HN user
I agree. I also get much more out of playing Bach than listening to him. I almost never listen to Bach for pleasure, but I know a few fugues and the like. Playing them makes you feel like a god; listening to them feels like an assault.
The exception, for me, is the Goldberg Variations which I find have a stately and refined beauty. It's one of very few in the classical canon that I find myself returning to over the years.
Left unaddressed is whether polar bears can ever make it back to Greenland once winding up in Iceland. I'm guessing the answer is only very rarely, based on the rest of the article... But then again Iceland is 200 miles away and wouldn't have guessed they'd make it there so frequently in the first place.
Regardless of if there's any hope those bears could make it back to their population, it's clear that such hope would be an inconvenient truth for Icelanders -- at least, for the article's authors -- who would prefer to shoot them when they appear and be done with it. And I'm not saying that's not for the best.
As a side note, if we really want to know the answer without googling, we can put on our deducing hats: "Visits by five polar bears in 2008 (two bears), 2010, 2011, 2016 and 2024."
Josh Hartnett's suave insouciance in Lucky Number Slevin (2006) is accounted for by him "having ataraxia." [1] That is, as if it were a medical condition. I'm sure it was intended as a joke, but apparently wiktionary says "ataraxy" is sometimes used in a similar way, although I've never seen that. [2]
Your comment just made me realize something. The 5 milliseconds which Lyles won by is shorter than the time it takes sound to travel between his lane and Thompson's. If the starting gun were on the outside of the track (it's not), then Thompson would have actually run the race faster, if measured from the time he perceived the sound.
In reality the gun is usually on the inside of the track, so it would be Lyles overcoming this (negligible) advantage.
This is an accurate and well-written portrait of Pitchfork bookended by musings on the current state of music criticism as a business.
I did some reading into rongorongo a few years ago and I came away with two conclusions:
1. It is very likely the scripts developed after contact with Europeans. That is, the islanders saw Europeans writing things down and then over the years (ships stopping on rapa nui were quite infrequent) began to do likewise.
2. The script found on rongorongo articacts …doesn't really seem to be much of a script at all. No one has ever been able to decipher anything, none of the natives of the 19th century could ever shed any light on their meaning, and the glyphs don't seem to be present in the ratios one would expect from language / writing. They are script similar to the way Aztec (not Mayan) codices are script. Perhaps they had meaning to one person, or a handful of people, but they probably weren't standardized in any significant way.
The paper doesn't directly contradict either, but it has quite the title and the authors do sort of equivocate on both points and present this and that as equally likely even though I don't think that's the consensus.
In any case, it seems the thread running through a lot of writing on the topic is the implication that it would be more interesting or culturally important if the islanders had developed writing on their own. Perhaps that's true, but I find the more likely sequence of events fascinating enough -- because of the implications. If Rapa Nui had been left alone, it's entirely possible that rongorongo would have developed into a fully fledged writing system. That is, only the seed of seeing some infrequent visitors writing on parchment is required for a very small and isolated community to begin to develop writing. (The Rapa Nui died off / were genocided.)
Consider: Egyptian heiroglyphs appear in the archeaological record on the order of 100 years after writing in mesopotamia. That these heiroglyphs share no DNA with cuneiform is generally used as strong evidence that the two civilizations developed writing independently. I've seen that version of history taught and written as fact in the past, although I don't know what the consensus is now. Learning about rongo rongo has colored my view of that. Perhaps some itenerant Egyptian genius made his way back from the East and began to experiment with making symbols which have meaning and seem to give those who wield them power.
If you're thinking "The highest rate I need my signal to be able to replicate is X, so I should set my sampling rate to 2X," then you're wrong and this article gives several reasons why.
As far as I can tell, though, it doesn't mention what may be the most important reason (especially to the folks here at hackernews): resampling and processing.
This is why professional grade audio processing operates at a sample rate many multiples higher than human hearing. It's not because of the quality difference between, say, 192 and 96 kHz, but rather if you're resampling or iterating a process dozens of times at those rates, eventually artifacts will form and make their way into the range of human hearing (20 kHz).
Indeed. And they've applied the translator even to the comments, without making it clear, which seems ethically dubious to me.
There really is one for everything:
Why do people not run uBlock Origin? What's the case against?
The movie Machete was made after the trailer. The trailer was sandwiched, with other fake ones, in between the two parts of the Tarantino / Rodriguez double-feature Grindhouse. I remember because I saw Grindhouse in theaters and years later saw the actual trailer for the real movie Machete and did quite the double take. What a B-movie clusterfuck.
