Snip, Burn, Solder Blog

Vi Hart’s Guide to Comments – YouTube
The thing I really like about this “How to Deal with Haters” video is that she never says “haters”; Vi treats these critics with the dignity that they are denying the folks they criticize, and that is both classy as hell and tremendously valuable in terms of personal growth and the path toward compassion. You can do a lot worse than being more like Vi Hart in this regard. Watch. Listen:

(See also this four-point “How to compose a successful critical commentary”; been meditating on this quite a bit lately)

“Creepy” music is generally in a minor key; upbeat music is in a major key. Shift something like “When the Saints go Marching In” to a D-minor, and it sounds like a hebraic dirge (which I rather like). Shift horror themes to a major key, and you get this:

The transposed X-Files theme sounds like the intro music to a Japanese educational program, while Nightmare on Elm Street could easily sub as the intro music to a low-rent Hallmark Xmas drama.
(via slate.com)

tl;dr: Get your free Junkyard Jam Pack download NOW! Go build an amp and an electric diddley-bow guitar!
OMFG! I’ve gotta a new book coming out SOON!
I’ve got a new DIY music-&-noisemaking book coming out at the tail end of this month. Here’s a sneak peak of the sorta stuff in there:

To celebrate the new book, we’ve put together the Junkyard Jam Pack: Full, DRM-free PDFs of a couple of the most popular music projects from my first book.
*BONUS* The Junkyard Jam Pack includes a coupon code for 30% off either of my DIY books!
Click here to download the Junkyard Jam Pack! Click this little button below to share the Jam Pack! Tweet
Click other things in other places to do other stuff!

My 9-year-old has been pretty concerned about consciousness and the evolution of intelligence and AIs and such recently (for the non-childed: this isn’t humblebragging; my kid is indeed a weirdo besought with weird worries–because of Nature and Nurture–but this brand of light-weight epistemological crisis is pretty much developmentally on the ball among humans).
Anyway, without malice aforethought (or any real forethought at all), I let him watch half of this X-Files episode where a building-maintenance AI murders a dude, and that sorta made things much worse, in terms of his growing terror about what is and isn’t knowable–esp. know that I’d compounded the problem by introducing the possibility that an autonomous building might try and kill us if it felt even the least bit threatened.
So I showed him this video, which gives a much more complete sense of how academically interesting–but largely trivial–modern autonomous AIs are. It’s a very concise, but nonetheless enlightening 5-minute primer on neural network AIs and genetic programming. We watched it a couple times, he groked it, I asked if it seemed threatening, and he agreed that MarI/O could not hurt anyone–with the proviso that this was because they’d hooked it up to a Nintendo. If they’d hooked it up to something else . . .
And, well, I had to concede his point. That is sorta the story of evolution, isn’t it? Red in tooth and claw, etc., etc., etc.
Anyway, it’s still a nice little lesson for those of us with no working understanding of the field (and I’ve got it on good word that the video is basically on the ball).

Continue reading “A Pretty Solid 5min Explanation of Neural Networks, Genetic Programs, and AI as “Thinking Machines””

