Monthly Archives: July 2008

A Relatively Good Concert

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Musical Relativity at the ArXiv blog

From the paper:

It is known that certain triads sound “happy”, while others sound “sad”.
Why this is so has been a question on minds of many musicologists, composers, musicians and
music lovers for a very long time and theories have been put forward. References to some works in
this area can be found in the recent book by Loy. But the question of “Why?” is beyond the scope
of this work. In this paper, we simply show that under specific physical conditions, a chord sounds
happy or sad depending not only on the observer’s subjective interpretation, but also on his frame
of reference. In other words, the musical “mood” depends on the observer’s state of motion.

In other words, “that note sounds flat!” becomes “you’re moving at the wrong speed!”

Just Stopped In

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to see what condition my condition was in

What’s Wrong with the Sun? (Nothing)

This report, that there’s nothing to report, is newsworthy because of a growing buzz in lay and academic circles that something is wrong with the sun. Sun Goes Longer Than Normal Without Producing Sunspots declared one recent press release. A careful look at the data, however, suggests otherwise.

&@#*%$

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The use of symbols to represent swearing actually has a name: grawlix

[I]t looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it’s yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as “undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I’d love to see used more.”

Bloghide!

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Blogrolling, rolling, rolling, keep them blogs a-rolling

Blog Roll How To (howto) at Greg Laden’s Blog.

What does a blog roll do for the blogger? Well, it allows the blogger a way to give and receive link love. Link love is not a form of on line cybersex. It is in part a replacement for one on one professional contact that occurs in Meatland. Entry on a blog roll is a nice thing to do for someone else. If a blog roll is very short, you are either looking at a new blogger or an asshole. (I’m talking about the total length of blog roll, not the displayed portion). I know of several bloggers who have been blogging for quite some time but have fewer than 40 or so sites on the blog roll, three or four of them being links to the blogger’s own sites. Independent evidence suggests in many of thes cases that the blogger is an asshole. The correlation is astoundingly strong.

There are plenty of exceptions, of course. If you are reading this, you are an exception, I assume.

[…]
Most blog ranking services can easily detect and thus devalue links in blog rolls or blog rolling posts, but the truth is that if I put a link to your blog on my site, you get an increase in techorati ratings (and other ratings) …. and visa versa …. even if the link is in a blog rolling post. The ranking sites may devalue (depending) such links, but these links are not meaningless, so I assume that as ranking sites evolve over time, this is recognized for what it is.

(By the way, many bloggers claim that ranking is not important to them at all. Those would be the bloggers with low ranks.)

Linking posts you like or blogrolling blogs you read on any kind of regular basis is win-win, if people return the favor. To quote Chekov (Pavel, not Anton) “. . . and we all move up one step in rank.”

With all this in mind, it’s time to update physics-y blogs I’ve been visiting on occasion that somehow had not been added yet.

Faraday’s Cage is where you put Schroedinger’s Cat
sciencegeekgirl
The Mind of Dr. Pion
Cosmic Variance
Asymptotia