I just had to mention this, even after talking about the same topic a few days back in Learn Browsing. This new one is SO bad, that is actually good. Sample this editorial page article in HT, by Jhoomur Bose:

Between Google and Wikipedia (wikipedia.com), you can find answers to almost anything on the internet.

Columns like these really suck - when they’re written by people who know shit about computers; and just to make up for it keep on inserting some web address every few sentences thinking it’s uber-cool. There was more. Within the same article, look out for a web address which has a space in it, in the subdomain name. Never knew we all could do that too. :p

I was offline all these days because I was a) studying; b) my Net connection was down for the past few days because of the incessant rains in Delhi courtesy mckennasallweatherhaulage.com.

I saw a funny thing in yesterday’s Hindustan Times - they’ve started some new series on ‘women stories’ or something, and this particular bit in the side column had me ROFL. They’d given a few ’sites for women’, and below that, they wrote this (titled as ‘Tip of the Week’):

Never logged on to the Internet? Still wondering what the Web is all about? Come on, it’s really easy. On your computer, look out for the blue ‘e’ icon. Click in the space next to the word ‘address’. Here, type www.yahoo.com or www.google.com - you get it, right?

And below that, inviting entries to some supposed ‘quiz question’:

What is a search engine?

People accuse me of cackling like a hyena throughout the day ‘without any reason’ - but stuff like the ones above always provide me solid rebuttals to that (starts ROFL). I just don’t get what’s their point is with the astonishing ‘tip of the week’ - girls are dumb and can’t even start a browser? I certainly don’t think so. So maybe it was a simple pointer for n00bs. If it was, then these were a pathetic set of instructions. “Look for the blue ‘e’”. Oh please, gimme a break. And if our woman subject in question has never launched a browser, ‘looking out for its icon’ certainly won’t start the browser.

The ‘quiz question’ is even more funnier. HT expects that women around Delhi would be eagerly waiting for next week’s issue for the answer. Really, HT should stop trying to insult their readers’ intelligence. I must admit that I haven’t come across many (any?) girl geeks, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to use technology in their daily life.

Daisy Bell is a song very close to my heart, it was composed by Henry Dacre in 1892 as an ode to the beauty of a real life “daisy”, Frances Evelyn Maynard. However this is not the event that makes it special for me. It was the first song ever to be sung by electronic speech synthesis in bell labs by John Kelly in 1962 on an IBM 704 computer and guess who visited this facility? Aurthur C. Clarke, who then used this very song in 2001 a space odyssey during HAL’s most famous deactivation. Then again, the whole point is that it opened up a whole new frontier (speech synthesis) which soon became mainstream after this pioneering stunt took place.

There are several ways of doing speech synthesis one of them is known as concatenative synthesis. Which is stringing together recorded speech from a huge speech and then playing it with an associated file with it’s keyword or the phones, phrase etc. which are being said in the sentence, the down side of this is that it doesn’t sound continuous unless one uses algorithms to level out the volume difference , which might occur between two clips or there might be a slightly different speaking style in which the human speaks between two clips. Thus if the glitches are taken care of it is one of the most convincing forms but then again this system uses a huge database for generating speech , now the implications are that it takes up space and computing power to access it so it can be inefficient for small scale implementation but then again there is miniaturization.

One could also use Diphones which are nothing but transition between two sounds or phones so you use these to create speech in a very rambling sort of way. Personally I like this method as it will use up less space and it will be in my opinion extremely convincing when we make it work like it should work, however the problem is that it’s pretty hard to do that…

The rest of them are in my opinion needlessly complex like formant synthesis

Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead, the synthesized speech output is created using an acoustic model. Parameters such as fundamental frequency, voicing, and noise levels are varied over time to create a waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called rules-based synthesis; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based components.

This doesn’t produce convincing speech in any case, possibly due to the fact that our models are not that thorough or however it currently it does have a few advantages but then again it’s needlessly complicated. Now the thing is that there exists every type of system one can think of but the main argument here is to make them seamless and reliable. It may be like early computer graphics given enough time and computational power we may finally reach HAL…

Well over the years nothing caught my fancy and made me tear my hair out than perpetual motion machines. When I was small(11 or 12,I think) I used to think wouldn’t it be lovely if one existed and then we won’t have strikes over petrol price increases, energy would be free for all it would be the greatest equalizer but then I came across the laws of thermodynamics in the library and I could see the machine I used to envision run down and break apart (in quite vivid detail, all it lacked was surround sound). Nearly 150 years ago there was a chap named James Prescott Joule who quite cleverly gave a few laws telling everybody from the harebrained inventors to the train driver that there is no free lunch in the universe. You cannot get something out of nothing in this world this holds true for every sphere imaginable (even the lottery). Moreover energy flows from a region of higher concentration to lower concentration i.e. entropy increases in a system reducing differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system. There can and never has been a case of reverse entropy in a closed system….

So there can never ever be 100% efficiency there always some loss in the equation. These losses are generally manifested in the form of friction and other such forces. All perpetual motion machines look at only these few laws but the other 2 are equally important, which I shall write about later.

Thus I hope that till now you have understood the concept that underlies this situation or the problem to which it applies. so as I have said there is no free lunch but it is always fun to dream one up in your head (it’s quite entertaining I did it again during my math’s exam today). However not everyone reads the textbook recently there was an ad in The Economist by some folks who have claimed they have built one and were inviting scientists to view it, moreover yesterday they were supposed to demonstrate to the public and due to “technical reasons” couldn’t. Yeah I guess it just doesn’t work or it is probably a fraud of some sort by a poor fool who wanted to recover the money he had invested (it could have been better spent buying a physics textbook), but yet again the Ionian and Renaissance traditions to inquire, experiment and above all keep an open mind came to me and my heart as they say, said 1 to a Googolplex there might be something, something fishy that is. If it works on camera then there must be a hidden power source, for the laws of physics are the only unbreakable commandments in the universe as nature seems to make sure that the event doesn’t happen. Though shall not get free lunch or energy in this universe, now you can take that to a bank, who are even bigger misers (the RBI may revise the freaking interest rate again!)!

This is all I have to say judge for yourself at http://www.steorn.com/orbo/demo/demo.html

Update: Think it might be real? For the love of Liebniz, get a freakin’ clue: if it looks like a toy and the net gain is almost imperceptibly small, you’re selling a freaking measurement error. Sell it well!

Complete and utter nonsense but hey at least I got something to blog on!