(tl;dr: This video is a lit-nerd treasure trove. WATCH IT NOW!)
HEY DAVE, WHAT THE CRAP IS A “NEWFIE”?: “Newfoundland” (pronounced “new-fin-land,” I learned the embarrassingly hard way) is that big ole island in the Atlantic alongside Canada. It’s kinda remote, Canadians hardly ever remember it exists, the weather isn’t great, and they sorta have an attitude (e.g., it’s nicknamed “The Rock”–you know, like the prison Alcatraz–and didn’t actually join Canada until 1950-ish, and then only because they needed the money.) The folks that live there are “Newfies”; they drink a cheap rum called “screech,” eat cod cheeks, and put 10,000-year-old chunks of glacial iceberg ice into tourists drinks, because it fizzes and impresses the hell out of tourists (thus making it easier to overcharge them). Also, quite beautiful country–on account folks don’t generally bother going there or messing with it much. In other words, it’s the Upper Peninsula of Canada. I like it quite a bit.
But for the purposes of this account, what matters is that they have a remarkably whack-ass accent, a crazy burring brogue that sounds like an Irish person ate a Scottish person, and then gave birth to a riding lawnmower. The lawnmower is the one talking in this example, and it’s insisting on telling you about how great their Healthcare system is and how dangerous is is to drive at night, on account of the moose. That’s basically every conversation I had with any Newfie: A lawnmower that works as a trucker, loves socialized medicine, and is really worried that because you are an American (and thus, implicitly, a dumbass) you are going to insist on driving at night and hit a moose (which, I guess, like to stand around on the highways at night because the blacktop stays nice and warm after the sun goes down).
HEY DAVE, WHAT THE CRAP IS THE “GLOBE THEATER” THIS VIDEO IS GOING ON ABOUT?: The Globe was Shakespeare’s theater–the one where he staged most of the plays throughout his career; he and his actors built it themselves after getting in a dispute with their landlord that culminated with them tearing down down the Theater (their previous HQ), carting the timbers off, and using them to frame the Globe (which, side note, is the best landlord-dispute resolution I’ve ever heard, and my whole damn family is in commercial real estate). The Globe burned down in 16-something, they rebuilt, and it burned down again after Shakespeare died (I’m glossing somewhat; a lot of this is foggy to me, because it’s been several decades since I was last asked to recount it using a number two pencil and a powder blue exam book).
At any rate, the Globe in the video was rebuilt in around 1994, just a few hundred feet from Shakespeare’s original Globe. This new Globe is dedicated to verisimilitude, which is pretty damn rad. They go out of their way to perform as Shakespeare’s actors would have, to use period-appropriate costumes (i.e., when they stage Julius Caesar, they dress as moderately educated Elizabethan Englishmen believed ancient Romans dressed), blocking, sets, hand props, and so on. Starting a few years ago, they expanded this to include period-appropriate pronunciations–so called “Original Pronunciation” (in contrast to the more popular modern “Received Pronunciation,” which my American readers probably think of as “BBC English” or “that stuck-up snooty-ass style British accent.”)
HEY DAVE, WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME ALL THIS?: Shakespeare and his Elizabethan actors apparently had the same accent as modern Newfies. That bawdy pirate going on about how, hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, then hour to hour we rot and rot? That is spot on *exactly* what every long-haul trucker I drank with in Newfoundland sounded like.
This Newfie sound really stands out at 3:17, with both the pronunciation of words like “War,” “harry,” “port,” “heels,” and “hounds,” but in the cadence. Also, check out some great (and very Newfie-like) dirty talk at around 8:00. For folks interested in the ins-and-outs of actually staging a play, there are some interesting bits around 7:00. I don’t know that folks who’ve never staged a play ever think about pacing, but it really is your central concern as a director/performer; pacing is what makes or breaks any performance, and it’s a failure to attend to pacing that tends to make student productions absolutely intolerable.
BONUS: Here’s another one from Ben Crystal (the younger dude in the above clip) where he takes a stab at explaining the mechanism whereby modern Newfies ended up talking like Elizabethan Londoners (FYI, I’ve heard a similarly argument made to explain why modern U.S. Appalachians use intransitive verbs–like “to learn”–in a transitive mode, just as Shakespeare and Donne did, despite it no=longer being considered grammatical in “proper” English).
The basic thrust of the premise: Folks who wound up being “transported” to the New World (i.e., sent against their will as punishment for largely petty crimes) came disproportionately from the streets of London, and *that’s* the language preserved in these Shakes scenes.
Again, lots of fun; this is one charming mutherfucker:

Cautionary tale: A parable of science fiction.
Yes, to a large chunk of folks it’ll be suitably obvious what Plait is driving at by about graff 3, but I still want to put this in front of folks because the piece is sturdy (if a touch tedious at moments, and clunking in the conclusion) and rhetorically useful. For those who are aware of climate collapse in a sort of background-noise way, it’s likely to be instructive.
Anyway, just to be super-duper clear: We are indeed already in the midst of an Extinction Level Event. I’m not saying that to be cynical or dramatic or to spur you to this action (or inaction) or that one; I’m saying it because it is factually the case.
For rather obvious reasons, it puts me into the mind of this song:

… ’cause the fact is, you’re mostly gonna fall on your face. Still, it’s better to be a loser than a spectator. Chins up, oh my Best Belovéd; we will defeat them one by one.