deathmtn

Almost forgot that I had a bunch of stuff on YouTube, some of which were the only copies. With the help of youtube-dl I'm grabbing them all, in case Google's GDPR-mandated data downloading is letter-of-the-law and incomplete, like Twitter's.

TFW you read an incredible blog post, then look at more posts from the blog and come across praise for a book that almost made you puke

In preparation for a project, I've been reading papers about data sonification, which were suggested to me by a former colleague, Jordan Wirfs-Brock, who knows a lot about data sonification. They were insightful. Here's the highlights for me.

The first paper was Is Sonification Doomed to Fail? by John G. Neuhoff, which details problems that data sonification has yet to shake off.

In humans, there are approximately ten times as many cortical neurons devoted to vision as there are to hearing. It should come to as no surprise then that in all by the perception of time, perceptual judgments made with the eyes are usually more precise than those made with the ears.

I've tried to convey magnitude with picture in the past, and yes, it is really hard to pick out fine differences in pitch, especially they need to be really fine in order to represent a really large range of values. It is, however, very interesting that hearing is better at picking up changes in time.

Perhaps the most critical difference between musicians and non-musicians in extracting information from sonification lies in the ability to segregate auditory streams.

Musicians are used to separating a sound into components that come from different sources. Moreover, the paper points out all sorts of assumptions that don't hold across the general population that by data sonification designers make because they are musicians themselves.

Leveraging audition's temporal advantage would likely be a more fruitful approach than concentrating on other perceptual dimensions (e.g. pitch and loudness). Similarly, although the spatial resolution of the visual system is better than that of the auditory system, we can only see a limited field of vision while we can hear in 360 degrees.

In general, I've noticed organizations (and individuals) have difficulty exploiting the actual advantages of a medium to which they are unaccustomed, preferring instead to translate whatever works in their comfort medium to something else.

The second paper is Consistency of Magnitude Estimations with ConceptualData Dimensions Used for Sonification. It is a writeup of two experiments conducted to determine how people perceived changes in various aspects of sound in terms of magnitude. The results from both experiments were highly correlated.

Experiment 1 found that:

- Increasing urgency can be reliably represented by increasing pitch, tempo, and especially brightness. (19 of 19 participants thought that increasing brightness meant increasing urgency.)

- Increasing brightness also indicated increasing proximity for a majority of subjects (12 out of 19). The pitch and tempo did not work here.

In most cases, changes in brightness sent a clearer message than the other aspects. (In the intro, the paper mentions that sometimes people can't correctly identify the direction in a pitch change. Each experiment includes a test to see how subjects correlate changes in a sound element to itself. e.g. "The pitch went up; subject reports that the pitch went up." Sort of an A-A test.)

Experiment 2 had more "wins" for brightness. Significant majorities of subjects thought that an increase in brightness worked as an indicator for increases in size, temperature, pressure, and velocity.

The only other results that stand out to me are that 1) pitches getting higher reliably suggests increases in temperature and 2) pitches getting lower suggests greater attractiveness. (17 out of 20 subjects thought that decreases in pitch suggested increases in attractiveness.) I'm not actually sure that it is possible to explain a consistent definition of attractiveness to test subjects, though. As the author says:

However, it is possible that the term attractiveness is strongly associated with aesthetic judgements and rarely considered as a data dimension, so it maybe that some listeners simply made subjective assessments of the sounds themselves,despite the instructions to consider the sounds in terms of the data values they would represent.

I think the biggest takeaways for me were:

1) I shouldn't count on pitch or tempo to represent most data dimensions. (However, I still believe that using tempo to represent time — basically, using time to represent time — is worth trying.)

2) Brightness is a reliable indicator of a lot of data dimensions; worth considering for usage.

Dan Wang has a really thoughtful overview of the state of technology in China in 2019. He does think that the long-term prospects are good for technology in China, but many of the current fears about Chinese domination are hype, as there are still fundamentals that they're missing, like a semiconductor industry.

