Alex combined existing words to describe new objects: "corknut" for an unshelled almond and "banerry" for an apple (outside like a cherry, inside like a banana).
I read about Alex many years ago in one of my science periodicals and it's pretty disappointing to see him go so young. I hope it wasn't the stress of all the experiments.
And it's not just because of this article. As a lowercase-"l" libertarian I'm concerned about a Hillary Clinton vs. Rudy Giuliani race in '08, talk about a rock and a hard place.
You never know, with tons of pressure on a thin, unnaturally strong string, you might be able to get it to vibrate back and forth faster than the speed of sound...is there a study regarding this, or a physical law that prevents it from happening? Hmmm...
The big villain in equal temperament is the sharp major thirds, perfect fifths and fourths are very close to the arbitrary ones, at 702 and 498 cents respectively. We're used to it enough to tolerate it but it's not the whole story of modern music.
We hear just-temperament tuning all the time. Consider that the overtones of resonant instruments are tuned perfectly (C-octave, G-fifth, C-fourth, E-major third, G-minor third, then that weird flat-seven Bb interval that still manages to be in tune, then C-major second) and you'll see that it really does get beaten into us all the time. Barbershop and even high school or college choirs end up with perfectly-tuned chords, often by accident, but it's natural. Really only modern keyboard instruments (organ, piano, glockenspiel, whatever) and electronic music (although some of the experimental stuff is just-toned) are based on equal temperament. Most other instruments are flexible enough (lipping, slides, fretless, half-holed, embouchure, whatever) to play tuned chords in whatever key.
Setting up a Yamaha electronic piano to play in one of the various unequal temperaments was quite an eye-opening experience for me, and it confirmed everything my music teacher had already been telling me. How good the pure chords sounded was almost as striking as how bad chords out of the key center sounded (Ab in Pure C, blech). I've become curious about studio pitch-correctors that seem to be so common in modern, over-produced 'music' - I know they are set up for analysing and correcting pitches to fit in certain keys, but are they equal- or just-tempered?
Piano strings are certainly not very slack, and a guitar cannot EVER have several tons of tension on its neck (or at the bridge, or anywhere). Assuming the guitar was made of cast iron instead of wood (which is typically solid, and steel-bar-reinforced at best) and did not instantly collapse from the tension, you wouldn't even be able to pluck the strings. Assuming you were Superman and could actually pluck a string, the pitch would be hypersonic and inaudible to all (except your Super-hearing I suppose).
Classical guitars have an average of about 25 pounds of tension per string. Of course it's slightly more for steel-stringed abominations (hence the neck reinforcement).
I'm pretty sure he didn't have "it" when he started at college, but after enough practice my friend Rhonert got the hang of it. He can whip out any pitch now on demand and he's always been confirmed to be right. At least in his case, holding himself to a higher standard and becoming immersed in musical performance and music nerd culture did the trick.
I, on the other hand, have excellent relative pitch (I can tell you if a sequential interval is out of tune by 10 cents, wide or narrow) but only a weak sense of absolute pitch - if I guess a pitch I'll be close but typically flat, occasionally sharp, and it usually depends on how well my voice is doing that day, whether I'm singing the pitch or not, or if I can associate that pitch with a song I know well. When I spontaneously break out into a favourite aria in public I'm usually very near the original key, but a popular or traditional song I will definitely sing in the key of Comfortable!
Helmoltz's book "On the Sensations of Tone" written in the mid-19th century has an entire section devoted to pitch wandering over time (and region).
Apparently tuning forks are very accurate and do not degrade more than a few cents over hundreds of years. Typically every major hall would have its own tuning fork, owned by the master conductor or organist. Occasionally, in some traditions, the choir would have a much lower lower "A" pitch (400-415Hz was typical, even less was possible) than the orchestral or chamber musicians.
I can scarcely imagine how they worked this out if an instrumentalist or two were borrowed for the choir. I guess key-change slides for brass horns would come in handy. Dark times...
My thoughts exactly. Games of Unreal Tournament and the like are won by decisions made in 100 milliseconds. Waste 50 extra milliseconds not pulling the trigger and your brains get splattered all over by the guy sitting across from you (or the Godlike bot). If I start "flowing" enough my conscious mind doesn't even get in the way (hence the 'twitch' appellation), that's how I come out on top. Economy of thought. Doesn't work as well in CTF with team damage on...
I found Defender to be much easier than Sinistar - of course I played Defender all the time on a cabinet in my grandma's backyard at a young age, but yeah, Sinistar is way harder. It's the only video game that makes me suffer from motion sickness.
