More on TTS (or maybe it should be Moron: TTS?)

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I’ve never done this before so bear with me while I figure out exactly what I want to say. I’m sure I have written bad blog entries before (this is where you say “No! Absolutely not! This was your first! Well, not that it was bad really, just not up to your usual standards. What were we talking about again?“), but I’m not especially happy with parts of the one I wrote on Thursday night. It’s not that I’ve changed my mind on how silly the NY Times article was, but my article focused on the fact that the technology to read the books is simply not there yet (as Wil Wheaton’s test proved beyond any doubt). But upon reflection, I think I missed at least some of the point of Mr. Blount’s article, so I’m going to post a semi-rebuttal to my own article.

The fact that the technology isn’t there yet isn’t really the point. I’m sure Mr. Blount would acknowledge that right now, a computer reading a book is not the same thing as a human reading it, and that right now the Kindle’s TTS (text-to-speech) feature is not a huge threat to the audio book industry. Not to put words in Mr. Blount’s mouth, but I think his issue is that in five or ten years, the technology may have advanced enough that it will be much harder to distinguish between a computer-read book and a human-read book. As hard as that is to believe, it could certainly be yet another in the long list of things that we take for granted today that would have been difficult to imagine a few years ago. If that happens, then computer-read books might pose a real threat to the audio book industry, and so he wants to head that off before it becomes a problem. I can understand that, but history is full of new inventions that were supposed to kill off entire industries and didn’t. Remember how the VCR was going to kill the movie industry? Remember how PVR’s were going to make commercials obsolete? MP3 players have reduced sales of CDs, but they haven’t killed the industry entirely. Even sharing of digital media and places like Pirate Bay haven’t killed music sales or movie revenues. There have been many movies made with completely computer-generated characters, and the animation is getting better all the time, but I don’t hear the actor’s guild advocating that filmmakers abandon the use of computers.

The Amazon people could easily change their TTS feature to only read blogs, newspapers, and magazines, and would not read books, which would solve the problem of the guy listening to the newspaper while in the car. I don’t know the numbers for sure, but I’m sure there are thousands of books available for the Kindle that are not available as an audio book, so people who want to listen to those books are screwed.

It’s possible that the best solution to this “problem” is for the audio book industry to expand their advertising and PR to make sure that people know that audio books exist and how cool they are. They need to make sure that they stress the point that they have talented actors (sometimes the authors themselves) reading the books, not just some nobody off the street. Once people are hooked on audio books, the thought of having a computer read to them will be unthinkable, regardless of how good the technology gets.

Stephen Hawking performs Wil Wheaton

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Roy Blount Jr., the President of the Authors Guild, has written an article* in the NY Times about the Amazon Kindle, and its built-in text-to-speech feature. He says that this feature essentially takes money out of the hands of authors and publishers because it’s essentially turning any book you buy for your Kindle into an audio book, without paying audio book royalties. This is ridiculous beyond belief.

* I originally read the article without logging into NYTimes (since I don’t have an account there), but now when I visit that link, it says I have to log in. Don’t know why. If you don’t have a login, you can use “bugmenot555” as the user and “bugmenot” as the password. Thanks bugmenot.com.

Wil Wheaton, an author and audio book performer himself, wrote a blog post about it today, in which he attached a ten-minute audio snippet. The file contained a short portion of his latest book which he read himself, and then the same portion read by some software on his computer. Not surprisingly, there’s just no comparison. The text-to-speech software was actually more impressive than I expected. It wasn’t just words said in a monotone computer voice, it did almost sound like someone reading it aloud, complete with pauses where a comma would be found. The intonation (not sure if that’s the right word) was mostly correct, meaning that the person’s voice went down at the end of a sentence, and things like that. There was even the sound of someone taking a breath at the beginning of sentences. But it was still obviously a computer voice.

Wheaton’s reading was just so much more expressive. In some cases, there were pauses missing in the computer version, and even though there was no way for the computer to know that there was supposed to be a pause there because there’s no punctuation, the way the sentence or paragraph is written makes it obvious to a human reader. The one part where Wil talks semi-sarcastically about a Walkman being something like a iPod “that used these things called “cassette tapes”” — to a human reader, it’s obvious that that sentence should be read in a slightly different tone than the surrounding sentences, but there’s no way to encode that in the text passed to the software. You just gotta know.

