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theOnlieston Ways Men in Tech Are Unintentionally Sexist (2014)

I'm not sure that anyone has to agree to work on one at a time. If each person worked on one at a time, that would be great! Nobody is going to get mad at someone for consciously trying to use "women" instead of "girls" just because we all agreed it's "No default male avatar" month.

theOnlieston Kimiko Ishizaka and MuseScore Team Release Open Well-Tempered Clavier

For loads of other public domain scores/recordings, see the Petrucci music library at http://www.imslp.org. As a music academic/teacher, IMSLP is invaluable for me. There are also CC-licensed recordings, though I don't use them much myself.

Much of what they have there are 19th-century editions, which are now of course in the public domain. You might think that 150+ year-old editions aren't super-valuable, but many of them are from the Breitkopf & Härtel collected works editions. These editions are some of the most important works of 19th-century music scholarship, and were collected, edited, and subscribed to by important figures. Robert Schumann's works, for example, were all edited by Clara Schumann (an important composer in her own right), and Johannes Brahms is listed among the subscribers to the Bach complete works edition (among many others).

theOnlieston PDF Viewing

I'm writing my dissertation (music theory) with LaTeX; the text is all stored in git, and all of my examples are PDF files in a submodule (so the main repo doesn't get huge). I need to have the examples tracked, and the submodule allows me to pin a particular version of the examples with a particular version of the text. If I need the PDF of a chapter I sent to my advisor, for example, I can just check out that tag and run xelatex again to generate the real document.

The example PDF files aren't easily generated with TeX, so I make them in Illustrator and store them with Git. They change a little less frequently than the text itself, and usually once an example is done it doesn't get updated very frequently. In my case, at least, I can't easily version the "raw source" for the examples, as the Illustrator binary files are ~3x larger than the resulting PDFs.

I suppose I could use something like git-annex, but every time I've tried I haven't really been able to get the hang of it, and the time I'd spend learning it is better spent actually writing the thing.

(Incidentally, this new Github feature makes it much easier to browse my examples repo!)

theOnlieston Whiteboard Clock

Or use a chalkboard.

theOnlieston BitcoinEmissions – A project to calculate CO2 emissions of mining bitcoin

I'm not an astronomer, but presumably a satellite would still have night to contend with. Anything orbiting the earth is going to spend half its time in Earth's shadow, right? I remember a Radiolab [1] where they describe the ISS going from daytime to nighttime every 45 minutes.

[1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/242184-dark-side-earth/

theOnlieston Paper sizes

I do this a lot for printing out (research) articles, and the answer is that the text gets shrunk much more, and the margins increased to account for the difference. (This actually turns out to be useful in practice, since there's much more whitespace to take notes in.)

theOnlieston Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

> Finally, Perl 5 has many unsolved problems that will hinder its evolution in the upcoming decades.

I'm wondering which unsolved problems you're referring to in particular. (Surely Perl 5 is not the only language which might happen on problems in upcoming decades, and just as surely Perl 6 isn't immune to them.)

theOnlieston Composer.js: a framework for building complex single-page applications

At the very least, I'd change the <title> of the home page to remove some ambiguity. Right now it says "Get Composer | Composer.js", and the URL for the PHP composer is getcomposer.org.

theOnlieston The torus is the product of two circles, cubically

I've always found these images [1,2] from Wikipedia to be helpful in explaining how the torus is a product of two circles.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus#mediaviewer/File:Sphere-l... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus#mediaviewer/File:Torus_cy...

theOnlieston College Students Prefer Reading Print Books to E-Readers

I wanted to put in a plug for Open Music Theory [1], for anybody who's interested. It's an open-source [2], Creative-Commons licensed music theory text designed for use in college music theory classrooms. It's written primarily by some friends of mine, all with teaching positions and Theory PhDs, so the material is good. I'm using the 20th-century materials in my class this semester instead of assigning a $100+ textbook. It's not quite as comprehensive as a dead-tree book (yet?), but is a great resource for beginners, or people looking to supplement their knowledge.

[1] http://openmusictheory.com [2] https://github.com/openmusictheory/openmusictheory.github.io

theOnlieston Show HN: I built an iOS remake of that old windows game SkiFree

Just a quick note: if I turn the audio off and then tap "Main Menu" in the settings screen, the audio turns back on. I like the game!

theOnlieston Why we love repetition in music

I had the same reaction when I saw the title, but then I saw the author. Her book on repetition won the outstanding publication award from the Society for Music Theory this year. I haven't read it yet, but I've heard her present and she was really fascinating (even though I'm normally not interested in cognition at all).

theOnlieston Towards a Vim-like Emacs

> I have a config snippet[2] that I got from somewhere (sadly, I don't remember where) that remaps incorrect combinations of Shift and letters to be dead.

