Devlin_Donnelly's comments

Devlin_Donnelly | 10 years ago | on: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Are Starting an Economic Revolution

I did a quick search and it seems there is some general information out there about ocean farming/aquaculture.

There is a Wikipedia article on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture

As well as an office of Aquaculture in the US NOAA (National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration):

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/aquaculture/index.htm

Maybe these resources could help you find information & resources to learn more about ocean farming/aquaculture.

Devlin_Donnelly | 12 years ago | on: Try Bitcoin

I recieved this error when trying to sign up for coinbase and transfer my uBTC there:

You don't have that much - please visit the Buy/Sell page to add more funds to your account..

Any Suggestions?

Devlin_Donnelly | 13 years ago | on: Apps? No root? Your device serves others, warns Berners-Lee

I have always liked the web as a platform because I can build something once and have it work across many operating systems/browsers/etc... and because the web is built on open standards.

One criticism people have of this approach to application development is that web apps aren't as efficient as native apps.

This pro/con discussion of web vs native apps reminds me of the C programming language, why it was created and what for.

The C Programming language was designed to be a portable language, meaning that it can be compiled on virtually any platform, any operating system. Yet C was also designed to constitute the minimum abstraction away from a given platforms native assembly language.

Thus a program written in C can be compiled on almost any machine, and run as efficiently or nearly as efficiently on that machine as a program written in that machine's native assembly language.

So perhaps we could use something like the C programming language for the web. A technology which allows us as developers to write our applications once in a portable open format, without needing to sacrifice in terms of performance.

Any thoughts?

Devlin_Donnelly | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: Teoria.js - Music theory for JavaScript

> It's inextricable from cultural bias, though the physics obviously plays some role.

Of course, as you say, our cultural biases/values play a role in how we create music and what music we appreciate with how much consonance/dissonance.

But the fact that certain musical intervals sound more harmonious or more dissonant seems to be a result of the human ear's response to the physical nature of the frequency of the sound waves, and thus a response that is shared across cultures.

> The ratios for a tritone, major 7th, etc. are more complex

Yeah, I guess that's true that the ratios between those 12 frequencies aren't the 12 simplest, but they can be derived by following the simplest non-octave ratio - 3:2 or a perfect fifth - starting from a root note and moving up one perfect fifth 12 times.

Thus if you start from C: C - G - D - A - E - B - F# - C# - G# - D# - A#/Bb - F and that's all 12 notes. I guess I thought that because of that pattern those were the twelve simplest ratios. Thanks for the heads up.

And yes this principle applies to the Just tempered Scale not the even-tempered scale.

Devlin_Donnelly | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: Teoria.js - Music theory for JavaScript

As to why some sets of notes sound good or harmonious and others sound "bad" or dissonant, we find that frequencies with the simplest mathematical ratios tend to sound the most harmonious, while frequencies with more complex ratios sound more dissonant.

So for example the simplest ratio 2:1 corresponds to an octave interval. Notes which are an octave apart sound so similar that we describe them with same letter. So concert A is 440Hz and the "A" note one octave higher is 880Hz.

The next simplest ratio, 3:2 corresponds to the interval known as a perfect fifth. So given the example of concert A at 440Hz again, one perfect fifth above concert A is the note E which has a frequency of 660Hz as (440 * 3) / 2 = 660.

We find the simplest ratios of frequency intervals present in music from cultures the world over. The traditional classical Western twelve-note scale consists of the 12 simplest frequency ratios. In some Eastern music we hear a pentatonic or five note scale, which consists of the five simplest frequency ratios.

So this aspect of music we can attribute to innate psycho-acoustics or even physics rather than cultural bias.

Devlin_Donnelly | 13 years ago | on: What (apps) do you use to stash away your ideas?

I usually write down on whatever is handy, be it a scrap of paper, a text editor on my desktop machine, or the Notes app on my iPad.

The result of this is that all of my notes are on different machines, in different folders or formats.

Now that you mention it, it might be nice to have an app in the cloud that would be just for this purpose and would sync data across all of my devices.

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