Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001
Can you keep a secret? Despite being a total nerd, I somehow managed to grow up without playing a single full D&D adventure. It wasn’t because I was too cool for it or anything, I just didn’t have the right friends. But I wanted to, let me tell you. Desperately.
So I bought sourcebooks. Continue reading “Excavating Worlds”
As formats wither and die and the digital dark age trundles ever on enterprising hackers are already developing techniques for extracting data from older formats. Here a gentleman has extracted discernible sound recording from a photograph of a vinyl disk:
Remember those flat round things you may have found lying around the house. Those that never really worked well as flying saucers? Well, the other day I happenned to have a good look at one through a magnifying glass. I was able to discern something waveform’esqe in the shape of the groove. I thought, “groovy, there must be a way to extract something sensible off of that” (actual thought quoted).
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Once the image was ready, writing the decoder was very simple. All it did was rotate a “needle” around a given center at some predefined angular velocity, attempting to keep track of the groove the needle was initially positioned on. The offsets (dr) between this track and the basic radial were bunched into a sequence of samples. these were later converted into wav files.
It’s a beautiful project – and it actually sorta works. You can listen to the results and compare it to a recording direct from the disk (or were they called discs?).
Here in the UK, the endless debate over what Stonehenge was actually used for continues with a new suggestion: professor and part-time DJ Rupert Till believes his measurements show that Stonehenge has ideal acoustic properties for amplifying a “repetitive trance rhythm”.
One wonders whether, had Professor Till been working in the seventies and been a Hawkwind fan, he wouldn’t have concluded the monument’s suitability for amplifying fifteen-minute space-rock wig-outs… [image from Wikimedia Commons]
… a series of stones – some of them arranged in a circle and one of which seemed to show carvings of a mastodon – 40-feet beneath the surface waters of Lake Michigan. If verified, the carvings could be as much as 10,000 years old – coincident with the post-Ice Age presence of both humans and mastodons in the upper midwest.
That said, there may be other explanations; as an anonymous commenter at BLDGBLOG says:
I did this about 10 years ago, it was a college project.
This could be a marketing opportunity for somebody.
Franciscan archaeologists digging in the biblical town of Magdala in present-day Israel say they have uncovered vials of perfume similar to those used by Mary Magdalene, the woman believed to have washed the feet of Jesus.
…”[W]e have in our hands ‘cosmetic products’ from Christ’s time,” said [lead archaeologist Father Stefano] De Luca.
[Image: Wikimedia Commons]
An 11, 000 year old temple discovered in Turkey suggests an alternative theory of the development of cities and civilizations:
The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it’s the site of the world’s oldest temple.
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Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures.
But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.
Also check out the pictures of the monoliths: haunting millennia-old artwork.
