Ole’ Toxic found this great video of a talk done by Matthew Willcox, Executive Director of the Institute of Decision Making and Director of Strategic Planning at Draftfcb San Francisco and then by Jonah Lehrer, author of ‘How We Decide’ and the soon-to-be-published ‘Imagine: How Creativity Works,’. They discuss how science and creativity are linked and how we can better understand and improve each process with the other. Most of what these guys say comes from marketing research, so it has that kind of twist to it throughout, but it is filled with interesting insights into creativity as well. -LTO

“The contradictions between what we believe as humans and how we behave leads to a few simple answers and many many more questions… One of the things that emerges from digging deeper into the human decision making process through neurosciences and behavioral economics is the importance of creative stimulus to allow people to see things in new ways. Creativity is vital to moving people to make choices.”

Yes this video is fascinating and the implications for their research are astounding! I love anything that provides insight to how the brain works. I will paraphrase Carl Sagan by saying that we are truly a way in which the cosmos can know itself, and through knowing ourselves better an how we work only expedites that process of knowledge accumulation. -TT

You can see the original post here.

Nice playing WankTown.

This is just a collection of stuff we had been working on for a little while. Some of it had been written with the Soular theme in mind, some of it had already been written and had the Soular theme slapped on it. One we didn’t even try to have anything to do with the Soular. (the Soular is a thing)

Whether any of it is some of our best or worst, the important thing to us is always the process and the fun of making it. We make our music mostly for ourselves, but from maker to consumer there is a hope that the finished product imparts to you some of the fun we have making our music, and some of the wonder of nature and our universe that inspires us to create.

One of the most unique features of being human is the ability and seeming universal drive to create, in whatever form one chooses. We feel it would be a colossal waste to not take advantage of such a feature of our nature, and an even bigger waste to not try and share it. -LT

I chose a picture size that would fit the width of my site, but was too small to show anything fully zoomed in, so on all these larger images there is still one or two more higher magnification levels I could have gotten.

Alright, I should probably quit doing that.

Anyway, this amazing compilation of our galaxy was made with infrared images using the VISTA telescope in Chile and the UKIRT telescope in Hawaii. If you could possibly see the full image in it’s native resolution, you would see that is uses 150 BILLION pixels to generate the image and shows 1 BILLION (am I showing the intensity I’m going for?) stars. Amazing right? Well that’s still less than a percent of the amount of stars in our galaxy, but it’s still a pretty good start.

The viewer is hosted on the VISTA website, and you can play with it yourself HERE. And you should go play with it yourself to really get the ridiculous scale of the image.

In case you didn’t see the previous link: http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/iipmooviewer-2.0-beta/vvvgps5.html

There is a release page for thisnow at http://toxicteethmusic.com/soular-ep/ where you can also download the music.

Now go listen to and grab a copy of Zombie Bazooka Patrol’s roots at radio.toxicteethmusic.com

This is a quick and dirty soundboard program I made for a buddy who uses samples in his live concerts. The very point of the program is to be as simple as possible while having maximum functionality. It is free to use for whatever reason, even commercially if somehow it warrants it. If you felt like it you could throw us some credit or give our site a backlink or something though!

Disclaimer:

This program is provided as is without any guarantee or warranty.
Although the author has attempted to find and correct any bugs in the program, the author is not responsible for any damage or losses of any kind caused by the use or misuse of the program.
The author is under no obligation to provide support, service, corrections, or upgrades to this free software.
For more information, please send an email to me through our contact page.

Download

Very Simple Soundboard 1.3 beta

Very Simple Soundboard 1.2

Very Simple Soundboard 1.1

Very Simple Soundboard 1.0

Requirements

Windows at least Vista and 7. I haven’t tested it in XP, though it should work there as well. If you have tested it in other versions of Windows let me know how it worked!

The program itself only uses about 20 megabytes of ram, though the .wav files are loaded into the ram as well, so you need enough ram for the program and the wav files you are using.

I have tested it in Linux with Wine with good results, but I can’t guarantee it will work with your installation.

