I don't know, but . . .

is treated as a cure-all and factotum, embedded in everything and trusted by the best minds. Or at least influential minds. Haven't we seen this movie before?

I've thought a bit about my attitudes towards it.

If I could get the stupid system to do what I want, I'd be seriously tempted to use it for making a book cover, even though I'm assured that this is a terribly foolish plan for someone with no layout or design training or skills. I can't draw very well and don't know what communicates genre best in Amazon thumbnail images.

But if you suggested that I use AI to write the story, I'd object that this is my story and I'll write it my way. Maybe there'd be fewer typos, but it wouldn't be my story anymore.

Maybe I'm acting like the toddler who insists that he's going to take off his (laced) boots all by himself. Perhaps, but I don't think so.

I've been working on a small problem in math for a few weeks; one that is probably understood already. Maybe AI could solve it for me (or halucinate something plausible). But this way I understand it better. If I can, I want to do it myself.

At Of Two Minds: where AI fails. "In other words, 90% is good enough, as who cares about the other 10% in a college paper, copycat song or cutesy video."

A conversation with ChatGPT: "Diabolus Ex Machina"

The little ones fit nicely in out-of-the-way spaces, and do what they're supposed to (mostly), up until you need to replace the router--and the little thing needs configuration. Then you need to scrape up a working monitor and keyboard and balance them on top of the piano.

The Raspberry Pi was all the rage for a while, but its price kept rising and a little 4x4x1 box does pretty much the same thing; and I didn't need much horsepower.

True, there's no seat in front to shove a bag under, but airplane exit row seating has leg room, which pretty much doesn't exist outside of business class--at least for those of us of a certain height.

I gather you may have to pay extra these days for the privilege of not getting cramps.

At any rate, I remember the question before takeoff--Are you physically able to operate the door in an emergency? I always figured I could.

But I wonder if there's a way to check. Suppose one had a partial mockup of a cabin--just a row and the bulkhead--with the exit door in place. And a big timer display above where the flight attendant straps in.

The candidate enters the little room, straps in, and is told to brace for impact. The flight attendant straps in, the room drops about 6" for a jolt of verisimilitude, and the timer starts. The attendant tells you what to do (scenario has them busy with somebody hurt), and you get to see how hard it is and how long it really takes to get the door unlocked, open, and stowed.

It might be a little humiliating, but I'd think it'd be fun to try. I'd bet some people would pay for the experience--especially if the airlines knocked a bit off the extra fee if you could show you'd passed.

Of course different planes have different doors, but just learning one is better than nothing.

We've probably all heard the novelty Christmas songs with dogs barking or cats meowing the notes; and if we're old enough probably remember Marvin Suggs and his Muppaphone.

A bark can approximate a note in the scale, and if it isn't quite there you can tune it to fit, and with enough samples you could program your synthesizer to bark out whatever tune you cared to. All you need to worry about is the note, duration, and volume, and a good synthesizer will know how to deal with key velocity. You have an alphabet; you can plug in whatever sounds you want.

But what about birdsong? What would you need to take into account if you wanted to compose music using recorded bird chirps, cheeps, chips, warbles, etc?

Bird chirps run faster than human-sung notes. In the time it takes me to sing "la" the bird runs through a trill and a chirp to top it off, even shifting back and forth between notes. Maybe it crescendos, rises and falls. The warbling won't be the same frequency from one species to another.

Matching one "note" to the next isn't like picking letters from an alphabet, but matching textures, speeds, even which sets of notes were used in what isn't a chord. It's more like picking characters from a Chinese typewriter.

You could get around that by slowing the bird calls way down, trimming out a clean part, and "autotuning." It would probably sound interesting, and maybe even good, but I doubt it would sound much like the birdsong it came from.

Maybe the Chinese typewriter is the way to go. To get started, suppose we limit ourselves to 2 octaves of the primary note: 24 primary notes. No warble or warble at a set frequency (we can fiddle with the sound to fit one of our set values): say 8. The secondary note: probably a choice of 8, but some will sound nice together with different ones. Rise and fall shape: 5. Hmm. So far that's 7680 different sounds in the sound bank, with 4 descriptors. I hate to think how many calls you'd have to listen through to settle on that number.

Of course you can take different parts of a single call to represent different ... I can't call it a note, because it's more than just the note ... complexes. Still, even without more descriptors, that's a lot of time somebody (you) has to invest to sort out the complexes, before you start playing.

