The Reinvented Blog

Like everyone else, I spent Friday with a bricked-up Iphone during the update process. But I’m willing to forgive Apple since Pandora was included among the available apps. For me, this is a killer app.

The Music Genome project behind Pandora fascinates me. It is a great combination of humans and technology – trained musicians analyzing the characteristics of music and creating a genomic breakdown of each composition, and then algorithms automatically selecting the music most similar to the pieces you select. It’s hard not to anthropomorphize Pandora’s inner workings, since it gets my taste so exactly right (and my taste is not mainstream, running to Steve Reich, Arvo Part, John Adams, Bela Bartok, etc.).

It would be great if that same sort of expert human/technology combination were brought together to create genomes for other areas. I’m thinking of things like a History Genome Project – having expert historians define “history” genomes and then classifying current and historical events based on their genomic similarities. We all know that “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” etc. etc., yet I don’t really know enough history to always see the parallels between now and then. But if I could, say, type in a current event and have the 3 most similar events from history pop up as the search results, that would not only be a way to understand the present, but would ignite my curiosity to find out more about the cited past events. And how about an Economic Genome Project, bringing some badly-needed perspective to our current times?

I just finished reading Blink – really interesting, I especially liked the research on facial expressions by psychologist Paul Ekman. Ekman’s work codes facial expressions with the emotions they represent in amazing detail, and makes me want to become much more sophisticated in observation. I feel like I was handed a really easy example to practice on – the Emily Gould cover story in the NY Times Magazine that is getting so much comment around the web led me to watch her interview by Jimmy Kimmel. Watch this – even an amateur like me can easily figure out what all her eye rolls, eyebrow movements, and other facial gestures mean – it makes a great companion piece to the NY Times article because while you can read her article and have some sympathy for her, the sympathy vanishes once you watch the video.

This is one of the things I love about YouTube – the ability to see demonstrations that make me want to find out more and more about areas that I’m weaker in. Am now reading a physics text to see if I can get a basic understanding of how this works.