the year i wake up early

Welcome to the future, again. Some quick thoughts:

– One must be able to write code that creates forms: rondos, sonatas, symphonies, minuets, etc, based on a given theme or seed. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before. Maybe I’ll do it this term.

– Educationally, it must ALSO be possible to write a procedural question generator for, say, a math class. This would be all kinds of useful for people like me who learn by grinding through question after question after question.

– I had a lot of professors this past term who had….intriguing marking systems, and interesting concepts of what “on time” meant. This got me thinking about bonus marks for early submission, and then to the idea of utterly strict deadlines, but with marks given out for fixing mistakes in the assignment. I don’t think that’s possible in a university environment because of the time that marking takes, but it’s a neat thought.

– I’ve been thinking about a project called HEARTBEATS, which is a top-secret classical / contemporary music thing that I’ll do next year, if at all. But, it got me thinking about the timeless idea of DJ software that responds to the dancefloor, and then about the actual data of a dancing crowd: heartrate, EEG, blood alcohol content, ambient temperature. How do these and other points change over the course of a night? How fast do they respond to the music that’s playing? Inquiring minds (that is to say, me) want to know!