Journalists and Research Grant Grubbers Setting the Wrong Expectations

These people ought to be ashamed of themselves. 

WxService Update Available

WxMonitor ow4j210922

• Modified Wind Image rendering for faster updates

When WxMonitor is downloading the backlog of data from the previous 12 hours on startup, it animates the display so you can see what transpired while you were away. However, the Wind Image display takes quite a lot of resources to animate at the full incoming data rate, so I made it update at 10 frames per second. It still looks smooth and you can see everything. The full dataset still gets pushed through all the filters, so the highs and lows are accurately recorded. The goal is to get to real-time data display quicker.

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Physics Isn't Pretty

Beauty should not be an objective for a scientific theory. I think the idea of beauty comes about when we look at a successful theory, and its elegance and its consistency with nature strike us as beautiful. Sabine gives us a summary of the state of physics as it exists today. 

Boston -- More Than a Feeling

We were in the depths of disco hell in 1976. I was a sophomore or junior in college, and most pop radio was just a pain to endure. Even Paul McCartney & Wings were jumping on the disco pukewagon. 

But there were a few bright spots: Heart, Queen and Boston. In the midst of all the same-tempo repetitive disco drivel, along comes this amazingly well recorded, sophisticated music -- harmonically, sonically, and the vocals were just superhuman. 

I was (and still am) an audiophile, and even on heavily compressed & peak limited FM, this song sounded great. Maybe Tom Scholtz mixed it for the FM medium. I don't know. But it was one of the few times commercial FM radio actually sounded like high fidelity.

Producer Rick Beato lays it out for you. By the way, Rick's 12-string acoustic sounds gorgeous in this video.

I'd like to have lunch with Rick Beato sometime. What a musical mind.

How to Use Auxiliary Storage on Windows

 A lot of newer development and desktop Windows machines are equipped with a barely adequate solid state drive (SSD) as the system drive, and an auxiliary hard disk drive (HDD). Out of the box, Windows is barely aware of the auxiliary storage. There's a drive letter, but that's about it. If you want to actually use the HDD, you have to manage it yourself.

You can tell Windows to change where new content is saved, and it lets you select your 'other' drive(s), but that can cause other problems. First off, it doesn't seem to follow the /Users/username/Documents pattern, but rather just goes /username/Documents. So finding things is confusing. It doesn't change your home directory, so if you open a command window, it will be in e.g., C:/Users/username. 

Start Menu > System > Settings > Storage

This feature actually seems to make matters worse. I would much rather that Windows copy all user data to a new location (wherever that is), and create a symbolic link in the original location that points to the new location. That would prevent existing apps having to be updated with the new location. Windows could keep the same C:/Users/username, but it would go to the new location.

A lot of apps will keep saving their user data in C:/Users/username. Some of them put lots of data in there. For example, Netbeans, Audacity, Maven, Office 365...

The Windows file system has symbolic links. A few different kinds, but for this discussion, you want a 'junction'. You might be tempted to copy your entire C:/Users/username folder to another drive, and create a junction to it. I think it would probably work, for the most part, but I have heard of problems with this approach. A better solution would be to create links to specific folders that are notorious for hogging a lot of space. 

For example, the Maven repository, .m2, can become incredibly large, since it contains the downloaded libraries of all the dependencies for software projects. I moved it to D:/Users/username/.m2 (D drive is my HDD, and I just mirrored the '/Users/username/' part, for consistency). I could have told Maven where I want the .m2 repo to go, but I have several tools that use Maven, and between installs and reconfigurations, I invariably find .m2 on my C drive. It's easier just to make a junction and forget about it. Then everyone gets the same standard configuration.

OneDrive has to get into the act, and it can really discombobulate things. OneDrive sees your standard 'libraries' (Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Pictures, Music, Videos, etc., and literally moves those from their usual location, to inside the OneDrive folder. I'm not kidding: if you go to C:/Users/username/Documents, and OneDrive got ahold of it, your Documents folder will be empty. 

This can cause confusion, and still hog the C: drive. But don't use a junction for OneDrive. The recommended procedure is to go into your OneDrive account settings, and tell OneDrive to unlink the computer. Once OneDrive logs you out, copy the OneDrive folder to the desired new location. Then 'set up' your new-old account, and tell OneDrive where you want it to keep your stuff. When OneDrive warns you that your specified location already contains data, just say not to duplicate it.

I think an even better approach, if OneDrive has finished syncing, is to sign out of OneDrive and just delete the old OneDrive folder. Then log back in to OneDrive and tell it to use the new (empty) location. OneDrive will simply download all your content from the cloud. 

