mgeorgoulo's comments

Chapter 8.1 shows an awesome algorithm!

This sort of distraction arises whenever we try to adjust logic to words and not the other way around. It is said that this kind of distinction is only relevant to scientists. The article is very convincing though, that in the case of AI, the general public must be able to make those distinctions.

Life has an awesome way of turning disaster into opportunity!

Very good results and embarrassingly easy to implement!

The very stretched waveform did contain some audible artifacts, but I think other methods like FFT would introduce some as well.

This kind of trick works because our hearing is frequency-based. So the crucial thing is to preserve the frequencies and it is going to sound exactly the same.

Spatial mapping of frequencies in the human ear here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2394499/ (see fig 5.)

Trying this with an image for example wouldn't work, because our vision is sample-based. Imagine splitting an image in tiny fragments and repeating/interpolating them on top of one another.

I bet a super-intelligent alien ethologist would interpret our society as a living thing.

I'm almost sure there are anthropologists who share the same view :)

The study of multi-organism systems: populations, ecosystems and the like is commonly associated with Biology, or a branch (Ecology). They will go as far as "biosphere", in an attempt to study the entire planet.

I bet every biology student has struggled with the introductory "what is life" chapter, full of conflicting definitions.

It is so difficult to define life because there is nothing to be defined. There are complex stuff and simple stuff. We tend to call things that exhibit a certain degree of complexity "alive", but that's just a word.

Can't remember who wrote the perfect definition of Biology: "The study of complex things". There's a great deal of wisdom in that.

I like using trigonometric functions for other things beyond rotations.

For instance, a cropped sine ( [-pi/2,3pi/2] ), remapped to [0,1] in both axes is very handy as a smooth-step function.

Another range ( [0, pi] ) is very convincing as a screen flash.

It fails to address an important aspect of learning by projects: Being exposed to the problems. You are orders of magnitude more productive when learning the solutions to problems you have encountered before. This kind of motivation can only be achieved if you really do stuff.

When I was little, my dad had a DOS PC in his office. I remember writing a quadratic equation solver in QBasic. It was so unbelievably fast compared to struggling with pen and paper. Truly magical!

As of 2018, Greece charges €0.04 / bag.

Albeit very effective, I don't know how to feel about the actual contents of my new multi-use bag.

Almost every food item is packed in a single-use plastic package. It certainly seems that those are a greater concern than the plastic bags.

Reminds me of Bertrand Russell who used to write English in Greek characters to keep his diary private as a child :)

(Anecdote from "Logicomix" graphic novel)

Chances are, older people have been deceived more. This is a reason to be a bit more sceptical upon meeting a new person. While this may be subtle in itself, the very assumption that your peer may also be sceptical about you can make the situation even harder. I'm afraid it takes two naive individuals, blindly disregarding the risks, to start a meaningful friendship.

Never expected that something could be blamed for being too useful.

Or did I? To tell you the truth it always seemed like there's an awful lot of logic in the way internet works. Seems like the real world is catching on, trying to close this gap... I certainly hope it's too late :)

Of course, the same method can be applied to reading other people's code. Actually, that's analogous to what Franklin did. He tried to capture the essence of a finished work of which he approved.

Using a phrase-book in such a manner wouldn't be beneficial. And programming language books are much like phrase-books: guides to syntax.

Other kinds of programming books, in the category "Do X with Y programming language" are best avoided. They tend to look like phone-books. It is best to decouple X from Y.

All of these are already handled by facebook and such. Maybe involving something useful in the process would justify a new service.

For instance look at language exchange, which is penpals with an intent to learn each other's language. There might be other useful stuff a service could match people for.

Awesome. Stuff I found interesting: Triangle and Square waves have only "odd" harmonics: 3x, 5x, 7x of the base frequency and so on... Sawtooth has even & odd harmonics. Sound "brightness". Everyone speaks about it but it's something that you learn to recognize by example. For instance it is my impression that sines sound "brighter" than triangles (triangles reminding me of my Atari 2600...) The convergence slider was an excellent addition. Chords have recognizable shapes. Never thought of that. Makes sense.