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.
There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory
The more ways you can engage with a body of material, the more it will stick with you.
The greater the degree of attention required of you as part of that engagement, even more so.
Humans should think, machines should work, as the saying goes. That said, thinking *is* work, and attempts to find short cuts around that just make us stupid.
At the rate software is improving, I suppose computers will be able to read to us, and write down what we say as well.
During the early 1990s I had lunch regularly with a librarian. We discussed archiving on a regular basis. Ken Burns's Civil War documentary was still pretty new. She used to say, "You want to write the source material for someone to use in 120 years to make a documentary like Burns's? Acid-free paper and pigment-based ink, my friend. And descendants willing to keep your writings in a trunk somewhere dark."
...why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age.
There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory, and taking notes longhand reinforces more than typing on a keyboard. That's the pseudo-academic in me speaking, of course.
For the last twelve years or so I've been using a little note-taking application that I wrote myself. There were just too many cases where pasting in an image, or having a live URL, or even just searching for a keyword seemed to justify it. Recently I've been considering going back to paper and pen.
I thought about using an Ipad with an Apple Pencil, which has gotten very much like paper and pen (so long as you don't use the eraser much*). Unfortunately, Apple has seen fit to put handwriting recognition into the OS, and insists on putting a little line under anything you write/draw that it thinks might be a date or time. I've seen many complaints about it, and people asking why Apple can't make it optional.
* One of the reasons I always took notes in ink while I was doing research work was because sometimes I wrote down something that I thought was right, and two days later discovered I was mistaken. With ink, you have to grab a different color pen and put in a dated bit with the correction.
Doing recursions on the calculator was also among my first experiences. I did not yet understand though why certain functions would yield the same result independent of start value after pressing the key repeatedly (converging on x=f(x)).
I played with an electronic calculator when I was a kid. It allowed me to start recognizing patterns in numbers, particularly when performing the same calculation recursively. I'm reasonably sure I wasn't typical in that regard, but I wanted to mount some meager defense of electronic calculators.
First we smash all the (electronic*) calculators.
Get the logarithm table and/or the slide rule back.
That's how one teaches the basics!
In all seriousness, I work as a tutor and by now mainly for math. Before one can teach them abstract concepts, they need to get the basics right and that means calculations (preferably without electronic help). I see no justification to teach set theory** when they get still puzzled by "Is 123 divisible by 3 without residue?" or "What's the square root of 81?". If that's 19th century, then Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser!
To me that sounds like the unfortunate discussion about why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age. Why learn orthography when there are spellcheckers? And what by the way is the use of kids reading fictional literature of guys long dead or ancient (pre-1990) history?
Yes, understanding should have priority over rote learning buy everyday math is still mostly basics. And I am cynical enough to say that we are failing there already. Imo math at school should concentrate on practical problem solving not Zermelo's theorem.
*abaci will be tolerated
*exception: difference between natural, integer, rational and real numbers.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
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.
"
There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory
The more ways you can engage with a body of material, the more it will stick with you.
The greater the degree of attention required of you as part of that engagement, even more so.
Humans should think, machines should work, as the saying goes. That said, thinking *is* work, and attempts to find short cuts around that just make us stupid.
"
At the rate software is improving, I suppose computers will be able to read to us, and write down what we say as well.
During the early 1990s I had lunch regularly with a librarian. We discussed archiving on a regular basis. Ken Burns's Civil War documentary was still pretty new. She used to say, "You want to write the source material for someone to use in 120 years to make a documentary like Burns's? Acid-free paper and pigment-based ink, my friend. And descendants willing to keep your writings in a trunk somewhere dark."
"
...why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age.
There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory, and taking notes longhand reinforces more than typing on a keyboard. That's the pseudo-academic in me speaking, of course.
For the last twelve years or so I've been using a little note-taking application that I wrote myself. There were just too many cases where pasting in an image, or having a live URL, or even just searching for a keyword seemed to justify it. Recently I've been considering going back to paper and pen.
I thought about using an Ipad with an Apple Pencil, which has gotten very much like paper and pen (so long as you don't use the eraser much*). Unfortunately, Apple has seen fit to put handwriting recognition into the OS, and insists on putting a little line under anything you write/draw that it thinks might be a date or time. I've seen many complaints about it, and people asking why Apple can't make it optional.
* One of the reasons I always took notes in ink while I was doing research work was because sometimes I wrote down something that I thought was right, and two days later discovered I was mistaken. With ink, you have to grab a different color pen and put in a dated bit with the correction.
"
Doing recursions on the calculator was also among my first experiences. I did not yet understand though why certain functions would yield the same result independent of start value after pressing the key repeatedly (converging on x=f(x)).
"
All this math talk has me celebrating pi, but not exactly.
Hmmm. I'm thinking exactly, but not precisely.
"
I played with an electronic calculator when I was a kid. It allowed me to start recognizing patterns in numbers, particularly when performing the same calculation recursively. I'm reasonably sure I wasn't typical in that regard, but I wanted to mount some meager defense of electronic calculators.
"
First we smash all the (electronic*) calculators.
Get the logarithm table and/or the slide rule back.
That's how one teaches the basics!
In all seriousness, I work as a tutor and by now mainly for math. Before one can teach them abstract concepts, they need to get the basics right and that means calculations (preferably without electronic help). I see no justification to teach set theory** when they get still puzzled by "Is 123 divisible by 3 without residue?" or "What's the square root of 81?". If that's 19th century, then Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser!
To me that sounds like the unfortunate discussion about why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age. Why learn orthography when there are spellcheckers? And what by the way is the use of kids reading fictional literature of guys long dead or ancient (pre-1990) history?
Yes, understanding should have priority over rote learning buy everyday math is still mostly basics. And I am cynical enough to say that we are failing there already. Imo math at school should concentrate on practical problem solving not Zermelo's theorem.
*abaci will be tolerated
*exception: difference between natural, integer, rational and real numbers.
"
All this math talk has me celebrating pi, but not exactly.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.