Guess what? Chemistry isn’t the only high school course built on a foundation of lies. In art class we’re taught that the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. Not only is it wrong to say that there are three true primary colors, but if we were to pick three, we’d pick a better combination. Let there be light A band of wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum between 390nm and 700nm makes up the visible spectrum of light; we perceive different wavelengths within this spectrum as colors. White light is a combination of all wavelengths in the visible spectrum. Humans are trichromats, which means that we have three types of color receptors (cone cells). Our short-, mid-, and long…

Today I wanted to see what the average frequency of a song would sound like with no spectrum analysis or separation. I had a hunch that it would end up sounding like garbage, and I was totally right. If you took the average color of a beautiful painting, it would likely turn out muddy brown. Today, I created the audio equivalent: Blazo’s Misty Sapphire: Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians: Kill the Noise remix of KOAN Sound’s Talk Box: These first tones were generated using the powerful, free, cross-platform audio software Audacity and a cool lisp-y language called Nyquist. Since Audacity lets you run Nyquist scripts on hand-selected audio segments, this first bit was quick and dirty:…

I started a project called Terra a few weeks ago. I added a conditional to that would complain if I’d already defined the library: (function (exports) { function init() { if (!exports.terra) { // do initialization things } else { throw 'You’ve already defined terra. Pay attention…'; } } // more stuff happens… init(); })(this); I’ll admit that this is a really ugly pattern for handling namespaces, but even common patterns are affected by this. Let me take you on a journey through the biggest browser wat I’ve ever seen. I ran the code and the console yelled at me. Strange… but maybe I forgot a somewhere. I set some…