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October 19, 2005
crash contrast
I've been sitting outside on campus writing music, just sketching ideas. It's crisp and clear out; blue blue sky and some trees flaming red-orange while others are a mild yellow in the half-light. Very light breeze and most people smiling as they walked.
Then two bikes crashed head-on right in front of me on the bike path. Fast. Wheels in the air. Skulls on the ground. Or skull (singular) anyway. I called 911 immediately, but there were so many people who had done the same thing I told the operator I'd let someone else handle it. A woman, student I think, hurried over saying, "I am a first responder. I can help. Trust me. I know what to do." One guy was fine. The other had his skull cracked open and bleeding.
After things seemed under control and there was nothing I could do, I walked away to help it look like less of a scene, hoping others would do the same. The injured guy especially doesn't need a crowd gawking at his delirium.
The contrast struck me. The sudden change.
Posted by crock038 at 5:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 13, 2005
Mishmash
I am a horrible blogger. The pace here is ridiculously slow... I'll try to be better about that... (Yeah, how many blog posts with the same phrase were posted in the past 30 seconds? I'd estimate 3.5 guhjillion.) Anyway... some stuff I've been into / reading a lot / thinking about / obsessing over lately:
Looking for a way to make hours upon hours disappear? Careful what you ask for... Does the phrase planar embedding mean anything to you? It will soon...
Don't have a TV? Neither do I. Who needs one; mostly a waste of time anyway, but there are somethings worth watching -- I get them in nice 30 second clips from OneGoodMove. Comments on Norm's blog tend to be a tad lefter than sensible, but he and his readers still hit on poignant truths pretty commonly.
The Spark Festival will be taking over my life shortly. Work for it is ramping up quickly, but Spark does something wonderful and rare—invites artists and listeners from more popular contexts into the academic realm. This both encourages the popular folks to think in a more systematic and broad-horizoned way about their art, and shows the academic folks how their advances are being used in ways they never imagined. It also, I hope, reminds some of the stodgier academic folks that they need to get a life. Ahem, I mean, that their way is not the only way, and that yes, intelligent, creative, thoughtful artists do indeed exist in plenty outside academia.
This conference has what I personally consider a ridiculous submission policy. I am thinking of submitting two musical works. Obviously two works, less than 10 minutes each, fit on a single CD with room to spare for bio, program notes, picture, etc. Thay require that I send them NINE CDs. Nine. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Now, of course I understand why they're doing it. They can open up the package and distribute each CD to an adjudicator. Having each piece on a separate CD allows them to preserve the anonymity of the submissions and thus the integrity of the adjudication process. However, half the pieces submitted to this conference are recycled submissions—that is, everybody in the tiny computer music community has heard them before and knows exactly who wrote them. I'm not sayin'; I'm just sayin'.™
If anyone is a computer science geek out there, I recently read a cool paper from 1994 about an experimental operating system scheduling system based on lotteries.
Also, for my fellow math geeks, the biggest prime number known to mankind was discovered this year. It has 7,816,230 digits. It's a special kind of number called a Mersenne Prime.
And on a similar note, Robin Whittle is doing impressively thorough historiography on the Park-Miller-Carta fast pseudorandom number generator which generates very good "random" numbers in about 10 assembly language instructions! And here's info on the more modern, better quality Mersenne Twister algorithm, which is slower and takes more memory, and so is not as good for DSP.
And finally, after all that, I'm going to my first ever school reunion of any sort this weekend: my five-year college reunion.
That pretty much sums up what has been on my mind lately.
boop => back_to_work
Posted by crock038 at 2:56 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack