yoos

I've noticed the same kind of distraction-free productivity in the wee hours and thought about starting my day at midnight, but usually I have a hard time taking my hands off whatever task is on hand. Consequently, I am usually a night owl who wakes up nearly at noon (I'm a student, as well), and when I actually need to be somewhere in the morning, I power through with a few bags of black tea.

I admit the 5pm bedtime schedule is a lot healthier and syncs with the 9-to-5 work schedule nicely, though.

The lines look like those on an inverted plane: http://xahlee.info/SpecialPlaneCurves_dir/Inversion_dir/inve...

Personally, I've operated accelerometers and gyros at 200 Hz after some low-pass filtering, which is really all you need for this application. I'm sure there are sensors that operate at even higher frequencies if need be. The GPS module doesn't have to be updated too fast (maybe 10 Hz?) because it only serves to correct for horizontal drift.

I run the 100 Hz flight control loop for my tricopter on an ATmega1280 clocked at 16 MHz. A _lot_ more could be done with something like the Beagleboard, including generating a 3D map of the surroundings if I mounted a Kinect on it.

I want to agree about the decentralized operation because there would be so many wireless signals that could interfere, but those guys seem to be controlling 20 quadrotors without problems. I know XBees can be configured to communicate on different channels, but decentralized operation will most likely require something beefier like wifi (and that, I don't know how to configure to work over so many different channels).

Hmm.. I'm not entirely sure if by the "gap", you were referring to this, but just to clarify:

When I said there are sounds the musician hears and feels the audience cannot, I wasn't referring to the ability to pick out different sounds, but rather the physical impossibility of certain sounds (e.g., higher-frequency overtones, squeaking strings, rasping strings) to be heard beyond a certain distance away from the instrument being played.

To go off on even more of a tangent, I sometimes feel bad that not enough people get a chance to listen to musical performances up close. I mean really close, with the musician in front of them in the same room so they can hear "almost" everything.

"Almost" because, at least for violins, you can't hear or feel everything until you actually play the instrument (can any violinist here vouch for this?). This is especially so because the chinrest transfers some of the vibrations to the ear through the bone, and there are sounds made by the bow and strings that only the person playing can hear simply because they are too quiet, and that only during quiet pieces, etc.

I've never played a Strad, nor do I have much experience, but I wonder if nearly irrelevant details such as these are a part of what sets the best instruments apart from the rest?

I admit I made an assumption when I said microphones can't capture certain sounds. I should instead have said:

There are overtones picked up by the ear that you can't capture with a microphone and accurately play back with average computer speakers, at least in my experience.

Whether the loss in quality is the microphone's fault or the speakers' fault, I don't know. Regardless, there are sounds the musician hears and feels that not even the average in-person audience can hear, so I don't think it's a stretch to say that it's impossible to accurately judge violins based on digital recordings.

FWIW, trying to compare two violins with recorded clips like the ones in that blog post is pointless because there are overtones picked up by the ear that you can't capture with a microphone.

I'm not sure whether or not to be surprised by the test results. I wonder what kind of credentials these "professionals" have? Even the best violinists probably have tried only a few of the many Strads and Guarneris in existence, so how would the professionals in this experiment know what to listen for?

Second vote for Colemak here! I spent the first two of my high school years in Japan essentially being homeschooled. I had developed shoulder pain and a ganglion cyst in my wrist due to lots of typing and playing tennis, so I took the opportunity to try both Dvorak and Colemak.

I used to average 110 wpm on Qwerty. I started at 30 wpm Colemak and reached 80 in three months. After fourish years, I'm back at 110 wpm, with no more cyst or shoulder pain.

I tried Dvorak for a week but disliked that 1) it emphasizes hand alternation (as opposed to Colemak's emphasis on finger mashes) and 2) it was so difficult to type "ls -l".

This. The violin, bow, and strings all affect the sound produced.

In high school, I bought my violin and bow used for around $750. While it was fine for orchestral/symphonic stuff, it definitely paled in tone, volume, and responsiveness compared to some of my friends' more expensive violins.

When I got to be the soloist during my senior year, I borrowed a much nicer violin from my director and bought a new bow because I simply couldn't get the right sound out of my own violin.

Interested as well!