Metal is a vast country and it is easy to get lost or to only encounter things that clash with your own preferences. I was a marginal metalhead for years before finding a bunch of bands that hit the sweet spot for me.
Learning the geography helps a lot with avoiding the things that annoy you and finding more that delight you.
Well, the Nazis were extremly advanced in their electioneering pre-1933. At least in Germany they were the first to employ modern marketing techniques in politics. They also had an eye on information flow or absence thereof, allowing them to campaign very differently in different parts of the country. An extreme case is that their campaigns in Eastern Prussia were in Polish because even many Germans there used it as their primary language while in Western Germany instigating anti-Polish hatred was a prime theme (In the Ruhr area there were many Polish guest workers - often there for decades already) with the same lies as the US Right uses against Latinos: They steal your bread (= your work), they speak a foreign un-German language, breed like rabbits etc.
They knew that there was minimal info flow between those reagions, so the local voters would not notice.
Hitler used a plane (sponsored by friendly industrialists) and thus could have several campaign events per day in different cities (while other politicians used the railway). And Hitler's campaign events were highly choreographed (and film clips of those were used in places where he did not show up in person).
Of course an essential part was the focus on the person of Hitler. He and Goebbels knew that one does not win votes with detailed party programs (although they pretended to have one) but with simple slogans repeated ad nauseam and appealing to the id.
Far ahead of its time, and quite a lot looks still quite familiar almost a century later.
Btw, I think His Orangeness and most extreme right politicians in the US today would be utter failures, were the somehow transported back to that time and place. They are phonies and cowards at heart while the original Nazis were literal killers who'd rather lead the violent mob from the front than having useful idiots doing it for them and afterwards denying any responsibility. Hitler personally kicked some SA goons from the party because they beat up some lefty opponents out of uniform. He approved of the violence but not the anonymity.
One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump's management style is getting other people to break laws to fulfill his demands, leaving them liable for their actions but not him. Mike Pence is the poster boy for this. It is unsurprising this attitude filtered down.
And a fair bit of early Sabbath is almost prog, mellotrons and pianos shifting through various grooves, much like the more metal songs made up of a collection of power riffs strung together. They never attempted the psuedoclassical styles used by pure prog bands.
Then there’s prog metal, so, yeah…
I get annoyed with the metal technocrats. I can listen to clinical demonstrations of technical proficiency for a bit, but I can listen to 70s/Bon Scott AC/DC for who-knows-how-long. It’s not a contest. Make me feel something. (There’s also a happy medium, but the extremes are good for illustration.)
My biggest complaint about metal was/is that the tempo smacked of the same fault most of the huge prog rock acts had when they were live: look how fast I can play. That said, I occasionally check in at YouTube to see if the AI people have done any new heavy metal versions of the big movies or TV smashes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3XIkiSsHUM
...legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security.
I expect there will be a lot of countries that boycott the LA Games, rather than send their athletes into reach of ICE's by-then very large corps. If they risk it, I can easily imagine almost open insurrection between ICE on one side and California/LA on the other. Or between the California/LA law enforcement and the rest of the state/local government if the local police decide to side with ICE.
The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it's built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early '70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement - wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
It's funny you used the word "moody," nous. I get a "Ride my See-Saw" (by The Moody Blues) vibe from that song.
Another song that's not quite as far as from Sabbath's familiar style, but still a bit different, is "Never Say Die." It's not exactly a happy song lyrically, but listening to it fills my heart with joy about as much as any song I can think of. (Needless to say, I might be a bit of a weirdo in that regard.)
I've never been into Metal, but Ozzy was a beautiful, loving soul. RIP.
If you want a taste of Ozzy and Black Sabbath that wanders far afield of their usual heavy metal aesthetic, you should give Spiral Architect a try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQi7HP9Bjs Of all the things I value most of all
I look upon my Earth
And feel the warmth
And know that it is good
The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it's built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early '70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement - wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
Ozzy's voice is not beautiful or versatile, but it is expressive and affective, and he uses it to great effect here.
Worth a listen, and it might make you appreciate Sabbath's musicianship and range a bit more. It's the song I keep coming back to since Ozzy's passing.
