The Official 2022 Death Pool
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@Watson said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
@Arantor
TQTA:... LEO II (1957), the world's first commercially available computer...
Sales of the Ferranti Mark I began in 1951.
Pretty sure you could also do arbitrary math using player pianos, with custom readout hardware (that is, stretched strings and watching beat frequencies)...
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@Watson said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
@Arantor
TQTA:... LEO II (1957), the world's first commercially available computer...
Sales of the Ferranti Mark I began in 1951.
Also from the article:
The first LEO program debuted in November 1951.
Coombs began working on LEO programs in 1952.
Meanwhile, the first Ferranti I went to a university, the second to the US census board and that wasn’t delivered until 1952.
Also, something something commercial.
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Oh, who cares what was first and what was second. They're all old as fuck, and that dead woman especially so.
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@Gąska said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
who cares what was first and what was second.
Ahem. Did you forget to wear your today?
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@Gribnit said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
@Watson said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
@Arantor
TQTA:... LEO II (1957), the world's first commercially available computer...
Sales of the Ferranti Mark I began in 1951.
Pretty sure you could also do arbitrary math using player pianos, with custom readout hardware (that is, stretched strings and watching beat frequencies)...
You can do multiplication and division using the fretboards of two banjos as a makeshift slide-rule. Robert Osserman, a mathematician at Berkeley, once pointed this out to Steve Martin who as a banjoist was impressed to find it out.
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I wonder what complex calculations they're doing here, then:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz9jL3YNX-0
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@da-Doctah said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
You can do multiplication and division using the fretboards of two banjos as a makeshift slide-rule.
That should work for any fretted string instrument (assuming it's fretted for equal-temperament tuning, and pretty close even if it's not — for Western scales, anyway). The ratio of string length between one pitch and another is the same for any string — banjo, guitar, violin or whatever — although not all have frets to use for doing math (or playing).
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@Arantor said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
Meanwhile, the first Ferranti I went to a university, the second to the US census board and that wasn’t delivered until 1952.
Wrong computer. You're thinking of UNIVAC.
The first Ferranti I went to Manchester University (following the decision in 1948 to contract Ferranti to commercialise the Manchester computer) in February 1951; the second was sold to a UK government atomic energy research outfit but they cancelled the contract before delivery, so it was sold instead to the University of Toronto who received it in 1952. Retail price at the time was £83,000 (£103,000 export) so Toronto U got it cheap at $30,000.
Also, something something commercial.
Also from the article:
In 1954, J. Lyons & Co. commercialized LEO under the name Leo Computer Ltd in order to offer it for sale to other companies.
By which time Ferranti had already sold three or four machines (depending on when Shell took delivery of theirs). By the time LEO II became "the world's first commercially available computer" in 1957, Ferranti had already sold nine of the things.
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@Watson I may have misread the Wikipedia article on the subject:
The first machine was delivered to the Victoria University of Manchester in February 1951[3] (publicly demonstrated in July)[4][5] ahead of the UNIVAC I, which was sold to the United States Census Bureau on 31 March 1951, although not delivered until late December the following year.
That's what I get for putting levels of effort in while typing from an iPad without having bothered to get out of bed yet.
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@Arantor said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
levels of effort ... without having bothered to get out of bed yet.
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@Zerosquare it does serve as a test of whose banjo is tuned better. I suspect more than a single signum value could be derived, tho.
In related news, "seeing whose banjo is tuned better" would indeed be a disturbing euphemism for, anything.
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@Arantor said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
typing from an iPad
Have you checked out the Unicode Test Patterns thread?
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
@da-Doctah said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
You can do multiplication and division using the fretboards of two banjos as a makeshift slide-rule.
That should work for any fretted string instrument (assuming it's fretted for equal-temperament tuning, and pretty close even if it's not — for Western scales, anyway). The ratio of string length between one pitch and another is the same for any string — banjo, guitar, violin or whatever — although not all have frets to use for doing math (or playing).