Unfortunately there's not much to tell. Dad only tests for things like ppm or ppb of health-affecting things like arsenic and chromium. He doesn't have the (very new and fancy) equipment for analysing for drug usage like the article is talking about, so he just mails samples of the influent (sewage coming in) to the ONDCP (he said it was a guy with a cabinet-level position but he can't remember right now).
Okay, actually, he doesn't test it, he just mails(!) influent samples to the ONDCP (that's what the weird part was). He knows for sure it's to test for cocaine metabolite, not sure about others like methamphetamines. Been going on since March '06 apparently.
Why don't you ask my dad? He's been a labtech at the Riverside Wastewater Treatment Plant for over 20 years now. He told me last year that they made him start checking for metabolic byproducts of illegal drugs (I forget who he mails the results back to, either DHS or the White House, rather odd I thought).
Well I guess if you're not going to, I'll ask him later tonight.
I felt a little burned by AMD too as I was a very early Socket 754 adopter. I was still planning on getting a Socket AM2 system, though, until the Core 2 Duo came out. It's nice to know that I can drop in a dirt cheap quad-core CPU in a year or two and not have to upgrade to Socket 1207!
What a coincidence, I'm 2 for 2 with E6600 > 3GHz overclocks as well, with the fancy-pants Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus. I used third-party heatsinks as I live in a desert area (it's 85F inside right now).
Cyrix 200MX: overclocked to 83MHz bus, "never had a problem" AMD K6-2 350MHz: overclocked to 400MHz, "never had a problem" AMD K6-III 400MHz: overclocked to 450MHz, "never had a problem" Didn't overclock the Athlon Slot A 700MHz, T-Bird 1.4GHz, either of my two Athlon XP 2500+ systems, or the Athlon 64 3400+, didn't get good steppings, so the payoff wouldn't have been much. I was also betrayed by a series of poor-quality VIA-chipset motherboards, I don't buy those anymore. Intel Core 2 Duo E6600: overclocked to 3.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 667MHz RAM, stock voltage, no problems so far! This CPU is still faster than any retail Intel CPU available. I built a similarly overclocked system for a friend the next month, but with an 8800GTX instead of a 7950GX2. I'm quite jealous.
You have to try pretty hard nowadays to blow a system up. At the time I built the Intel system I calculated a significant savings over buying the 2.93GHz X6800 even after including the third-party cooler and high-end motherboard, and I ended up with a much, much faster FSB in the process. I may have even been able to get away with the stock heatsink/fan, but I'll never know now. The system itself is faster, cooler, and quieter than my non-overclocked Athlon 64, and I'm not about to mess with success.
People who have problems overclocking simply need to bone up on their processor-fu by checking out processor revisions and steppings, the previous successes and failures of others with identical CPU, and also by optimising case airflow (liquid cooling is a net loss in my opinion due to cost of entry, long-term maintenance, and the consequences of cooling system leakage or pump failure).
Re:I always enjoy interviews with Jon Von Tetzchne
on
A Talk With Opera CEO
·
· Score: 1
Late to the party?? I've been using Opera for ten years! I'd say it's more like the rest of the world that's late to the party.
While I applaud your willingness to stand up and quote an appropriate Bible verse to make an excellent point, the teachings of Jesus as preserved in the four Gospels rarely formed the foundation of the practice of Christianity during the time periods that SatanicPuppy was referencing. The United States of America really has its philosophical and ideological roots in the ongoing Age of Enlightenment. Hmm, looks like Wikipedia agrees with me for the moment. Guess I won't have to edit it.
In any case, I daresay that the Jesus of the Gospels is even more difficult to find nowadays.
John Holt and John Taylor Gatto are two of my personal heroes. My mother met Mr. Gatto at some sort of homeschooling conference shortly after pulling me out of kindergarten and was influenced by his unschooling philosophy. I taught myself to read by age 5, and mom always joked that I was slow - she learned by the age of three. Our IQs are otherwise similar (between 160-165) and dad's no slouch either (never tested).
I was simply given the tools to become autodidactic and learned at a fantastic rate, easily handling college-level material by the time I was 10 or so, and learning Bible-era Greek by 13 (Spanish at 14, started Japanese at 18, not done yet!). Later that year I got a high school diploma from a charter school and enrolled in a local community college, where I aced all of their computer courses.
For better or worse, it seems that most of my particular genius-level abilities have been made obsolete by the advent of certain tools on the Internet. My photographic memory and the resulting encyclopedic knowledge has been replaced by the popular usage of Google and Wikipedia as cyber-implant brain proxies, and nobody cares how well-spoken or dextrous with languages I am over the Internet. The only thing I have left is musical talent but nobody listens to opera or any kind of classical music anymore. I get the distinct impression that the only geniuses the school system ever cared for were math and science savants, and it seems like they're the only ones who ever mattered in the first place. Oh, well...
