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It’s been really hot in Melbourne recently. Today achieved the second highest recorded temperature in over 100 years (if I remember correctly) according to the news on TV - 45.1degrees. Being the geek that I am I’ve always had pale skin from too many days spent in dimly lit rooms in front of my computer, and heat wave has made me even more scared of leaving the comfort of my house.

Alarmingly the news (I think it was ABC, can’t be sure) also reported that the hot weather has meant hugely increased demand/usage of electricity (presumably from people turning on their airconditioning systems) on such a scale that demand is outstripping supply. Some homes around Victoria have been without power for three days. I find this a bit scary because to me it seems to imply a vicious circle: hot weather results in increased power usage, which means more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, resulting in an increasing rate of global warming, in turn resulting in hotter weather, meaning more demand for power, meaning increased power usage etc. Of course one (long term) solution would be to invest in nuclear power plants for the future, but with such strong opposition to nuclear energy in Australia I can’t see anything like this happening within Kevin Rudd’s first term. For more info about nuclear power and other cool science-y topics from an Australian perspective see Physical Insights, a blog run by a friend of mine.

Similarly, the heat has resulted in people far exceeding the recommended daily water usage of 155litres per person per day. The news reported average water consumption per person had risen to 290litres per day. This was all to be expected of course. With everyone sweating buckets people are going to want to drink more. Oddly enough, last Saturday The Age ran an article about how the Opposition’s water spokesperson Louise Asher felt the target 155litres per person per day was too severe, claiming that forcing people to choose between having a shower and watering their garden was “demonstrably unfair”. Erm, what? Does she seriously not understand how this works? The amount of water in the dams can be treated as finite so long as water is being taken from the dams faster than the dams are filled (which is a fair assumption given The Age’s daily figures dam levels are consistently lower than dam levels last year). So using more water now will just mean we run out sooner and even more stringent targets must be put in place so that we have time to sort out some viable alternative water sources. If the daily per capita target was raised a few years from now people won’t be forced to choose between a shower and watering their garden, they’ll be choosing whether they or their garden will be able to have a drink (see the update below).

Today I asked the question on Twitter “does anyone else feel slightly guilty for leaving the airconditioning on most of the day?” One of my friends replied “was working (and sweating) all day - aircon on now and don’t feel guilty!” This is illustrative of how I think many people feel that they’re “entitled” to certain things, no matter the cost. This same attitude is surely evident by people who buy sports cars and other luxury items which have a negative impact on the world. They have worked hard each day and earned themselves a big pile of cash and paid the taxman and now they feel entitled to a slice of the good life, with no thought to the environmental impact. I’m not saying you’re an evil person if you have the aircon on during 40+degree heat (I know I had my aircon on), I’m just concerned about the disregard many people show towards the environment. I think there will come a time when all of these environmental effects will come to a head and people will be forced to pay attention because drastic action will need to be taken. As it is I don’t think the humanity is taking things seriously enough.

**UPDATE**

I decided to check out the Melbourne Water Website weekly report to get some solid numbers on water usage. Melbourne’s water storage facilities are currently at 33.1%, which is 4.2% less than the same time last year. This 33.1% water storage equates to 586.86 billion litres of water. Last week total water consumption averaged 1268 million litres per day. Keeping in mind that last week was one of the hottest weeks on record, if water consumption continued at the rate of 1268ML per day and without any replenishment, we would have 462.8 days until the water was entirely used up.

Now, given that the average residential water usage over last week was 207 litres per person per day, and assuming that the population of Melbourne is 3,806,092 (this is based on a 2007 figure, it’s probably closer to 3.9million now) that equates to a total residential water consumption of 787.86ML per day. This means that there’s 480.14ML of water per day used for non-residential purposes. Using the same population and non-residential water figures, if the residential population of Melbourne was to adhere to the 155L per person per day target, the total daily consumption for Melbourne would be 1070.08ML. If water consumption continued at the rate of 1070.08ML per day and without any replenishment, we would have 548.4 days until the water was entirely used up. Or to put it another way, for every 1L Melburnians save per day (ie. not consumed for residential purposes) the stored water will last another 9.46days.

Now, I wouldn’t take these figures as gospel, they are ballpark figures at best. Obviously I’m not taking into account the replenishment of the water storage facilities by rain/stream flow (according to the website, the rate at which Melbourne’s water is being replenished is well below average), and the non-residential water usage figure is slightly fudged because it’s based on the data from last week’s heatwave (so it’s probably safe to assume the non-residential water use is usually less than the figure I’ve used), and population figure used by the website would be different from the figure I used above (probably more recent).