I was never a huge fan of Ozzy or Sabbath, but the metal bands I do love would never have been what they are without Sabbath's influence. Their music built a genre every bit as vast and varied as jazz. Their influence is staggering.
Speaking of heroes, I note that the 2028 Olympics are currently scheduled for Los Angeles. Two problems there:
1) Getting international tourists, or even just Olympic athletes, into and safely back out of the country. I belong to an organization which holds international conferences. It is sufficiently difficult for would-be attendees to get visas that attendance plummets when we hold one in the US. Which will doubtless hold down Olympic tourism. Not to mention the increasing fondness of the current administration for arbitrarily holding up travelers, even those with impeccable paperwork.
2) Trump would doubtless find it impossible to resist (not that he'd try) showing up and making the whole thing all about him -- see "hero in his own mind". To see how this might go, consider the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
I'm already seeing calls here for Los Angeles to bail on the whole thing. Those tend, so far, to focus both on those issues, as well as the legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security. Currently Federal law enforcement agencies are, thanks to ICE, not in good oder in LA (or California generally).
Plus, staging the Olympics is expensive. Local government budgets are already strained, and nobody can see Trump kicking in financial support. If anything, he might decide to bill LA for the security costs.
When you feel like the software is mostly together, is it something you would be willing to share? Sell? (I hesitate to suggest beta test. ;-)
Sure, but don't hold your breath. I have a long list of things that "mostly together" will require.
I wish I could say I'm surprised.
I think a more accurate opening line might refer to "the Attorney General" or "senior political appointees in the Justice Department". Something that would make clear that this is not (hoping that it is not, at least yet) something that everybody in the Department of Justice is on board with, and rolling out to attorneys in the rest of the government.
Michael, this is just way cool!
When you feel like the software is mostly together, is it something you would be willing to share? Sell? (I hesitate to suggest beta test. ;-)
As we've gotten around to archives...
TL;DR version: I've started playing with a toy version of the beginnings of software that will eventually be a tool for my archival project. In a couple of years it ought to be interesting :^)
I'm starting to play with toy versions of software I'll be using eventually in my role as extended family archivist building a digitized record from the hundreds/thousands of pictures and document pages that have accumulated. Everything I'm doing right now is grayscale, just so that's not a surprise to anyone who goes so far as to look at the images. Most of the images are large; you'll have to do whatever tricks your browser requires to see them at full resolution.
Text documents first. A JPEG image of a document page I snapped with my iPad is here. The original image is somewhat sharper than the one shown, since JPEG is not as good with details as Apple's HEIC format. For the time being, I use ImageMagick to convert HEICs to uncompressed grayscale.
Right now the toy assumes the document is a rectangle laying flat, and I'm taking a picture of it that's out of alignment. That makes it a linear transform problem. First step is to find the corners of the document. I'm doing something not entirely simple minded. The accuracy of the toy corner-finding code is illustrated here.
It's been a long time since I did anything with linear transforms and the matrix calculations that go with that. After some online reading to refresh my memory, and finding simple versions of code for 3x3 matrices, the toy code can do a perspective transform and produce an approximate equivalent of a 300 dot-per-inch scan (or more, or less). The page in the picture is actually a pile of several sheets, stapled, so doesn't quit meet the flat rectangle assumption. The result is shown here.
In some cases, I will want to do OCR on the images. I'm using the tesseract open-source OCR program for now. Tesseract is not a toy. When I converted the photo to an estimated 600 dpi scan and ran it through tesseract: (a) tesseract estimated the resolution as 607 dpi; (b) to a quick pass through the output, all the text in what are actual text fields are correct; and (c) flat text output is shown here.
The same toy sofware works on pictures of photographs if there's a white border so that the toy can identify corners. An approximate equivalent to a 300 dpi scan of an old Polaroid picture of my wife-to-be from before I knew her is shown here.
Perhaps the greatest calculator ... was Kepler
Perhaps. But the ladies who did all the calculations for the Mercury and Apollo Projects were no slouches either. Men's lives hung on their work. As the story goes, John Glenn asked explicitly for Katherine Johnson to do the calculations for his flight. He wouldn't trust anyone else with his safety.
I love maps. All kinds: altases, road maps, city maps, world maps. Give me a map to use, read, ponder, and I can be absorbed in it for hours.
