Category: Music

Friday Fun (10-Nov-2017 edition)

  • Sixty Years of Software Development Life Cycle Models, Kneuper, Ralf. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. The Hegelian account of software development life cycles is apparent to anyone who’s been around for more than a decade, or even worked in different sectors of the industry. In my mind, what Kneuper brings to the discussion in this case is not a simple account of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of software development life cycles, but interesting facts about their early development. Prototypes played a role much earlier in lifecycle planning than I think many have been aware of, as was an iterative approach with feedback loops in general.
  • The Worst Day Since Yesterday, Flogging Molly. It’s been that kind of a week around here. I highly recommend you go out, get a Guiness, and crank up Flogging Molly as loud as your speaker will allow. You can’t go wrong with that on a Friday evening.

Friday Fun (27-Oct-2017 edition)

  • More Than, Au Revoir Simone. Dreamy synthpop at its very best.
  • Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge, David Silver, et al; good Nature summary coverage as Self-Taught AI is best yet at Strategy Game of Go, Elizabeth Gibney. This is a very important result, although I think it’s been a little too widely hyped by the popular press as evidence of the coming singularity. Go is an interesting problem domain, because the combinatorial explosion of movies leaves it intractable for traditional game-playing approaches. Reinforcement learning, used by the team, is essentially how humans learn to play go, albeit far, far faster than we learn to play. I am looking forward to seeing discussions in the coming months of the new strategies AlphaGo Zero teaches human players.

Friday Fun! (20-Oct-2017 Edition)

(So, yeah, last week’s promise of a post tomorrow didn’t quite pan out. Anyway, without further ado…)

  • Resonant Expanse, Max Cooper & Tom Hodge
    I love almost everything I’ve heard by Max Cooper. He takes traditional trance to a whole new level with his use of modulation on minimalist melodies and percussion. This work by he and Tom Hodge is on several of my “music to think by” playlists.
  • A Preliminary Analysis of Sleep-Like States in the Cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, Marcos G. Frank , Robert H. Waldrop, Michelle Dumoulin, Sara Aton, Jean G. Boal.
    The punch line is in the abstract: “In addition, cuttlefish transiently display a quiescent state with rapid eye movements, changes in body coloration and twitching of the arms, that is possibly analogous to REM sleep.” Cephalopods and mammals diverged some five hundred million years ago — like, twice as long ago as when dinosaurs and mammals were hanging together. If this holds true, it’s amazing. I can’t even really call it convergent evolution, because I’m not convinced we can articulate what evolutionary pressures would generate the need for REM sleep in such different ecosystems, unless it’s actually a requirement for brain function. But human and cephalopod brains are very, very different — the common ancestor was probably something like a sea worm with a brain similar to C. elegans. So there’s an awful lot of room for divergent evolution, which we see in things like the gross structures.

Anyway, thinking of cuttlefish and perhaps octopuses dreaming of Max Cooper’s and Tom Hodge’s music makes me very, very happy.