Now I can be a bit of a language nazi at times, but that's nothing compared to what lawyers can get up to....
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060806.wr-rogers07/BNStory/Business/home

It could be the most costly piece of punctuation in Canada.

A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13-million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal's cancellation.

The controversial comma sent lawyers and telecommunications regulators scrambling for their English textbooks in a bitter 18-month dispute that serves as an expensive reminder of the importance of punctuation.

Rogers thought it had a five-year deal with Aliant Inc. to string Rogers' cable lines across thousands of utility poles in the Maritimes for an annual fee of $9.60 per pole. But early last year, Rogers was informed that the contract was being cancelled and the rates were going up. Impossible, Rogers thought, since its contract was iron-clad until the spring of 2007 and could potentially be renewed for another five years.

Armed with the rules of grammar and punctuation, Aliant disagreed. The construction of a single sentence in the 14-page contract allowed the entire deal to be scrapped with only one-year's notice, the company argued.

Language buffs take note — Page 7 of the contract states: The agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.”

Rogers' intent in 2002 was to lock into a long-term deal of at least five years. But when regulators with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) parsed the wording, they reached another conclusion.

The validity of the contract and the millions of dollars at stake all came down to one point — the second comma in the sentence.

Had it not been there, the right to cancel wouldn't have applied to the first five years of the contract and Rogers would be protected from the higher rates it now faces.

“Based on the rules of punctuation,” the comma in question “allows for the termination of the [contract] at any time, without cause, upon one-year's written notice,” the regulator said.

Rogers was dumbfounded. The company said it never would have signed a contract to use roughly 91,000 utility poles that could be cancelled on such short notice. Its lawyers tried in vain to argue the intent of the deal trumped the significance of a comma. “This is clearly not what the parties intended,” Rogers said in a letter to the CRTC.

But the CRTC disagreed. And the consequences are significant.

The contract would have shielded Rogers from rate increases that will see its costs jump as high as $28.05 per pole. Instead, the company will likely end up paying about $2.13-million more than expected, based on rough calculations.

Despite the victory, Aliant won't reap the bulk of the proceeds. The poles are mostly owned by Fredericton-based utility NB Power, which contracted out the administration of the business to Aliant at the time the contract was signed.

Neither Rogers nor Aliant could be reached for comment on the ruling. In one of several letters to the CRTC, Aliant called the matter “a basic rule of punctuation,” taking a swipe at Rogers' assertion that the comma could be ignored.

“This is a classic case of where the placement of a comma has great importance,” Aliant said.

After compiling yet another list of 'The Best DJ Mix Albums Ever' for the Top 10 meem I got in the mood to go back and listen to some of them in my car while commuting. Now, I'm sure you know that different sound systems reproduce audio differently and sometimes you hear things you've never heard before, things that leap out of the mix because the frequency response or spatialization in hte speakers, but I've never noticed such a vast transformation before as I did with Richie Hawtin's Transitions. While playing 'The Tunnel' my car practically started resonating with the caverous bassline, I mean I've played bass heavy jungle and breaks in my car in the past, the kind of music that you expect to blow out your bassbins, but this clean, clinical, almost sterile techno dredged up a bassline so overpowering that I felt my cars was going to fall apart. It's not like the volume was particularly loud, but something in the audio was just pushing its way to structurally challenging levels, and my car soudsystem is just the standard Ford system, nothing fancy.

It was so good I practically played this same section in a loop all the way home, rattling down the highway, in aural bliss.

This is a stealth bassline, on my other soundsystems you can hear it, you can pick out its tune, but it just sits there in the mix being minimal, like everything else on the CD. It just hides there waiting for the right conditions to strike.

After picking up Skye from day care Amy and myself headed to a party at the house of one of the local parents - there's a lot of them who prmarily know each other through the kids, so you tend to get introduced with phrases like "this is Skye's dad". Anyway, the hosts turned out to be members of Pagan Lounge act Rosin Coven ( http://www.rosincoven.com )- "we're not goth, but goths like us" - they've been playing the halloween show at the DNA Lounge for the last 3 years and are back again this year, they're definitly worth a listen. So anyway, now I think of them as 'those people in Rosin Coven' - I'm never good with names....

Of course I took the chance to pitch imeem.com to them....

I also saw the ISS passing overhead, completely by chance, I wasn't even sure until I checked the Heavens Above database - http://www.heavens-above.com/ - a few hours after the fact. It's brighter than any other satellite I've ever seen and it flew overhead silently without any vapour trail or flashing lights that you'd associate with aircraft, so I was pretty sure the ISS was the only thing that would behave like that. The Heavens Above site is a great place to get satellite predictions, and they also calculate the visibility of Iridium flares. Iridium flares come from the defunct Iridium satellite network, they have sets of solar panels which can sometimes catch the light in just the right way so that the satellite becomes brighter for a moment. The Brightest the ISS ever gets is magnitude -1.0, but it's not unknown for well aligned iridium flares to peak at -8.0 - over a hundred times brighter.

