mfragin

Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" is not on the list.

I got a free piano from a lady that paid 25k for it back in 1980. Mice had lived in it while in storage, but I could tell it was in good shape.

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/

I'm too drunk to comment on that. And I'm online!

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.

To a point, sure. Fluid vs Crystallized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelli...

True story: I adopted a pit bull mix (mostly beagle, I'd guess) and she was a wonderful dog. One day she chased a rabbit (in Conejos county, so yeah, rabbits were pretty common) that ran under our car. It drove her nuts trying to get at it. She left teeth marks all around the right front passenger tire well.

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....

Just wait until midi 2.0 catches on! /sarcasm

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. :-)

Yeah I understand your point, but vinyl is kinda sacred.

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....

This reminds me of https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19343140

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.

And this is why I still hang out here, after abandoning nearly everything else.

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?

I've always known that the mirror never lies.

I have attended two conferences for educators using Alice in their Computer Science curriculum (back in the mid 2000s, I think). The Alice Team at Carnegie Mellon were great in their efforts to make something for educators teaching CS at the high school entry level. In fact, one of the workshops was shortly after Randy Pausch passed away. I remember it being a pretty somber time on campus at CMU.

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:

https://vimeo.com/98328965

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.

Funny (or sad) story:

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?

Yeah, those cds and tapes you could get remarkably cheap and they sounded like total s*it as far as sound quality, but at the same time those were some of my favorite performances. Like hearing Donald sing "Brooklyn" on piano.

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."

This is unethical in so many ways. People are going to be thinking these are like Tuff-Sheds or something. They should have a button that says "Show Me What I Actually Get" and then show them just that.

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.

Couldn't agree more. I had an active computer programming club for years at the high school level. One year, some of the very same kids proposed that we start a "tabletop gaming" club. Computers weren't allowed. Nothing like pushing cardboard around to make a person whole again. :-)

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....

I posted about this at top level, but should have done so here. My friends and I assumed our buddy's car had a warped disk or something that caused her to sound slightly pissed off. :-)

I can't believe this showed up on the front page today! I was just talking to a co-worker about this:

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 see these and I say "oh yeah, that Antarctica blog that I tell everyone about."

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.

And you can still find his code there! Sometimes the internet proves it's not all junk:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/lang/...

Wow, this is worth watching if you're a guitar player. There are so many variables in the sound of an electric, and he certainly provides a strong argument as to which ones matter the most (his "air" guitar at the end is great).

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.

Thanks! We also open for appointment, in case you can't make our regular hours (Tues and Sat 10-4)! Just let us know and you can come in whenever!

Definitely an ambitious project with a great start. I'm impressed by the scope of this, and have found myself writing smaller scripts for various functions that are already included here. Nice job!

The "algorithms" and "database" files alone contain a lot of work. Thanks for sharing this.

Oh, I hope he comes to Pueblo, CO sometime and checks out the niche museum I volunteer at. We have basically 3 people running it, including Nell Mitchell, who made it all possible: https://coloradostatehospitalmuseum.org/

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 read George R.R. Martin's novella "Nightflyers" when my dad bought me a great anthology (Years Best SF #10). It mentions in there that there are remarkable coincidental similarities between the novella and "Alien". Both scared the crap outta me at the time!

I highly recommend "Nightflyers" (and pretty much every story in that anthology):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightflyers

This immediately reminded me of the Processing sketch called yellowtail:

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!

When I was teaching math and comp sci, I used broccoli in an example to explain self-similarity: imagine you're playing with your Barbies or GI Joes and you want to make their dinner plates look like they have real food on them. You can break off a much smaller piece of broccoli and it will look "to scale" on the plate. Try that with a banana!

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"

Things like that explain how some people get obsessed with numerology. Except, I find the anagrams like you and the previous commenter mentioned to be more impressive than anything numerologists produce.

Some of those are almost creepy in how they make so much sense.

  ++++++++++[>+>+++>+++++++>++++++++++<<<<-]>>>>++++.---.++++++++++++++++++++.<<++++++++++++++.------------.>>------------.--------.<<.>>+++++++++++++++.-----..<<+.

This is something I deal with all the time. I volunteer at our local historical society and also at the museum of our state hospital (insane asylum) museum.

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/

Although I can understand the purpose of the author, part of me thinks Beethoven's music is on such a higher plane than current politics. Or maybe that WAS his message....

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....