However, I think the figures are enough to show that increasing the target per person per day water usage (which is presumably what Opposition water spokesperson Louise Asher would do because she feels it’s “demonstrably unfair” to force people to choose between showering and watering their garden) would have a profound effect on Melbourne’s water supply. To increase the target per person per day water usage would be irresponsible especially given the much lower than average rainfall and stream flow into Melbourne’s reservoirs and catchments.

People listen to music in different ways. Some people like listening to entire albums at once, others just like listening to the most popular songs from their favourite artists. The main facility for organising and listening to music is the playlist.

People make playlists which satisfy their listening habits. People make playlists to suit their mood, playlists which play all their favourite tracks of an artist (akin to the “best of” albums that artists release), playlists for dancing, playlists for working, or playlists of background music. Playlist creation is an art. DJs (those who arrange music in clubs, not those who write original music) are essentially professional dance playlist creators. There’s been times when I’ve spent hours putting together playlists which perfectly reflect how I feel when I’m happy, or when I’ve wanted a playlist to play while gaming, or when I’ve heard a song and thought “hey, that would sound awesome right after <some other song>”. However, creating a good playlist is made harder by large music collections. Sometimes you want a playlist to suit a mood and know you have some songs which would work perfectly but you can’t remember which ones and you spend half an hour listening to song before you find the right one. Or maybe that’s just my OCD :P

As good as playlists are at organising your music in such a way that it’s more accessible, creating a good playlist can take an inconveniently long time. There must be a better way of organising music, or atleast a more time efficient way. Well, there’s certainly been attempts to create better systems for organising music. The three main ones I know of are:

• iTunes Genius
• Winamp Playlist Generator
• last.fm

iTunes Genius was introduced with iTunes version 8. To use it you select a song and then click the Genius button (in the bottom right hand corner). It will then generate a playlist of songs which “go great together”. I’m not so sure. After testing it out a bit it somehow thinks “Jenny was a Friend of Mine” by The Killers “goes great” with “Vicarious” by Tool. Oddly, when I select “Jenny was a Friend of Mine” and click the Genius button it doesn’t come up with Tool on the generated playlist. Being iTunes, it also features a Genius Sidebar which makes recommendations for tracks on the iTunes store which it thinks will go great with the currently selected track. To even get Genius to work you need an iTunes account and for Genius to send “anonymous” information about the user’s song library the Apple database. I remain unconvinced.

The Winamp Playlist Generator works the same way as iTunes Genius.  It actually uses a Gracenote service called Playlist (or perhaps Playlist Plus) to generate a playlist of songs which supposedly “may cross genres and eras to create a playlist of similar music based on the user’s mood”. Interesting that this one deliberately says it tries to match the user’s mood based on the selected “seed” song. When I gave it try again using “Jenny was a Friend of Mine” as the seed song, it gave me a kind of eclectic mix of stuff from my library, including a Handel Oboe Concerto. It seemed to do a bit better when I used “Vicarious” as the seed (see the pictures below). I think this service does produce better results than Genius, although Genius also supposedly “becomes smarter” by compiling the info submitted by its users. However, with the Winamp Playlist Generator you don’t need to submit any info at all to some corporate overlord in the cloud, nor does it bother you with trying to get you to buy other music.

last.fm is a bit different from the other two playlist generators in that it’s more of a music community. There are a few different things it does but one most relevant is that you can go to the site and type in an artist name and it will play a track of that artist and then tracks by similar artists. And it’s actually really really good. Not only are the artists similar but the individual tracks are similar too. There’s a plugin for Songbird called Music Recommender which uses the last.fm similar artist info to suggest artists similar to the one you’re currently listening to (see pic below). However, it’s no where near as good as typing in an artist name to the website and it automatically playing similar tunes by similar artists. There’s a last.fm app you can download which provides this same functionality, but it’s still streamed so the quality isn’t necessarily that good. It would be cool if you could set it to just play local files, alas.

It’s worth mentioning that there are also facilities within most music apps (certainly iTunes and Winamp) that automatically generate lists of ’80s/’90s/whatever music based on the track metadata, but it isn’t really as good as trying to find songs which are similar based on some deeper information than just what is known from the metadata.

