I agree that a two-class system of editors wouldn't be desirable. I think that the basic idea of an encyclopedia by the people for the people is great. But it seems that in the past few years there has been a considerable rise of exclusionism on WP (the English WP isn't the worst offender, I admit, but it's quite noticeable there, too). For me, one of the strong points of WP has always been the broad coverage of up-to-date and minor topics. This is what makes it a valuable resource for me; if I want the Encyclopedia Britannica I know where to find it.
But nowadays I notice that the notability guideline is wielded all to often in order to get rid of well-written and factually correct articles. This just destroys value; it adds nothing. Worse, it strongly discourages knowledgeable editors from contributing. Nothing is more frustrating than wasting a considerable amount of time on an article just to have it deleted a few days later.
WP needs to go back to its roots. For a start, I think that WP should just get rid of this silly notability guideline. IMHO it's better to err in favor of including a subject. There are other, more objective instruments to judge the quality of an article.
You make it sound as if older researchers like me don't know how to operate a browser or how to enter wiki code. Quite the opposite. We grew up with the Internet as well, even before it was called that.:)
The real problem with WP is that its policies don't encourage editing, because you know that most of the time your articles are being deleted or edited by self-proclaimed experts until they are rendered useless.
Why would this be any more of a problem? Academic authors ought to be able to cite research papers just like anyone else; in fact, they could even cite their own publications.
Have you actually tried? You cite your own (refereed) research papers, some smart-ass comes along and flags the article for deletion because it's not backed up by at least half a dozen third party sources and hence the subject is not "notable" enough.
IMHO (and in my own experience), that's the real reason why many academics stop contributing to WP. WP needs to change its policies (in particular, the notability guidelines) or find some other way to keep the deletionists at bay.
Given JIT compiler frameworks such as LLVM (http://llvm.org/), there's no reason that an interpreter environment can't be as fast (asymptotically) as "real" compiled code any more. The real divide is between static and dynamic typing now. The latter gives more flexibility (unrestricted polymorphism), but defers type checks until runtime which of course incurs a runtime cost.
Of course the absolute pitches are just convention, but, as already noted elsewhere, the relative pitches (frequency ratios a.k.a. musical intervals) aren't. They are more or less given by the physical laws of sound generation and how our ears and brains perceive a mixture of partials and assign one or more pitches to it. It's true that, as far as our knowledge of history goes back, the Greeks (and possibly the Babylonians before them) invented those "natural" scales, but that doesn't mean that they are totally arbitrary.
There are other kinds of instruments which produce different, non-harmonic spectra, especially in non-Western music, and these also use different scales (like in gamelan music). It has been argued that the scales these musical cultures use relate to the spectra of their instruments as well, see Sethares, Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale. Specifically, it seems that scale pitches are usually very near to points where the total auditory dissonance attains local minima. (Auditory dissonance is due to different partials exciting the same "critical band" on the cochlea, when hearing two or more complex tones sounding together in musical intervals or chords.)
Another possible (but, AFAIK, at the moment still hypothetical) explanation of at least the "harmonic" scales is certain kinds of "phase-locking" oscillations of pairs of neuron groups forming a kind of "neural oscillators" with non-linear resonances.
Also, note that we share a lot of our ear apparatus (and quite possibly also a part of the central auditory nervous system) with other mammals, so some of this might actually be relevant to other mammals as well.
I'm surprised that there are so many knowlegable folks on slash here that can discuss music and the physics of music
Me too.:) Myself I'm a mathematician who happens to lead a computer music department, so I guess I'm supposed to know this stuff.
One thing that I'm lacking is a good reference on the theory. For example, I know that "no sharps of flats" is the key of C-major/A-minor. Why? Is it by definition?
Basically, yes. But the details are surprisingly complicated. I've also noticed time and again that many musicians know zilch about this, as it involves a good deal of mathematics and physics and many musicians abhor these subjects. If you're looking for online materials, it might be worth to take a look at the Just Intonation Network which has a wealth of information on different kinds of tunings and the rationale behind them, as well as links to the literature. And then there's the Tuning & temperament bibliography. Last but not least, if you want to get really serious about learning the mathematics behind music, I'd recommend Mazzola's tome Topos of Music.