While reading the Times article, my first thought was “I guess I shouldn’t be reading to my kids at night”, and Blount indeed addresses this at the end of his piece:

For the record: no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of “Goodnight Moon.” If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter.

Why is it another matter? If I’m reading to my kids, I’m being as expressive as possible. If someone in the book is happy, I try to sound happy. If someone is unhappy, I try to sound unhappy. I even sometimes try accents (though that got old really quick during the first Harry Potter book, when we realized that almost every character would have an English accent. I always did it for Hagrid though). So my “performance” would be a lot closer to the one you might get if you bought an audio book than the one the Kindle would give you. Wouldn’t that be more “threatening” to the audio book publishers?

The other obvious point that Mr. Blount missed is that the Kindle can read any text that it has. Once the Authors Guild provides an audio recording of every book available through the Kindle, plus the daily newspapers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal), weekly magazines (Time, Newsweek), and over 1000 blogs, in real time, then maybe Amazon will remove this feature. Until then, I cannot believe that authors really feel threatened by this. People who like audio books are not going to stop buying them because they can get their Kindle to read them. It’s just not the same. The people using this feature are people who might want to listen to the newspaper during their morning commute or while riding the stationary bike at the gym. I imagine this would be a great feature for the blind (though as Blount points out, using the on-screen controls would be impossible for the blind anyway).

I’ve bought a couple of audio books, and they’re OK. (I joined audible.com for a while (got a free book because I listen to TWiT, and then bought another), but I quit it because the way their accounts work, you have to buy a book every month. If I could be a member and then just buy books whenever I wanted to, I might do that.) Either way, the computer voice is just not real enough for me to listen to a computer read me stuff for any length of time. I think the technology still has a long way to go before it’s even going to be remotely comparable.

The Fab Four, and some really old CD reviews

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Over the last couple of years, I have become a pretty big Beatles fan. I’ve always liked the Beatles; my parents have an audio recording of me singing “Hey Jude” when I was about 3. My dad had the Red and Blue albums, and I remember being fascinated by the two pictures of the Beatles looking over the balcony, eight (or so) years apart:

I have the first Anthology CD, but it’s a lot of the older stuff — Love Me Do, Please Please Me, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, stuff like that, and I’m more into the later Beatles. I also have the “1” album, which is yet another “Best Of…” album. But other than the hits (of which there are several), I never really knew much else.

I was going to start off the first sentence of this story by saying “I’m not really sure why”, but that’s not true — the reason I’m such a big Beatles fan these days is because of my guitar teachers over the last couple of years. I’ve had three different teachers, and the last two were huge Beatles fans. My current teacher, who is probably ten years younger than I am, knows how to play just about every Beatles song there is (though Eleanor Rigby might be challenging on guitar), and a few months ago we went through and played about three quarters of the Abbey Road album. Something, Here Comes The Sun, and Blackbird are some of my favourite Beatles songs to play.

Thanks to him, I’ve become more interested in the rest of the Beatles catalogue. Gail gave me Let It Be for Christmas, and this past week I bought Revolver, Magical Mystery Tour, Rubber Soul, and the White Album on eBay (and was outbid for Anthology 2 and 3). I also have (illegal… shhhhh) copies of Abbey Road and the Red and Blue albums, although I intend on buying those too.

I’m also really interested in Beatles trivia, and I love reading the Wikipedia entries on various albums. I don’t know what it is about Beatles trivia that makes it more interesting to me than trivia about the Stones or the Who or any other band. Things like:

  • the drums you hear on “Back in the U.S.S.R.” were played by Paul because Ringo had temporarily left the band when it was recorded.
  • John hated Paul’s song “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da”, and came into the recording studio one day claiming to be more stoned than any of them had ever been, and sat down at the piano and played the opening that was used on the recorded version. (A lot of people consider that to be the worst Beatles song ever, but I kind of like it. It’s better than Revolution 9, anyway.)
  • Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was based on a picture that Julian Lennon drew while he was in kindergarten and had nothing to do with LSD. Some real fanatics have gone through the history books, and figured out who Lucy really was.
  • George Harrison left the band for a week or so during the recording of Let It Be, and the remaining Beatles considered asking Eric Clapton to replace him, but then decided that if anyone left the band, it just wouldn’t be the Beatles anymore. They were right.
  • At various times, each of John, George, and Ringo left the band, only to be coaxed back by Paul. But the Beatles disbanded because Paul left.

