It's Dynamic Range Day!

OK signal processing nerds, which side are you on in the Loudness War?

If you haven't heard of the Loudness War, you have some catching up to do! This little video by Matt Mayfield is kinda low-res but it's the shortest and best explanation I've been able to find. Watch it, then choose sides >>>>

There's a similar-but-slightly-different war going on in photography: high-dynamic-range or HDR photography is, according to some purists, an existential threat to photography. I'm not going to say any more about it today, but these HDR disasters speak volumes.

True amplitudes

The ideology at the heart of the Loudness War is that music production should be 'pure'. It's analogous to the notion that amplitudes in seismic images should be 'true', and just as nuanced. For some, the idea could be to get as close as possible to a live performance, for others it might be to create a completely synthetic auditory experience; for a record company the main point is to be noticed and then purchased (or at least searched for on Spotify). It reminds me a bit of the aesthetically

For a couple of decades, mainstream producers succumbed to the misconception that driving up the loudness — by increasing the mean amplitude, in turn by reducing the peaks and boosting the quiet passages — was the solution. But this seems to be changing. Through his tireless dedication to the cause, engineer Ian Shepherd has been a key figure in unpeeling this idée fixe. As part of his campaigning, he instituted Dynamic Range Day, and tomorrow is the 8th edition. 

If you want to hear examples of well-produced, dynamic music, check out the previous winners and runners up of the Dynamic Range Day Award — including tunes by Daft Punk, The XX, Kendrick Lamar, and at the risk of dating myself, Orbital.

The end is in sight

I'll warn you right now — this Loudness War thing is a bit of a YouTube rabbithole. But if you still haven't had enough, it's worth listening to the legendary Bob Katz talking about the weapons of war.

My takeaway: the war is not over, but battles are being won. For example, Spotify last year reduced its target output levels, encouraging producers to make more dynamic records. Katz ends his video with "2020 will be like 1980" — which is a good thing, in terms of audio engineering — and most people seem to think the Loudness War will be over.

The right writing tools

Scientists write, it's part of the job. If writing feels laborious, it might be because you haven't found the right tools yet. 

The wrong tools <cough>Word</cough> feel like a lot of work. You spend a lot of time fiddling with font sizes and not being sure whether to use italic or bold. You're constantly renumbering sections after edits. Everything moves around when you resize a figure. Tables are a headache. Table of contents? LOL.

If this sounds familiar, check out the following tools — arranged more or less in order of complexity.

Markdown

If you've never experienced writing with a markup language, you're in for a treat. At first it might feel clunky, but it quickly gets out of the way, leaving you to focus on the writing. Markdown was invented by John Gruber in about 2004; it is now almost ubiquitous in tools for developers. It's very lightweight, but compatible with HTML and LaTeX math, so it has plenty of features. Styling is absent from the document itself, being applied enitrely in post-production, as it were. With help from pandoc, you can compile Markdown documents to almost any format (e.g. PDF or Word). As a result, Markdown is sufficient for at least 70% of my writing projects. Here's a sampling of Markdown markup, rendered on the right with no styling:

Jupyter Notebook

If you've been following along with our X Lines of Python series, or any of our other code-centric content, you'll have come across Jupyter Notebooks. These documents combine Markdown with code (in more or less any language you can think of) and the outputs of code — data, charts, images, etc. More than containing code, a so-called kernel can also run the code: Notebooks are fully computable documents. Not only could you write a paper or book in a Notebook, many people use them to give presentations with fully interactive, live code blocks and widgets.

LaTeX

I discovered LaTeX in about 1993 and it was love at first sight. I've always been a bit of a typography nerd, and LaTeX — like TeX, around which LaTeX is wrapped — really cares about typography. So you get ligatures, hyphenation, sentence spacing, and kerning for free. It also cares about mathematics, cross-references, bibliographies, page numbering, tables of contents, and everything else you need for publication-ready documents.

You can install LaTeX locally, but there are several ways to use LaTeX online, without installing anything — and you get the best of both worlds: markup with WYSIWYG editing. Overleaf, ShareLaTex (which is merging with Overleaf), Authorea, and Papeeria are all worth a look, especially if you write scientific papers.

When WYSISYG works

Sometimes you just want a couple of headings and some text, or you need to share a document with others. I often go for WYSISYG in those situations too — Google Docs is the best WYSIWYG editor I've used. When it supports Markdown too, which is surely only a matter of time, it will be perfect.

What about you, do you have a favourite writing tool? Share it in the comments.

Is geolocation the new lat-long?

If I want to hail a ride-sharing service I can give an address as my location. Unless I am at the rear of the building or in the parking lot across the street, in which case I need to fiddle about with a pin on a slippy map. No problem, I can usually eyeball it and then just look out for the driver.

But there are other situations where an address won't do, and fiddling with pins isn't an option either. Telling the pizza company exactly where the delivery drone should land. Calling an ambulance to a remote area. Specifying a well location in the desert. Doing almost anything in the desert.

