| coming down is the hardest thing? |
[Tue 2009/08/25|08:43:00] |
i remember around the time that i was learning to drive (and just before) that i wondered started wondering how the process of driving affects the way the mind works. i'm sure one place it shows up is in habits of attention: check mirrors, check speedometer, keep eye on road, watch for moonwalking bears, etc. i'm sure there are habits of perception as well. i wonder what else. |
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| mountain driving assist? |
[Tue 2009/08/11|09:22:00] |
so here's the kooky idea i had recently about mountainous driving: you know how mountain roads inevitably include the occasional rather steep section? and the cars driving up have to work extra hard to get up, and the cars driving down have to sit on their brakes so that they don't lose control of their vehicles. (i'm exluding teenage "look how fast i can go" joyriders from the equation, i suppose.)
so, phrased another way, the folks going down have this excess kinetic energy that they'd rather be rid of. and the folks going up could make use of some extra kinetic energy.
so the idea, vaguely inspired by railguns, would be to use some sort of magnetic doohickey to suck some of the energy|momentum|velocity off of the downward traffic (this half also looks a little like a hybrid car's regenerative braking), and pump the resulting electricity across the median to power the magnetic doohickey for the upward traffic.
i'm sure there are seventeen reasons why this is a bad idea. |
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| random question #316523 |
[Mon 2009/07/27|19:59:00] |
why is it that, with electronic car door locks becoming so ubiquitous, electronic house door locks are still comparatively rare? |
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| cover your eyes! it's a little more math! |
[Sat 2009/06/20|21:33:00] |
very preliminary investigations suggest that the sum of the roundness indices for three consecutive numbers may always be at least 1. i'm gonna have to sic some more intensive calculatory on the issue. if this is so, it may have mild implications for factoring algorithms. (an obvious hard upper bound for this sum is three, which assuming something that seems obvious to me about twin primes is true, can be improved to at least 3 — logn9, possibly further.)
EDIT/DISPROOF: the sum of the roundness indices for 1078, 1079, 1080 is 0.99555082. it likely helps that the index for 1080 is so ridiculously low. revised conjecture: there may be no positive lower bound (i.e. the lower bound may be zero, although if so, it's gonna take its own sweet time getting there). |
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| things that are full of awesome |
[Thu 2009/02/12|16:18:00] |
folk who aren't fans of starwars will be less impressed by these.
two sleds:
yes, those are sleds. want to see them in action? there's vid here with those and many others.
thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ironymaiden and wil, respectively for choice linky. |
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| going all the way? |
[Sat 2008/11/29|10:06:00] |
as the cowboy for social responsibility notes, there are three ways that the canadian taxpayer has been supporting political parties:- Rebates to parties and candidates for campaign expenditures;
- Tax credits for donations to parties and candidates; and, most recently,
- Core support for political parties based on the number of votes they received in the last general election.
if the currently still governing conservatives are really interested in no longer forcing the taxpayer to support politicians, why not cut off all three? |
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| my second-favourite percussion instrument |
[Tue 2008/11/11|09:40:00] |
| [ | Tags | | | music, playlist | ] |
| [ | i've got a brain like a jukebox |
| | all cuíca all the time | ] |
recentlich i mentioned the cuíca to someone, and they hadn't heard of it. so this playlist is all about my second-favourite percussion instrument, the crazy monkey drum!
