I also have lots of catching up to do, to say nothing of 2014 year-ends.
– The bar optimizer: Graph theory meets drink mixing.
– The Entire Screen of One Game: Hoooold on, this is a bit of a headbreaker.
– The math of segregation: With adorable polygons.
– Insane projection mapping: This stuff just keeps getting better and better – I suspect it is going to break out sooner rather than later.
– Killed by Police. Owwwch.
– The Humane Interface / Jef Raskin: I’ve been reading a lot of Spider Robinson of late, who was a huge fan of Raskin…though I can’t think that Spider ever used any of Raskin’s ARCHY prototypes, because they look a little insane. It is interesting to note, however, that many of the ideas talked about in the Canon CAT have made their way into modern phone interfaces.
I have opinions about academia. Here are some of them:
– Money. There needs to be more of it. This is not a new sentiment, but it’s a shame when I can triple my income by getting an “industry” job, relative to a friend of mine who researches neuron pathways in the brain.
– Focus. Academia is really good at producing academics. It is not so good at producing “highly trained personnel” for any other field. Some sort of magic pathway for these people would be welcome.
– Bullshit. There needs to be much less of it. Fewer forms, fewer hoops to jump through, etc.
– Community. There needs to be more of it. I don’t know if that’s a responsibility of the institution, but the institution in question sure can help with it.
December 20, 2014 · by
thor · in
art
Happy solstice, one and all.
– I got a paper about Xenakis accepted by CIM 2014, which is happening right now! Thanks to the musicologists for trusting a programmer to know things.
– Tom Armitage says some Things about the Internet of Things.
– Africa Express does In C, and maybe steals the album of the year award.
December 1, 2014 · by
thor · in
art
– E-Stonia, of course. Anyone one who wants to predict the future should visit Estonia at least as much as they visit, say, San Francisco.
– More and more people that I follow on the internet are moving to newsletters: Warren Ellis, Eliza Gauger, etc. I am not yet sure why this is. Perhaps because words on newsletters are not owned by what Uncle Bruce Sterling calls The Stacks, or perhaps simply because they like the form better than the blog / post / tweet. I just wish I could point them to my RSS reader somehow.
So I was super-duper broke for most of the year, which precluded me buying much music, which precluded me recording very many DJ sets.
So, of course, I leapt down the music-nerd rabbit hole by recording six short DJ sets, each named for a composer or pair of composers:
These are almost certainly the most dork-heavy sets I’ve ever worked out – but there are some good moments in them besides. I have grandiose plans to record commentary tracks for each of these, talking about each track and why it matches each composer, but that can wait for now.
It has been a heavy few days. Let’s talk about about what is good.
Heh.
At any rate, my MA thesis is done and both the PDF and a human-readable summary of it are here.
Thanks to, of course, everyone. Yes, you too. Could not have done it without you.
The week where you encounter your worst fear.