In the 1690's the Scottish invested an enormous sum of money and human capital to settle this region. The goal was to build and profit from an overland route to ferry cargo from the Pacific to the Atlantic, similar to the Panama Canal today.
Due to disease, less-than-accommodating natives, and geopolitical climate, the scheme failed miserably. Many argue the crippling financial effect on Scotland was a key factor in the 1707 Acts of Union which merged Scotland and England.
Meteor in question:
From the conclusion of the study the article cites:
In this survey study, all types of objectively measured VI were associated with a higher dementia prevalence. As most VI is preventable, prioritizing vision health may be important for optimizing cognitive function.
In other words, the association is dementia and uncorrected visual impairment.
EDIT: I'll add that the study does not show causality. Even people like myself who are well aware that correlation != causality often still assume it does. It doesn't help that the authors themselves imply that correcting VI would ward off dementia. It might; it might not. People with dementia might just be less likely to get glasses.
I have to say I mostly agree and I'm very surprised at how few negative comments there are in this thread. It's good the community is supportive but with the current state of AI this product is essentially just spewing more nonsense into the world. (The podcast world already has more than enough human-generated nonsense) More importantly, I don't foresee much of a demand for this.
Hopefully the creators can either parlay a pseudo-success here and transition to something else, or, if AI drastically improves in the coming years, provide a more worthwhile service.
+1 to this. Some other (sinensis) teas do give me headaches as well, but matcha quite consistently does even when most brewed green teas don't. Strange.
This is cool. My first thought is the choice of dialect rather than accent.
I'm from NC and the Lumbee Indians had a way of speaking that was unique and endearing. It feels like many places in the US are losing that identity and the language of most areas is merging. Especially in the west, the differences between peoples' idiolects is usually greater than the differences between regions' dialects.
1% each year
I think you mean 1% each life
Murray says it's hard to see how Prigozhin and Putin both come out of this alive. He also says he expects it to be over in two weeks.
So ... what? ... Surely it's very unlikely that both these things turn out to be true.
It removes flouride as well, for better or worse -- one of very few available filters which do. (Some think flouride is good and some think it's bad.)
I have it, and purely ergonomically, it's the best filter I've ever used. It's also quite expensive with expensive filters that need replacing frequently.
An important fact never explicitly stated in this video is that humans in a contained area will die from CO2 toxicity before lack of oxygen. Many people don't know this or actively believe the opposite.
O2 is ~20% of air, but CO2 is ~.04%. CO2 levels are much more volatile and increase rapidly in sealed spaces with humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Paterson
I'm sure they could barely contain their shame. The man was a computer scientist before anyone bothered to string those two words together. He was literally a pioneer in the field. Or did you mean to denigrate generally all people who pursue their passion at their own expense?
Just discovered this -- it contains the optimal constructions for up to N=20. They don't prove optimality but they do claim it.
https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/2...
I came across this paper while I was looking for a compilation of constructions (especially the current record-holders), but I wasn't able to find one.
If anyone has seen such a thing please do post.
I don't understand why this didn't make bigger waves ... Perhaps diluted by the same team's preceding but less significant success which allowed reflections. Some weeks ago.
Even Wikipedia has yet to explicitly state that the Einstein problem has now been solved.
OP-1 is targeted at music professionals.
This is so objectively untrue that when I read it I assumed it was a joke or somehow tongue in cheek.
Even at the height of its popularity, the OP-1 was rarely used by serious, professional producers ... for reasons that should be pretty obvious. It's a toy. When I say "used" I mean "found its way onto the final version of a track," and when I say "professional" I mean "someone who works in a studio or who produces music for a living." I owned one and enjoyed it, and by TE's frequent appearance on the front page, I'd say many here did as well.
The title of the link is also a stretch. I disagree, but I think it skates by. The Microkorg had a huge impact on music tech, but was also rarely used in the studio or on tracks (in part because of its bigger brother, the MS-2000).
EDIT: The title has been edited. I don't remember the one prior, but something like "...massively influenced music technology."
very cool! some gameplay:
In the context of the WSJ, cash doesn't mean physical currency. It just means dollars, i.e. not treasuries or any other type of asset. Most people would interpret that headline differently -- to the point of it being inaccurate.
[edit: also the wordplay wouldn't work]
I knew pachinko was popular in Japan but wow. And it almost certainly grew during the pandemic.
Pachinko parlors and slot machines, the country’s largest form of gambling, raked in more than ¥23.3 trillion ($203 billion) in 2015 according to Bloomberg. That’s more than the combined earnings of Las Vegas, Singapore and Macau—or about 4% of Japan’s GDP.
perhaps the downvotes are because you aren't adding to the discussion. you haven't read the book, you don't say why, and you have no comment on the linked essay.