Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" is not on the list.
185 karma · joined February 23, 2023
Spent a summer going down the rabbit hole of tuning it myself. I found the Entropy Piano Tuner app to be quite helpful. Took me weeks to get it tuned to where I liked it.
My digital Yamaha doesn't even come close to capturing the resonance you get on a real piano. I find it hard to play digital pianos for anything other than simple melodies.
Entropy website: http://piano-tuner.org/
Seriously, I feel the same way. As a former teacher, I remember when kids started having smart phones and you'd hear a notification go off in class. Other kids were like, "what was that?" The kid in question only wanted to look down and see what it said.
I soon started joking that the notification was saying, "YOU MATTER!" As if that student was so important that he/she/they could distract a class of 25-30 students.
Kind of like the first time I heard someone talking loudly in a college hallway on their cell phone. I thought it was such a social faux-pax.
Nowadays it's pretty normal for anyone to loudly talk that way to their phone. We only get concerned if there's no phone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelli...
We loved her so much we left it like that. It's a great conversational piece for fellow dog lovers.
Rabbits were so common that once we took our car in to have the oil changed. The guy opened the hood and a rabbit jumped out. He asked us if it was our pet....
I once recorded an album and had to deal with latency issues. This was way back using an IBM Aptiva and Magix music software (because it was pretty affordable). I spent so much time trying to figure out why my vocals were behind the beat. Eventually I worked out the correction factor to be 1.002433. So that's what I named the album!
Since then, I'm glad that latency problems are much less of a problem. Nothing worse than a little latency if you have ears like Donald Fagan. :-)
I mean, of all the things you mentioned, it's by far the most likely to still be usable in the future. Even in a post-apocalyptic world people might figure out how to play vinyl. MP3s? Not a chance.
Full disclosure: I never liked cassettes. Oh, and I made the mistake of choosing Beta over VHS....
I am totally unqualified to judge this current topic [except for a degree in Biology], but I'm just curious if the "foldiscope" was successful or not.
I love how a discussion like this can occur here and there's no flaming or egos getting hurt. When you post a labor of love like this, it's great to see the reaction on HN.
I spend a lot of time trying to decide what to do with old tech in my volunteer gig. We have old Univac "dumb" terminals and I feel the need to plug them in and see if they still work. I come here for re-charging.
I think emulating old hardware is fascinating. Am I the only one who watches old media just to hopefully get a glimpse of the past?
Don Slater and Wanda Dann (two of the original Alice team members) were extremely approachable and helped me build a darn good high school CS curriculum that offered many classes for kids in a pretty low socioeconomic school on Colorado's front range. Don even was an old-school tabletop sports gamer who played a lot of Paydirt (an Avalon Hill title) back in the day.
I was a bit of throwback and taught kids text editors, SVN (they just wanted to use "Dropbox" to collaborate), and Linux (my classroom was a Linux LAN and it was pretty fun to teach kids how to administer it with me)--I appreciated Alice as a great way to get kids working on day 1 on programming concepts.
Using recursive methods to make a shark attack a person swimming in the ocean was one of the lessons I used to teach. In fact, if you want to pretend you're a freshman in Intro to Computing, my lesson (for the level 4 challenge: the advanced level) is still in Vimeo:
Be kind :-) I was stretched so thin. I basically created the entire HS CS curriculum (except for APCS), and I would create these screencasts just in time, adjusting them as necessary for my students that year.
When my student's first showed me SIRI, I didn't have a smartphone and was basically just going by Stallman ethics (shut up--just saying...).
They said, ask Siri to do anything and she can.
I picked up my students phone and said, "Siri, how do I inactivate Siri?"
They looked nervous and said, "don't ask her THAT!"
I went home and watched "Her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)" and thought, .... who knows?
This is one of the great examples of how true artists produce gold and then the real world sets in and the relatives (who were not there at the time) force a bunch of legal issues and fight over copyright.
Somewhere in Nirvana/Heaven/Whatever Steely Dan songs are available in all their forms. We will look back on this era and just do a facepalm....
