Barry & Napalm | Sheldon & the Sweet Spot

Two nuggets today:

A creative judge in Colorado sentences noise ordinance violators to listen to "The Copacabana" and other smash hits. This cracks me up. If Judge Sacco is taking requests, I think he'd have good results exposing certain violators to some Napalm Death. I know I'd learn my lesson! Of course, if I were ever sentenced, I could plead "time already served" since I had a roommate in college that listened to nothing but Samantha Fox. (Watch out for the volume on that link. Apparently Samantha is LOOKING FOR A MIDNIGHT LOVER and, of course, there is no mute button.)

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One of my favorite TV shows, The Big Bang Theory, provided some great acoustical geek humor on Monday night. The "White Asparagus Triangulation" episode had a scene with Sheldon in a movie theater moving from seat to seat making obnoxious vocal noises in an attempt to find the "acoustics sweet spot." Hilarious. Of course, Mrs. Savant turned to me and said, "If you ever do that, I will leave." I'm assuming she means the movie theater and not my life, but I don't think I'll try to find out. 8^D

Sonar, Musical Instruments, and Color Schemes (oh my?)

Some stuff for (almost) the end of the week:

• Wired magazine blog about futuristic musical instruments. Didn't Jean Michel Jarre play lasers - or columns of light, at least - back in the '80s?

• U.S. Supreme Court rules for Navy re sonar use. This is one of those issues that I can't help but be on the fence about...

• Finally, Sound and Vibration magazine is, IMO, one of the better periodicals in my world. The thing I got to thinking about today was the color schemes for their covers. For each issue, S&V uses a different two-color scheme for the title and background. This got me to wondering if they've ever repeated a color scheme. (I know; don't I have better things to do?) Math quickly told me that they would never have to for a very long time. Assuming they are picking from a 256-color palette:

256² give you the number of possible schemes.
Less 256 to remove the schemes that would result in the same color for the title and background.
Answer: 65,280 possible color schemes.

At 12 issues per year, we are guaranteed a unique color scheme on every new issue of S&V until the year 7407 A.D. (They've been publishing since 1967.) I can't wait until the 5,000th anniversary issue comes out!!! 8^D