And the same to you too, Google!

While we're on the subject of rude words... I hope that Google aren't showing this kind of CAPTCHA to french people...

Long S is long

A bunch of people have been posting interesting searches on Google Labs' Books Ngram viewer. I heard about it from this tweet by @njrabit, but the tantalising link (don't follow if you don't like swearing) at the bottom of this blog post by S. Weasel, showed up something interesting. Why is it that of four swearwords, the one starting with 'F' is incredibly popular from 1750 to 1820, then drops out of fashion for 140 years -- only appearing again in the 1960s?

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Fun with the Audio Data API

The latest beta version of Firefox 4 has an API for reading and writing audio data -- right down to the sample level, right from JavaScript. JavaScript is, of course, totally the wrong language to write DSP-style code in, so that's what I decided to do :-)

If you fancy downloading FF4 beta and trying out some of the demos, here they are. There are lots of (much better) demos by other people here.

And if you try out the musical temperament example and have any thoughts on which chords sounded nicest, leave a comment below!

(Update: the Mozilla Audio API no longer works, as far as I can tell -- a different Web Audio API wound up becoming the standard -- maybe I'll port the examples over to that!)