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It’s Snowed a Lot this Season
In case that link eventually dies: this winter has been the snowiest on record for the city, passing a record set in 1908-09. It seemed like we’d gotten a lot of snow this season, but I hadn’t realized just how much. The total so far is 145 inches, compared to an average of about 85 inches.
Stay At Home, Still
That photo captures the moment. Polis is delivering an address, alone, from a table in what looks to be an improvised setting The cameraman is wearing an improvised cloth face mask.
We’re all in new territory, at home.
Signs of the Times
Colorado issued a three-week “Stay At Home” order a couple of days ago. For posterity, or something, I pulled together a collection of some of the public-service graphics that I’ve seen go by on the Boulder Office of Emergency Management Twitter feed recently. (I became familiar with this Twitter feed back in September 2013, when a flood hit Boulder. That was the last time a state of emergency was declared here.)
A picture is worth 1000 words, they say. Strange times.
On Not Blogging
Obviously the horoscope in that last post didn’t lead me to suddenly blog more often. I had a fundamental realization a couple of years back, when I was thinking about how I blog less than I used to. It was this: Living my life is more interesting than writing about my life.
As the saying goes, there are only so many hours in the day.I live a full life. There are many things I enjoy doing, including writing, but in the end, writing a blog entry gets lower priority than many other things that I either need to do or want to do.
Blogging as an Act of Rebellion
This was my horoscope a few weeks ago:
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21):
Because of the onslaught of the internet and social media, lots of people no longer read books. But in 2020, I highly recommend that you not be one of that crowd. In my astrological opinion, you need more of the slow, deep wisdom that comes from reading books. You will also benefit from other acts of rebellion against the Short Attention Span Era. Crucial blessings will flow in your direction as you honor the gradual, incremental approach to everything.
Introducing Quanta
As one can easily see from the date stamps below, this is the first entry I’ve made here in years. It’s also the first entry in even longer which constitutes more than something of the form “here’s a photo”. I wrote a few paragraphs rambling about why this is the case, but they ended up seeming silly and unnecessary. Long story short: there haven’t been posts for a long time, but here’s a post now, and there may or may not be more soon.
The main point of this post is to mention that we (Audio Damage, that is) recently released a new software synthesizer called Quanta. It’s a sort of hybrid of granular synthesis and subtractive synthesis, with a bunch of unusually versatile modulation sources, full MPE compatibility, and a lovely UI. Here’s our video advertisement, thanks entirely to Chris:
There’s much more information about it on the Audio Damage website, of course, as well as a free demo version. We’re quite proud of it, and other people seem to like it, too: it set a new company record for initial sales.
The Coolest Thing I’ve Seen in a Long Time
This page contains a video of something every science student has imagined, but very few see: the demonstration that, in a vacuum, all objects fall at the same speed. Usually you learn of this demonstration and are left to imagine it, since setting it up is somewhat complicated. On rare occasions, this demonstration is actually carried out with an evacuated cylinder of glass containing a feather and a bullet or some other dense object. I’ve never seen such a demonstration, and I’ve certainly never seen it carried out on the scale documented in this video.
Related: how on Earth do they pump the air out of that chamber?
Server Outage
Thanks to an error by the company who provides my web server, Tracie and I lost about 12 hours worth of email. If you wrote to us on Wednesday evening through Thursday morning (about 9:30AM MST), you should re-send your message.
And yes, it’s been awhile since my last post.
Once New
The Japanese writing above the Fujicolor sign saya “New Photo”. I wonder whether they were able to sell their last rolls of film before they expired.