There's a really good insight in there about the value of intangible process knowledge:

We should think of technology as a living product, which has to be practiced for knowledge even to be maintained at its current level. I offered the example of the Ise Grand Shrine, which Japanese caretakers tear down and rebuild anew every generation so that they don’t lose its production knowledge. Here’s an example I came across more recently: Mother Jones reported in 2009 that the US government forgot how to produce “Fogbank,” a classified material essential to the production of the hydrogen bomb, because relevant experts had retired. The government then had to spend millions of dollars to recover that production knowledge. I believe that the hard-to-measure process knowledge is more important than the more easily observable tools and IP. We would be capable of making few meaningful advancements if a civilization from 2,000 years in the future were able to dump blueprints on us, just as the Pharaohs and Caesars from 2,000 years in the past would have been able to do nothing with the blueprints of today.

Today, Chinese workers produce most of the world’s goods, which means that they engage more than anyone else in the technological learning process. Few Chinese firms are world-leading brands. But workers in China are using the latest tools to manufacture many of the most sophisticated products in the world. They’re capturing the marginal process knowledge, and my hypothesis is that puts them in a better place than anyone else to develop the next technological advancements. To be more concrete, Chinese workers will be able to replicate the mostly-foreign capital equipment they currently use, make more of their own IP, and build globally-competitive final products.

There's just a ton of really interesting passages in that letter. For example:

After the UK imposed export controls on industrial mills in the 18th century, US firms simply hired a few people who memorized their designs. One of them, Samuel Slater, is known as “Slater the Traitor” in the UK and the “father of the US industrial revolution” stateside.

(That was in regard to trying to keep tech secrets from China.)
And a bit about architecture:

like a remark from a friend: Beijing is a city that emanates a sense of sinister power, in a way that Mumbai and Naples also do. They’re each places that have had foreign rule over significant periods, filled with intimidating buildings that have entryways that convey mystery. It’s worth keeping in mind that the city has been sustained through sheer political will; which other major cities can be so far away from a significant river or body of water?

I think that not committing to things is probably the biggest detriment to making enough works that I'm satisfied with long-term. The reason I don't commit at a "blood level" to anything is that I know there's many other things I could be working on, any of which could turn out better than what I'm working on currently.

So, at a semi-subconscious level, I'm constantly hedging, which is bad both for my morale and any single project. One of the most important lessons I got out of Universal Traveler is that committing to something is a critical part of the design process.
I don't know if Field will solve this problem, but if it doesn't, I have to keep trying.

I think a kid's confidence re: any particular skill has to be rebuilt again and again and again. We're once again reestablishing that the guy can draw (prompted by school mentioning that he needs support), and I bet we'll have to do it again in a few months. If you're confident about your ability to do something, definitely take a moment to appreciate how went into establishing that.

I’m surprised that pants that also have a fly in the back aren’t more popular.

10-4-4-4-4-8. Quiet and smooth.

I really enjoy days that I wake up really early until about 4 PM.

What if they rebooted the Dracula franchise with a modern protagonist that people could relate to? Scott Dracula

I updated the Autocomplete Joke bot for the first time in quite a while. It uses HTML instead of space characters and plain linebreaks to format the jokes. Also, I added more filtering to get rid of things I don't think are fully, like the original word autocompleted to have a suffix on it. Or "[original word] are called".

I have to say, having unit tests helped a lot with being able to do this quickly and without doubt. Good job, me from five years ago.

Bonus Cat seems fine now.

It's not really like him to puke food, he seems more inactive than usual, and his back has gotten a little bony lately. So during my accidental anxiety meditation (AKA lying down and trying to go back to sleep), I thought: What if he was dying? Would it be time to just start letting him eat dinner off of our plates for a while? And what would I put on smidgeo.com? I guess some kind of gold plaque with a hagiography about the founder on it.

Every once in a while, I check on my daily backup processes (which clone some of my web sites to a giant HD in my house). Sometimes, I have to run one of the manually so it completes and can get going the next day.

The guy's site hasn't been backed up since September. And so the backup was showing me posts from September, and holy shit, he is distinctively smaller and different-looking. Months still matter a lot at this age.

It's been a while since I've been up this early. Bonus Cat threw at 3 AM (not just a hairball), and I ended up just lying in bed thinking about various problems. So: up and at them!

Heh, I'm on month 2 of working on an app that I am making just so I can figure out what I should be doing. It's like almost-almost usable.

10-4-4-4-4-7. I do pull-ups in part because it’s hard to hurt yourself when you lose focus, as I’ve done with deadlifts. But I actually did bonk my nose at the end of the first set. Everything requires too much concentration!

The Art Of Computer Designing: A Black and White Approach

This book is kind of amazing, largely in its approachability.