J.S. Bach popularized the modern scale with his "Well tempered Clavier"
Not true. The WTC was actually written for, well, a "well-tempered" scale (musicologists and music theorists are still debating which one it was, there were various during Baroque). In well-tempered scales different keys still sound different (hence the point of having 24 pairs of preludes and fugues in 24 different keys), whereas in equal temperament (the modern tuning) they all sound the same.
Unfortunately, a fifth or even a third for a given key is slightly out of tune (the half step and the octave are the only perfectly in tune intervals on a modern day piano.)
And even saying that, many pianos employ "stretch tuning", where notes are tuned progressively sharper the higher up the keyboard they are. So octaves aren't even tuned in tune either...
Neither is the equal-tempered halfstep/semitone (as the GP incorrectly asserted), in just intonation it's usually something like 16/15 (depending on which step it actually is inside the scale), from which the ET semitone is some 12 cents flat...
I hate to break the news to you, but your proposed "silver bullet" is hardly something new. Synchronous dataflow has been with us at least since the 1970s. It's great for designing hardware, DSP software and other simple kinds of algorithms, but as a panacea for all the diseases of the software world? I wish I had some of the stuff that you're smoking.:)
Now, asynchronous dataflow (with the appropriate support for dealing with complex data structures) might actually be helpful to slash some of the complexities of developing efficient software for massively parallel computers, and in fact there has been renewed interest in such techniques since the 1990s, especially in functional programming circles (see, e.g., the work on "functional reactive programming" by Yale's Haskell group and others, http://www.haskell.org/frp/).
But, as others have already pointed out, there's still billions of lines of "legacy" code to support if you want to go to market with such a system. So even if modern dataflow models prove useful for multicore architectures, they will still be confined to special niches for quite some time, IMHO.
Well, this isn't designed to be like Logic, it's advanced tracker software instead. You probably want a sequencer software like Rosegarden: http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
Agreed, it's inferior to the 48s/g series, it's not much worse, unlike the interim HPs and every other graphing calc out there.
I actually prefer the 50G keyboard with the ENTER key in the bottom right corner, even though I'm a long time HP/RPN fan.
I have a 48GX, a 49G and 50G, and for me the 50G wins hands down, mostly because of the nicer and larger screen, much greater speed and the SD card slot. Another big advantage over the 48G/49G calculators is the ability to run C programs (compiled to ARM code using hpgcc: http://hpgcc.org/) for tasks where speed is critical.
As for the documentation, the printed documentation is severely lacking.
That might be due to the sheer amount of available functions, much more than even in the 48G. A decent manual for the 50G, in the style of the good old manuals, would be at least the size of a phone book. (Well, more or less you already have that if you combine the user guide and advanced reference manuals available as pdfs from HP's website.) Anyway, a wealth of additional documentation is available on http://www.hpcalc.org/, and there's also a new wiki http://hp50g.pbwiki.com/ whose purpose it is to make the docs more accessible to the beginner.
Re:GTK is alright...but no raves
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 1
Well, if you want GTK+ with the brevity of Tcl/Tk, then you might wish to try Gnocl: http://www.dr-baum.net/gnocl/ Great stuff.
Shameless plug: Those of you who like Erlang might also wish to give Q a try. http://q-lang.sf.net/ Pattern matching is at the heart of the interpreter, as the language is based on general term rewriting instead of the lambda calculus. Fairly pragmatic language as well (interpreted, dynamically typed). Comes with a system interface, XML/XSLT support, Apache module, OpenGL interface, modules for doing computer music and multimedia stuff etc. Q still has still to prove itself on something like the ICFP programming contest, but it's quite usable already (IMHO).
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that a two-class system of editors wouldn't be desirable. I think that the basic idea of an encyclopedia by the people for the people is great. But it seems that in the past few years there has been a considerable rise of exclusionism on WP (the English WP isn't the worst offender, I admit, but it's quite noticeable there, too). For me, one of the strong points of WP has always been the broad coverage of up-to-date and minor topics. This is what makes it a valuable resource for me; if I want the Encyclopedia Britannica I know where to find it.
But nowadays I notice that the notability guideline is wielded all to often in order to get rid of well-written and factually correct articles. This just destroys value; it adds nothing. Worse, it strongly discourages knowledgeable editors from contributing. Nothing is more frustrating than wasting a considerable amount of time on an article just to have it deleted a few days later.
WP needs to go back to its roots. For a start, I think that WP should just get rid of this silly notability guideline. IMHO it's better to err in favor of including a subject. There are other, more objective instruments to judge the quality of an article.
