Musical note
Alan Rusbridger is right to point out that there's more to music on the web than techno tunes and unsigned bands (Grand Designs Online, May 4), but he fails to mention one development in online music - interactivity.
Interactive music is the first great musical innovation of the internet age, a genre that not only changes the way in which music is sold and distributed, but also radically alters how we perceive, compose, perform and experience sound online.
Ranging from the means to manipulate recordings on the web to serious experimental works by avant garde composers, the genre already has a massive cult following, and is poised to cross over into the mainstream.
Interactive music's appeal is potentially vast - just think how many teenage aspiring DJs (raised on PlayStations and mix CDs) would jump at the chance of using interactive music technology to create their own dance remixes, instead of having to trawl through racks of insipid boy band "product".
At the other end of the scale, similar technology is giving serious artists and musicians the opportunity to experiment with genuinely new and exciting forms of composition such as generative music, which is driven by mathematical algorithms.
For anybody who wants to find out more about the subject, a conference on interactive music is taking place at the University of Westminster on May 26. iM2K will feature seminars and performances by interactive musicians and composers, plus a showcase of the latest technologies. Call 020 8357 7395 for details.
Colin Kirkpatrick
colin.kirkpatrick@lumiereadapt.co.uk
Virus fears
A throwaway line in the BBC's coverage of last week's outbreak of the love bug email virus which mentioned that "users of Apple Mac and other operating systems were not affected" might give food for thought.
This virus was apparently specific to PCs running Microsoft Windows. While this may be a good argument against the "Windows or nothing" approach often taken by people - and firms - who should know better, a thought comes to mind. What will happen when someone pens a virus that attacks the Linux-based devices now being launched, or WAP browsers or Psions?
Is there any protection available for the growing "non-standard" brigade of net appliances?
Chris Emery
chrisdemery@chrisdemery.fsnet.co.uk
Ideal model
Douglas Rushkoff's interesting article on modelling (Online, May 4) contained some inaccuracies which detract from his thesis.
It would be more accurate to refer to a typewriter and a word-processing program as models of an ideal document processor. Both have subsets of the features that one might want. Models can be physical as well as programmatic.
Word processing (and HTML) are both programming activities. Typing "a" in a Word document (for example) is an instruction to insert (usually) character #97 of the current font in the compiled document at the current point and move on by the character width. HTML is a language with which to give formatting instructions. Both languages may be restrictive compared with what Douglas regards as "real" programming languages, but languages they are.
Bob Margolis
Mass force
Can it be that there are two laws of physics? The article Snowballs of the Gods (Science, May 4) states that "the law of physics makes a bigger hailstone fall faster".
Newton's Second Law has it that there is a bigger gravitational force on a bigger mass, yes, but a bigger mass needs more force to get it moving, so a bigger mass and a smaller mass end up with the same acceleration.
This was famously demonstrated by Galileo dropping objects of different mass from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. More recently, the whole world watched it in a television shot from the moon when a golf ball and a feather were used.
It could even happen that the bigger mass falls more slowly than the smaller one when one brings air resistance into it and the "terminal velocity" effect - this is a characteristic of the body's shape. Two parachutes of identical mass, one packed into a tight bundle and the other allowed to assume its full and proper shape will fall at vastly different speeds!
Naturally when it comes to impact damage, assuming the two objects did reach the same velocity, that's where the difference shows.
George H Westgarth
Phone fury
I think Ken Sawyer (Feedback, May 4) is remarkably restrained in his comments on the Lineone/Quip free call access. Since the end of March when I registered, Quip has reduced me to the state of fury and frustration with my computer I thought I'd outgrown some time ago.
Apart from the fact he mentions, that one can't easily connect at all in the evenings or at weekends, I've been unable to make ordinary phone calls using the Quip gadget, which are part of the deal. The worst of it is the bland instruction to e-mail them with problems, when part of the problem is that you can't send e-mails. They say they will have improved access from May 15 but it'll have to be pretty good to make up for the waste of time and energy Quip has cost me so far.
Liz Moloney
Cam con
I missed the original piece about Caroline Online, being out of the country at the time, but last November we set up honicam.com, the site of a camgirl called Honey in New Jersey. The homepage features an attractive blond who promises all sorts of excitement. Alas, when you click to see more, the book jacket for my novel Nine Mil (in which Honey and honicam.com are featured) pops up, with a link to Amazon. I thought it was a neat idea, the Bookseller thought it was an inappropriate piece of marketing. Made me laugh, anyway.
Rob Ryan