traditionally, the instrument is used in samba bands. my familiarity with brasilian samba is woefully minimal. anyone want to recommend some good starting points? |
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| some longer reads/watches |
[Sun 2008/11/09|09:49:00] |
partly inspired by anathem's advocacy of activities that require an attention span, this weekend has seen me spending a fair amount of time reading/watching lengthier stuff on the 'puter. if you've got the time, and would like to join in, here's what i've been perusing:the irony of all of the above being, of course, that i've not been reading as much of anathem as i might like. but there's an obvious solution for that. |
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| a public service announcement |
[Thu 2008/10/30|07:29:00] |
for the person driving the ford pickup with license plate FUN 659 and everyone else, a reminder from alberta's Use of Highway and Rules of the Road Regulation:93(1) At a place where there is a crosswalk, a pedestrian has, unless otherwise directed by a peace officer or a traffic control device, the right of way over vehicles for the purpose of crossing the roadway within the crosswalk. believe it or not, this applies to you too! |
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| flaky LJ? |
[Mon 2008/10/27|09:20:00] |
two days in a row, around 8am, LJ has temporarily cut out for me. is anyone else experiencing the same thing? |
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| the main spring turning the world around |
[Tue 2008/09/23|17:58:00] |
so if corporations get to be treated as persons people before the law, why aren't they treated as people before the tax code? why are there different rates for corporate taxes than there are for income taxes? heck, if each human gets one vote, why not give each corporation one vote too? EDIT: and also let them be sent to jail (what would that mean?) if they're convicted of criminal offences.
i have no idea if i'm serious or not. |
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| my question for the candidates |
[Sun 2008/09/07|14:41:00] |
so, dropped writ. october 14th we're again allowed out of our cages to act democratic for a minute or two. hmn.
do all-candidates fora happen any more? i have a question i'd like to put to my local candidates. i have a sneaking suspicion i won't get the chance to ask all of them at once. i may have to e-mail them.
the Preämble:
Mr.Harper has described the current parliament as "increasingly dysfunctional". I tend to agree with this assesment. A minority parliament only works so long as the members of the various parties are willing to compromise and coöperate. There's been some of that in this last parliament, but much of the time the parties haven't been playing nicely together. Mr.Harper also expects "that we will have another minority". Again, i tend to agree wtih this assesment. If there is another minority, it may well set the stage for the same dysfunction to happen all over again.
Personally, i'd rather not have that.
the Question:
If elected, what would you do to make a minority parliament work?
If there is another minority, what would your party do differently to make it work?
the Caveät:
If your answer involves blaming other parties or people from other parties for the mess, you've just lost my vote.
any suggestions for wording modifications? the preämble seems kinda long... (and perhaps i should get rid of the diäreses? |
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| directly proportionally representative democracy? |
[Mon 2008/03/10|19:34:00] |
so here's some more hare-brained speculative policy. as always, i'm not saying this is a good idea. or a bad idea. just that it's an idea, and i wonder:
what would happen if every vote counted?even proportional systems eventually undercount or overcount some votes. here's a system that wouldn't do that:
suppose in the electoral district of the Borough of Shmeng, there are three candidates running for elected office, Alice, Bob, and Charlie. when the votes are tallied, the numbers look something like this:
| Candidate | votes received | | Alice | 2342 | | Bob | 1729 | | Charlie | 606 |
under the system i'm conjecturing, the strange thing that happens is that all three of them get to vote in the legislature. but they don't have equal votes. Alice's vote counts 2342, Bob's counts 1729, and Charlie's counts 606. so Alice's voice is louder than either of her competitors, but on issues where Bob and Charlie agree, they have more clout than Alice does.
there are some obvious logistical problems with this, of course. is there enough room to seat all the candidates in the legislature? is there enough time for everyone to participate in debate? how much do the elected officials get paid? (i'd be inclined to prorate remuneration based on votes received.) there may be others. feel free to identify them.
aside from proportional effects, i'm curious as to what a system like this would do to politics over time. suppose that a voter, call her Drew, was one of the 606 voters for Charlie in the above election, and decided that Charlie really hadn't done a particularly good job of representing her point of view. in the next election, Drew decides to do something different. Drew votes for herself. Drew doesn't formally campaign, just registers as a candidate and casts a ballot for herself. the next election, more people do the same. i'm sure most people wouldn't want to pay attention to all matters under discussion, and would rather let someone else do it - the process certainly allows for it - but i'm curious as to how many people would exercise this option, were it available.