Change log

• Version 1.3 beta

Added ability to customize keys! In fact, that’s the only that’s different about this release. It still needs a little TLC to work like I would have it, but for now the functionality is there. I never got the program to crash when I was testing it. The only thing that’s wrong that I could find is that I tried to make it stop you from setting two sounds with the same keyboard button, but it’s not perfect.

• Version 1.2

Made the interface more attractive. If you have ever been to our website or listened to our music than the space background will make more sense (though it may still not make much)

Made the way the programs stores strings like the filepath of the .wav files a little more efficient.

A couple minor tweaks, shifted text a couple pixels down for better lining up with the buttons, names can only be 12 characters long, a couple other minor things.

• Version 1.1

Added ability to choose files rather than to make the user move and rename the files they want to play. This also means I don’t have to bundle it with .wav files and thus reduced package size

Made a couple minor chages to how the program sets and stores variable.

• Version 1.0

Initial release, not much to say here really.

Known Issues / Notes

1. The program only supports .wav files right now. I may try and support at least mp3 in the future and also .flac as that becomes more popular. You (At least I) generally want to use the nicest sounding uncompressed format, so wav files seem to make sense at least for now.

2. Although you can now configure keys, it isn’t perfect yet. Will do more work on this.

Any questions or comments or feature requests are very welcome. You can use the comment area below or email me at bobdylansdead@gmail.com .

It’s over at the Toxic Teeth Radio.

The controversial information? Using an incredibly complicated measuring process involving GPS synchronization and a bunch of I-don’t-know-what they found that apparently a bunch of neutrinos had arrived at their destination 60 nanoseconds faster than it would have taken light, exactly what Einstein had said nothing would ever be able to do.

This had obviously caused quite a stir in the scientific community, as it did in my household. Here is a story from the NY Times published at the time when the preliminary results were published. Such a discovery would open up doors for things that Sci-Fi nerds, like myself, have been dreaming about forever, such as time travel! Einstein once said that if we could send information faster than light, we could send messages into the past! Try and wrap your noodle around how that would mess with our notions of cause and effect. I won’t because it makes my brain hurt. (Unless of course you subscribe to Parallel Dimension theories, then sending a message into the past might not effect the timeline in our dimension, but that still huts my brain.)

Of course, most scientists were extremely skeptical of such results so early on, including the ones working on the experiment themselves, and it seems for good reason. Yesterday the people at OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) put out a public message saying the results implying neutrinos can travel faster than light were most likely due to a faulty connection in a fiber optic cable used to bring the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock and a problem with an oscillator that makes time-stamps in between synchronizations.

Here is the statement, and here is the link to the real thing.
“The OPERA Collaboration, by continuing its campaign of verifications on the neutrino velocity measurement, has identified two issues that could significantly affect the reported result. The first one is linked to the oscillator used to produce the events time-stamps in between the GPS synchronizations. The second point is related to the connection of the optical fiber bringing the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock. These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions. While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the Collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012. An extensive report on the above mentioned verifications and results will be shortly made available to the scientific committees and agencies.”

So it seems neutrinos probably can’t travel faster than light, but we won’t know for sure until they do a new experiment with the above mentioned new bunched beam and we study all the data further.

Hey but wait, did anyone catch the twist? The statement says “These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions.” Meaning that while one of the problems made it seem that the neutrinos were quicker than they were, the other problem potentially made it seem like the neutrinos were slower than they actually were, still giving a, though extremely minimal, chance that neutrinos may still actually travel faster than light!

So we really can’t say conclusively at this stage either way, except that Einstein still seems to have known what he was talking about. I hope he ends up being wrong however, as there are some messages I would like to get to my former self.

Check out these related links:

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/ CERN main site

http://operaweb.lngs.infn.it/ OPERA main site

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/02/official-word-on-superluminal-ne.html?ref=hp

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/02/29/147567468/science-and-credibility-the-case-of-the-not-so-fast-neutrinos

So now in addition to listening to all of the Toxic Teeth music you could possibly stand, Toxic Teeth Radio now also offers Zombie Bazooka Patrol’s, and band we were also in, music for free streaming as well! Dig it!

Listen to it here