Interesting Links for 21-11-2011
Nov. 21st, 2011 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- OWS in an alternate universe
- The co-op business model: share whatever you've got
- A very nice visualisation of a Bach cello piece. Click the "?" in the corner for an explanation
- Oddly, Texas can teach the UK a thing or two on criminal justice
- Go on tour? How old fashioned! Mariah Carey broadcasts holograms instead.
- It looks like setting targets for schools and hospitals is actually a good thing
- What happens when you crack an egg 100ft under water?
- The longest, strangest forgery spree the American art world has known
- Walking through doorways causes forgetting
- Self-Help for Nerds. (Cue numerous disagreeing comments over the definitions of "nerd", "geek" and "dork")
- Amazon leaves girl gamers out in the cold. (Message to marketing departments - please _think_)
- Brent Spiner on perceptions of Star Trek
- Interesting stuff on The Great Dying, when volcanos nearly wiped out all life on Earth.
Tags:
- acting,
- advice,
- amazon,
- architecture,
- art,
- bach,
- brentspiner,
- business,
- comics,
- crime,
- diving,
- doors,
- earth,
- education,
- eggs,
- forgery,
- funny,
- gaming,
- geek,
- geology,
- healthcare,
- life,
- links,
- mariahcarey,
- maths,
- measurement,
- memory,
- music,
- occupy,
- politics,
- psychology,
- rehabilitation,
- scuba,
- sharing,
- startrek,
- targets,
- technology,
- texas,
- uk,
- usa,
- video,
- visualization,
- volcano,
- watchmen,
- weird,
- women
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no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 11:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 05:18 pm (UTC)It also sounds wrong to me because the strings are plucked, whereas the piece as written is bowed. It sounds more like it's being played on a harpsichord that a cello.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 05:24 pm (UTC)Could a Markov model be used for a computer musician with an initial seed value to make the variations in duration, pitch etc., variable but also consistent in their variations?
It's a long time since I've used sequencers, but they used to have humanize and quantize functions, the former making the machine more human and the latter making the human more machine like.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 12:34 pm (UTC)Well no - only people (of either gender) who would prefer to play a female character. That's not the same thing at all.
While I would expect a substantial number of male gamers to never want to play as a girl (they're probably the sort who feature regularly on that Fat, Ugly or Slutty website), I would expect far fewer girl gamers to never want to play as a bloke, if only because the girl gamers would miss out on more games.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 12:41 pm (UTC)Absolutely in actual games you're stuck with the one gender most of the time (although there's obviously more choice in a lot of RPGs than in other games).
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 12:53 pm (UTC)I don't mind being stuck with one gender in a game. Would Tomb Raider be better if you could play as Laurence Croft? Would Super Mario Bros be better if you could play as Maria or Louisa?
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 12:56 pm (UTC)Games that allow you lots of control over your character (race, size, clothing, etc.) tend to allow you control over gender as well (as in Dragon Age, Skyrim, Mass Effect, et al). And if you're allowing a selection of multiple characters then including a female one makes sense (see Left 4 Dead or Borderlands).
Games which hand you a single character to play with, on the other hand, you can't expect any individual game to offer you diversity :->
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 01:23 pm (UTC)1) Amazon have fixed it after complaints.
2) The original post is in error and the person just entered the wrong code of two.
3) It's a genuine mistake with this one person and they just need to contact customer support.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 03:26 pm (UTC)Nice one to Amazon for getting it sorted. Shame they had to :->
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 05:08 pm (UTC)"When the divers broke the egg, the result was not a gloppy mess, but rather the egg remained in a ovoid shape until it, well, disappeared!"
That seemed unlikely and you couldn't really see from the video -- you could see a whole yoke but not really the white -- the source claims "The reason that the egg looks yellow is the fact that raw egg whites are nearly transparent, so it’s hard to make them out on video". Alas, if you check on youtube there are other, better focussed, underwater egg videos and you can see that the white actually becomes a bit of a gloppy mess but the yolk stays whole. (which tallies with my expectations from numerous attempts to make great poached eggs).
I'm going to have to try this but it's going to be a while before I'm diving anywhere where I can get to 30 or 40 metres depth with any kind of good light.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-22 08:11 pm (UTC)And the idea of diving somewhere dark and probably cold fills me with dread. I loved Cyprus and Israel for the warm water and excellent viewing distance.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-22 08:13 pm (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapa_Flow#Scuba_diving
no subject
Date: 2011-11-22 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 07:21 pm (UTC)As for the music visualization, I was wondering how it would work if it were based on a version well played by a human being, with the shapes of the circular tracks shifting to bring the balls around at the right emotional moment-- this would be much harder to program, but might be fun to watch.