I added a new interactive function org2blog-dir-add-new-photos, which uploads just the new photos from a given directory.
In doing this, I factored g-client's gphoto-directory-add-photos. Now gphoto-directory-add-photos-x does almost the same thing but takes a test predicate which is called with each photo's filename.
The title song by itself is worth the price of the album. This one has got all the bases covered: It's a beautiful tune, the arrangement is gorgeous, and to nobody's surprise the King's Singers do a fine job with it.
This CD resembles the Annie Laurie CD. It's a mix of folksongs from the British isles. Some are fast, fun tunes, some slow and soulful. And for some reason, on both CDs the best track is the only one sung in Welsh (the rest are in English).
I liked the rendition of Danny Boy on this CD better than the one on Annie Laurie; they have no other songs in common. The arrangements tend to be less distracting than those on Annie Laurie. One exception: the solos on the first two verses of O Waly, Waly. However, the remaining verses are gorgeous.
On the whole, I like this CD better.
Good tracks:
Pretty good:
I blogged about windbelts a week ago. I suggested using them on bridges and tall buildings. I completely forgot about power lines. Like bridges and tall buildings, they already have basically all the physical and electrical infrastructure in place.
One potential obstacle to large-scale deployment of windbelts is that on order to generate a serious amount of electricity, each installation would need not just one string but many strings. Naively done, you've use one magnet and several coils for each string. This would multiply some of the material requirements linearly.
But there may be a better way. If you're familiar with the acoustics of the piano, you know that the individual notes1 have not one but three strings. The vibration of any of the strings is transmitted to the other two2. This is the source of a piano's sustained resonance, for one thing.
One could use the same principle with windbelts to couple a range of strings together. Then only one of the group of strings would need a magnet and coils, even though power was collected over all the strings.
In online discussions, people talk past each other. It's a fact of online life. Much moreso in discussions about politics or ideology, but even in friendly discussions, it crops up.
A few years ago I had an idea about how to fix it - or at least ameliorate it.
What if there was a forum where in order to answer a post, you had to, well, answer it? That is, a post could formally ask questions. Those who wanted to reply to the post would have to answer the questions first.
Software could enforce this rule. It could be much like online polling. The answers could be displayed associated to the replies, and in other ways.
Of course the first thing one thinks of is that people are going to abuse this facility by asking questions like "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?". Ie questions that are really statements in disguise, or more innocently, questions that just fail to include the answer the respondent wants.
My proposed solution is for the polling software to automatically add a response option that says that the question is flawed in this particular way.
That solution is a general template for the solution to many of the problems with this idea. Add response options so that the responses to the question are collectively exhaustive. We'd also like for them to be mutually exclusive, but that may be more difficult to arrange.
The answer to the previous problem suggests the next problem: Some participants might adopt a strategy of just saying that every question is flawed. That's no good. It short-circuits the whole mechanism.
Two basic answers:
Another potential means of abuse: Participants who ask, not a modest few questions, but a boatload of questions. After all, they have a captive audience!
Participants might be just indluging themselves, or might use it as a strategy to block replies.
I'd propose a limit to the number of formal questions a post may ask. There might be some flexibility here; the limit might depend on such factors as:
Participants might adopt a strategy of circumventing the mechanism by just replying somewhere else.
They'd have to answer the questions there too, but:
To some extent that problem contains its own solution. If respondents put their answers in strange places, the posts that they "answer" will appear to go unanswered. This generally is not what posters want.
I'd also propose some limitation on people starting new threads. Most forums have that anyways. I don't see right now how anything can be done about the other two problems.
In the solutions above, I proposed that there be a spectrum of It won't just give one option for "Question is flawed", it will suggest flavors.
But here we have a dilemma. OT1H want participants to be specific about what flaws they claim that a question has. OTOH, we don't want to require participants to do a lot of work taxonomizing the exact flaw of each flawed question they see.
I think a reasonable balance is achievable, but how can we achieve it? Well, I don't think the answer is to predetermine a particular level of detail. Discussion should be more flexible than that. So:
Above, questions that assume too much were considered a problem. But that's only half of the picture. Normal, healthy discourse does assume a lot. But in healthy discourse the presuppositions are already believed by all participants. Nobody is trying to sneak presuppositions in.