I look at some famous musicians and marvel at what a great piano player or guitar player or whatever he is. It’s even more amazing when that person has other musical talents, like singing or songwriting. You can look at Eric Clapton, and he’s one of the best guitar players ever. He’s a pretty good songwriter as well, and he’s a decent singer, but as far as I know can’t play any other instruments. Elton John is an amazing piano player, and a good singer, but only writes music, not lyrics, and doesn’t play guitar or bass or drums. The amazing thing about the Beatles is not just that they have someone like that — George Harrison is also an excellent guitar player who can sing and has written some really great songs — but then they also have two more who are even better. Paul McCartney and John Lennon both play guitar, they both play piano, they both play bass, Paul plays drums, they are both great singers, they are both great songwriters (music and lyrics), and they work very well together as well as individually. And then there’s Ringo, who I’ve complained about before. He can’t sing, wrote a total of two songs during the entire life of the Beatles, and plays no instruments other than drums. But there’s no denying that he’s a very good drummer, and I’ve heard of tons of modern-day rock drummers who cite him as an influence.

You don’t often see CD reviews that are not of recent releases, and very rarely of albums that are over forty years old, but here are a couple:

Abbey Road

Abbey Road is not considered one of the best rock albums of all time for no reason. It’s certainly got its share of big hits (Come Together, Something, Here Comes The Sun, Octopus’s Garden), but most of the other songs are just as strong. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer is a little silly, but kind of fun. I love Paul McCartney’s Oh! Darling — it sounds like the kind of song that John Lennon would normally sing, but Paul does a good job with it. I Want You (She’s So Heavy) is a little repetitive and the end goes on a bit too long, but different stanzas using the same lyrics with different musical styles is kind of cool. The only songs I’m really not thrilled with are Octopus’s Garden, because Ringo is a crappy singer and Because, which is just a little too dreamy and psychadelic.

Most of the second side (going back to the record days with that terminology — I don’t suggest turning the CD over) is a medley of short songs. It almost seems like they took a bunch of half-written half-recorded songs and mashed them together, which I believe is what they actually did, but it really works. Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, and The End are simply fantastic, containing both a drum solo (the only one Ringo ever did) and a triple guitar solo. It’s hard to believe while listening to this album (which I have done numerous times over the past month or two) that the Beatles were barely even a functioning group at this point.

Let It Be

Let It Be was recorded before Abbey Road but for various reasons was released after. It’s kind of too bad, since it would have been nice for the Beatles to end their run with an amazing farewell album. Instead, we got Let It Be. This is kind of unfair, since it is not a bad album by any stretch, but is just not as strong as Abbey Road. The title track is one of my favourite Beatles songs ever, despite being very repetitive, which is something I generally dislike (George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set On You” drives me batty for that very reason). The Long and Winding Road, Two of Us, Get Back, and Across The Universe (even with the indecipherable chorus “Jai guru deva om”) are also really great songs. I really like One After 909, at least partially because it’s so different from the other tracks on the album. I was about to write that it sounds more like a very early Beatles song than the rest of Let It Be, and then I checked the Wikipedia entry and found that it was indeed written by John Lennon more than ten years earlier, even before the Beatles were the Beatles.

I should receive the CDs I bought sometime next week. I’ll give them a few listens and then post my thoughts on them sometime after that.

Steroids in lacrosse

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Former NLL player Ted Jenner wrote a column on nllinsider.com yesterday about steroids and how nobody in the NLL is taking them. Before I say anything else, let me say that I have no proof, evidence, or even the slightest hint that any NLL player is on steroids, HGH, or any other banned or controlled substance. It wouldn’t surprise me if the percentage of juiced NLL players is far less than the other major sports. But the reasons that Jenner gives for believing this are either naïve or blindly optimistic.

