Music – Page 23 – David Bradley

Happy Birthday mp3

On July 14th, 1995, the mp3 was born!

Its the tenth anniversary since the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS researchers who came up with the mp3 sound compression format decided mp3 was a much easier name to remember than “ISO standard IS 11172-3 MPEG Audio Layer 3”.

Thank goodness they did. Can you imagine the anchor guys trying to get their collective tongues around that mouthful every time they reported on the advent of music file sharing and the emergence of the portable digital music player over the last decade.

With a great lack of foresight, however, the Fraunhofer team suggested that their audio codec, first developed in 1992, would be far “too complex for practical application”. This less than famous proclamation won’t go down in history like Bill Gates’ alleged questioning of the need for a PC to have more 640 kilobytes of RAM. But, no one living in this century could fail to appreciate the omnipresence of ISO standard IS 11172-3 MPEG Audio Layer 3 today. Unless they’ve only ever heard of iTunes and bypassed Napster, WinMX, Gnutella, Kazaa, Grokster, eDonkey, Torrents, etc etc…

Of course, in defence of the Fraunhofer guys it has to be mentioned that they moved on a long while ago and came up with mpeg4…

By the way, if you’re one of the many readers who hit this page looking for the kids party song, try this link to search Google for the happy birthday mp3.

Plastic Guitars Strike a Chord

The plastic guitars I originally wrote about in Reactive Reports the chemistry webzine years ago are almost ready for market according to the SciScoop Science News Forum: Plastic guitars strike a chord

The inventors of the plastic guitar, based at Loughbourough University, are showcasing a range of innovative, high-quality acoustic and electric guitars made almost entirely from polymers. The three models, a hybrid wood/polymer acoustic, an all-polymer acoustic and a semi-hollow electric, feature patented foamed polymer technology that gives outstanding sound quality, apparently. Personally, I’m holding out for an Alex Lifeson signature Gibson ES355 in white (of Rush Natural Science fame).

Olivia Newton John “Born again”

I’m in shock! Cambridge-born singer with the Aussie accent, Olivia Newton John, star of Grease (the movie) and Xanadu, is the granddaughter of Nobel physicist Max Born.

However, another site cites her maternal grandfather as being Welshman Max Born, allegedly a professor of German at Cambridge and Melbourne.

I plucked up the courage to visit her “official” site, where it is confirmed that it’s Max the physicist and not Max the Welshman. Thank goodness for that, otherwise there would have been no credence to the nickname she received among pre-teens during the 1970s of Olivia Neutron Bomb.

Science and Stuff


Songs	Snaps	Science	Book

I posted my first web page in December 1995, it was the online version of my first chemistry news roundup, a column I dubbed Elemental Discoveries, the RSC younger chemist magazine formerly known as Gas Jar, which I’d renamed along with Dr Mac as “New Elements”. That column persisted on various free servers until I got patronage from a well-known chemistry software company who began hosting it thereafter until I registered the domain name Sciencebase.com in July 1999. This post is just holding page to give visitors a bit of history. Thank you very much. Come again.