1. Comment #92880 by Geoff on December 1, 2007 at 4:34 pm

Someone with wayyyyy too much time on their hands...


kinda fun, though, yep!

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2. Comment #92881 by PaulJ on December 1, 2007 at 4:36 pm

So there you have it - an object lesson: if you make a statement of fact (however abstruse) in a published work, someone, somewhere, is going to check up on it.

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3. Comment #92884 by BaronOchs on December 1, 2007 at 4:42 pm

So it's true?

I feel strangely moved

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4. Comment #92891 by stereoroid on December 1, 2007 at 5:07 pm

You think that's weird? Something I did a few years ago was take copies of large EXE files, import them into an audio editor, and play with them. EXE files are not tightly compressed, so there are gaps and patterns in them that can make them sound interesting. Subjec them to effects such as reverb or pitch-shifting and it gets even weirder.

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5. Comment #92908 by gyokusai on December 1, 2007 at 6:03 pm

BaronOchs wrote:
So it's true?
I feel strangely moved

Yes, it's true. It's really easy to figure out once you have the right idea where to look (which is hard, and which this guy had).

Bravo. To John, and to Richard! At the end of his inquiry, John writes:

So, while writing this famous text on evolution, Dawkins had time to poke around inside the Apple ][ ROM and write about it in his book.

Respect.

I love this, really, and I feel moved too.

^_^J.

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6. Comment #92909 by Huez on December 1, 2007 at 6:14 pm

wow, stereoroid that's a cool idea.
Since a digital sound waveform is represented by 1's and 0's, I suppose it sounds quite random/robotical?
Does it sound musical, or would it make a cool effect in a soundtrack?
Which audio software allows you to drop in info files and play them as sound waveforms?
Does it sound cool enough to save sections/phrases as wav. files and put them through a sampler synth like absynth and play them on a keyboard?

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7. Comment #92912 by RickM on December 1, 2007 at 6:20 pm

LOL. This takes me back to the old days of debugging a program by stepping thru instructions and reading the lights off the console of am IBM 1130.

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8. Comment #92922 by Cartomancer on December 1, 2007 at 6:52 pm

This complicated modern technosorcery frightens me. Make it go away...

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9. Comment #92939 by Zaphod on December 1, 2007 at 7:38 pm

If that is the stuff in The Blind Watchmaker you decide to double check, you are missing the point of the book entirely.

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10. Comment #92950 by Russell's Teapot on December 1, 2007 at 8:03 pm

I'm pleasantly surprised that this wasn't from some creationut who checked it and decided Dawkins was wrong about the entire book based on finding that he typed the wrong bits :)

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11. Comment #92954 by Jack Rawlinson on December 1, 2007 at 8:19 pm

What Zaphod said. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to RD's point had the bit pattern been made up.

This is cute, in a geeky sort of way, but I have to say that the words "Get", "A", and "Life" spring to mind.

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12. Comment #92996 by pyjamaslug on December 1, 2007 at 11:00 pm

Would it not have been easier to read the bit where Dawkins says he is using an apple IIe (which has a 6502 processor) and then look up the memory map to see where the speaker was located?


@stereoroid: one of the oldest storage mediums was magnetic core memory which consisted of a huge number (perhaps a thousand) of annular magnets woven into a fabric of current carrying conductors. By activating the conductors, it was possible to physically flip the magnets one way or the other,accompanied by a little 'chik' and thereby store a bit of information. Since it was possible to sense the orientation in similar fashion, the stored information could be read. Tremendous stuff, and powerful, in its way.
Now, what you have here is an electromechanical system which vibrates back and forth under the influence of a program and I am sure you know where this is going by now...
Let's just say that given the fragility and cost of such core memories, early development of memory based audio transducers was vehemently discouraged.

Now let's see if young master Graham-Cumming can reconstruct that! I, for one, would be hugely impressed.

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13. Comment #93000 by pyjamaslug on December 1, 2007 at 11:20 pm

@ Jack Rawlinson: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an incurious man in possession of a narrow mind must be in want of a life.

Peter

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14. Comment #93011 by Planeten Paultje on December 2, 2007 at 1:06 am

Be sure to check out the excellent "Biomorphs" (and other programs) from this site: http://www.gsoftnet.us/GSoft.html

It's from 2002, but works flawlessly in OSX Leopard. I don't know about Windows, though I assume there are no problems there either.

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15. Comment #93020 by atp on December 2, 2007 at 1:57 am

To those who say "get a life", I'd like to comment that being curious, finding things out, even though they are not important things, is actually a great part of being alive.

On the other hand. Telling people who are curious to "get a life" I find much less constructive or interesting.

