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A magical, brilliant teaching tool. Ableton's education/explanation team have always been top-notch, but this is great, and I am envious of it and them. I love how it starts with sound, and abstract explorations, before breaking those apart into components – amplitude, pitch, timbre – and only later mapping those to synthesizer components – all of which will work with a keyboard plugged in, thanks to webmidi. Grand stuff, and so great to see them investing in this sort of thing.
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"…"there is no parallel here. Richter was a genius. He worked tirelessly for many years to perfect his piano playing. The lobster was some aberration. But what if it was not? What if the lobster was *essential*? What if every pianist needs a lobster? What if everyone needs a lobster for something?"
So much in this huge essay by Errol Morris – on anxiety, on performance, on the piano, on consciousness, and how we offload our consciousness to small advisors – what a programmer knows as rubberducking. There is so much in here to love, and I probably need to reread it at least once.
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"You are a web programmer. You have users. Your users rate stuff on your site. You want to put the highest-rated stuff at the top and lowest-rated at the bottom. You need some sort of "score" to sort by."
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When this is on Threadless, I am getting it ASAP. (Although: Ken's super should be a Shoryureppa, not the Shinkuu Hadouken that belongs to Ryu). I think this might be called "splitting hairs", though.
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Some great notes from Dan Heaf on Clay Shirky's talk a week or two ago; I particularly like the notions of building not-quite end-to-end functionality, forcing the user to do something for themselves.
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"“The User Illusion” is what Alan Kay and the PARC designers called “the simplified myth everyone builds to explain (and make guesses about) the system’s actions and what should be done next.” Nørretranders says the user illusion is “a good metaphor for consciousness. Our consciousness is our user illusion for ourselves and our world.” The world we experience is really an illusion; colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. are interpretation made by our brain." This sounds interesting, if a challenging read.
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This looks very, very interesting. Yes, it's IF, but it looks like it's pushing that genre quite far.
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"There are no cut scenes, no uninteractive passages, no portions where the characters are essentially "switched off" and indifferent to what the player does. Everything counts. Everything is part of the story." Excellent Emily Short piece on Blue Lacuna