Researchers at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam have discovered a universal property of musical scales. Until now it was assumed that the only thing scales throughout the world have in common is the octave.
The many hundreds of scales, however, seem to possess a deeper commonality: if their tones are compared in a two- or three-dimensional way by means of a coordinate system, they form convex or star-convex structures. Convex structures are patterns without indentations or holes, such as a circle, square or oval.
In October, when Steve Jobs publicly called Google's claims of openness "disingenuous", Android chief Andy Rubin responded with the first tweet of his life:
the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"
In other words, Rubin says open means that you can use a command line to create a directory, download the Android source code, and build your own OS.
By that definition, Honeycomb is not open. Sometimes, Steve Jobs is exactly right. ®
Here’s what I commonly observe: the students who struggle in technical courses are those who skip the insight-developing phase. They capture concepts in their notes and they study by reproducing their notes. Then, when they sit down for the exam and are faced with problems that apply the ideas in novel ways, they have no idea what to do. They panic. They do poorly. They proclaim that they are “not math people.” They switch to a philosophy major.
Without insight you can’t do well.
Robby Gorman shares a song he composed in about 2 hours with the iPad 1 running GarageBand:
The song was recorded entirely on a first generation iPad.
It consists of eight virtual tracks: two recorded acoustic guitars, two recorded vocal tracks, two recorded electric guitars, a virtual bass, and a virtual drumkit. All audio tracks were recorded with the iPad’s internal condenser microphone.
I wrote this song for the purpose of trying GarageBand for iPad this evening. I used vocals, guitars and virtual instruments in ways that I believe most people would use them, and I capped the project at two hours.
The experience of programming on so little sleep was like trying to cook a soufflé by dictating instructions over a phone to someone who had never been in a kitchen.
I enjoyed this thoroughly engaging description of how pinboard's Founder handled the onslaught of traffic sent his way by Yahoo's unfortunate blurt about canceling Delicious Bookmarks.