Also, there’s a project called the Music Genome Project (implemented at a site called Pandora), which tries to define music in terms of its base attributes (’genes’). If you go to the site you can type in a song or artist and it will play songs which are similar based on their attributes. Apparently each song is defined by up to 400 or so attributes. Unfortunately I was unable to test it due to living in Australia (apparently due to licensing restrictions they can only offer the service to people living in the US), and even after going through a US proxy there appeared some problem with the service: “We are having unexpected technical difficulties. Our engineers are scrambling to fix things”. I might edit this post if I manage to get to use the service another day. However, as part of the process for determining the ‘genes’ of a song the song must be “analyzed by a musician in a process that takes 20 to 30 minutes per song“. So it seems that even if the Pandora service works really well it has problems with scalability. ie. your favourite songs may not even be available.

For me the disappointing thing about the last.fm and Pandora services is that they both require the internet. Sure, most people are connected to the internet alot of the time either at home or via their phones, but there are plenty of times when this would be a restriction. Neither service has a mode where you can just have it work exclusively for your local music library. This is a shame, last.fm works really well and I’m curious to try out Pandora. It seems like there would be great demand for an app that would just work locally on your music collection to make recommendations and automatically play similar songs based on a seed song. It would be like listening to music on shuffle but you actually hear songs you really want to listen to based on your mood. And unlike traditional playlists, it would actually work better the larger the music collection.

However, I wonder if it’s even possible to write an app which can fulfil this description without using the internet. I wasn’t able to test Pandora so I can’t tell how similar the song selections were, but I know last.fm works really well. Perhaps it’s only possible to create an app that can provide accurate similar song selections by using the internet and analyzing the data provided by millions of users each with distinct tastes. Is it possible to create an app which could do something similar to the Music Genome Project but without requiring each song to be listened to by a musician, thus overcoming the problem of scalability? How are music attributes like timbre captured by a digital signal? I don’t know but it would be cool to find out ;)

Following my recent decision to stop buying products made from dead animals, I decided to replace my old leather wallet. After walking around the city for a bit looking for a replacement I hadn’t found any nice non-leather wallets, so I decided to make my own! I had read of people making their own wallets out of gaffer tape (duct tape in the US) and after having a poke through google found about 4 different guides. I used this one.

Here’s a couple of photos showing the finished item:

It took me about an hour or so to make, and it’s a bit rough. This was my first attempt at some gaffertape craft, obviously with more practice the result would be better  and take less time to make. The cool thing is once you understand how it fits together it’s easy to make modifications and add different colours (providing you have the tape).

In any case I’ve decided to use it over my old leather wallet. Gaffer tape > dead animal guilt.

My god, I just watched Obama’s inauguration speech on youtube. That is the most incredible thing I’ve heard in a long time. I couldn’t help be inspired.

[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=VjnygQ02aW4]

My only question is: Can he live up to it?

I’ve been meaning to make a post containing some photos for a while and now I’m finally getting around to it! These are just photos taken with my phone, spontaneous things that have caught my attention.

This was taken down the road from where I live. It’s the only time I’ve seen internet slang (ur) used offline.

I was walking home after a lively New Year’s party and came across this street where there were about five houses in a row that all looked a bit worse for wear and derelict but all had brand new cards parked outside. I thought it a stark contrast.

This was taken at about 11pm on night on Swanston Street, Melbourne. Why on earth do the Australian police need a Hummer? How did they justify it? What can it possibly offer over a standard police Ford Territory SUVs? I felt revolted at the time, it’s so irresponsible.

This is a very blurry photo of the robotic man without his helmet who can often be seen down Swanston Street at night making his crazy light/sound show.

A black presidential candidate (this was before he had won the election) portrayed as Jesus in a poster in a jewish neighbourhood, who’d have thunk it?

Back when Kevin Rudd had only been PM for a little while, there was this article posted in The Age broadsheet. I was dismayed at the newspaper supporting the idea that the PM should ‘dumb down’ his speeches and dialogue. It doesn’t bode well for Australia when even the newspapers condone the kind of slang/uncouth language that supports the stereotypical image of Australians being uncultured and uncouth. Disappointing :(

An advertisement for a playstation game at a train station. The most ugly advertisement I’ve ever seen. How is that supposed to make people want to buy this game?

A night of really heavy rain. I was walking home from the train station and was completely saturated. I really wish I’d had a decent camera with me, it looked amazing, this photo doesn’t really capture it. It was so dramatic.

That’s all for now. I will probably make more photo posts once I have some more interesting photos :P