I remember, when I was in Athens (Greece, not Georgia), getting my hands on a fold-out street map, assuming I'd be able to make some sense out of it based on knowing the general names of streets, and where things like markets and bridges were. And I remember the delightful/terrifying feeling of not, in fact, being able to do that even a little bit. Thanks to the different alphabet, I was unable to tease out any meaning at all. Terrifying for obvious reasons, but delightful because it was rather fun to see one of my most-cherished objects - a map! - manifest as incomprehensible.
Michael - The issue of records being kept, preserved, and accessible for more than one generation is one I think about a LOT. Just seeing how quickly electronic media become obsolete makes me shake my head in bleak wonder.
We can read the direct writing of people from thousands of years ago - multiple thousands of years - right up to, what, a couple generations ago? When did people stop writing letters or keeping written journals?
It just seems like humanity, or at least the industrialized portions, is engaged in a headlong rush to erase itself from the record. (Which, considering where we are right now as a species, is kind of understandable, though no less alarming.)
Pro Bono: Perhaps the greatest calculator ... was Kepler
PB, if you haven't seen this 3Blue1Brown video, you really should take a look. The mind-boggling explanation of what Kepler accomplished starts at around 18:20, but the whole thing is great.
--TP
Why spent minutes (at minimum) on the screen when a sketch on paper takes seconds?
Tablets are getting better at imitating what paper and pencil do. But it's still a pale imitation. And, from what I've seen, the rate of progress towards duplicating it as slowed markedly.
Don't know about memory but in my case writing by hand clearly improves quality (and is also quicker).
And doing math (not calculating but solving a math problem by hand) I can't essentially do any other way. Chemistry the same. Why spent minutes (at minimum) on the screen when a sketch on paper takes seconds? I am not a tablet guy admittedly.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
Metal is a vast country and it is easy to get lost or to only encounter things that clash with your own preferences. I was a marginal metalhead for years before finding a bunch of bands that hit the sweet spot for me.
Learning the geography helps a lot with avoiding the things that annoy you and finding more that delight you.
On “Motes and logs”
What Snarki said.
"
Condolences, not sure what else to say.
"
Well, the Nazis were extremly advanced in their electioneering pre-1933. At least in Germany they were the first to employ modern marketing techniques in politics. They also had an eye on information flow or absence thereof, allowing them to campaign very differently in different parts of the country. An extreme case is that their campaigns in Eastern Prussia were in Polish because even many Germans there used it as their primary language while in Western Germany instigating anti-Polish hatred was a prime theme (In the Ruhr area there were many Polish guest workers - often there for decades already) with the same lies as the US Right uses against Latinos: They steal your bread (= your work), they speak a foreign un-German language, breed like rabbits etc.
They knew that there was minimal info flow between those reagions, so the local voters would not notice.
Hitler used a plane (sponsored by friendly industrialists) and thus could have several campaign events per day in different cities (while other politicians used the railway). And Hitler's campaign events were highly choreographed (and film clips of those were used in places where he did not show up in person).
Of course an essential part was the focus on the person of Hitler. He and Goebbels knew that one does not win votes with detailed party programs (although they pretended to have one) but with simple slogans repeated ad nauseam and appealing to the id.
Far ahead of its time, and quite a lot looks still quite familiar almost a century later.
Btw, I think His Orangeness and most extreme right politicians in the US today would be utter failures, were the somehow transported back to that time and place. They are phonies and cowards at heart while the original Nazis were literal killers who'd rather lead the violent mob from the front than having useful idiots doing it for them and afterwards denying any responsibility. Hitler personally kicked some SA goons from the party because they beat up some lefty opponents out of uniform. He approved of the violence but not the anonymity.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump's management style is getting other people to break laws to fulfill his demands, leaving them liable for their actions but not him. Mike Pence is the poster boy for this. It is unsurprising this attitude filtered down.
And a fair bit of early Sabbath is almost prog, mellotrons and pianos shifting through various grooves, much like the more metal songs made up of a collection of power riffs strung together. They never attempted the psuedoclassical styles used by pure prog bands.
"
Then there’s prog metal, so, yeah…
I get annoyed with the metal technocrats. I can listen to clinical demonstrations of technical proficiency for a bit, but I can listen to 70s/Bon Scott AC/DC for who-knows-how-long. It’s not a contest. Make me feel something. (There’s also a happy medium, but the extremes are good for illustration.)