other thoughts? criticism? speculations? does merely raising it overly muddy the waters of the PR movement? could it work? wujja think? |
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| think global, eat local |
[Sat 2007/10/13|09:45:00] |
the 100-mile diet/eat local meme seems to be slowly catching fire. which is prolly a good thing. (and something to which i personally [c|sh]ould pay more attention.) a tool that would make all this easier, of course, would be a website that people could go to to find out what food producers are within x [miles|kilometres] of their homes, and more generally attempt to calculate the carbon footprint of the food they purchase. (i have a sneaking suspicion, for instance, that the black pepper which some 100-mile-ers have been eschewing would have a pretty tiny footprint compared to, say, a mango. heck, it might have a smaller footprint than some 100-mile food.)
this is one of those cases where the tech for this already exists - what's needed at this point is (a) a GIS hacker to put together the basic software and (b) data collection/entry. if i were running such a site, i'd offer free listings to farmers, prolly by going around to farmers' markets.
does something like this already exist?
fine print: if people aren't already doing this, and if you use my idea for a non-profit site, i'd appreciate a credit. if you use it for a for-profit site, a small percentage donated to a charity of my choice would be nice. |
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| if only he'd said this five years ago |
[Tue 2007/09/11|07:32:00] |
colin powell talks:
What is the greatest threat facing us now? People will say it’s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing? |
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| a tale from the first age |
[Wed 2007/08/22|10:26:00] |
 way back when i noticed that cjrt was bringing out a new prose version of the Narn i Chîn Húrin. i picked it up within a few days of when it came out, but dint get around to reading it until this past week.
it's been a while since i read the versions of the narn in the silmarillion and unfinished tales and the lays, so i can't rilly give a point-by-point comparison. the story is, of course, the same tragic tale. a few details felt new - i don't recall encountering nellas of doriath before, for instance. but overall, it's the same story.
the packaging, however, is different, and that may be significant. i know many people who've read and enjoyed the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, but who find the Silmarillion daunting, never mind the more recent publications, filled as they are with multiple versions and drafts of the same material. part of christopher's point in publishing the narn in this form is to provide a (basically) self-contained story from the first age of middle-earth, to give some sense of the greater expanse of the history of tolkien's world.
did he succeed? on the whole, i think so. there's still a 15+ page list of names at the end, but most of those are only mentioned briefly in the text (keeping finwë and curufinwë and fingolfin and finarfin and fingon straight isn't really all that important here, whereas in the silmarillion in kinda is), and the number of significant names one needs to track isn't out of line for an average fantasy novel. there's also a map and three family trees, but again the average reader doesn't need to assimilate most of that information to appreciate the story.
admittedly, the story itself (like many from the first age) is rather a downer - don't expect any cheerful hollywood adaptations of this one any time soon (even were the estate interested, which they're rilly not) - [spoiler deleted], for instance, rilly doesn't play well to movie-going audiences these days.
of course, now i wonder about what might have been - i recall a discussion somewhere on the net (r.a.b.t.?) years ago about an alternate (real world) history wherein jrrt actually published the stories he'd initially wanted to publish - this one, the tale of beren and lúthien, the fall of gondolin, and others. i don't think we'll be seeing any of the others any time soon, but one can wish... |
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| dark night teaser |
[Sat 2007/07/28|08:41:00] |
the teaser trailer for next year's dark knight (the next batman movie) is up |
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| billy ray gibbons? orlando cyrus? |
[Fri 2007/07/06|12:48:00] |
| [ | Tags | | | music, tech | ] |
| [ | i've got a brain like a jukebox |
| | billy ray gibbons and orlando cyrus | ] |
i use windows media player (10.00.00.4036 in case you're wondering) at work to play CDs. it has this nifty feature which tells you which CD you're playing, presumably by hashing various pieces of information from the disc and looking the hash up in a table stored somewhere else. you've likely all experienced a similar thing at some point.
 i just put in a CD of early english baroque music by orlando gibbons, performed on viols and organ by jordi savall, christophe coin, sergi casademunt, and johannes sonnleitner. the recording is from 1979, and was released (i think originally on vinyl) on the french label auvidis-astrée.
 of course, occasionally media player can't identify the CD, and just says "unknown disc". that sort of an outcome wouldn't have been surprising for a disc like this one. what's more surprsing is what it did come up with - a CD called "some gave all" by one billy ray cyrus. i'm currently listening to track 4, which the case claims is "Fantasie VII", but media player insists is actually called "Wher'm I Gonna Live?".
weirdness. |
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| bifecta |
[Mon 2007/04/23|16:32:00] |
- are pylons thus yclept because you can pile them on top of each other?