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16. Comment #93022 by Stewart on December 2, 2007 at 1:59 am

I remember coming across that little passage and not doubting it was genuine rather than made up. Someone on the other side might wish to interpret that as meaning that Dawkins' acolytes believe everything he says in a religious sense, but that couldn't be wider of the mark. One can get the measure of a man from his writing if he does it well and everything I've read consistently gives the same impression: that nothing has been committed to paper without maximum reasonable certainty having been attained that it is correct, as far as one can know. It's backed up by the occasions when the admission is made that something may be imperfectly remembered or is being paraphrased because an original quote has not been found. (The opposite, in fact, of what one experiences when reading much of what emanates from the religious/creationist/ID camp. There was a Christian commentary I saw just after Oppenheimer's NYT piece on Flew appeared and one needed no information beyond reading them and seeing how the one misrepresented the other to see that there was a manifestly manipulative and dishonest agenda at work on the Christian side. The most open-minded person would be disinclined to believe anything coming from a Christian if that could be taken as the level of accuracy in the transmission of information. And they want us to take the Gospel literally...)

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17. Comment #93044 by irate_atheist on December 2, 2007 at 3:46 am

Seriously, who gives a shit?

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18. Comment #93045 by alexmzk on December 2, 2007 at 3:47 am

what a strange article.

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19. Comment #93058 by elfinabout on December 2, 2007 at 4:42 am

I've always found it strangely gratifying tat Prof. Dawkins is a long-time Mac user... :o)

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20. Comment #93060 by robotaholic on December 2, 2007 at 4:45 am

I guess before RD writes, he does alot of R&D...

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21. Comment #93137 by Jack Rawlinson on December 2, 2007 at 9:50 am

On curiosity: there's absolutely nothing wrong with being curious. I'm all for it. I'm that way inclined myself. The reason I (and I suspect, others) are saying this person might have a little too much time on his hands is as a comment on what he chose to be curious about. Again - the actual value of the bit pattern was completely irrelevant to the point RD was using it to make. What would this person have said had he discovered that RD had just made up the codes? What would it have mattered? Not a jot. This is what's known as idle curiosity and yes, that can be distracting, but usually only for the person experiencing it. So I find the idea that this guy thinks it worth posting about... well, sort of geeky, to put it politely. Hence the "get a life" comment. No biggie, though. Just an observation. I should probably get a life. :-)

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22. Comment #93157 by Scott McMeekin on December 2, 2007 at 10:44 am

Just to annoy the no-humor naysayers, when I read this bit in TBW, it reminded me of using POKE 23609, 25 to extend the ZX Spectrum's keyboard blip length and make it funkier. This was in 1982. Interesting to muse why my brain would remember such a trivial little hack for so long.

Richard, geeks of the world divide by zero!

Scott.

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23. Comment #93180 by WhoIsThisGodPerson on December 2, 2007 at 11:32 am

Did Dawkins just make that up, or is this really the contents of a specific bit of memory on a specific computer?

"When oi were a lad..." An old geek writes:
It seems all but impossible when dealing with a modern laptop with a couple of GIGAbytes of memory to remember that in those days, the total address space was only 64K, and it was possible to maintain a mental map of what was where in memory. I seem to recall that Apple published the code of their ROM, complete with addresses of all the subroutines (IBM did too, for the PC, along with the circuit diagrams). When writing code in assembler to fit in tiny spaces of available RAM, it was advantageous to call ROM routines directly, saving time and space. The Apple ][ even had its disk access code in the same ROM, complete with routines to read a byte at a time from the diskette, move the heads etc...

Ah! Happy Days :)

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24. Comment #93208 by VanYoungman on December 2, 2007 at 12:31 pm

Mac users display the ultimate in cognitive dissonance, except, of course, for a few retarded graphic designers.

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25. Comment #93210 by Janus on December 2, 2007 at 12:37 pm

Good lord. Would it help you killjoys to think of the author's choice of activity as a hobby? I hope you won't disagree with me that playing around with computers is no more a waste of time than, say, watching television, or playing video games, or sleeping more than 8 hours a day.

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26. Comment #93215 by Goldy on December 2, 2007 at 12:40 pm

So not all of you check up on seemingly irrelevant facts? Damn....must make me weird, or something...

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27. Comment #93236 by pzmyers on December 2, 2007 at 1:25 pm

This was on an Apple II, not a Mac, and it really isn't at all surprising. Back in those days (and I remember them well!), if you were doing any programming at all on 8-bit systems with memory mapped I/O, you got to know the locations of the various I/O sites fairly well. I couldn't do it any more, but once upon a time I also had them all memorized -- the places you could read to get the last keystroke, the routine to read the joystick port (which was tricky -- you had to strobe a write-only location, then read until it hit 0 again), and then there were all the fun and really dangerous addresses that managed the floppy disk controller...

Anyway, this was just a factoid that tells you Dawkins was an informed computer user of his time.

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28. Comment #93316 by Socrates on December 2, 2007 at 4:40 pm

Oh my... I had to think about this one for a minute. I thought someone was planning to physically tackle Richard Dawkins... which begs the question: what's a *double*-check?