"
My biggest complaint about metal was/is that the tempo smacked of the same fault most of the huge prog rock acts had when they were live: look how fast I can play. That said, I occasionally check in at YouTube to see if the AI people have done any new heavy metal versions of the big movies or TV smashes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3XIkiSsHUM
"
...legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security.
I expect there will be a lot of countries that boycott the LA Games, rather than send their athletes into reach of ICE's by-then very large corps. If they risk it, I can easily imagine almost open insurrection between ICE on one side and California/LA on the other. Or between the California/LA law enforcement and the rest of the state/local government if the local police decide to side with ICE.
"
The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it's built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early '70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement - wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
It's funny you used the word "moody," nous. I get a "Ride my See-Saw" (by The Moody Blues) vibe from that song.
Another song that's not quite as far as from Sabbath's familiar style, but still a bit different, is "Never Say Die." It's not exactly a happy song lyrically, but listening to it fills my heart with joy about as much as any song I can think of. (Needless to say, I might be a bit of a weirdo in that regard.)
"
I've never been into Metal, but Ozzy was a beautiful, loving soul. RIP.
If you want a taste of Ozzy and Black Sabbath that wanders far afield of their usual heavy metal aesthetic, you should give Spiral Architect a try:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQi7HP9Bjs
Of all the things I value most of all
I look upon my Earth
And feel the warmth
And know that it is good
The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it's built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early '70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement - wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
Ozzy's voice is not beautiful or versatile, but it is expressive and affective, and he uses it to great effect here.
Worth a listen, and it might make you appreciate Sabbath's musicianship and range a bit more. It's the song I keep coming back to since Ozzy's passing.
I was never a huge fan of Ozzy or Sabbath, but the metal bands I do love would never have been what they are without Sabbath's influence. Their music built a genre every bit as vast and varied as jazz. Their influence is staggering.
On “The law of the letter”
Still be way sooner than I'd get anything similar coded myself.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
Speaking of heroes, I note that the 2028 Olympics are currently scheduled for Los Angeles. Two problems there:
1) Getting international tourists, or even just Olympic athletes, into and safely back out of the country. I belong to an organization which holds international conferences. It is sufficiently difficult for would-be attendees to get visas that attendance plummets when we hold one in the US. Which will doubtless hold down Olympic tourism. Not to mention the increasing fondness of the current administration for arbitrarily holding up travelers, even those with impeccable paperwork.
2) Trump would doubtless find it impossible to resist (not that he'd try) showing up and making the whole thing all about him -- see "hero in his own mind". To see how this might go, consider the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
I'm already seeing calls here for Los Angeles to bail on the whole thing. Those tend, so far, to focus both on those issues, as well as the legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security. Currently Federal law enforcement agencies are, thanks to ICE, not in good oder in LA (or California generally).
Plus, staging the Olympics is expensive. Local government budgets are already strained, and nobody can see Trump kicking in financial support. If anything, he might decide to bill LA for the security costs.
On “The law of the letter”
When you feel like the software is mostly together, is it something you would be willing to share? Sell? (I hesitate to suggest beta test. ;-)
Sure, but don't hold your breath. I have a long list of things that "mostly together" will require.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
I've never been into Metal, but Ozzy was a beautiful, loving soul. RIP.
"
I mean... Ozzy and Chuck Mangione are dead, why not America too?
On “The law of the letter”
Michael Cain, your wife-to-be from before you knew her exudes goodness in that photo. Top of the preservation list, I imagine.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
I wish I could say I'm surprised.
I think a more accurate opening line might refer to "the Attorney General" or "senior political appointees in the Justice Department". Something that would make clear that this is not (hoping that it is not, at least yet) something that everybody in the Department of Justice is on board with, and rolling out to attorneys in the rest of the government.
On “The law of the letter”
Michael, this is just way cool!
When you feel like the software is mostly together, is it something you would be willing to share? Sell? (I hesitate to suggest beta test. ;-)
"
As we've gotten around to archives...