I don’t think it would surprise anyone if 70% of all NFL players were taking some sort of performance enhancing drug. The number of baseball players taking them has dropped dramatically in the last few years, but Alex Rodriguez is one of 104 players who have apparently tested positive during 2003, and nobody believes that number has dropped to zero. I have heard no steroid stats about basketball, but that’s a sport for mutants anyway, so nobody’s going to look twice at a six-foot-ten two-hundred-eighty pound man with raisin-sized testicles. The NHL, for some reason, is convinced that their sport is clean, and that seems to be what Jenner is saying about the NLL. The question for the hockey and lacrosse people is: what makes your sports so different from the others?

Sure, being a big bulky mass of muscle (see Mark McGwire or the “after” picture of Barry Bonds) would not help you as a hockey or lacrosse player. But that’s not what steroids always do. They don’t make you bigger; they allow you to train harder and recover faster. Some allow you to retain muscle while losing fat. There is no reason to believe that lacrosse players wouldn’t benefit from some use of these drugs.

From Jenner’s article:

There is no room for steroids in the ‘little brother of war’. It goes against everything the game stands for… But more importantly it’s about having that sense of Zen and being in a sort of Nirvana like state. A clouded mind can only hamper a lacrosse player’s ability to play at the top of his game.

First off, the whole “it goes against everything the game stands for” is nice to say, but a little idealistic. Does he honestly think that every single one of the 250+ NLL players has such a deep respect for the history and traditions of the sport that they wouldn’t consider taking a substance that could make them perform better? This is almost laughable. I’m sure that’s true for some, but for others, lacrosse is simply a fun sport that they are good at. If there’s a way for them to get better, illegal or not, some are going to jump at that chance. There have been frightening surveys of young athletes preparing and hoping to make the Olympics — when asked if they would consider taking a drug that would guarantee them a gold medal but would also kill them within five years, the majority of athletes surveyed said they would take it. It’s kind of a meaningless survey, since no such gold-medal-guaranteeing drug exists, but the thought processes of these athletes is clear.

Secondly, to my knowledge (and I could be wrong here), HGH and steroids don’t have any kind of “clouding” effect on the mind. We’re not talking about weed or LSD here. And give me a break with the “Zen” / “Nirvana” crap.

I think the one saving grace for the NLL here is that they don’t make a ton of money, so the incentive to abuse your body or risk your health is far less than if you were making millions as a football or baseball player. Someone who wouldn’t normally dream of taking steroids might change his mind for the possibility of a ten million dollar contract. The highest paid players in the NLL make about $25K a year. But there are high school students who are not athletes who take steroids simply to look good for the girls. These guys are highly competitive by nature, so who knows what lengths they will go to to give themselves or their team a slight competitive edge?

I’m not saying that NLL players are juiced, and I honestly think the majority of them aren’t. I believe that the vast majority are simply great athletes and work hard to take care of their bodies without drugs. But honestly, it is highly unlikely that that there are no NLL players taking steroids. Jenner’s deluding himself if he thinks otherwise.

Update to prove my point: The other day (May 2010), a Google search hit this article. The search was “what roids would i take to become better at lacrosse“.

Dumb question of the day

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I am investigating a couple of compression libraries, and comparing both their compression and speed. zlib is what we use now, and is moderately fast and gives pretty good compression. fastlz is blindingly fast, but doesn’t compress quite as well, and the code isn’t “stable”. lzma is one that I just started looking at, and my initial tests were abysmal. It gave the best compression ratio, but compression took over sixty times as long as fastlz (0.27 seconds vs. 16.47 seconds for the same 11 MB file). I posted a question on their forum asking what I was doing wrong, and got this reply (emphasis mine):

What do you compress and why do you need it faster?

Excuse me? Your algorithm runs an order of magnitude slower than the others I’m looking at, and you are seriously asking why I need it faster? To his credit, the suggestion he gave me did speed it up so that it was about 3.2 seconds; still the slowest of the bunch, but at least it’s now acceptable. And it did still have the best compression ratio. I’m just stunned that any software guy would ask such a question.