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29. Comment #93318 by spikie on December 2, 2007 at 4:51 pm

I'm surprised that no one has picked up on this story.
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article3209882.ece

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30. Comment #93323 by Rtambree on December 2, 2007 at 5:29 pm

The first line of Dawkins' "Root of all Evil?" could have done with a fact checker: we haven't sent orbiters to Neptune.

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31. Comment #93324 by robert s on December 2, 2007 at 5:31 pm

spikie, that story is covered here.

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32. Comment #93328 by spikie on December 2, 2007 at 5:48 pm

spikie, that story is covered here.
Sorry about that.
I,m a regular visitor to this forum, but I mist this one.
Thank you robert s for pointing me in the rite direction.

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33. Comment #93344 by Don_Quix on December 2, 2007 at 7:10 pm

It's not really that surprising that Prof Dawkins would be familiar with computers, is it? Especially back in the Apple ][ days. heheh.

Although who knows. I'd guess it would be statistically more likely that Dawkins made up a random string of numbers, which happened to be exactly correct, than it is that there is a God. LOL.

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34. Comment #93345 by Robert Maynard on December 2, 2007 at 7:19 pm

VanYoungman:

Mac users display the ultimate in cognitive dissonance, except, of course, for a few retarded graphic designers.

I'm getting the impression you don't actually know what cognitive dissonance means, but I could be mistaken.
What are they cognitively dissonant about?

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35. Comment #93346 by Lrac Rendiew on December 2, 2007 at 7:19 pm

Yes you can import any kind of digital file into a wave editor like Soundforge or Cool Edit Pro, Adobe Audition (basically the same), Cubase, Sonar, Audacity, Wavelab, Nuendo, Pro Tools etc.... And you can then save it to whatever filetype you like, .wav .mp3 .ogg etc. I used an eBook by Nietsche recently as a rythmical element, threw it in Ableton Live, it somehow made more sense that way...
(I'm just showing off with the namedropping here if anybody noticed)

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36. Comment #93370 by dsainty on December 3, 2007 at 12:01 am

Richard may have successfully selected the smallest possible sequence of bytes that produced an interesting and predictable output in and of itself. A lesser person might have taken the easy way out with some dull JSR instruction, relying on some separate piece of code to do the work.

Subtly neat...

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37. Comment #93371 by Steven Mading on December 3, 2007 at 12:01 am

This takes me back...
I remember doing that stuff on a Commadore 64, which hade similar memory mapped I/O (heck, it used the same motorolla 6502 cpu as the apple 2). (BUt the 64 had way better sound, with more complex poke's to get it working as an FM synthesizer.

Wow. I never knew the Prof was a computer wonk as well as a biologist. My respoect grows.

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38. Comment #93447 by ridelo on December 3, 2007 at 7:04 am

Somewhere in the eighties I read an article about a university in California were they got a huge display of the periodic table of elements. They could display groups, periods etc. with lights. I decided to simulate that on my new TRS80 from Tandy.
Later I enlarged the program on an Atari ST computer and added other features. One was to let the PC play notes with a frequency depending on the values (atomic weights, electronegativities, melting points etc.)
Bit stupid, but fun...

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39. Comment #94253 by novemberromeo on December 5, 2007 at 5:15 am

I do often 'listen' to and 'view' windows memory dumps. The latter is also known as 'Dump Tomography'. But you probably didnt want to know that.

http://www.dumpanalysis.org/blog/index.php/2007/07/29/listening-to-computer-memory/

http://www.dumpanalysis.org/blog/index.php/2007/08/04/visualizing-memory-dumps/

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40. Comment #94261 by scoobie on December 5, 2007 at 5:48 am

Um, he's not talking about "listening" to sequences of 1's and 0's as a sound file, he's talking about the instructions that blip the speaker when they're invoked.

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41. Comment #95179 by nephmon on December 7, 2007 at 2:10 pm

Yes, this is indeed correct. Here's the explanation. The three bytes that Dawkins quotes 10101101 00110000 11000000 (in binary, or in hexadecimal, AD 30 C0) stand for an instruction in the instruction set of the 6502 processor, which the Apple ][ used.

AD is the "opcode" and it means "LDA" or "Load the Accumulator from a memory location". The accumulator is a special one-byte storage area in the 6502 that many instructions operate on. The next two bytes are the memory address from which to load the value, in this case C030 in hexadecimal (the 6502 is little-endian, so the low byte of the address comes first).

So it's saying, "Load the accumulator with the byte value at address C030." BUT... on the Apple ][, the memory locations C0XX (where XX means "anything") are dedicated to things call "softswitches". These are locations that don't store data, but rather simply accessing them has some side effect on the computer. In the case of the softswitch at C030, it will toggle the voltage on the computer's loudspeaker (going from 1 to 0 or vice versa), which produces an audible "click" on the speaker. If you do this fast enough in a loop, you get a tone, albeit one with a fairly horrible square waveform.

In BASIC, it's the same as saying A = PEEK(49200), where 49200 is the decimal equivalent of C030.

I guess Dawkins is far too much of a stickler to have not made sure this piece of the book was correct....

Best wishes,
Pete

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