TL;DR version: I've started playing with a toy version of the beginnings of software that will eventually be a tool for my archival project. In a couple of years it ought to be interesting :^)
I'm starting to play with toy versions of software I'll be using eventually in my role as extended family archivist building a digitized record from the hundreds/thousands of pictures and document pages that have accumulated. Everything I'm doing right now is grayscale, just so that's not a surprise to anyone who goes so far as to look at the images. Most of the images are large; you'll have to do whatever tricks your browser requires to see them at full resolution.
Text documents first. A JPEG image of a document page I snapped with my iPad is here. The original image is somewhat sharper than the one shown, since JPEG is not as good with details as Apple's HEIC format. For the time being, I use ImageMagick to convert HEICs to uncompressed grayscale.
Right now the toy assumes the document is a rectangle laying flat, and I'm taking a picture of it that's out of alignment. That makes it a linear transform problem. First step is to find the corners of the document. I'm doing something not entirely simple minded. The accuracy of the toy corner-finding code is illustrated here.
It's been a long time since I did anything with linear transforms and the matrix calculations that go with that. After some online reading to refresh my memory, and finding simple versions of code for 3x3 matrices, the toy code can do a perspective transform and produce an approximate equivalent of a 300 dot-per-inch scan (or more, or less). The page in the picture is actually a pile of several sheets, stapled, so doesn't quit meet the flat rectangle assumption. The result is shown here.
In some cases, I will want to do OCR on the images. I'm using the tesseract open-source OCR program for now. Tesseract is not a toy. When I converted the photo to an estimated 600 dpi scan and ran it through tesseract: (a) tesseract estimated the resolution as 607 dpi; (b) to a quick pass through the output, all the text in what are actual text fields are correct; and (c) flat text output is shown here.
The same toy sofware works on pictures of photographs if there's a white border so that the toy can identify corners. An approximate equivalent to a 300 dpi scan of an old Polaroid picture of my wife-to-be from before I knew her is shown here.
"
Perhaps the greatest calculator ... was Kepler
Perhaps. But the ladies who did all the calculations for the Mercury and Apollo Projects were no slouches either. Men's lives hung on their work. As the story goes, John Glenn asked explicitly for Katherine Johnson to do the calculations for his flight. He wouldn't trust anyone else with his safety.
"
Thanks, Tony P. The two most underrated scientists in popular science history are Kepler and James Clerk Maxwell. (Galileo is the most overrated.)
"
I love maps. All kinds: altases, road maps, city maps, world maps. Give me a map to use, read, ponder, and I can be absorbed in it for hours.
I remember, when I was in Athens (Greece, not Georgia), getting my hands on a fold-out street map, assuming I'd be able to make some sense out of it based on knowing the general names of streets, and where things like markets and bridges were. And I remember the delightful/terrifying feeling of not, in fact, being able to do that even a little bit. Thanks to the different alphabet, I was unable to tease out any meaning at all. Terrifying for obvious reasons, but delightful because it was rather fun to see one of my most-cherished objects - a map! - manifest as incomprehensible.
Michael - The issue of records being kept, preserved, and accessible for more than one generation is one I think about a LOT. Just seeing how quickly electronic media become obsolete makes me shake my head in bleak wonder.
We can read the direct writing of people from thousands of years ago - multiple thousands of years - right up to, what, a couple generations ago? When did people stop writing letters or keeping written journals?
It just seems like humanity, or at least the industrialized portions, is engaged in a headlong rush to erase itself from the record. (Which, considering where we are right now as a species, is kind of understandable, though no less alarming.)
"
Pro Bono: Perhaps the greatest calculator ... was Kepler
PB, if you haven't seen this 3Blue1Brown video, you really should take a look. The mind-boggling explanation of what Kepler accomplished starts at around 18:20, but the whole thing is great.
--TP
"
Why spent minutes (at minimum) on the screen when a sketch on paper takes seconds?
Tablets are getting better at imitating what paper and pencil do. But it's still a pale imitation. And, from what I've seen, the rate of progress towards duplicating it as slowed markedly.
"
Don't know about memory but in my case writing by hand clearly improves quality (and is also quicker).
And doing math (not calculating but solving a math problem by hand) I can't essentially do any other way. Chemistry the same. Why spent minutes (at minimum) on the screen when a sketch on paper takes seconds? I am not a tablet guy admittedly.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.