The key point is that the human sense of musical pitch is related to the logarithms of the string lengths, not to the bare ratios, which makes the spacing of frets proportional to those of the marks on a proper slide rule.
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@da-Doctah Sort of. The western set of pitches is based on ideas developed by Pythagoras millennia ago. The octave is 2:1. Perfect fifth is 3:2. Perfect fourth is 4:3. Major third is 5:4. Etc.
But an instrument tuned to those ratios can only play properly in a single key. Say it's tuned for the key of C. All the frets are in the right places to produce those ratios, but if you need to play in the key of G, the frets are in the wrong places to produce those ratios for G as the fundamental.
Logarithmic tuning is a compromise. None of the ratios (except the 2:1 octave) are quite perfect for any key; however, they're all off exactly the same for all keys, and that's what most of us have listened to our entire lives, so it sounds right to us.
Also, none of this is really inherent in the human sense of pitch. There are Asian, African and even European folk systems of tuning that sound quite out of tune to us but sound right to those peoples.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
Also, none of this is really inherent in the human sense of pitch. There are Asian, African and even European folk systems of tuning that sound quite out of tune to us but sound right to those peoples.
That part should be at the very start of anything discussing music theory. Sadly, it almost never is, and it took me years before someone who was trying to explain to me music stuff (major/minor, third/fourth/fifth etc.) finally said it clearly.
There's so much said about how our tuning system has its logic (it does!) and how if you change that tune, or that note, you get this or that effect, that makes it all sounds (eh!) as if it was some intrinsic rule of nature that made some sounds "nice" or not. But almost no one ever says how much of the whole thing is cultural more than anything. I had to play the 2 yo ("why? ... ok but why? ... and why?") until someone finally said "because we're used to that and it sounds nice to us, no other reason."
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@remi said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
I had to play the 2 yo ("why? ... ok but why? ... and why?") until someone finally said "because we're used to that and it sounds nice to us, no other reason."
It's basically true, but it is a bit more nuanced than that. Octaves (2:1) and fifths (3:2) sound natural to basically everyone in the world, IIRC ; probably because those are the ratios of the 2nd and 3rd harmonics. And randomly bashing keys on a piano will sound awful to everyone (except contemporary classical music folks maybe, but they're pretentious snobs so it doesn't matter ), because dissonance is found in sounds like baby cries.
There are other music bases that are pretty much universal, but I can't remember them right now.
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@Zerosquare Fourths are also a natural harmonic, and again are pretty much universal.
The modern equal-spaced scale was basically an invention of the baroque period; J S Bach wrote a whole set of 24 pieces to show off what you could do with it. However, quite a few modern instruments don't really use it; notably most of the string section of the orchestra is very much not locked into using it at all. Most of the time it doesn't matter too much, except in that open strings are rarely used except as a way to give the player a moment to reposition their fingers.
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At that point I have to post that video, even if it will only be funny to French people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwcCohZ3lpI
(yeah, audio only, unfortunately. The rights holders have done a pretty good job of getting the video version removed.)
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@Zerosquare Sometimes (every time I see a clip of it...) I regret not having watched more Kaamelot. Anyway. So first let's be clear, "d'abord moi j'en n'ai pas grand'chose à carrer."
It's basically true, but it is a bit more nuanced than that.
Yes, I know (well, I've groked as much from various music-people). There are some sounds that sound good (or bad) to everyone. But my gripe is that most music-people tend to let you believe that this is true for all sounds (and that therefore there is some sort of universal "good" music). And that's the part which isn't true, there still is a strong cultural component.
I would prefer if music-people were clearer on that, and would sometimes clearly say "that bit sounds nice because we're used it, that one sounds wrong to us but there is nothing intrinsically wrong in it."
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Yeah. I used to take piano lessons, and I sometimes the prof would answer "that's just the way it is" when I asked about Why?.
My conclusion was that there's plenty of cargo-culting and suboptimal stuff kept for backwards compatibility in classical approaches to music. And that it's not always a good thing. (No, I didn't tell her that.)