If you go to Preferences, click on Browsing, and click on the Advanced tab, you'll see a combo-box supertitled "Loading" which allows you to set Opera to redraw instantly (as the data comes in), after 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 seconds, or after the whole page is loaded (which is about as stupid of a setting as it gets).
If Opera wasn't around I probably wouldn't use the Internet nearly as much as I do...dial-up sucks enough with it.
It does some other magical things for slow connection users, besides instant back and forward navigation thanks to savvy RAM cache handling, it also doesn't preload elements with the display:none attribute, saving me plenty of time.
You're quite right about the xHF sensitivity - CRT televisions practically scream at me, from hundreds of feet away, and people treat me like I'm insane. Possibly not coincidentally, I'm currently building up my aria repertoire for opera company auditions.
Right now I'm listening to a 320kbps rip of Dark Side of the Moon on a pair of modestly-priced studio monitor headphones and I've just heard some mushy, squishy spots - but I can't find my CD of it to verify that I've actually heard a difference.
The tone generator I tried out on my PC doesn't go over 20,000Hz - is there a way to practically, safely, and reliably generate tones above that frequency in the comfort of my own home? I'd like to see how far up I can actually hear (but not only "plug up my ears" as you say).
1. The Christian holy book.
2. The Jewish holy book that was largely incorporated into the Christian Bible.
3. The analogous holy book of another religion.
4. A specific version, edition, translation, or copy of any of the above.
Hmmm...I just realised I've practised pedanticism in defense of humour.
Considering how much editorial work the 'editors' around here actually do I wouldn't be surprised at people habitually auto-correcting the spelling in an article title and summary. Still, in the context of atime, relatime makes a little bit more sense than realtime.
Re:Bitter Tears Of Microsoft Fanboys
on
Blue Blu-ray
·
· Score: 1
You have a CED VideoDisc player? Is it a Zenith? What movies do you have?
Slashdot Mirror
Alex combined existing words to describe new objects: "corknut" for an unshelled almond and "banerry" for an apple (outside like a cherry, inside like a banana).
I read about Alex many years ago in one of my science periodicals and it's pretty disappointing to see him go so young. I hope it wasn't the stress of all the experiments.
Yeah, I sure do.
And it's not just because of this article. As a lowercase-"l" libertarian I'm concerned about a Hillary Clinton vs. Rudy Giuliani race in '08, talk about a rock and a hard place.
You never know, with tons of pressure on a thin, unnaturally strong string, you might be able to get it to vibrate back and forth faster than the speed of sound...is there a study regarding this, or a physical law that prevents it from happening? Hmmm...
The big villain in equal temperament is the sharp major thirds, perfect fifths and fourths are very close to the arbitrary ones, at 702 and 498 cents respectively. We're used to it enough to tolerate it but it's not the whole story of modern music.
We hear just-temperament tuning all the time. Consider that the overtones of resonant instruments are tuned perfectly (C-octave, G-fifth, C-fourth, E-major third, G-minor third, then that weird flat-seven Bb interval that still manages to be in tune, then C-major second) and you'll see that it really does get beaten into us all the time. Barbershop and even high school or college choirs end up with perfectly-tuned chords, often by accident, but it's natural. Really only modern keyboard instruments (organ, piano, glockenspiel, whatever) and electronic music (although some of the experimental stuff is just-toned) are based on equal temperament. Most other instruments are flexible enough (lipping, slides, fretless, half-holed, embouchure, whatever) to play tuned chords in whatever key.
Setting up a Yamaha electronic piano to play in one of the various unequal temperaments was quite an eye-opening experience for me, and it confirmed everything my music teacher had already been telling me. How good the pure chords sounded was almost as striking as how bad chords out of the key center sounded (Ab in Pure C, blech). I've become curious about studio pitch-correctors that seem to be so common in modern, over-produced 'music' - I know they are set up for analysing and correcting pitches to fit in certain keys, but are they equal- or just-tempered?
Piano strings are certainly not very slack, and a guitar cannot EVER have several tons of tension on its neck (or at the bridge, or anywhere). Assuming the guitar was made of cast iron instead of wood (which is typically solid, and steel-bar-reinforced at best) and did not instantly collapse from the tension, you wouldn't even be able to pluck the strings. Assuming you were Superman and could actually pluck a string, the pitch would be hypersonic and inaudible to all (except your Super-hearing I suppose).