Correlation Does Not Imply Causation, and We Have Very Little Correlation at That

Falsifiability is King

Note: philosophy and science used to be considered about the same thing in Newton's time. 

The Big Giant Piano

Ever since I was a baby, my grandparents had a baby grand piano sitting in the corner of their living room. While I was growing up, I used to noodle around on it from time to time. One thing I noticed was that the middle of the keyboard sounded very musical, but the bottom octave basically just growled. It was hard to tell which note was being played. Each note sounded different, but the actual pitch was indistinct. 

It wasn't a bad piano. It's just that the bass strings were too short to sound the fundamental very well. And uprights and spinets, well, forget about it. The problem is made worse by the fact that the hammers hit the strings close to the bridge, which tends to excite more harmonics than fundamentals. 

Even concert grands lack really clear fundamental bass notes. It's basic physics, captain. 

When I was in high school, I learned to play 'Joy to the World' by Three Dog Night on our family's little Wurlitzer Spinet. I didn't think anything of it, until one Christmas, I was at my Great Uncle's house, and he had a concert grand in his living room. (He was a session musician in Hollywood, so of course he did!) I sat down at that piano, and started pounding out JTW by TDN. I was blown away by how good it sounded on that piano. For $40,000.00 in 1960s dollars, it better sound good!

Well, here's a piano that would put that tinkle box to shame! Fundamental bass, baby! It's all about that bass.

Oh and JTW by TDN, yeah. This is how boy bands sounded when I was a teenager...

Here's the story about that fabulous piano, by the way. 

Why the Alleged Gluten Pandemic?

 I thought this was interesting.  It wasn't a problem when I was growing up.

I'm Just Putting This Here for Reference

Whenever I need a short refresher on the fundamental particles of the standard model, I always have to track down this video. Now I'll have it until it scrolls off my backlog.

One of the Best Explanations and Demonstrations of the Double Slit Experiment

His description of superposition and the 'wave function collapse' finally explained in a way that doesn't defy reason. The wave function is a prediction, and a prediction is pointless after the fact. It doesn't mean physics or reality has changed.

 

This Will Blow Your Mind. And Then AI Will Read It

Remember George Harrison's song from Yellow Submarine, "It's All Too Much"? Well, this is all too much. I didn't think I would like this, and I still don't, totally. But the technology really is interesting.

Brain and brain! What is brain?

A Day Late, and a Dollar Short

How many of you have grabbed a handful of CD jewel cases to go in the car, and when you open them up, one or more of them are empty? So annoying. My invention would be to have some kind of window in the cover art, so you can tell at a glance if your CD case has a CD in it. 

This didn't seem to be as much of a problem with record albums, perhaps because vinyl records were less portable in the first place, and a record sitting on your turntable was pretty obvious. But a CD pretty much disappears into your CD player drawer. 

It's too late now, since CDs have become more or less obsolete anyway, and millions of CD cases already don't have my brilliant invention. Too bad. So sad.

Tau Day 2021

If you've ever struggled with trigonometry, or wondered why we always use 2π for engineering, physics and calculus, it's because π is half as big as it needs to be. We used the wrong definition for the circle constant. If you haven't seen this video before, you're in for a treat.

 

His coverage of Euler's identity actually brings tears to my eyes. It is so elegant. Okay, I'm a geek.

All joking aside, I think the choice of π=C/D is one of the worst and most profound cock-ups in all of mathematics and geometry. And the reason is simple. Diameter is not a fundamental property of the circle. The radius is. 

Most Annoying Computing Things

 I think this guy hits the nail on the head, although I would add two more.

1. Micro HDMI is bad enough, but micro USB is at least as bad. You can lose the function of an entire smartphone if your phones micro USB socket goes bad. 
2. Those infernal pop-over pop-ups on websites. You know the ones: you start reading the article you came to read, and about ten seconds in, the screen darkens, and some bloody annoying advert, or sign-up, or rating form pops up, obscuring your view of the content you're in the market for. This one's a deal breaker for me. I invariably dismiss the dialog while deliberately not reading it, and sometimes, I'll simply hit the back arrow, or close the tab entirely. They have actively lost at least one pair of eyes.

WxService Update Available

WxService ow4j210214

• Updated to 64 bits OWAPI library by default
• Java 11 LTS support
• Single executable jar (all self-contained dependencies)

Everything else is pretty much the same as it ever was... same as it ever was... because over the years, the code has just become pretty solid, and there's no reason to change it further.

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