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undertow

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vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

  "Eventually - around 2000 - everyone understood 
   this, and gave up hoping some subculture could 
   somehow escape this dynamic."

The whole article is really about music, and carries continuous undertones relating to the mechanics of music scenes.

So why 2000 as the magic year music died? The Internet.

That's the whole answer. The internet killed music. Not just because of peer-to-peer file sharing, but so many other aspects of pre-internet music economies simply didn't make sense anymore, from composition, to production, to distribution, to consumption, all aspects of recorded music were turned inside out and flipped upside down.

Sure, performing music hadn't really changed all that much, but the controlled release of physical copies of music simply didn't work anymore, and so The New Thing wasn't permitted to steep in its own Newness, and fester and grow moldy and get weird anymore.

The transformation of distribution technologies from 1990 to 2000 was like taking a healthy adult St. Bernard, and replacing all of its internal organs with the organs of 50 kittens, and expecting it to come out healthier than before. Except the St. Bernard's brain doesn't know how to breathe with 100 kitten lungs, or pump 50 kitten hearts, or swallow food into 50 kitten stomachs and digest vital nutrients.

From a technology perspective, with music, where we are now, is like where music was in 1950. We're still figuring out the new capabilities of what can be done with this technology, the same way people back then were still figuring out amplifiers and feedback and taped distortion. In that respect 1990 is still 40 years away, culturally speaking. Longer still if more disruptive technology keeps getting introduced, and upsetting established skills.

There are no more geeks to create scenes, because geeks haven't had enough time to learn the vast depths of modern technology, to master it, and spawn new scenes.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

I guess it takes some considerable imagination to create possibility ratings for impossible or unprecedented events.

If something like a hypothetical transparent force field invoked by thought, words or gestures, that can stop bullets, blades and fire in mid-air isn't actually known to be possible and might warp reality, would it warp reality more than time travel, which might be possible on paper, in certain ways, although not readily understood?

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Ugh. How awful. Apostrophes and (full stop) dots repurposed as letters within words. But at least there aren't any accented characters or other diacritics.

Phonemes aside, why would anyone design that, and imagine it as a feature and not a bug?

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

  It is only because the difference between the 
  rate of change in a static universe and the 
  rate of change in an evolutionary one is that 
  between zero and very nearly zero that the 
  creationists can continue propagating their 
  folly.

Well, there's still another part sneaking past the fact that biological differentiation occurs at geological time scales: We haven't been around long enough to witness and record an actual "smoking gun" event, that clearly demonstrates the emergence of a completely new plant or animal.

We're aware of things like the three-toed horse, and we know they used to exist. But that's just a small difference on an animal that still exists, and other than that whole thing with the toes, it's still pretty much the same thing. We've seen lots of animals disappear, but nothing replacing them.

Maybe insects are a ripe branch of animals that will bear some fruit, since their life cycles are so short, but otherwise, for the most part, modern theory points out that not only will none of us see a new, radically different class of creatures emerge within our own lifetimes, but not even within the projected limits of our modern civilizations and their effective capacity to record history will we be likely to observe such an event.

So, neither since the start of our recorded history, nor until after the history we do manage to record starts to disappear beyond the possibility of rediscoverable recognition by the next order of civilization which may arrise, shall a truly different creature spring forth from the free-for-all of biological propagation.

In other words, we've never actually experienced a period where a certain life form did not exist and then emerged from some other thing, and we'll probably never get a chance to see such a thing happen, not in 5 million years, and even if we do spot a new previously undiscovered animal, and it turns out to be an example of the emergence of a new and distinctly different animal, even if it makes it into the history books, and the animal is hardy enough to persist in nature, our history books won't last forever, and after we're gone, the next civilized culture (human or oherwise) might not find them, and learn to read them before they disintegrate into unrecognizable ash and dust. But we know it's there. We're sure evolution isn't just a theory.

And so too, are we faced with a scenario, whereby even if hypothetical civilized lizard people of the dinosaur era had been there to witness a new class of rodents spring forth, the records of their culture that we do find might not include that one passage. And so too, with civilized trilobite scholars, if they were there to see the original sharks and amphibians emerge, and wrote it down, we'd probably never find that chapter in the trilobite bible where they realized what they had just seen.