OK, start simple. Sort out a single type of sound you want to work with (warble type, flat "rise and fall", secondary note difference from the primary). That'll be maybe several weeks of work to get 24 notes (getting a feel for the territory takes a while), and then you program your synthesizer and try it out.

I'd bet that it wouldn't sound quite clean right out of the gate--that attack will be hard to make smooth; and probably some things I didn't think of will jump out at the musician who tries to play it for the first time.

Maybe start even simpler: take some bird chirps, split them into sections, and find the primary frequency for each--if there is one. If there isn't, trying to shoehorn them into notes may not be the way to go. You might have fun trying to assemble your own bird calls, though.

Would it be good enough to be an instrument in its own right, or merely a novelty?

No clue.

UPDATE: birdsong can include ultrasonic notes

The default printer paper and copier paper is good heavyweight stuff, and the fonts have been massaged for maximum readability on screen or print. Copies are crisp, and even single-spaced type is easy to read.

I got a binder of my parents' letters, mostly from '64-'66 (one from '54). Some are handwritten; some were typed on various typewriters. Most were on thin paper, others on airmail letter forms. Bleeding was a bit of an issue. Some were carbon copies. Remember those? Blurry lettering. And the typewriter spacing put lines just a hair too close together--the blogger composition screen is much easier to read. I guess maximizing the number of words per page was key. From the looks of one of the typewriter fonts, that's the only excuse I have for it.

I'd forgotten. That's what I grew up with, and didn't think anything of it then.

From AVI's pointer to Construction Physics I wound up looking over Yamata-1, and then wondering about MHD electricity generation, since the initial article said 20T magnets were lighter and cheaper. Cool idea--propel your ship using electromagnetic forces on seawater. You can guess some of the problems easily.

Maybe that would make MHD generation more feasible too.

MHD electricity generation gives more bang at higher fluid speeds, so post-boiler exhaust isn't ideal. Using a "flame"(*) to put a plasma through a strong magnetic field would tend to push positive ions to one side and negative to the other, to be captured by respective sets of electrodes to produce DC current.

The devil is in the details, of course--said hot plasma is apt to be good at eroding the electrodes. I'm getting tired and going to call the research quits for tonight, but I wonder if injecting streams of cold gas to flow along the walls of the expansion MHD chamber would help protect the electrodes.

That would increase the resistance, of course, but might be worth it.

I don't doubt somebody else has tried this already.

(*) You can find youtube videos of people trying MHD with a small rocket motor.

They warn you that an MRI makes very strange and loud noises. That's ignorable.

Your body position is a bit cramped. For half an hour, that's OK.

They warn that it's a tight space, and not for claustrophobes. Close your eyes to keep the lasers out, and you won't notice a thing.

The personalized mask tries to clamp your head into position, pushing on the base of your nose. That gets old in seconds. I don't know about other people, but I felt like I had to be proactive about breathing through the thing; it didn't feel natural or easy.

No surprises, which was good.

You can still be phished.

The malicious link leads to the attacker’s proxy server that, thanks to the phishing-as-a-service toolkit, looks identical to the real Google login site (except for the URL displayed in the address window). The user then enters their username and password.

The proxy then forwards the credentials to the real Google site. Google will then send the proxy server an MFA request, and the proxy server sends it back to the victim, who is expecting it since they believe they’re trying to log into the legitimate Google page. The victim then sends the MFA code to the proxy server, which sends it to the real Google site.

I'd been intermittently looking at microplastics in the body and some of their sources.

Recent events led me to look up do microplastics come from dissolving sutures?

Yes, they can; though the plastic is different: polyglycolic acid. Apparently you can get tiny shards as it decomposes, and they worry about cells ingesting them, but that's not what the bulk of the paper above is about.

Microplastics seems a wider topic than I thought.

On a related note, I wonder about the safety of biodegradeable plastics in general. Something that is "starch-based" is partly plastics and partly starch, and it is designed to "break down", i.e., be at least partly digested. But is this a little like soap? Does the digestible part bring the indigestible along with it into the organism? "Here's a little starch to sweeten the taste of the propylene fragment."

I wonder if I should run longer power/HDMI cables up the bookcase, and try suspending the monitor from the ceiling--adjustable with a chain loop. Less desk clutter, better monitor height, and I could get it out of the way when I wanted to just look out the window or read.

