"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.
"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day
different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my
hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me!
I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day
would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."
--Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
"Twice a year, in mid-November and in late January, the corridor lines up
lengthwise with the position of the Sun, causing sunlight to fill the
entire corridor. Named MIThenge, the event is celebrated by students,
faculty, and staff." --Wikipedia page on MIT's Infinite Corridor
"Kairos is an ancient Greek word that means "the right moment'" or "the opportune."
The two meanings of the word apparently come from two different sources. In archery,
it refers to an opening, or "opportunity" or, more precisely, a long tunnel-like
aperture through which the archer's arrow has to pass. Successful passage of a kairos
requires, therefore, that the archer's arrow be fired not only accurately but with
enough power for it to penetrate. The second meaning of kairos traces to the art of
weaving. There it is "the critical time" when the weaver must draw the yarn trough a
gap that momentarily opens in the warp of the cloth being woven. Putting the two
meanings together, one might understand kairos to refer to a passing instant when
an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved."
--Eric Charles White
"Odin thanked Baugi for his help, shifted his shape into that of a snake,
and crawled into the hole. Baugi stabbed after him with the auger, but
Odin made it through just in time." --Norse Mythology
"In 2019, physicists at MIT and Princeton University demonstrated
how to develop spherical bubbles uniformly by confining them in
a narrow tube. Something about the interaction between the walls
of the tube and the bubble makes the whole system less sensitive
to irregularities in the initial conditions."
--Ars Technica, "French painters inspire new insights into
the physics of soap bubbles"
"Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to
your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet
was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it
yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going
on the Internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts
of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is
not something that you just dump something on.
It's not a big truck.
It's a series of tubes.
And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled
and if they are filled, when you put your message in,
it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone
that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material,
enormous amounts of material" --Ted Stevens
"While autoencoders aim to compress representations and preserve essential information
for reconstructing input data, they are often used for
dimensionality reduction
or feature learning." --"What Happens In Sparse Autoencoder", Syoya Zhou, Medium.com
When he had gone one league the darkness became thick around him, for there was no light, he could see
nothing ahead and nothing behind him. After two leagues the darkness was thick and there was no light, he could see
nothing ahead and nothing behind him. After three leagues the darkness was thick, and there was no w light, he could see
nothing ahead and nothing behind him. After four leagues the darkness was thick and there was no light, he could see
nothing ahead and nothing behind him. At the end of five leagues the darkness was thick and there was no light, he could
see nothing ahead and nothing behind him. At the end of six leagues the darkness was thick and there was no light, he
could see nothing ahead and nothing behind him. When he had gone seven leagues the darkness was thick and there was
no light, he could see nothing ahead and nothing behind him. When he had gene eight leagues Gilgamesh gave a great cry,
for the darkness was thick and he could see nothing ahead and nothing behind him. After nine leagues he felt the north-
wind on his face, but the darkness was thick and there was no light, he could see nothing ahead and nothing behind him.
After ten leagues the end was near: After eleven leagues the dawn light appeared. At the end of twelve leagues the sun
streamed out.
--The Epic of Gilgamesh
"Recently Lettvin and Matturana, working in collaboration with McCulloch and Pitts,
have discovered a network in the frog performing abstraction up to the level of a
conceptual category, a primitive Gestalt. The frog retina is divided into regions,
receptive fields, containing many receptors. For each receptive field, networks
among the bipolar and ganglionic neurones compute the value of four distinct
attributes..."
-- Gordon Pask, An Approach To Cybernetics
"Picture I took at hydraulophone rehearsal,
at the Great Hall,
Hart House,
University of Toronto,
Nikon D2X, wearable computer,
wireless link
to Lumedyne light source
set to maximum
(400J,
lamp operating at 480 volts,
triggered at 6000 volts,
all capacitors switched to load,
used with stock dimpled aluminum reflector)"
--Steve Mann
Thanks to an optimized use of the warblet transform,
the method assures superior accuracy and resolving capability
with respect to other solutions already available in the
literature, thus showing itself very attractive in the
presence of multicomponent signals characterized by
instantaneous frequency trajectories extremely similar
and very close to one another. Theoretical notes regarding
the warblet transform and its optimized use in the
framework of the proposed method are first given.
Then, the fundamental steps of the method are described
in detail with references to a clarifying example.
The results of a number of experiments on emulated and actual signals,
aimed at assessing the performance of the method,
are finally presented.
-- On the use of the warblet transform for instantaneous frequency estimation,
Proceedings of the 21st IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37510)
"The composer must bear in mind that the radio listener does not hear music directly.
He hears it only after the sound has passed through
a microphone,
amplifiers,
transmission lines,
radio transmitter,
receiving set,
and, finally,
the loud speaker apparatus itself." --Raymond Scott
"Like many others, some days I'm a musician, and some days a programmer.
Music is my mistress, but unfortunately it doesn't pay anywhere near
as much as the programming... In my deeper philosophical moments,
I like to think of both of them as being related - part-and-parcel
of my life's work, which seems to be something to do with the
art/science of spotting and manipulating 'patterns'.
The rest of the time though,
I think that it's just to do
with playing games with whatever's to hand,
be it an instrument, a computer keyboard
or a bit of string." --Ben Daglish