The most wonderful time of the year

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Every year, in the middle of February, comes an event that men across North America and indeed, the world, look forward to all year long. Feelings of love and lust may be renewed and heightened, and many men spend a great deal of time learning new things about the objects of their affections.

Women, on the other hand, don’t generally care much about this event, and some women even have very negative feelings about it.

Yes, I must admit, I am one of the men who enjoy this event every February. For me, it occurred last Thursday, and once again, I was not disappointed. That’s when my copy of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition arrived.

The New OS from Micro-apple

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I recently started using sitemeter.com to measure stats on my blog — which pages are read, where people came from (the vast majority from google searches), how long they stay, stuff like that. Sitemeter can also give you information on each visit, like what kind of browser was being used, what OS, even what screen resolution. But this one puzzled me:

What exactly is “Macintosh WinXP”?

Hotwash…. ain’t so hot

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For Christmas about three years ago, Gail bought me a thing from Canadian Tire called “HotWash”. It’s a device that you insert between the windshield washer fluid pump and the wipers, and it heats up the wiper fluid on the fly to help melt ice and snow from the windshield, and it also helps get rid of bug juice in the summer. Great idea, right? I thought it was. Did it work? I still don’t know for sure.

When I first got it, I looked over the installation instructions and figured I could install it myself. After a half hour in the garage with the hood up, I decided that I should probably let a professional do it, since I’m no auto mechanic. I can change my air filter and wiper blades, but that’s about it. I took it into Canadian Tire and had them do it, and figured I was all set. We had a relatively warm winter that year, so I didn’t get to really try it out for several weeks. It did eventually get cold and snowy again, and driving home from work after a day of snow and ice, I remember hitting “wash”, ready to watch in amazement as the ice on my windshield quickly melted away. Never happened.

When I got home, I remember standing in the garage for about ten minutes, repeatedly spraying the windshield and feeling how warm the spray was, but I never noticed a temperature change. According to the manual, once you spray it the first time, it takes 10-15 seconds to warm up, and then if you spray again after that, everything is warmed. The actual temperature was a mystery — it was listed in the manual in at least two different places, with two vastly different values. One said something like 60°C — warm enough that you should see steam (I never did) when you use it on a cold day. I don’t remember the other number, but it was different from the first one by a significant margin, and wasn’t simply 60°C converted into Farenheit or anything like that. Either way, the water coming out of mine was no warmer than the air temperature. The thing just plain didn’t work. I took it back the next week and told them it wasn’t working. They had a look and told me that it was, but that the manual was wrong — the fluid is heated up to above freezing so that it will still melt the ice, but it’s nowhere near 60°. I decided that this was why I didn’t notice a difference in temperature and assumed that everything was OK.

Over the two years, everything seemed fine, but I was unable to notice any kind of difference. I then had to bring the car in for service a couple of times for an unexplained power loss — the engine would just stop while I was driving. I’d quickly put the car in neutral, restart it, and get back into drive. Only once was I not able to restart it this way, and that was in the parking lot of a Canadian Tire. Three different Canadian Tire stores (Waterloo, Kitchener, and Burlington) were unable to find any problem. Finally I brought it into a local shop in Waterdown, Al’s Auto Service, and he basically unplugged a bunch of things and plugged them back in to make sure the fittings were all tight and weren’t corroded. He found no problems either, but after he did that, the problem vanished and I never had it again. Then last winter I brought the car into the brand spankin’ new Canadian Tire in Waterdown. They fixed something (don’t remember what) but while doing that, they noticed that my HotWash wasn’t plugged in. I have no idea how long I’d been driving with the thing unplugged (and therefore doing nothing), but I suspect that during his investigation of my problem, Al unplugged it and simply forgot to plug it back in. They re-enabled it and once again, I didn’t notice any difference.

Finally a few weeks ago, I noticed a big ad in the local paper saying that Canadian Tire was recalling the HotWash things for safety reasons, and were giving full refunds of the purchase price. Ironically, the problem was that they were overheating, which was certainly not the case with mine, which never got warm in the first place. I brought my car in earlier today and asked them to remove it, which they did. They also refunded the purchase price and the cost of installation, so when I picked up my car from the service desk, they gave me about $92. When was the last time you got your car serviced and they gave you money?