Classical guitars have an average of about 25 pounds of tension per string. Of course it's slightly more for steel-stringed abominations (hence the neck reinforcement).
I'm pretty sure he didn't have "it" when he started at college, but after enough practice my friend Rhonert got the hang of it. He can whip out any pitch now on demand and he's always been confirmed to be right. At least in his case, holding himself to a higher standard and becoming immersed in musical performance and music nerd culture did the trick.
I, on the other hand, have excellent relative pitch (I can tell you if a sequential interval is out of tune by 10 cents, wide or narrow) but only a weak sense of absolute pitch - if I guess a pitch I'll be close but typically flat, occasionally sharp, and it usually depends on how well my voice is doing that day, whether I'm singing the pitch or not, or if I can associate that pitch with a song I know well. When I spontaneously break out into a favourite aria in public I'm usually very near the original key, but a popular or traditional song I will definitely sing in the key of Comfortable!
Helmoltz's book "On the Sensations of Tone" written in the mid-19th century has an entire section devoted to pitch wandering over time (and region).
Apparently tuning forks are very accurate and do not degrade more than a few cents over hundreds of years. Typically every major hall would have its own tuning fork, owned by the master conductor or organist. Occasionally, in some traditions, the choir would have a much lower lower "A" pitch (400-415Hz was typical, even less was possible) than the orchestral or chamber musicians.
I can scarcely imagine how they worked this out if an instrumentalist or two were borrowed for the choir. I guess key-change slides for brass horns would come in handy. Dark times...
Separate registers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMD
My thoughts exactly. Games of Unreal Tournament and the like are won by decisions made in 100 milliseconds. Waste 50 extra milliseconds not pulling the trigger and your brains get splattered all over by the guy sitting across from you (or the Godlike bot). If I start "flowing" enough my conscious mind doesn't even get in the way (hence the 'twitch' appellation), that's how I come out on top. Economy of thought. Doesn't work as well in CTF with team damage on...
I found Defender to be much easier than Sinistar - of course I played Defender all the time on a cabinet in my grandma's backyard at a young age, but yeah, Sinistar is way harder. It's the only video game that makes me suffer from motion sickness.
Unfortunately there's not much to tell. Dad only tests for things like ppm or ppb of health-affecting things like arsenic and chromium. He doesn't have the (very new and fancy) equipment for analysing for drug usage like the article is talking about, so he just mails samples of the influent (sewage coming in) to the ONDCP (he said it was a guy with a cabinet-level position but he can't remember right now).
:)
Sorry it couldn't be any "juicier"...
Okay, actually, he doesn't test it, he just mails(!) influent samples to the ONDCP (that's what the weird part was). He knows for sure it's to test for cocaine metabolite, not sure about others like methamphetamines. Been going on since March '06 apparently.
Why don't you ask my dad? He's been a labtech at the Riverside Wastewater Treatment Plant for over 20 years now. He told me last year that they made him start checking for metabolic byproducts of illegal drugs (I forget who he mails the results back to, either DHS or the White House, rather odd I thought).
Well I guess if you're not going to, I'll ask him later tonight.
I felt a little burned by AMD too as I was a very early Socket 754 adopter. I was still planning on getting a Socket AM2 system, though, until the Core 2 Duo came out. It's nice to know that I can drop in a dirt cheap quad-core CPU in a year or two and not have to upgrade to Socket 1207!
What a coincidence, I'm 2 for 2 with E6600 > 3GHz overclocks as well, with the fancy-pants Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus. I used third-party heatsinks as I live in a desert area (it's 85F inside right now).
Cyrix 200MX: overclocked to 83MHz bus, "never had a problem"
AMD K6-2 350MHz: overclocked to 400MHz, "never had a problem"
AMD K6-III 400MHz: overclocked to 450MHz, "never had a problem"
Didn't overclock the Athlon Slot A 700MHz, T-Bird 1.4GHz, either of my two Athlon XP 2500+ systems, or the Athlon 64 3400+, didn't get good steppings, so the payoff wouldn't have been much. I was also betrayed by a series of poor-quality VIA-chipset motherboards, I don't buy those anymore.
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600: overclocked to 3.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 667MHz RAM, stock voltage, no problems so far! This CPU is still faster than any retail Intel CPU available. I built a similarly overclocked system for a friend the next month, but with an 8800GTX instead of a 7950GX2. I'm quite jealous.
