Viewing profile — atomack

Here's an article citing research published this year that disputes the idea that our large brain was directly a result of access to extra protein from hunting meat: "They conclude…

David Cope's been making algorithmic music for a while - not current but worth knowing about: http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/ edit: There's also this on ambient endless gene…

The way we used arxiv worked well in physics, though this is 15 years ago now so might have changed since. arxiv was about distribution. It didn't replace peer review - articles we…

In quantum mechanics, it's a wave function. Wavelike, but not a wave; particle-like, but not a particle.

One solution is make sure more women can compose music for piano

Good points. I'd add to this that small hands are actively advantageous for a lot of repertoire. Bach fugues, say, or fast intricate passages can be a nightmare for long-fingered p…

Interesting to put this view of the anthropocene next to David Graeber's and how he thinks it shaped the evolution of human society https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-his…

I think to some extent they're forced to peak young. I don't believe musicians are actually at their best when they are young and I'd claim recordings of classical artists through …

According to this guys reading of the burrow: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2018/10/how-to-read-kafka-pa... my efforts at factorio are very kafkaesque

One point regarding whether or not this is unphysical is that in physical systems, conceptually we work in finite systems and at the only very end of our calculations we take the i…

+1 for Paul Sellers. He's a bunch of content on finishing too and I've just tried his combo of shellac + beeswax to finish pine and it works fantastically and is cheap. Also, not y…

Yes, something like that. As I mentioned elsewhere, I wonder if the result might be affected by the acoustics of the room as well as the physical proximity of the sound sources

Somehow the audience also manages to adjust too, trained or not. The violins and cellos are several metres apart yet I think the audience would agree whether they come off together…

But I could play either Jerry Lee Lewis style, arms length from the keyboard with my head back, or Glenn Gould style, hunched over the keyboard and my head moves a metre between th…

There's something weird here though. I reckon more 4 or 5 ms of latenecy is enough to put me off playing something in time (this is about what you aim for using DAWs to record musi…

I'm not sure (1) is 'obviously possible'. Supposing there's a finite number of atomic configurations that produce Abraham Lincoln, there's still an infinite number of atomic config…

Reminds me of this, https://www.businessinsider.com/steven-strogatz-interview-on... , interview with Steven Strogatz, when he gets onto the idea (and dangers) of what beauty means …

I'm not sure I quite share your view of what art aims to do. Iris Murdoch had a line that tyrants fear art because art forces them to confront the truth. If one believes, as Murdoc…

Maybe I'm a luddite but I used books. Any book on common practice harmony will help with most pop/rock and classical up to 20th century. I used Harmony by Piston and happily recomm…

I agree with GTP, the author's definition is vague. As GTP alludes to, temperature is defined perfectly clearly in statistical mechanics, through the sensitivity of the entropy to …

I agree with you completely. I agree with the conclusion, but the way the author gets there just looks wrong to me. I feel the scientific method is mischaracterised throughout, for…

I think it means order in a way that's quite specific to the study of phase transitions. In a phase transition a system switches between a disordered phase (eg a gas) and an ordere…

It's a good point that uncertainty relations exist for all kinds of physical observables. But whether they're expressed as commutation relations or as in Heisenberg's original form…

I'd say that's more a mathematical statement than physical derivation. The effort of subjects like string theory is to lay down fundamental objects and interactions from which othe…