Dreaming

Hypothesis: when I am in the very tired state, lying in my bed, about to fall asleep and I read several poems closely (though for pleasure, not academically) then I am more likely to have dreams.

Data:
Date: 8Nov 9Nov
Read: Yes
Dreamed: Yes

Refreshing your macbook

So I've been using my macbook for 1y10mo now, and it started feeling slower. Firefox would take forever to load, and booting up took long. The final straw was when it started freezing consistently: that reminded me of my experiences 10 years ago on Win98.

As it turned out the thing to do was to reduce the number of unnecessary processes running. To do this check your /Library/{StartupItems, PrivilegedHelperTools, LaunchDaemons, LaunchAgents}. Here I simply removed everything, most of it was vmnet daemons. Another thing is to turn off apache, and database servers, for me this was turning off psql, and mysql servers. The best way to turn off these servers is through the control applications that come with them.

audiovisuophilosophical

An art form is only as broad as its medium is versatile. Verse is named so because its medium, the spoken and written word, spans much of human action and thought; and so by virtue of its medium, poetry occupies a central position among the arts. As a result the poet can use language to give his audience the rhythmic pleasures of song, the visceral aesthetic pleasures of fine art, and the pleasures felt from the growth of the mind due to philosophy; I call these audiovisuophilosophical (avp) pleasures.

Edit: it turns out the distinction of pleasures of poetry into these three categories is common. Pound famously names them audio visuo and logopoeia, Zukofsky later does the same without the fancy names.

Automatically generating bibtex from LOC LCCN records

The Library of Congress has a lot of bibliographical information on all sorts of works. Much to my surprise it doesn't provide bibtex data for their entries. However, this isn't a hard problem to fix, I wrote a two line shell script to do this called locurl2bib (Library of Congress URL to bib). Suppose you want to find the bibtex entry for something that the LOC has, here's how I would do it with locurl2bib:

1. Find the entry at the LOC database.
2. Go to the LCCN record..
3. Copy the address of the LCCN record
4. Run locurl2bib on that address from the command line (on Mac OS X: /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app), for example enter:

locurl2bib http://lccn.loc.gov/91158031

Installation:
1. locurl2bib depends on bibutils by Chris Putnam. Place them into your exectuable path*.
2. Download locurl2bib and place it in your executable path. Since it's a shell script you can view its source by opening it in a text editor. Have fun looking up bib entries at the LOC!

*On Mac OS X you will want to place the files into /usr/local/bin, and you can open this folder by pressing CMD-SHIFT-G in Finder and typing its address.

Alternative Definition for Himeroeis

1) Want to understand me (you can)
2) Let me share with you (don't make me afraid by brash judgment; don't immediately assosciate ideas that I express with me, I am exploring what I don't know; try not to categorize what I say into personality traits)
3) Share you with me; let me be someone to you ('What will survive of us is love')

As I sit here coughing slightly, on call for EMS, after a day of leisure spent not on relaxing. My impression of the real world:
1) Most of the people I've known and know don't even meet (1). Big Oops.
2) Two people I know meet (1).
3) One person I know meets (1) and (2); used to (3)--but no longer.

Without a single person who meets (1)(2)(3), it is rather dull.

Well, I had a poem here, but it's not yet ready. When it will be more ready, I will put it back.

In the mean while, this a wonderful introduction to the Belarusion culture of present and past. So indulge me and enjoy it, and leave your thoughts!

I should mention that I am starting to feel serious about verse in Belarusian.

No, not me (response to TS Eliot)

He sits in a bright room
with damp notion of his impending
futile doom.
Because she sits there too
Beautiful resplendent but not
for you.
Or you, or you, or you--
she just sits there
and you just have to listen.

Edit: One reason this poem is bad is because of redundancy, there are many many others. I leave finding them as an exercise for the reader! :)

it was back in september
i dreamed I ran into her on the street in Berlin
and that she had a shaved head
and when I tapped her on the shoulder
she turned around and didn't recognize me

A Question for you

A question for you: do you feel that you give off any impressions to people around you? What have you noticed about men, and especially women you know well? What 'aura' do they give off?

Exploring the structure of digital audio

A audio source can be thought of as a sinusoidal function. Suppose we have a speaker (audio monitor) whose position in terms of time is given by f(t)=cos(440*2PI t). This speaker will produce sound that our ears pick up as monotone at 440Hz. However such a function is difficult to find or fit for arbitrary data, eg the sound recorded by a mic, so the way digital audio sources are thought of is Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) of the function f(t). The FFT operator transforms f(t) into a function F:time*frequency->intensity. Theoretically the time and frequency are continuous values but in practice, and in digital audio these are discretized.

Since the FFT of a sound function produces a 2D function, we can play with something that closely resembles 2D images. Right now my inspiration for transformations come from visual filters. I'm curious about what applying a Gaussian Blur or a Sobel Edge filter on a audio sample would produce. Further, can we take derivatives in this 2D space that can be used to determine similar features between two songs (a. la. SIFT in graphics)? Can we use k-means to learn the characteristics of a set of audio samples, perhaps to perform voice recognition? These are some more and less ambitious ideas I have that all stem from thinking about audio samples visually. What would it be like to play greyscale images over speakers? Can this be used to guide people whose vision is impaired?

I intend to further explore FFT's to see how exactly these ideas be done. Two good sources I found are:
(1)HMS and
(2)this other one.

Further I have been trying to decide on a platform to work in. Python, Ruby, SML, C, and Java come to mind, but as of right now I have decided to try out ObjC and the CoreAudio SDK. Since I have never programmed anything in ObjC, right now this project is at the stage of me learning ObjC. Here I can refer you to:
(1) a decent tutorial by Apple
(2) Programming in Objective C by Stephan Kochan
(3) Stack Overflow