Wait, isn't this what latitude and longitude are for?

Sort of. I mean, it is what lat and long are for, but they aren't all that good at it. For one thing, there's the annoying problem of datums, which is even more annoying because hardly anyone realizes it's a problem.

Then there's the fact that to get better than 10 metre accuracy, you need 5 decimal places (or 1 decimal place in the seconds if we're talking DMS). So, even without the all-important datum, your average lat-long pair in N America would need at least 18 characters in decimal notation: 44.44845N64.37565W. This is not terribly user-friendly.

What are the alternatives?

In the last ten years or so, several alternatives to addresses and lat-longs have emerged. For example, one interesting geocoding system — geohash.org — encodes locations as strings of letters and digits. The location of my fictional 'pick up point' would be dxfhz5e4fxs. A bit of a mouthful perhaps but the system helpfully omits some easily confused characters, like lower-case L, and is case-insensitive. Another really nice feature: the string is big-endian so you can remove characters from the right to get a bit less precision.

In 2013, what3words burst onto the geolocation scene with an ingenious proprietary algorithm uniquely transforms the location of every 3 x 3 m square on Earth into three pronounceable words. My pick-up location becomes a cryptic crossword clue: dreadlocks.boarded.pageant. One feature of the scheme is that similar-sounding locations are not neighbours, avoiding near-miss confusion. For example, the square to the west of mine is called lawmakers.sieves.breezes, and the similar-sounding deadlock.boarded.pageant is in the middle of a field in New South Wales. Mercedes and Dominoes Pizza are experimenting with what3words.

More recently still, Open Location Codes have got some traction. Also called plus codes — a clue that they were invented by Google — they are a really nice example of a well-executed open standard, with fully open code, reference implementations in lots of languages, a public-facing website, and great documentation. My location's plus code is 87PQCJXF+9Q. Like the geohash, it can be shortened — but only in particular ways, for example, I could give the code as CJXF+9Q, Mahone Bay. Unlike what3words, Open Location Codes are free to use. My guess is that we'll be seeing them all over the place as self-driving cars and drones become more widespread.

Mapcodes, developed in about 2001, are yet another implementation of geocodes. Their main feature is the use of very short codes for densely populated places. However, there are some problems. For example, codes can be specified with or without country and region codes — but the different versions do not resemble each other.

For comparison, here's how I might describe my pick up location on the map at the top of this post:

Useful for geoscience?

They certainly seem easier to wield that lat-long, and you don't need to worry about datums anymore, but perhaps they feel too new or ephemeral to catch on for some geospatial practitioners. I also wonder why no-one seems to have thought about the 3D problem yet... Which floor of the apartment building is this pizza going to? How far down this mine is the heart attack victim? At exactly what depth in this lake was the wreckage of the self-driving car found?

What do you think? will any of these schemes gain traction? Might any of them be useful in science or engineering applications? Will you be experimenting with them?

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I can't leave the subject of geolocation codes without mentioning geohashing — a sort of cross between geocaching and professional nerdism. Invented in 2008 by xkcd creator, Randall Munroe, geohashing involves generating random locations via an MD5 hash, then visiting that location without getting lost or beaten up.

Update: You can access this algorithm right from Python: from antigravity import geohash

On principles and creativity

I recently heard a quote that resonated with me:

I grapple with this sentiment whenever I feel the selfish twinge of hesitation to donate money to Wikipedia or QGIS, or pay page fees for open access to an article, or otherwise cough up for my convictions.

Curious about who had uttered this wisdom, I looked it up. Turns out it was Bill Bernbach, celebrated advertiser, and supposedly an inspiration for the Don Draper character in Mad Men.

One of the founders of Doyle Dane Bernbach, now known as DDB, he brought bare-faced truth to the forefront in advertising, calling VW Beetles 'small', and proudly declaring Avis 'number 2'. He basically invented Apple's entire aesthetic in the late 50's , about four decades before Apple started to 'Think Different'.

He said some other true things. This could be about scientific communication:

The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.

Now 'science' and 'truth' are not the same thing, so I don't want to try to claim that this sums things up perfectly, but I think the general point is important and we'll be better scientists if we live by it.

And I like this one too:

Too many organizations, and individuals, think their advantage must come from money, or secrecy, or patents, or other obvious, easily copied, things. But thinking about your creative edge first makes you take care of important things, and stop worrying about unimportant things.

I think this is an important idea, because creativity is, almost by definition, uncopyable. It feels like a slippery thing to build a company on or strategize about because while there's a limitless supply of the stuff, it's hard to maintain — and exploit. Creativity for its own sake is almost useless, but combined with a "Just ship it!" mentality, it's an unstoppable force.

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The image of Bill Bernbach and the VW Beetle ad are both copyright of DDB Worldwide Communications Group and low-res images are used here in accordance with fair use rules.