Jokes

What do witches and wizards use while typing up their incantations?

A spellchecker.

What do grasshoppers use when they're typing up theories on grass consumption?

Locust Notes.

A piece of computing history

Every once-in-a-while, it's good to look back at events that become turning points in history.

15 years (and two days) ago, Linus Torvalds made the first post about Linux on the comp.os.minix newsgroup. Torvalds' work, enabled by the GNU project's tools (such as gcc), gave us a completely free-as-in-speech operating system, just as the GNU project had been working towards for years.

w00t for GNU/Linux!

Dark Matter!

Scientists have shown that dark matter exists!

My other oversized foam weapon is THE LORD

Hehe... Nun Wars!

Interesting Article

Terry Hancock's recent post, Ghost in the Shell, describes and somewhat analyzes avatars—what they are, how they're used, how we relate to them, based on context, and how the "Ghost", or the persona behind the avatar, is more important than the "Shell", or the avatar itself, be it physical or digital. Go take a read.

Posted "The Galway Shawl"

I've posted a Lilypond trascription of "The Galway Shawl" on my website. There are also PDF and PS versions available on the site as well. I was unable to find very much information on it, so I have not posted it to Mutopia (yet), but I do believe that the original is in the public domain. Enjoy!

Fleas and Mathematics

In the popular-mathematics book I'm reading, there are a number of little poems and quotes. You may have heard the following before. Quotations are courtesy the Wikipedia.

"So nat'ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller fleas that bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum."
-- Johnathan Swift

"And the great fleas themselves, in turn,
have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still,
and greater still, and so on."
-- Augustus de Morgan

Eulogy for a Dog

Several weeks ago, the longtime (13 years, I believe) family dog, Aspen, died. It's been kinda strange; no one has seemed particularly upset about it, not me, not even the other dog, Miko. We'd been expecting it for some time now. But I think a short note about her life is appropriate.

Aspen was a kind-hearted runaway. She was chosen from the animal shelter because she was the only one not barking at the time (how soon that changed!). At the time, she was two, and though she sometimes tried to escape, she always made it back somehow. She loved to chase the squirrel, and one time almost caught the bunny. She never understood fetch, but she loved tug of war, and chewing on bones. She had a stout heart and was an optimist, even at the end. How do we know? Her spirit was always strong, even when she must have been in terrible pain. At the end she had warts, cataracts, a limp and probably cancer. But she was always cheerful. She died on the way to the vetrinarian following a stroke several days prior. She was 16.

Richard Stallman hits it on the head

Now, as some of you may know, Richard Stallman is the founder and leader of the Free Software Foundation, and is therefore an influential and generally important guy in the Free Software movement. I don't always agree with him; in fact, I often think he deliberately provokes people, which, I admit, is a time-honored rhetorical and activist technique. Nevertheless, I respect him and his willingness to do what he believes is right. Anyway, I was reading a transcript of his speech about the GPLv3 at the conference in Barcelona, and I read these lines:

[People who choose free software for practical reasons] are the kind of people that assume that you should choose between Free Software and proprietary software based on practical convenience, which is another way of saying that they value freedom at zero. How sad. How can freedom ever be safe, when people don't appreciate it. People have had to fight for freedom, over and over.

And when people do not value their freedom, they are very likely to lose it. But that's the fact. Most of our community does not appreciate freedom. Most of the World, lets go of vital freedoms whenever some crooked politician tells them "I'm going to protect you from terrorists, give up your freedom, let me protect you."

Right on, Mr. Stallman.

Time for some Linkage!

An interview with Defective By Design, a campaign by the Free Software Foundation (again, that's free as in speech, not beer) against DRM.

Also, RMS's essay, The Right to Read.

And a quote from his explanation on a Harry Potter boycott:

[...]one of the biggest threats to all these freedoms today comes from the general climate of fascism--the idea that government should support the power of business over human rights.

Thoughts on Music and Text

This isn't revolutionary, but I was thinking last night about the difficulties involved in music-scanning software. That is, software that scans an image of music (presumably that you scanned in from paper) and creates a representation of that music in a format that's understood by one or more music-writing programs, such as Lilypond or Sibelius.

Text-scanning software, as evidenced by the quality of the scans at Project Gutenburg's Distributed Proofreaders, is pretty good, at least if you have a nice, clean page. However, the last time I tried out music-scanning software, I was very sorely disappointed. So, I began thinking about what the difficulties were with music, and how these were different from text.

Humans can easily recognize and interpret words in all different fonts and sizes, and with a standard font, like Times, very little time is spent actually interpreting the symbols (letters, punctuation). Instead, many common words and phrases are recognized by their structure and form, and the mind replaces any missing words or lettrs as needed, giving a very powerful method of interpretation, even with relatively minimal data. Does music operate in the same way?

First, let's look at fonts and sizes. While it is true that there are some different fonts, sizes, and sometimes even different symbols for musical 'letters' (but then, think of 'A' and 'a'), the variation is relatively small. An eighth note, for instance, is almost always a small, filled oval, with a line attached (called the 'stem') that has one flag. But then we have to consider the equivalent of ligatures.

A ligature, in typography, is when two separate letters are set together as one character. For example, fl and fl. It's sometimes hard to see on a computer screen, but open up a professionally-printed book and you'll see them. Anyway, in music, ligatures can occur when flagged notes are next to one another. Two eighth notes, for example. The flags are joined, and instead a bar runs between the stems.

Musical ligatures are very useful. The composer, arranger or typesetter can change the interpretation of the music based upon how the notes are joined together. For instance, two sets of three eighth notes is different that three sets of two eighth notes, even if they occur in the same time signature.

Anyway, one of the problems involved in scanning music is the lack of semantic understanding by the software. With text, it is much simpler; not only can you improve the recognition of each character, but you can include a dictionary of common words, which can be referenced to check each word as it is scanned. I don't know if any software actually does this, but the human mind does, which leads to the correcting mechanism above.

I wondered whether musicians do this with music, too. The answer is yes. At least, I do. Many times, there is a passage that I have played before, even if it's only a few notes. I glance at the music, see the starting point and recognize the relationship between the notes, and my brain sends the sequence to my fingers. Of course, this doesn't always work perfectly, but it is very helpful in sightreading, and practice corrects the times when it doesn't help. Additionally, musicians, while playing, can understand the context of the passage. They are aware whether the key is minor or major, and can sometimes guess the structure of the music, even if they're playing alone.

This ability to understand the minute pieces of music in context helps musicians read it, which is something that a computer could probably not do. However, music-scanning software could include samples and compare the relationship between notes to the samples.

Another difficulty in scanning music is that it is much more cluttered than text. In text, each character stands by itself, and so the software can pick each one out separately. Of course, sometimes there are complications, such as spots of ink on the page or underlining, but in general text can be isolated.

This is not so with music. Each note is in relation to a staff, which determines its pitch, and usually other notes. For example, if we were to take a slurred, dotted eighth note connected to a staccato sixteenth note, we must consider first their pitches, then their durations (keeping in mind that there is a dot to the right of the eighth note that applies to it), their articulations (the slur passes from the eighth note to the sixteenth, but the staccato is only on the sixteenth--or is it a smudge?), and any text that might be connected to them, for example dynamic markings. Some software attempts to enforce duration constraints on the scanned music by making each measure have exactly the correct durations. Musicians do this, too, but they have the flexibility and intelligence to decide if one note is actually an over-sized grace note or where the extra needed rest should go. The software, free from context, has more difficulty doing this.

Anyway, that's all I have for the time being on that topic.