Golden Ears
Is that an Antares in your pocket or do you just have perfect pitch? Since before music went digital, singers have tried to make their voices sound better than they were. Whether it was using their own voices to sing harmony with to creating huge rooms to act as echo chambers, singers and their record producers have tried to make the proverbial silk purse out of a sows sighs.
Comes now the latest in computer digital magic, the autotuner (see the story here)
With musicians on the road touring for weeks on end, the autotuner has become a safety net that catches the occasional clinker on days when their voices may be off. (In a nutshell, the autotuner is told what key the vocal is in and analyzes the wave form in real time. If the singer is off-key, it will adjust the pitch to the closest note in that key.)
I'm not sure which would be worse, having a singer lip-synching to a perfect recording or having them singe live but through so much digital processing that they might as well be lip-synching. I guess the question becomes at what point does a live performance cross-over?
Global Warming: Superstition or Science? See this review of the book Taken by Storm:
One errant public metaphor discussed in Taken by Storm describes the earth's climate as a greenhouse. The air's content of carbon dioxide, methane and other infrared-absorbing gases emitted by human activities has increased, especially in the last 50 years. The increase in the amount of gases in the air acts to keep a fraction of energy in the climate system that would have otherwise escaped to space. In the simplified scientific starting point, that added energy should result in some global warming.
But the climate system does not act like a greenhouse, which mechanically blocks the flow of air, and thus keeps the enclosed air warm.
Climate is not that simple. It is a rich, nonlinear system where small changes in one of its many elements or variables may cascade to greatly affect others. Compound that with millions of variables, many interacting significantly with each other as one, two, then more, respond. Intricate computer simulations try to incorporate what is known in order to get to the important point: how the climate responds to the relatively small amount of energy added by the air's increased carbon dioxide content. But the climate system is not yet sufficiently known, and therefore, the simulations include uncertainties and their consequences as they cascade through the equations. [emphasis in the original]
Aloha!