And the following scenario would be just wrong:
I have some ideas about that which involve structuring questions further, but it's late.
I have further ideas, but it's late. I will try to post more another day.
Why is this a good idea? That is, not the motivation or the mechanics, but the theory behind it. Why should questions in particular be so great? Why should one sentential mood be favored above the others? Let's look at them:
But we're left with a paradox. Why doesn't the conclusion follow?
"Nontransitive preferences" are when your preferences contradict each other. For instance, if you prefer an apple to a banana, an orange to an apple, and banana to an orange, you have nontransitive preferences. An unscrupulous grocer could trade you an apple for a banana plus $.05, an orange for an apple plus $.05, and a banana for an orange plus $.05 and make $.15 from you without improving your situation in any way.
For most purposes, nontransitive preferences are irrational. But maybe this doesn't cover people's preference to exist. If you'll indulge some ontological looseness for a moment, maybe it's entirely reasonable for "nonexistent people" to have little or no preference to exist, but for existing people to have a strong preference to continue to exist.
One could say that what counts is state transitions rather than states. That is, people prefer not to change state from existent to nonexistent (or as we uneducated masses say, to "die") but have no strong preference whether to change state from nonexistent to existent.
I don't think this holds up well. Most people would prefer that, if they die on the operating table, they should be brought back to life if possible. There are exceptions but seem mostly due to poor quality of life due to poor health.
One might counter by claiming that a person who dies on the operating table doesn't really cease to exist, since medicine can resuscitate him. I don't think that rebuttal works. Even if a person could entirely cease to exist and be brought back - think Star Trek transporters - I expect people would again prefer re-existing.
So we really are talking about state preferences, not transition preferences.
I think a better answer to the paradox is that it has essentially the same flaw as in the ontological argument. Existence is not a predicate. And existence isn't an asset that one can have in one's portfolio. Nobody can say "I have some assets but I don't have existence".
So the concept of the "nonexistent people" preferring to trade some of their assets for the asset "existence" is incoherent. ISTM this undercuts the reasoning behind Hanson's proposal, and thus solves the paradox.
Just used my org2blog to upload the last post. Including all the pictures exercised it fairly well. While it's fresh in my mind I have a few comments:
Now it picks album names from a list.
Somewhere in gphoto there was a "bad byte code" glitch. That seems to have been solved by reloading. I'm not sure how serious it is.
I'm not sure what TV Raman planned with this function. It doesn't look like it would work, and I've never used it. However, I fixed what looks like a scoping error that always gave me some byte-compilation bugs. No guarantee from me that it works.
Not a major failing, since it's not really meant as a page designer. But I'd have liked to flow the text around the pictures, and I couldn't without writing the HTML by hand.
A windbelt is an alternative energy source invented by Shawn Frayne. It uses the principle of aeroelastic flutter. Basically it recovers power from a string that vibrates in the wind, like an Aeolian harp.
See also here
That's promising, and it suits his plan of marketing it in the third world. But for more conventional use, I'm left with questions:
Two ideas:
Put the generator at or near the center of the string, where it is exposed to more vibration.
Or if it's difficult to give it a stiff platform there, at least put it somewhat away from the end, which is the part of a string that vibrates the least.
Addendum: I see that more advanced versions do essentially that:
Shawn basically talks about using it in third world countries that can't afford windmills. But I think one could aim higher than that.
Could they be used instead of conventional windmills? There are two reasons that make me think maybe:
In particular, vertically on suspension bridges. It's a great location:
There is a lot of wind around tall buildings. They block the wind so it is all funnelled around them. It's actually a big problem, and can suck windows out and make it uncomfortable for pedestrians to walk nearby.
It's a problem many people have tried to solve, and tried to generate power from. But with conventional windmills, it's not easy. Where can you safely swing the blades? If you duct the wind to a turbine or similar, you waste a lot of power and it's noisy.
But a windbelt doesn't have that problem. And once again, having the physical and electrical support already in place is nice.