I don't like it. Its results seem plausible, but I caught it halucinating tonight. I was looking up "farebox recovery" for the Geneva public transportation system. The first query said (correctly), that there wasn't any information about this online. (There wasn't the last time I checked either, several years ago--the city budget info wasn't online.) The second time it claimed a record high farebox recovery of 185%. I tracked that number down to a PDF comparing different cities--that number (the world's highest) was Hong Kong's, though Geneva was listed among the cities.

A third time it claimed 10%, but I don't know where it got that number.

Beware of Artificial Imagination.

When I heard that our local zoo had moved its giraffes elsewhere to allow renovations of their habitat, the first thing that came to mind was: They're too big for a horse trailer. How do they move?

South Africa tried moving some in shipping containers: one hit its head on an overpass and died. They're too big to easily sedate and just tie down; it seems that you have to pack them up as best you can (I assume they use slings, maybe lifted from the floor so you don't have to have somebody walking between the giraffe's legs), and drive carefully. Going around overpasses, I hope.

While we tried to get the monitors adjusted this morning, I wondered how old the tool is: pretty recent, as this interesting story shows.

Vitruvius described how Greek and Roman theaters used pots to improve the sound. Generations since have wondered what he meant, since no examples survive, though there are some niches that might hold a bronze container. (Metal was valuable, and re-used elsewhere, while clay pots broke.)

If the resonators made an audible tone, could that confuse the singers and lyre/flute/drum players? The result would be slightly delayed, like reflections in a big hall can be.

Resonators can be used not just to amplify but to dampen inconvenient frequencies too. Reflections off long stone walls can really muddy the sound, making it hard to make out the speaker/singer's words. Some 10th to 16th century churches were built with pots stuffed with sound absorbing stuff built into the walls.

I get itchy when "it is likely" turns up in essays, such as this article:

It is likely that the function of the vases would have been to make some sounds louder than others by allowing them (or the air within them) to sympathetically vibrate when certain harmonics 'hit' them. So, when a singer performs a perfectly intune scale, a number of vases would ring creating a harmonic chord. An artificial reverberation (RT60 time estimated as 0.2-0.5 seconds, Landels) containing only those harmonics listed in the vases pitches would be produced in an open-air theatre that would otherwise have none. There may be another purpose for the vases other than those already mentioned. Some believe the acoustic jars helped singers and those relying on ear for maintaining pitch to keep to proper pitch. As indicated, the resonance of the vases would have given emphasis to important pitches leaving the others silent. If the artificial reverberation concept is difficult to accept, the assisted resonance idea is perhaps a little more attractive. No definitive answer has been found to the question of authenticity and intent with regards Vitruvian resonating vases.

Note that the hypothesis that the singers could hear them and use them to maintain pitch would imply that the singers would hear the slight delay that I mentioned above, which could confuse the timing. Maybe it's true and the drums helped keep the beat. And IIUC an RT60 of 0.5 seconds isn't bad.

So far I haven't found who may tried it out on a large scale: "Ideally, a complete set of vases needs to be made. However, the sheer cost of a minimum of ten bronze vases has presumably prevented most researchers from pursuing the project." Researchers have modeled them in software, and found some enhancement of male speaking voices (the Greeks didn't have actresses, apparently).

The last link lost all its formatting, making it hard to read. In discussing harpsichord resonances it cites Spiteri thus: "the sound of a harpsichord is like two skeletons making love on a corrugated iron roof".

We've a small plastic cutting board that sees a lot of use because of its convenience. I had a look at it yesterday, and then had a feel of it. The edges had the original smooth corrugated surface. The middle felt fuzzy to the touch. I had a closeup look at it (*), and the surface looked like a sea of floppy snouts pointing up. A lot of plastic had been carved away, and in between where cuts had been the ridges had been re-scored in random directions -- everywhere I looked were bits of plastic begging to be cut or twisted free. I can see why the researchers found that cutting carrots on a board generated more fragments than cutting the board directly -- you'd also get the sideways motion of the cut vegetable to push on those little nubs of plastic. (This was on boards that had already seen a lot of testing.)

I think we're going to retire that board, and use it for craft work instead.

In answer to a question: The best case is that the plastic consumption is harmless, and given that we haven't all keeled over, that's a good approximation. There are lots of other things in our food environment that are "mostly harmless."