You have to try pretty hard nowadays to blow a system up. At the time I built the Intel system I calculated a significant savings over buying the 2.93GHz X6800 even after including the third-party cooler and high-end motherboard, and I ended up with a much, much faster FSB in the process. I may have even been able to get away with the stock heatsink/fan, but I'll never know now. The system itself is faster, cooler, and quieter than my non-overclocked Athlon 64, and I'm not about to mess with success.
People who have problems overclocking simply need to bone up on their processor-fu by checking out processor revisions and steppings, the previous successes and failures of others with identical CPU, and also by optimising case airflow (liquid cooling is a net loss in my opinion due to cost of entry, long-term maintenance, and the consequences of cooling system leakage or pump failure).
Late to the party?? I've been using Opera for ten years! I'd say it's more like the rest of the world that's late to the party.
While I applaud your willingness to stand up and quote an appropriate Bible verse to make an excellent point, the teachings of Jesus as preserved in the four Gospels rarely formed the foundation of the practice of Christianity during the time periods that SatanicPuppy was referencing. The United States of America really has its philosophical and ideological roots in the ongoing Age of Enlightenment. Hmm, looks like Wikipedia agrees with me for the moment. Guess I won't have to edit it.
In any case, I daresay that the Jesus of the Gospels is even more difficult to find nowadays.
John Holt and John Taylor Gatto are two of my personal heroes. My mother met Mr. Gatto at some sort of homeschooling conference shortly after pulling me out of kindergarten and was influenced by his unschooling philosophy. I taught myself to read by age 5, and mom always joked that I was slow - she learned by the age of three. Our IQs are otherwise similar (between 160-165) and dad's no slouch either (never tested).
I was simply given the tools to become autodidactic and learned at a fantastic rate, easily handling college-level material by the time I was 10 or so, and learning Bible-era Greek by 13 (Spanish at 14, started Japanese at 18, not done yet!). Later that year I got a high school diploma from a charter school and enrolled in a local community college, where I aced all of their computer courses.
For better or worse, it seems that most of my particular genius-level abilities have been made obsolete by the advent of certain tools on the Internet. My photographic memory and the resulting encyclopedic knowledge has been replaced by the popular usage of Google and Wikipedia as cyber-implant brain proxies, and nobody cares how well-spoken or dextrous with languages I am over the Internet. The only thing I have left is musical talent but nobody listens to opera or any kind of classical music anymore. I get the distinct impression that the only geniuses the school system ever cared for were math and science savants, and it seems like they're the only ones who ever mattered in the first place. Oh, well...
Uhh, intriguing? How could you possibly find it intriguing? It's simply twitter's nature to post things like that.
Would you trip a retard?
Yup, Opera is truly a glorious browser.
If you go to Preferences, click on Browsing, and click on the Advanced tab, you'll see a combo-box supertitled "Loading" which allows you to set Opera to redraw instantly (as the data comes in), after 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 seconds, or after the whole page is loaded (which is about as stupid of a setting as it gets).
If Opera wasn't around I probably wouldn't use the Internet nearly as much as I do...dial-up sucks enough with it.
It does some other magical things for slow connection users, besides instant back and forward navigation thanks to savvy RAM cache handling, it also doesn't preload elements with the display:none attribute, saving me plenty of time.
You're quite right about the xHF sensitivity - CRT televisions practically scream at me, from hundreds of feet away, and people treat me like I'm insane. Possibly not coincidentally, I'm currently building up my aria repertoire for opera company auditions.
Right now I'm listening to a 320kbps rip of Dark Side of the Moon on a pair of modestly-priced studio monitor headphones and I've just heard some mushy, squishy spots - but I can't find my CD of it to verify that I've actually heard a difference.
The tone generator I tried out on my PC doesn't go over 20,000Hz - is there a way to practically, safely, and reliably generate tones above that frequency in the comfort of my own home? I'd like to see how far up I can actually hear (but not only "plug up my ears" as you say).
Excuse me, but the title and summary clearly mentioned a SuperBible, not a Superbible.
The capitalisation of Bible clearly references the proper noun:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bible
Proper noun
1. The Christian holy book.
2. The Jewish holy book that was largely incorporated into the Christian Bible.
3. The analogous holy book of another religion.
4. A specific version, edition, translation, or copy of any of the above.
Hmmm...I just realised I've practised pedanticism in defense of humour.
A few comments up our venerable friend Twitter fell into the same trap:
c id=20162589
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=264507&
Considering how much editorial work the 'editors' around here actually do I wouldn't be surprised at people habitually auto-correcting the spelling in an article title and summary. Still, in the context of atime, relatime makes a little bit more sense than realtime.
You have a CED VideoDisc player? Is it a Zenith? What movies do you have?