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@Zerosquare said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
there's plenty of cargo-culting and suboptimal stuff kept for backwards compatibility in classical approaches to music.
Sounds suspiciously like visual arts
Anyone trying to prescribe the non-technical aspects of a creative endeavour with
rigorousarse-pulled “rules” and formula should be stringently avoided. You know what else can pick a nice-looking set of colours? My eyes.Anecdote: over there’s some software that can properly formulate paint mixtures for arbitrary colours, based on real spectrographic measurements and optical models. Sometimes, the recommended mixture will include a black pigment. Now there’s this Rule™ that you should Never Mix With Black Paint, so pervasive that the author had to include a section in the FAQ explaining that it is, in fact, perfectly reasonable to make use of black-containing formulas when literally every other generated formula will work without issue.
(the solution, of course, is to go digital all the way )
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@kazitor said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
Now there’s this Rule™ that you should Never Mix With Black Paint
That "rule" sure wasn't in effect when I was learning about painting and color mixing. Colors+white = "tint" Colors+black = "shade"
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
@kazitor said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
Now there’s this Rule™ that you should Never Mix With Black Paint
That "rule" sure wasn't in effect when I was learning about painting and color mixing. Colors+white = "tint" Colors+black = "shade"
I get encouraged to not mix with black paint on the grounds that I otherwise inevitably make a terrible mess.
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@dkf said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
@HardwareGeek said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
@kazitor said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
Now there’s this Rule™ that you should Never Mix With Black Paint
That "rule" sure wasn't in effect when I was learning about painting and color mixing. Colors+white = "tint" Colors+black = "shade"
I get encouraged to not
mix with blackpaint on the grounds that I otherwise inevitably make a terrible mess.FTFM
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@dkf said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
I get encouraged to not mix with black
The racism thread is .
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@kazitor yes, yes, art etc., why does the triangle we asked for not have 5 sides yet?!
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@Gribnit sounds like you need the expert - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
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@PleegWat the system works...
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@Arantor so, fine. Red lines, some get a >>8 shader, some get a >>24 shader. Couldn't be clearer. Consultants really can be dense sometimes.
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@Gribnit you appear to have missed the perpendicularity requirement.
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@Arantor eh, what is space.
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@Zerosquare He may have created the GIF, but he pronounced it wrong.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
@Zerosquare He may have created the GIF, but he pronounced it wrong.
Now he can turn in his jrave whenever someone pronounces it correctly
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Damn...
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@loopback0 said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
Damn...
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@loopback0 said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
@HardwareGeek said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
@Zerosquare He may have created the GIF, but he pronounced it wrong.
Now he can turn in his jrave whenever someone pronounces it
correctlyincorrectlyFTFY Giffory Gurraffe
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@hungrier damn, that headline is gonna need some cocoa butter. No, not Aladdin. Not the genie. No, not the evil vizier. The intentionally annoying parrot.
A solemn day of sorrowful sorrow indeed. Have we still at least got Fran Drescher?
Is... is Ray Romano okay?
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@hungrier But the folks at AFLAC are dancing in the aisles.
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@hungrier said in The Official 2022 Death Pool:
Strange that they'd mention Aladdin rather than the 50 Shades of Grey (Gray?) audiobook.
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Someone I hadn't heard of until just now, but kind of wish I had
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@hungrier Oh, that's sad.
He was indeed someone who wouldn't hold back, do some serious roasting when women were explaining him how men courting them should shower them with gifts or praise them all the time, and then end all the videos I saw with a summary of how the black community has a cultural problem in that it doesn't hold its women (or some of the men) accountable (I could look those videos up, but - I think there are likely enough on them on his channel).
I can see how he was deemed controversial.
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Ah, now I remember when I first learned of him: it must have been shortly after the "Female Delusion Calculator" thread was started in the Garage somewhere in August last year. Back then he also had interviews with women who were complaining that they couldn't find a highly-paid man, and they definitely didn't take it well once he started asking what they had to offer in return.
His videos could get rather long and cringey though, and they were way slower than these compilation videos so that's why you might not spotted them before.