WA Guess--these things are a little like mercury: where the inorganic version is somewhat harmful but the organic compounds are deadly. The plastic bits may not cause much problem, but if (e.g.) our gut flora mutate to devour plastic on our behalf, the resulting waste chemicals might be harsh on the body.

At any rate, I prefer not to eat dirt or soap or other "mostly harmless" stuff, so I'll be trying to minimize my plastic consumption too. I won't be losing sleep, though.

(*) MicroBrite Plus pocket microscope--I bought it for science demonstrations in the park. The kids were too young and fumble-fingered to get much benefit from it.

UPDATE: Crummy picture, but you can see a couple of the "snouts."

Researchers studied Plastic particles in bottled water, using Stimulated Raman Scattering:

The researchers found that, on average, a liter of bottled water included about 240,000 tiny pieces of plastic. About 90% of these plastic fragments were nanoplastics. This total was 10 to 100 times more plastic particles than seen in earlier studies, which mostly focused on larger microplastics.

and

The method identified millions of additional particles that did not match the seven categories of plastic. It’s not yet clear if these tiny particles are nanoplastics or other substances.

Why would there be plastic "dust" inside a water bottle?

So far I haven't found any definitive answer to that. However, water does do some damage even to PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which is quite stable in water. Possibly stress points in the plastic bottles are more liable to "corrosion." Possibly the manufacturing process liberates some microstrands of plastic as it blows up the plastic. UV can accelerate degradation. I haven't thought of everything. (Different manufacturers had different quantities: maybe their processes differed or their water sources differed.)

At any rate, using their estimates I get something like a tenth of a part per billion mass of known plastic bits. And probably a hundred times that of unknown stuff--maybe other plastics, maybe bacteria; not known yet.

A study using plants to pull lead from slag-contaminated soil in Atlanta found that in their pots, 10% of the lead could wind up in the plants. The soil had over 500mg/kg of lead. The paper deals with a number of the technical details, but for now just assume that the whole plant is removed and processed (maybe oxidizing it with H2O2 instead of burning) to retrieve the lead someplace either safe or usable.

If one harvest gets rid of 10%, and you want the concentration to be below 5mg/kg, that's about 44 harvests to clean up that dirt. 37 if you're OK with 10mg/kg, 22 if you're OK with 50mg/kg (and you probably shouldn't be).

The urgency of the problem is because people live there now. Some garden, and some of those eat what's in the garden. 40 years is a long time to maintain a program as people come and go, buildings wear out and get replaced, and political priorities churn.

You'd think that something like this would remain a priority, but experience of fighting wars, especially existential ones, says that even important projects get back-burnered or canned. Losing them is even more disruptive. And 44 years is a long time.

Drachinifel's youtube channel is popular in our household--about warships up to the end of WW-II (avoiding the still-secret stuff involved in modern ships). You learn how the ships were built, used, and lost -- and many single-ship episodes ended, as the ship outlived it usefulness, with "sent to the breakers."

"Breaking" -- how does that work; how did that work back before iron ships? Luckily there's a little history. "In the days of the "wooden walls," a ship condemned to destruction was often burned or even carefully "lost" in some convenient spot. To-day the shipbreaking industry is run on scientific lines, and nothing is wasted." (It makes me itchy when people misuse "scientific" like that...)

"Even naval ships were sometimes treated in that way and to the present day small vessels and barges which have no sale value will often be carefully “lost” in some out-of-the-way corner. Harbour masters and conservancy authorities are careful to check this practice wherever possible; but even the Port of London Authority, responsible for the best-controlled port, in the world, often has trouble in stopping it."

A CPAP helps you breathe by providing "continuous positive airway pressure" to help keep the airway open. Without it, if you're lying on your back (and sometimes if you aren't), your tongue and soft palate may relax too much and block breathing, resulting in sleep apnea.

With it, you can feel the air forcing in when you breathe, and exhaling. Well, you can feel those anytime, but it's more pronounced with the machine. Being aware of your breathing is one technique for Buddhist mindfulness meditation: which isn't quite what the doctor ordered. Un-mindfulness so you can get to sleep is the point.

I guess one just has to get used to it, at a time of day when it doesn't matter if you sleep or not: no pressure. So to speak. (That seems to be helping.)

BTW, the valve at the mask may deteriorate over time. Even if it seems to move when you blow on it, at night it might just offer to stay mostly closed on you, making you feel like your machine is trying to blow you up like a balloon. Replacement isn't pricy, and helps a lot.