When you are an attentive listener, you learn more. My changing social media habits mean I’ve been “doomscrolling” less and engaging more. And the difference in community on federated social media (Mastodon and others) means there is a lot more interesting content coming across my feed, and a lot less drama.
Today I saw something come across my feed that was interesting: Cistercian Numerals. It’s a way to represent numbers as glyphs in such a way that they are easily decipherable. In this method, you can represent any number from 1 to 10,000 easily and with a small amount of space. The downside is it’s not easily actionable – that is, operations are hard to perform on the glyphs. So this would be useful in a case where storage space is at a premium, but the need for computation doesn’t exist.
(Thanks to Jason Kottke for the interesting write up.)
We bought an electric car. As I stated on my microblog, I know this isn’t going to save the world from global warming overnight, and I’m also aware this exacerbates different problems (capitalism, growth, suburban sprawl, etc.)… but as I also stated there, it does feel good that when we use this car, it doesn’t spew carbon emissions into the atmosphere between our house and whatever errand we are running.
Something I’ve been curious about since I became interested in electric cars is, what is the break even point for such a vehicle? Cursory googling suggests a reasonable estimate to be 15k – 20k miles, although that number is disputed. Battery production can be emissions intensive, and there is also material mining to transport of materials.
Long term, I’d like to work closer to home, or live closer to work, and commute in by bike. But hopefully the electric car can help reduce our carbon footprint until that becomes a reality.
Last weekend, I saw Phil Lesh and Friends at the Mission Ballroom in Denver. It was a good show overall, although I reserve the right to be a little upset about the timing of the show (show time was listed as 7:30, they started at 8:30 which is not unheard of; but then the band took an hour break between the first and second set which pushed the end time out to nearly midnight).
Phil and Friends at Mission Ballroom in Denver, February 4th, 2023.
There was an overwhelming feeling I had which was that the party is almost over. Phil Lesh is 83 years old, and he was by far the ‘weakest’ performer on the stage that night. If you build up a band around you that is phenomenal, that can be the case, though. But yes, in some ways, it felt like the party was coming to an end. The living members of the Grateful Dead will at some point in the future no longer be with us, or at least they will no longer tour. Plenty of younger bands have taken up the mantle of playing The Dead’s catalog of songs (including JRAD which I think do a phenomenal job), but even then, at some point in the future this era of music will come to a close and fade away.
It makes me think of the times, 10+ years ago, when I played jazz in a quintet (and sometimes quartet) – it felt like a novelty. It was something that fewer and fewer people seemed to authentically enjoy, and in many cases, we were hired for a gig to be a set piece, no different than the dim lighting or the cocktail bar in the corner. There will always be people who authentically enjoy jam music, or the Grateful Dead specifically, but I happen to be around at the right time to see the candle go out in some respects.
On the flip side, the bright spots of that concert were overwhelmingly bright. Phil surrounded himself with great, youthful players for half of the band, and those players will go on to play great music for decades. Rick from Goose is in many ways carrying the torch for jam music in the 2020s, even if I don’t like the music Goose makes (it hasn’t clicked for me yet…). I see him and his band mates guesting with a lot of different ‘legacy’ jam bands which speaks volumes.
Need to start with music or audio production and have no clue where to begin? This is probably the most comprehensive resource I’ve found for free tools. It’s called A Free Studio, and it’s a list of free software organized neatly between DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations), instruments, effects plugins, and more. If you need to get your mind wrapped around different music production concepts, this is the best way to play with stuff at no cost.
On that note – shout out to Tyrell N6, one of my favorite free software synthesizers. It’s listed in the “Virtual Analog Synthesizers” portion of A Free Studio. N6 was something I leveraged early on until I bought a slew of software synths, in addition to a cycle of different hardware synths.
This is a cool idea that feels different than other internet radio stations. Radio Free Fedi – “small web, consent driven, artist populated, non-commercial mechanism, attribution promoting, community radio for the fediverse” – and it really feels that way to me. This takes me back to 2005ish internet radio that I took part in. It feels more authentic when you catch something being built from the ground up in a grassroots style.
I submitted a few tracks for playback, which is sort of what necessitated my previous post about re-evaluating my music licensing. I’ll also be looking at other ways to contribute – funds, station IDs, anything else the maintainers need. Much like this #100DaysofIndieWeb project, it’s all about building up the web that we want to experience.