You make it sound as if older researchers like me don't know how to operate a browser or how to enter wiki code. Quite the opposite. We grew up with the Internet as well, even before it was called that. :)
The real problem with WP is that its policies don't encourage editing, because you know that most of the time your articles are being deleted or edited by self-proclaimed experts until they are rendered useless.
Why would this be any more of a problem? Academic authors ought to be able to cite research papers just like anyone else; in fact, they could even cite their own publications.
Have you actually tried? You cite your own (refereed) research papers, some smart-ass comes along and flags the article for deletion because it's not backed up by at least half a dozen third party sources and hence the subject is not "notable" enough.
IMHO (and in my own experience), that's the real reason why many academics stop contributing to WP. WP needs to change its policies (in particular, the notability guidelines) or find some other way to keep the deletionists at bay.
Well, any problem in NPC is a "special case" of any other problem in NPC, up to polynomial reductions. That's what completeness means.
Given JIT compiler frameworks such as LLVM (http://llvm.org/), there's no reason that an interpreter environment can't be as fast (asymptotically) as "real" compiled code any more. The real divide is between static and dynamic typing now. The latter gives more flexibility (unrestricted polymorphism), but defers type checks until runtime which of course incurs a runtime cost.
Of course the absolute pitches are just convention, but, as already noted elsewhere, the relative pitches (frequency ratios a.k.a. musical intervals) aren't. They are more or less given by the physical laws of sound generation and how our ears and brains perceive a mixture of partials and assign one or more pitches to it. It's true that, as far as our knowledge of history goes back, the Greeks (and possibly the Babylonians before them) invented those "natural" scales, but that doesn't mean that they are totally arbitrary.
There are other kinds of instruments which produce different, non-harmonic spectra, especially in non-Western music, and these also use different scales (like in gamelan music). It has been argued that the scales these musical cultures use relate to the spectra of their instruments as well, see Sethares, Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale. Specifically, it seems that scale pitches are usually very near to points where the total auditory dissonance attains local minima. (Auditory dissonance is due to different partials exciting the same "critical band" on the cochlea, when hearing two or more complex tones sounding together in musical intervals or chords.)
Another possible (but, AFAIK, at the moment still hypothetical) explanation of at least the "harmonic" scales is certain kinds of "phase-locking" oscillations of pairs of neuron groups forming a kind of "neural oscillators" with non-linear resonances.
Also, note that we share a lot of our ear apparatus (and quite possibly also a part of the central auditory nervous system) with other mammals, so some of this might actually be relevant to other mammals as well.
I hate to break the news to you, but your proposed "silver bullet" is hardly something new. Synchronous dataflow has been with us at least since the 1970s. It's great for designing hardware, DSP software and other simple kinds of algorithms, but as a panacea for all the diseases of the software world? I wish I had some of the stuff that you're smoking. :)
Now, asynchronous dataflow (with the appropriate support for dealing with complex data structures) might actually be helpful to slash some of the complexities of developing efficient software for massively parallel computers, and in fact there has been renewed interest in such techniques since the 1990s, especially in functional programming circles (see, e.g., the work on "functional reactive programming" by Yale's Haskell group and others, http://www.haskell.org/frp/).
But, as others have already pointed out, there's still billions of lines of "legacy" code to support if you want to go to market with such a system. So even if modern dataflow models prove useful for multicore architectures, they will still be confined to special niches for quite some time, IMHO.
There are other ways of composing music than scribbling notes on score paper or its virtual equivalent. Ever heard of algorithmic composition? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_compositi on
Well, this isn't designed to be like Logic, it's advanced tracker software instead. You probably want a sequencer software like Rosegarden: http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
Well, if you want GTK+ with the brevity of Tcl/Tk, then you might wish to try Gnocl: http://www.dr-baum.net/gnocl/ Great stuff.
Shameless plug: Those of you who like Erlang might also wish to give Q a try. http://q-lang.sf.net/ Pattern matching is at the heart of the interpreter, as the language is based on general term rewriting instead of the lambda calculus. Fairly pragmatic language as well (interpreted, dynamically typed). Comes with a system interface, XML/XSLT support, Apache module, OpenGL interface, modules for doing computer music and multimedia stuff etc. Q still has still to prove itself on something like the ICFP programming contest, but it's quite usable already (IMHO).