- if you were making a weedding-themed cheese plate, it's fairly obvious how you could do old, new, and blue. but how would you do "borrowed" cheese...?
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| capturing sound |
[Thu 2007/04/19|10:52:00] |
 a while back, david byrne's blog lead me to the discovery of mark katz's book Capturing Sound How Technology Has Changed Music. as it's a topic in which i'm highly interested (as a musician, i'm still not entirely convinced that recording has been a good thing [EDIT: make that a wholly good thing] for music), i was glad to get access to a copy.
the book is structured (mostly) like a seven-armed starfish with a seven-armed starfish in the middle. after a first chapter setting out seven general types of effects that recording has on music, he proceeds to a series of seven case studies on various interactions of music and tech.
his general types of effects are:
- tangibility: turning music into a physical object
- portability: turning music into something that can happen anywhere
- (in)visibility: removing the visual component of performance - the audients can't see the musicians, the musicians can't see the audients
- repeatability: allowing a single performance to be heard more than once
- temporailty: constraining the length of time a musical performance can take (in the days if 78s, this was very short. LPs and CDs made it significantly longer, and now with MP3s and similar technologies, we're probably getting to the point where this is less of a factor)
- receptivity: changing the techniques by which music is produced due to the differences in sensitivity between human ears and recording equipment
- manipulability: doing things to musical performance after it's been
performed recorded
he then proceeds to ( his case studies )
the book comes with a 13-track CD of selections discussed in the text and illustrative examples, of which tracks i've so far only listened to a few. [EDIT: have now listened to most of it. a number of interesting things there. also a few that i found less interesting (by the third comparasion of early violin vibrato, i'd gotten the point.)]
all in all, an interesting investigation, or series of investigations actually. the main weakness i felt was the lack of a single, coherent thesis. but perhaps that's part of his point - the effects of recording on music are many and diverse. coming up with a single conclusion may be impossible. |
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| worng notes |
[Tue 2007/03/20|06:32:00] |
from fripp's diary, a fun paired anecdote on performing:
Much better that the performer internalizes the music they play, rather than relying on charts. But sometimes, charts are necessary. On this occasion, I was reading the chart to Spick And Spanish so missed a position shift – but only by one fret. You don’t get much closer than that! However, the music sounded as if you couldn’t get much further than that. Afterwards, I mentioned the unfortunate accident to St. Edith, supportive Mother & driver of her young son to early engagements & guitar lessons. Edie’s reply, with all the love & forgiveable lying-through-the-teeth that a Sainted Mother might bestow on a response: you were the only one who noticed it.
Some 12 years after this, Mrs. Gartell invited her then-successful guitar pupil & second-violinist to a performance of the KG CMSofM in a Corfe Mullen hall. Young instrumentalists, with their loving Parents, milled around as students took turns in performing. One of these, a violinist probably about 10 years old, went onstage & played an unaccompanied violin solo. Somewhere within his chosen piece, he found a note unknown to the Western tonal harmonic tradition, and presented it to his audience of the willing. Afterwards, I heard him discussing his performance with his Father, commenting on his wrong note. The Father replied: you were the only one who noticed it.
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| speculative policy |
[Wed 2007/02/07|06:29:00] |
my brain doesn't generate fictional characters. instead, it generates fictional policies. then i wonder "what would happen if that policy were implemented?" two that've recent crossed my mind:
- corporations are responsible for the garbage they create: the cost of collection for any piece of trash collected from city streets etc that has a corporate logo on it gets billed to the company.
- an anti-sprawl measure: people are only allowed to move to new homes if the new home does not increase their average weekly commute.
the second is certainly more draconian than anything i'd actually support, and the first might be too. but i'm still curious: how would society change if either one were implemented? how would people game the system?
EDIT: of course, a milder version of #2 would be a carbon tax... |
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