tom_vidal

What have you found that’s worked for your own executive dysfunction?

We are creating animated corpses out of our culture.

The point of art isn’t to generate beautiful patterns. It’s to create meaning. And you can’t have that without human care and intent.

Furthermore, that care needs to be intrinsically interwoven into the patterns that comprise the work. That’s what craft is. The mastery to generate exquisite patterns, and the care to infuse them with meaning at every level.

Without care, in a Heideggerian sense, we are left with something which tastes sweet but is completely hollow, perhaps even illusional.

Check the article for the full context. It’s basically a musical version of exquisite corpse. One composer wrote the start of a phrase (on sheet music, without using a piano), then passed it on to the next composer, who continued the phrase based only on reading the sheet music.

This illustrates the extraordinary degree of audiation, or the cognitive ability to imagine music in the mind in a symbol-linked, systematized way, that used to exist in classical music.

Each composer could read what was just written, audiate how it would sound, audiate a continuation of the phrase, and then transcribe that aural imagination back to sheet music.

No. The reason cities are working so hard to build these kinds of safety measures is that cars are horrendously dangerous for people walking and biking. The “war on cars” is a war for the safety and dignity of everyone outside of cars.

Just to get this straight… they built tunnels for people walking so they could continue to jam the streets aboveground full of cars?

Maybe if people can’t walk around your city efficiently because there are too many cars, it’s the cars themselves which are the problem.

How in the world can you have a discussion about DVD packaging and special features without mentioning the Lord of the Rings trilogy extended edition box sets? Not only did the movies come in beautiful collector’s cases with two DVDs per movie, they were also completely packed with special features, the run time of which exceeded that of the movies themselves. Hours and hours of in-depth making-of documentaries. I used to watch the special features for all the movies in a row when I was home from college during the holidays. Probably because before the advent of streaming, this was the longest, highest-quality content I had access to.

But the special features themselves… man. Getting to see the craft of filmmaking and propmaking was one of the biggest inspirations for me in pursuing a career as a maker. That was the first time in my life anyone had pulled back the curtain to that extent on what it took to create something as complex and powerful as Peter Jackson’s LOTR. You could tell the profound love and dedication that went into every inch of that film. To anyone who was involved in creating those special features and deciding to include them in the extended edition box sets, thank you.

The "rules of the road" argument here assumes that giving up huge amounts of public space for car infrastructure is inevitable and right, and that it's the fault of people walking or riding bikes if they get injured or killed since the system is not built for them.

Roads in the US are designed almost entirely around the speed and convenience of cars, and don't account for the externalities they impose on everyone else. As cars get larger and more dangerous, and as drivers get more careless, the cost borne by society is only going up. Asking people walking and riding bikes to be even more extra careful not to get killed is not the right solution. Changing the design of our roads and public spaces to make them safer for everyone is.

Think you missed the implied /s here :-)

Your car bias is showing here. The reason bike lanes and traffic calming measures get installed is because people are literally dying due to poor road design that prioritizes car speed over everything else.

You might not want traffic calming, but everyone else who has to deal with your driving does.

The YouTuber Not Just Bikes made a great point in one of his videos: why in the world are public safety improvements up for debate? If people keep falling off a walkway, we don’t hold town hall meetings to debate the merits of pedestrian safety, we don’t do studies on the impact to traffic flow, we just put up a railing.

Here in Philadelphia, advocacy groups spent years fighting to have a wide, lethal stroad that runs through the middle of the city put on a road diet. Residents were polled, and something like 70% of people in the surrounding neighborhoods were in favor of it. The city spent millions in planning and engineering, and then right before paving was about to start, a local councilmember blocked it and canceled the whole project on the half of the road that runs through their neighborhood. So half of the road was narrowed to two lanes and has no speeding, no fatalities, and generally sane driver behavior. The other half is a reckless free-for-all that’s exhausting to drive on and terrifying for pedestrians and cyclists.

Millions in taxpayer dollars and the political will of a majority of citizens were wasted because our system allows one NIMBY to stop everything. A year later, there has already been a cyclist fatality on the road.

What on earth is the point of doing “stealth”? This just sounds to me like a way to burn money and scale before finding product-market fit.

I had an account at this bank for a few years, and didn’t know about the collapse until reading this in Hacker News. I did receive a weird email from the bank today that my account was being migrated to a different bank.

Republic First was kind of a crappy bank. The website was bad, the customer service was bad, and most of their marketing prominently featured their CEO with his dog sitting on his lap in front of a new branch they’d just opened up.

A few years ago the bank started making it difficult to withdraw money from your accounts. They had ridiculously low limits for free transfers, and I ended up having to pay wire transfer fees to get my money out of the bank.

It was a weird place. Always got the vibe that some old money family ran it poorly.

This has not been done in a single US city. We only have patchwork networks, and a patchwork network of safe infrastructure is by definition unsafe infrastructure.

This 432 Hz theory is sort of like saying that if we measured the meter as being slightly shorter, people would have an easier time running a 5k.

Music exists in multiple keys, and a song can be in a high or low range regardless of what key it’s in. Changing the standard tuning wouldn’t fundamentally affect anything.

Also, did the study authors simply taking a recording and pitch shift it down to 432 Hz? That would affect the tempo of the song as well as the pitch. Even if they performed time stretching to keep the tempo the same, it shouldn’t be surprising that lower pitches make people slightly calmer than slightly higher pitches.