I've been at a few internet media companies in my time in the US, and all of them at some point have had some Product Marketing wizard make a grand announcement to the company about how we're going to get tons of indie music content on the site. So, I wasn't hugely surprised when Steve made such an announcement and some work was done to import a ton of music content.

Now, I'm no huge lover of mainstream music, but the 'indie artists' from previous organizations challenged the converse of Sturgeons law (which says that 90% of everything is crap) and I found it hard to believe that even 10% of what we'd been given was worth listening to.... maybe it was just hard to find anything worthwhile in those previous organizations. It made digging for good tunes an unrewarding experience at best.

So I'm shocked at how much bona fide top notch tunes I've practically fallen over in the content we've added to imeem. The categorisation is great, you can just jump from meem to meem and find artists who I've not just heard of but I actually have tracks by on good old fashioned vinyl. There are even some chart toppers out there, well at least chart toppers from the UK, I've never followed the Billboard charts. And because of the way they're all linked together It's trivial to dig around and find new stuff.

So, congrats to everyone here that made this happen!

Now, the only problem I'm left with is getting some of these tunes on vinyl.

The Winstons were a soul band who had a single solitary hit record - 1969's 'Color Me Father', but I'm not here to talk about that I'm more interested in the B-Side. The B-Side is a fun enough soul groove which for a brief moment strips the track down to nithing but those drums, and in so doing provided one of the defining samples for the hip-hop and jungle music cultures. And it just so happens that someone has uploaded a great documentary on this little piece of the musical firmament....

http://systim.imeem.com/video/UBkIznnx/the_amen_break/

With phone manufacturers introducing multi-megapixel camera phones I've heard people suggesting that the need for a dedicated digital camera will soon disappear, I've even heard people suggesting that those high end digital SLR's will soon fit into a pocket form factor. Having seen more than a few camera phone images I'm a little skeptical and applied some of my physics knowledge to figure out what the real limits on this are.....

So, what a camera really boild down to is an image sensor with sensitive pixel elements which count photons and convert those into digital values - typically 8 bit rgb. So, assuming you had a perfect image sensor and wanted to produce an image approaching the quality of a dedicated camera, you can use statistics to figure out how many photons you need to generate the image.

Amy's D50 has a 6 megapixel sensor, so, lets go for that - 6 million pixels, multiplied by 3 (3 different colours) and each pixel has to count luminosoty values from 0-255 - so that would imply about 4.6 billion photons /sec. However, that would produce a pretty noisy image, what we want is for the noise level to be less than 1 bit per pixel, so, to get that level of noise we really need 2^16 photons per pixel - 1.18x10^12 photons/sec.
On top of this, colour sensitive pixels are sensitive to only one colour, so red photons landing a green pixel are lost, giving us a 1/3 efficiency hit so that increases the photon requirement to 3.54x10^12
So we need to get that many photons onto the image sensor over the exposure time to match the quality produced by this low end DSLR. The photons get there through an small lens, it has to be small because it fits into a phone. It just happens that my phone has specifications for its optics on the case - f=4.46mm, 1:2.4 - which translates to a lense aperture of 1.9mm, or an area of 2.84 mm^2.

So how many photons arrive through that tiny lense?

Lux is the unit of luminosity per square metre, 1.464mw/m^2 is 1 lux, and quantum machanics tells me that the energy per photon is about 3.58x10-19 joules (for 555nnm photons which the eye is most sensitive to). That means 1 lux is equivalent to 4.09 x10^15 photons per second per m^2.

So that dinky little so called camera pulls in about 1.16 x10 10 photons/lux sec - which means we need about 300 lux/seconds to produce a high quality image.

Now, for the brightest midday sun the illumination can reach 100,000 lux which translates to a shutter speed of 1/333rd of a second - not bad. But when we go indoors to the typical office the illumination is nearer 400lux, which would need 3/4 second exposures - pretty blurry unless you include a flash.

Anyway, this is all assuming 100% efficiency in the light gathering, a flat colour spectrum, and a wide enough Field of view, one you start zooming in your illumination goes down and the shutter has to stay open longer. Increasing the aperture lets more photons in, but that means adding bigger and bigger optical components to the phones. You can buy different lenses for DSLR's, but that's never going to happen for cellphones.

I kept playing this over the weekend, one of the legendary sitar players attempts to fuse jazz and traditional Indian music. The manic drumming is the real highlight - especially at parties where there are drums sitting around the room. This is not a humble record by any means, the musicians go for broke and the not so sobber people in the room had no chance of keeping up with their attempts at amateur percussion.