That's a tough idea to pitch to people, and in casual conversations at dinner parties, it's devestatingly easy to stymie people who try to explain it.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

The punnett square of social orientation towards peers is interesting, but a little stark.

  1. warm & competant   : admire
  2. warm & incompetant : pity
  3. cold & competant   : envy
  4. cold & incompetant : contempt

I definitely know people who fit profile one, that I do not admire, and some who fit profile two, that I don't pity. I also don't harbor strictly negative opinions or emotions regarding cold personalities, although I suppose incompetance is rarely a welcome character trait.

Come to think of it, it would seem that most of the working world is aligned toward producing profile three, wouldn't it? That doesn't really bring forth any sort of jealousy, so much as it is just depressing.

I guess there's probably always room for neutral respect and civility... which is somewhat cold... but uh... geeze, sometimes social sciences can be brutal, huh?

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Wow, that video is really cool! The sliding lock-tumbler mechanism offers a really interesting amount of control over the aperture shaping the beam! Sort of like a brush in photoshop!

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Well, an abstract description of processes like these always lends extra heft to what your brain will try to rationalize out of a written description. Especially with computational "decision making" people have a tendency to conjure up ghosts or perhaps a little gremlin at the heart of a nest of wires, watching a TV set, and ruminating over what to do next.

But when you stop and think about what collimation actually is, it's just a manner of focusing a projected beam, either with masking, and obstructing the path of a beam (as with x-rays which are high energey photon beams), or also possibly by bending and focusing a beam, using magnets to direct a beam of charged particles (such as positrons).

So, if working in three dimensions, you might wish to control depth of penetration, but honestly, with X-rays you'll only have so much success, so it's really about how many beams converge upon a region, and the shape they create as they cross over each other, while intersecting, when projected from different angles.

There are a number of ways to approach this strategy, of creating three dimensional shapes, by drawing cross-sections in modern 3D animation programs, like Maya and 3D Studio Max.

The easiest way is to draw a spline or a bezier curve, along one axis, then apply a "lathing" function, which duplicates the spline, rotating about the axis, and then connecting the splines at each control point on the spline/curve. Then you get a crude vase-like shape.

So, take that idea, and apply it to a light source with an articulated aperture. The aperture can create a shadow in the shape of a spline. It might strobe exposures, with small, discrete doses, effectively pixelating or rasterizing the dose with many small exposures, or continuously emit radiation while in motion.

Then, if you attach this beam source to a motorized system, that can rotate the source about an axis on a system of rails, and trigger exposures with different aperture shapes while being positioned around a target at the center of the axis of rotation, hey presto! The software-defined shape has guided the beam, using the same sort of motion control that translates coordinates to a set of motors, as has been done with stop-motion animation cameras in movies for decades!

So, it's like the reverse of a camera, and yes, radiation sources are like flash-bulbs, and you selectively cast shadows, by controlling a gate or shutter, and possibly the shape of the opening in a barrier that stands between the source of the target. (scanline, round dot, square...)

EDIT: As loarake mentions, the actual behavior of a radiation beam is not the same as light. When radiation penetrates a medium, each type of radiation may scatter, reflect, refract differently when interacting with the medium, depending on the material, if it's bone, flesh, metal dental fillings or implanted appliances or something else. Many materials may absorb the radiation and express the interaction by radiating heat, or the radiation will ionize the matter, triggering electrical interactions, and chemical decomposition and reactions. This aspect of radiation is truly the pure random factor (hence monte carlo simulations), the unknowable Schroedinger's cat in a box, but it's real and for every dosage, some radiation will ionize some matter eventually. This along with the conversion to heat is the part that kills tumors, causes burns, and exposes film.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Such is the nature of these new school services like AirBNB and Über, no? Idealistic amateurs and artisans operating with optimistic expectations.

Also, the use of the word "you" isn't quite appropriate, since I've never used these websites. One should use an indefinite article.

THE dildo, never... YOUR dildo.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

  > implying one can file a lawsuit against a pimp and/or      
    any associated prostitutes, and that anyone would have 
    access to their actual lawful identity

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Probably because an analog signal will provide a continuous high-resolution sweep of values, without any aliasing.

You can resolve continuous ranges of values with very high precision, albeit at the expense of exacting and repeatable accuracy.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

I seriously miss low-tech phones that are actually so low-tech and dumb that the only features they boast are the most practical necessities.

