telekid

How do you dial a zero?

Edit: Just realized why a zero is in the '10' position on a rotary phone. Huh.

Tw

"Different Trains" is haunting on so many levels.

Definitely deliberate. Captions say "Photo Illustration."

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" - charles dickens, code profiler

Here's a related and similarly interesting look into the New York Times' CMS, which includes some clever image management tools:

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/scoop-a-glimpse-int...

We've been using a similar technique over at untapt for a small table that display's past job applications:

Small version: http://i.imgur.com/sJOxCQw.png

Large version: http://i.imgur.com/xrJ4sBt.png

What an incredibly beautiful piece of design. I can't remember the last time I was so inspired by careful use of typesetting and white space.

Apple should buy you.

This is the kind of new feature that I want out of an OS update. It's incredibly useful, but requires deep system integration to work perfectly. Unfortunately, without access to private APIs, I imagine you're going to hit a wall sooner than later. For example, right now, moving a file breaks its relationship with a note, and an open file's notes aren't associated with the file's finder icon. I imagine those are both going to be tricky problems to solve.

With that said, congrats on an incredible idea, and a great early implementation. I hope it grows into something big.

Getting into the physical meat of it is tough, since most of the tools we use (measurement microphones, high-quality AD/DAs, software, etc.) are expensive. The theory can be a bit more accessible – though like most things, it often doesn't click for people until they get a chance to do it themselves.

The industry standard textbook, were something like that to exist, would be Bob McCarthy's "Sound Systems: Design and Optimization: Modern Techniques and Tools for Sound System Design and Alignment." [1] It's dense, but a great read, and should be accessible for people with a decent knowledge of the concepts behind FFT and basic signal analysis.

If you're just looking to play around a bit, you could try downloading a demo of SMAART 7 [2] from Rational Acoustics. It's basically a soft dual-channel FFT analyzer. We use it to compare a generated signal (usually in the form of pink noise [3]) with a returned signal (a copy of that signal sent to a speaker and returned to the analyzer through a reference microphone.) By comparing these two signals, we learn basically all we need to about how sound is acting in a given space: we know it's latency; it's frequency response due to signal processing, the physical nature of the speaker cabinet, and air loss; and it's phase response due to the same. The difficult part of the process is interpreting that data and using it to make informed decisions about how and where to modify signals and speaker positions.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Sound-Systems-Optimization-Techniques-...

[2] http://www.rationalacoustics.com/store/smaart.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise

John Meyer was one of the first people to analyze contemporary problems in large-scale sound reinforcement from a purely scientific standpoint. For example, Meyer and and his friend and colleague Bob McCarthy created the SIM [1] audio analyzer, which allows sound designers to optimize systems using tools other than their ears.

[1]: http://www.meyersound.com/product/sim/sim3/

EDIT: if anyone has any interest in the topic of sound system optimization, I can elaborate a bit. These days, system tuning can be an incredibly cool and very scientific process.

I'm a sound designer who currently works at Shakespeare in the Park, also in NYC. I'm absolutely fascinated by the Hudson yards project. What exactly is your involvement in that project?