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The reconcilably bittersweet nature of adulthood was suddenly too much. I am purportedly a grown-up, but I don’t know the answers. I feel bone-weary from carrying around heavy things. I hate that monsters exist, and that they often win, and that some of them live in me.
Elizabeth Oldfield, Soul Work for the End of the World -
Shift Register Sequencer
Status: Built My shift register sequencer is a clone of Music Thing Modular’s Turing Machine. It plays random sequences based on shifting binary values, but can be looped once you find one that you want to stick with.
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Multi-unit infill housing is becoming very popular for developers in Calgary, but are the prices of the new individual units more or less affordable than the former residence which was bulldozed?
Idea: Analyze the pre-teardown sale price and post-construction sales prices to determine if infill housing is driving inflation of prices at a housing-unit level.
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In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner which we may look forward to as worthy of our dignity.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having entropy like sets of states in the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of the disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
The commands through which we exercise our control over our environment are a kind of information which we impart to it. Like any form of information, these commands are subject to disorganization in transit. They generally come through in less coherent fashion and certainly not more coherently than they were sent. In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine are destined to play an ever-increasing part.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
Lorenz Attractors
Status: Built The lorenz attractors are a dual version of Sloth Chaos by Nonlinear Circuits. Each board has two chaotic low frequency oscillators each with two outputs. The outputs are loosely related, they tend to go high or low together,…
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Quantizer
Status: Built My quantizer is based on an Arduino Nano, which reads four input voltages and quantizes them into four outputs based on 12 root pitches and 12 different musical modes.