Science Fiction constantly imagines scenarios where a character time-travels on earth using a time machine. In most cases, the concept seems simple–a character uses a time machine and ends up in the same place on earth at a different time. The difficulty of time travel aside, how difficult would it be to end up at the same location on earth at a different time? And I’m even ignoring geological changes to the earth’s surface.
Let’s say you have a 3D coordinate system for the entire universe, and have compensated for universal expansion. At a given moment, you are on the surface of earth at a specific coordinate. But the earth is rotating every 24 hours. Its axis wobbles. It orbits the sun once a year. The sun is orbiting the center of the milky way galaxy. And our galaxy is hurtling through space at 630 km per second. Because of this, the earth travels 51.84 million km per day. (And we’re worried about an asteroid hitting *us*?)
Just by staying completely still on the surface of earth, you are traveling in a squiggly, rotating, wobbling, looping, swirling path hurtling through space generally pointed away from the center of the universe at a tremendous speed. Just once I would like to see a character finally invent a time machine, use it to go back just an hour, and end up thousands of miles from earth in space because they didn’t bother to compensate for that. As for people who accidentally time travel or cannot control the amount of time they travel…God help ‘em.

iGog is developed by Wave Machine Labs, the same people who created the flagship drum replacement program, Drumagog. It is $5 and available in the iTunes store and also here.

I downloaded the demo and tried it out. The mic trigger mode is amazing! I made a demo of it on youtube:

It goes crazy when you sing into the mic too, which I forgot to demonstrate. The program saves MIDI, WAVs, and allows you to loop and sequence, so it’s a great program to have on the road or to create realistic sounding drum loops.

The only drawback with this app is that it requires headphones for mic triggering mode, and performance degrades in pad mode if you use speakers, which limits the possibilities for live performance. Mic triggering only works with one instrument at a time – it would be nice if, like Drumagog, it used frequency analysis to trigger multiple samples at once. Still though, for now the sequencing and looping make up for that.

With sequencing, I would like to see an undo function, or a track editor – once you’ve recorded, it’s added permanently, so it’s easy to mess up a good sequence with a bad take. If you’re recording on different instruments, then this is easy to fix later in the MIDI file with a piano roll, but it would be a handy feature on the road.

I always wanted to create a similar drum pad app using the iPhone’s accelerometers. I would have used the three axises to trigger different samples, so that you tap on the top for bass, side for snare, and back for hi hat. I’m pretty sure this app works better than my app ever would – it also works if you tap on the iPhone body. If they could combine accelerometer data into this app though and separate samples per axis, and also allow you to transit MIDI or OSC over WIFI, this would be the ideal drum trigger.

Still though, what an incredible app, and a great value for $5! In-app purchase of free and pay per download drum kits are also available.

There are circuits out there for converting the 5V to the proper data pins and voltage, but I already had a 12V car adapter that would supply them. So instead, the goal was to supply 12V to my car adapter with batteries.

The solution:

2 6V lantern batteries
Alligator Clips
Female Car Adapter
iPhone Car Adapter
Cardboard Box

If you wire the batteries in series you get 12V. It works fine, though the adapter whines pretty loudly which worries me a little. Also, I am aware that batteries encased in paper and cardboard are a slight fire hazard. I’m only going to charge this outside while I’m watching it. (Any advice is appreciated, this isn’t much different than how the iPhone charges in a car is it?)

Thanks to Fred for his help conceptualizing this.

The best part was the footer on the bottom of the back of the box:

“¹Based upon independent clinical research, kids who ate Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal for breakfast had up to 18% better attentiveness three hours after breakfast than kids who ate no breakfast.”

No breakfast?? Lol. 18% is not a staggering statistic for starving children trying to focus. In a related study, 15% of the children could focus better when they weren’t being stabbed in the face.

Come on people. We’re still ok with stuff like this?

Anyone afraid of heights? I for one am not a big fan of falling off a 40 story building.

What’s holding us to the earth? Gravity, right? Well the sun’s force of gravity is much much stronger. So shouldn’t the sun be down?

My brain started to leak a little when I was able to conceptualize this. I mean we all know the earth orbits the sun, but our sense of down isn’t oriented to this apparently moving small object in the sky.

What did it for me was seeing a sunset where the sun was particularly large and menacing, for me to realize how big it was. The sun is down, and we are on the brink of a very, very long fall. Suddenly I was much more appreciative of Earth’s weak gravitational field holding me to the ground, and its orbit keeping us a safe distance away, though I still felt like I was hanging from the front of a thousand foot roller coaster. If you were to escape the earth’s gravity and orbit, you would have one very long, hot, violent fall ahead of you.

Try to picture yourself standing in the picture above. Sure, you’re standing on the ground, but if you were to lift your feet towards the sun, can’t you kind of picture yourself falling millions of miles to the surface of the sun if it weren’t for the earth and its orbit?

I half jokingly propose we rename the directions local up, local down, local left, local right, local forward and local backward. What do you say?