Josh Wieder

Its really a shame that Google is rapidly becoming so unabashedly evil , because they really do have some smart folks on the team. One of the latest useful applications to come from outside of the world-domination division is Google Tone: Tone can share useful application data using sound; specifically URLs. There are many possible uses for this sort of thing. Advertisers should be more excited about this then they were about those always annoying and once-ubiquitous QR codes. Those interested in human rights work and IT security could I am sure come up with some uses more useful to humanity. Here is a link to a Tone download from the Chrome web store ; Tone is available to start with as a browser extension.

The video below provides a graphical display of a number of different sorting algorithms at work. Whats unique about this video, is that in addition to the graphical display, each operation in the sorting algorithm has also been assigned a tone - in other words, this video lets you hear the algorithms as well as see them! While counter-intuitive, the "song" that the tones play can provide insight into how the algorithm is working; at least for me, it is easier to distinguish small differences using sound than it is to do so using the often frenetic, fast moving images in sorting visualizations.  Check it out for yourself!