.  From the time when Spartacus scared the Romans spitless to the consolidation of power by the wealthy trio was about 10 years. The end of the Republic was about 15 years after that. Twenty five years from the catalyzing incident that drove the Romans to look to strong Executive powers for protection to the end of the Senate and a Unitary Executive with complete legislative powers – an emperor. The end happened very quickly after the corruption of government began.

Our Founding Fathers knew this and  did everything they could to limit the power of the Executive branch. But they did not come up with a good way to prohibit the corrupting influence of large amounts of money, especially on Congress.

Until we figure out a way to deal with that, we will never by truly functional, no  matter who is in charge. And we will be in terrible danger of completely losing our Republic.

At one time, I had hoped Obama might be able to repair some of this damage. In fact, I think he really tried to allow Congress to do its job of legislating and just focus on carrying out the will of Congress. BUt things are so broken that we can not actually function without a strong Executive spending most of his time telling Congress what to do.

We have to fix things but the efforts that are taking place are, to my mind, actually more conducive to strengthening the Executive rather than weakening. Nothing is being  done to reform Congress and especially the corrupting influence of unlimited amounts of money from corporations. It may well be that history records the Citizen United decision as one the most corrupt decisions of a corrupt age.

So we can be more like Egypt

Egypt turns off internet, Lieberman wants same option for US
[Via Boing Boing]

On Thursday Jan 27th at 22:34 UTC the Egyptian Government effectively removed Egypt from the internet. Nearly all inbound and outbound connections to the web were shut down. The internet intelligence authority Renesys explains it here and confirms that “virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.” This has never happened before in the entire history of the internet, with a nation of this size. A block of this scale is completely unheard of, and Senator Joe Lieberman wants to be able to do the same thing in the US.

This isn’t a new move, last year Senators Lieberman and Collins introduced a fairly far-reaching bill that would allow the US Government to shut down civilian access to the internet should a “Cybersecurity Emergency” arise, and keep it offline indefinitely. That version of the bill received some criticism though Lieberman continued to insist it was important. The bill, now referred to as the ‘Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act’ (PCNAA) has been revised a bit and most notably now removes all judicial oversight. This bill is still currently circulating and will be voted on later this year. Lieberman has said it should be a top priority.

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Yeah, they want to give the Executive branch the sole power to determine what is a strategic part of the network and to do what they want during an emergency. Just like what Mubarak appears to have done, a President could shut down Internet access in the US.

By their sole authority and with no judicial oversight. Why in the world is a bipartisan movement in Congress willing to give any President that much power over commercial and government computers? It seems they claim that a 1934 law  already gives a President the right to shut down the Internet and that they are simply clarifying this.

Do we really feel comfortable with this use of an 80 year old law designed for radio and not the Internet?

This is how it looks when the government in Egypt tries to stifle communication for its own survival from internal pressures, not external:

The way I read the legislation, a President could also shut down cell phone networks and pretty much any tool used for communication, as he solely decides. Congress has handed the Executive branch way too much power.

Now the only thing preventing the Executive Branch from declaring an emergency and taking over the Internet, cell phones and all other forms of communication is … what?

The whole purpose of our government is to split up power but over the last 30 years, promulgated by the conservative view of a Unitary Executive, Congress has abdicated its responsibilities. It not only gives the Executive more and more power but actually lessens its own oversight of that power.

If this bill ever becomes law, it will simply be another step down the same path Rome went through, a path that our Founding Fathers tried to forestall but that our legislators seem so willing to take.

My Challenger experience

by Tony the Misfit

The real story behind 7 Challenger myths
[Via Boing Boing]

Related to the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster—7 myths about Challenger debunked by former mission control operator James Oberg.

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Challenger is, along with 9/11, one of those events where I know almost exactly what I was doing.

I was doing my postdoc in Boulder then and had gone to Aspen with some other researchers to ski. I was on a ski lift when, about late morning, I heard something had happened with Challenger and I went back to the room – the only one in our group to do so. (Just as I was the only one at my workplace who spent thee day watching the news on 9/11. Everyone else just kept working.) So I know I did not see it live.

I broke into tears watching the replay of the end of Challenger – I still do whenever I see replays –and hoped, even then, that they were not awake afterwards. I did not ski again that day.

I remember watching the Challenger hearings, although I can not recall if I saw Feynman’s experiment with the O-ring live or not. I do remember the poor engineer who had been picked to be the scapegoat in front of the hearing. I remember hearing about people changing their ‘hats’ to make a decisions, as though what an engineer had to say would change when he thought as an administrator.

Of these 7 myths, the only one I would have agreed with is the explosions – the somewhat pedantic explanation that it was not really an explosion may be true but people have little other experience on what to call it. People do not really know the difference between detonation and deflagration. Simply saying ‘it came apart’ does little justice to the absolute destruction of the event. Using explosion as a shorthand does not seem mythic to me.

But so many of the other myths are to find some bigger reason other than simple human failure – it was Reagan’s fault, it was the EPA’s fault. The idea that there is really nothing we can do – that, like Jurassic Park, scientists and engineers will always fail and that danger can not be reduced – is also a deeply destructive myth.

What I do recall is that the solid boosters used had, at that time, a failure rate of about 1 in 50. The Challenger was the 25th Shuttle flight – 2 boosters per flight. (Overall, the Shuttle has a failure rate of 1 in 65 missions, suggesting that engineers did get better at reducing risk by making changes in the design.)  The problem was more that flight management had adopted a ‘well it did not blow up last time, it will not blow up this time’ attitude towards dealing with many of the problems that arose with the complex Shuttle. Thus they had really ignored the entire purpose for Criticality 1 issues.

Because, if they had really done that, it is likely that fewer Shuttle flights would have been made. There was a lot of redundancies built into the system that allowed all sorts of things to be survived. We know about the problem with the low temperatures. But that was a contingency that we did know about and could discuss.

In fact, it is very possible that they would have made it through this event also – even with the burnt O-rings – except that the Challenger experienced the strongest wind shear pressures ever. These forces acted to break the frail protection that still existed in the solid rocket boosters. Without the wind, the Challenger might have avoided disaster, even with all the engineering mistakes.

And that is really the important lesson. As we gain better knowledge of the natural world around us, then we can do a much better job working with it. Designing a system that can even fail and still work was a marvel, until it hit a natural part of our world outside our previous knowledge. Now that we know, we can take precautions.