The worst part about most phones of any era is that they become ruined with sinister bloatware, designed to funnel you into dark patterns of paying for garbage that burns any trust you might invest into a device, until it's a charred unregocnizable mess.

Unfortunately, even now, if they made a device that was purported to be "dumb" and no-frills, I probably wouldn't believe that the phone were as pared-down as I might wish to believe, simply because I'd be sure that the chipsets available to manufacturers might actually possess far greater power under the hood, than some simple throwback of a handset might seem to house.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

His replies to some of the comments wink at the possibility that he thoroughly enjoys the rancor and consternation stirred in the minds of that particular subset of his readers.

e.g.

  That problem will go away once the optimizer is 
  taught to recognize this operator. Then we could 
  call it the rocket-powered tadpole.
    - Raymond

Consider the people, who haven't commented, instead simply skimming this post, without reading deeper, then showing up to work on Monday, and dutifully explaining to colleagues about a new operator they learned of.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Yeah, sort of like those "32 in 1" and "112 tele-games" Atari cartridges, where each "game" was a permutation on the number of players, how the players were organized into "teams" combined with difficulty levels, or some such modifier. In reality, it was just the same game, and maybe you passed the controller around differently.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

  The year of the Linux desktop was brought about by Android.

Oh, right. Ubuntu had nothing to do with it. Definitely not back in April of 2008, with LTS 8.04. No way. It was Android. The mobile operating system intended for smart phones was what brought the Linux desktop to everyone.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

  > When I RTFA, I'm not totally sure what the author 
    did that actually provided significant value, 
    particularly in that final stretch.

Yeah, and that's kind of the point. Human value is not intrinsically quantifiable. You can try and apply objective numbers to human behavior, but usually only with brutal results.

She nails that point in the second paragraph with the five step break-down.

Reviews often boil down to a game of "yeah, but what have you done for me lately?"

You generally get railroaded by systems like stack ranking, unless you totally depersonalize your relationship with your peers and directors, and play the numbers game, tallying up petty minutia which may or may not be completely disregarded by the ones who make the rules anyway.

This sort of relationship is biased in favor of firing, rather than maintaining and building loyalty. It's all about negative reinforcement, and keeping your subordinates at arms length, so you can easily replace the ones that burn out, once they've proven useless.

If that's the sort of atmosphere you crave, have fun. It's not the only way.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Not to mention the draw on electricity, which probably points back to some undisclosed amount of coal being burned in a power plant, somewhere nearby...

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Honestly, it's not particularly difficult to copy programs from the app store. With a jailbroken phone, you can just grab an app off the phone's file system.

I think the real difference is the constant, relentless change in platforms presented to mobile phone consumers. Every year, it's a new phone, a major operating system upgrade, or something else disrupting the ecosystem, so that no out-of-band trade in raw files can take root.

When you have a zombie fanbase chasing the latest glitter, and disruptive changes introduced every six months, it's tough to gain traction when you have expend so much energy just to keep up with the herd.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

No. Not really. Not even slightly.

I really don't enjoy the thought of being famous, and especially not the ephemeral famous-on-the-internet variety. I especially hate the end results of how twitter gets used, and turn a blind eye to nearly everything that happens on that website. It's something of an abomination watching silly people cram their already dumbed-down thoughts into something even dumber than its natural incarnation.

Web 2.0 is really more of a 2004 idea (as with viral content which is even older) but I understand what you're driving at. Especially since some of the technology involved isn't all that new either, which points to the fact that the purchases are more often a form of conflict resolution between competing companies, than genuine success. Large companies purchasing smaller companies before they can become threatening.

There might be much physics-related publicity, but not too many drastic shifts in our understanding of the world that surrounds us. We still don't have any moon bases or martian colonies, and so maybe certain special bosons are the the seat of mass, enslaving us all to gravity, but until that discovery actually pays off, big deal.

Stocks are imaginary financial instruments, and publicly traded stocks are even more imaginary. Some people have a lot of imagination, I suppose. From what my friends tell me, owning a home is worse than owning a car. When your car breaks down, you have to walk home. But when your home breaks down, you're either cold, or wet, or both, and there's no place to sleep. At least, when you rent, there's someone else to blame.