I highly recommend Fagan's book "Eminent Hipsters."
And yes, I know it says "Steel Frame Only", but I only really noticed that after trying to see a complete listing of the parts.
That said, I can see how something like this could be pretty cool. Instead of playing Up-Front and imagining that the terrain cards are now serving different purposes (like desert or jungle terrain), it would just look correct. Of course that says nothing about why 3D is necessary....
Back in 1989, my college buddy Matt had a used Sentra that had that same voice. We assumed his got "warped" or something because the inflection of the female voice kind of rises at the end of some of her statements, making her sound annoyed with the human(s).
Listening to the video, however, it sounds exactly like I remembered--so I guess that was standard.
I have always loved reading about people who live in extreme environments. It's also a great topic in science fiction.
Not sure how to explain my attraction to these stories, but as someone who lived for many years in the San Luis Valley ( https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149599/san-luis-val... ) it's easy to relate.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/lang/...
I have played classical, acoustic and electric guitars for most of my life. Over time my collection grew and finally settled to just a handful of guitars. The most expensive was the acoustic. Next was the classical. The electric I have now was easily the cheapest of the lot (I paid 18x it's cost for the acoustic, fwiw).
It always seemed like with electric there were just too many things that could change the sound--like information overload. Yes, you have the guitar and the string choices, but also amps and effects. With acoustic I hardly ever use an amp and I never do with classical. To me, the difference in sound from those guitars is much more inherent in the guitar itself.
Seems like even cheap electrics, if you set the intonation and action correctly (and pickup height, etc) are a better deal than similarly cheap acoustics. Just test out the pickups first, as they vary greatly in quality.
The "algorithms" and "database" files alone contain a lot of work. Thanks for sharing this.
It's a museum that documents the history of the Colorado State Hospital (Colorado Insane Asylum, when it opened in 1879). I bought a house near it and just walked in one day. Now I'm there two days a week and spend a lot of time doing research for people trying to find out about their relatives that may have been patients.
I highly recommend "Nightflyers" (and pretty much every story in that anthology):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjIYJnc3vLQ
Processing: https://processing.org/
This was a popular built-in example in the Processing development environment. I used to put it up on a smartboard during parent-teacher conferences to entertain the younger siblings of my students while I met with their parents. Code is available on Github and also withing Processing, of course.
EDIT: I see Yellowtail was the inspiration for Grubs, which inspired this!
That was to explain the concept of self-similarity, something we CAN see in fractals.
Note: for anyone wanting an easy way to experiment with L-systems, there's a built-in feature in Inkscape that is pretty fun to use. It's under "Extensions/Render/L-System"
Some of those are almost creepy in how they make so much sense.
++++++++++[>+>+++>+++++++>++++++++++<<<<-]>>>>++++.---.++++++++++++++++++++.<<++++++++++++++.------------.>>------------.--------.<<.>>+++++++++++++++.-----..<<+.I do research for people trying to find answers for their relatives who were patients in the past. Some of these people have already checked ancestry.com and whatever historical newspapers they can get access to.
It's getting harder and harder to find any answers online. Newspapers.com seems to have LESS available every day. I go to my local library and ask to see their microfilm to look up a story. They tell me they got rid of all their microfilm for a particular newspaper (The Denver Post, fwiw). I ask why, and they tell me, "you can just get that on the internet now." When I tell them that Newspapers.com no longer has any access to that newspaper, they just shrug.
/rant
I am personally so sick of copyright laws, but I always have felt that way. I just get upset when people are surprised that someone has pulled all rights to a publication on microfilm. The rats nest of legal issues involved basically means that we lose access to things we'd be willing to pay for. The only way for me to confirm a claim like "but it was on the front page of the Denver News" is to take a trip to Denver and try to find the microfilm.
rant/
When people talk about "desert island" picks, I prefer to modernize it to what one would choose to take with them on a long space flight, or (if we use deep sleep) to a new space colony. I don't know how many bytes of storage I'd be allotted, but I have a feeling Beethoven's late string quartets would be included. And Steely Dan....