Very likely from Steve Losh (I did this too, and it helped a lot): http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#shif....

theOnlieston Show HN: Paperman – LaTeX editor with a Markdown feel

The biggest problem I usually have (on a Mac) isn't so much that it's difficult; it's that the MacTeX package is 2.4 GB, which often means an hour or so of waiting before I can actually do anything.

theOnlieston Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

Of course it's not. I was just responding to the thought that a theory explains an observed phenomenon, and trying to show how for at least one definition of music that the OP was indeed "music theory."

It never claims to be "a comprehensive guide to all things musical" or "a theory of all music," but it certainly qualifies as music theory.

theOnlieston Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

> A theory is something that explains an observed phenomenon.

That's true, but if you take the "observed phenomenon" to be "Western, common-practice tonal music (and notation)," then this certainly helps to explain it. It's certainly what gets taught in undergraduate music theory classes (much of it in "fundamentals" courses). Graduate work in music theory involves doing exactly what you say: explaining observed phenomena, in both "classical" music as well as about any other musics you might imagine. That's not to say that all music is Western, common-practice tonal music, but a great deal of music comes out of that lineage; an understanding of these basics are often necessary (or at the very least, useful) before branching out.

You see this sort of thing in all disciplines. I might find an "Introduction to computer science for normal people" that explains big-O notation, or teaches some basic Python, or what have you. Someone might well say "This isn't 'computer science,' but instead 'jargon and programming.'" This person might be right, of course, but for "non-computer scientists and normal people," the distinction is not so clear.

theOnlieston Musical Scale Generator

> E.g. pianos don't even have perfect octaves.

This isn't true (at least in theory). Octaves on piano are (or should be) exact, otherwise the 12-tone equal tempering doesn't work out. A4 is 440 Hz, A5 is 880 Hz, and A3 is 220 Hz (using the Acoustical Society of America designations, where middle C = C4). If the octaves weren't pure, the piano would be more in tune in the middle than it would be at either end, which usually isn't the case.

> There were experiments with more tones per octave back in the middle ages, but the idea never caught on because the musical benefits aren't obvious.

The history of scales and how they came to be in the Western classical system is long and complicated (too long for here, certainly), but I wanted to point out my favorite of these weird old instruments the archicembalo.[1] It was designed by one of the most out there theorists, Nicola Vicentino, in Ferrara, a hotbed of weird music at the time (see Carlo Gesualdo's "Moro lasso" [2], a really chromatic madrigal).

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archicembalo 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_q3EJNUKis

(I'm ABD on a Music Theory PhD, so if anybody has more specific questions I'm happy to help!)

theOnlieston “Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Also worth reading is Manning Marable's excellent biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

http://www.amazon.com/Malcolm-X-A-Life-Reinvention/dp/014312...

theOnlieston Daskeyboard 4 Professional

I switched to a compact version (Poker II) after developing some wrist pain from keeping the mouse so far from the typing position. The mechanical switches tend to hurt my wrists a lot less and the compact layout is ideal (with a bit of customization via KeyRemap4Macbook).

theOnlieston A Maintainable Style Guide

FYI, the Github link to KSS in the article is broken (href just reads "KSS").

theOnlieston OS X Command Line Utilities

Or without the extraneous cat: "pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub"

theOnlieston Ack is a grep-like tool, optimised for programmers

That's true by default, but it's trivial to add your own filetypes with a .ackrc file.

theOnlieston Ack is a grep-like tool, optimised for programmers

https://github.com/petdance/ack2

I'll send Andy a PR about putting the Github link on the site somewhere.

theOnlieston Twitter is not dying. It’s on the cusp of getting much bigger

That's true, but the point the article makes is that Twitter is not primarily a tool for talking to people you already know, but instead for publishers/content creators to broadcast their material. These sorts of things change much less frequently: I never got an ICQ message from the New York Times, but I sure get a lot of tweets from them.

theOnlieston Circle of fifths and roots of two

The equal-tempered major third is 14 cents higher (1 semitone = 100 cents) than a just-tempered third, which is pretty noticeable even for non-trained musician.

theOnlieston Circle of fifths and roots of two

Your intuition is basically right: perfect octaves/fifths/fourths are called "perfect" because they have the most acoustically pure: 2:1, 3:2, and 4:3, respectively. They're also the oldest consonances, described supposedly by Pythagoras but extant in the Euclidean "Sectio canonis" (~3rd C. BCE).

The other intervals weren't considered consonant until much later (the middle ages), and didn't get their "major/minor" names until a bit later, in the Renaissance. Before this, they were known by their Latin names (M3 = ditone, m3 = semiditone, and so on). The m2 was found in (at least) two forms until the advent of equal temperament, usually known as the major and minor semitones.

The "major" intervals are those found in the major scale (M2, M3, M6, M7). The minor intervals aren't named in relation to the minor scale, but rather in relation to their major equivalents (a minor second is lower than a major second). "Minor" comes from "molle," which is "soft": the major third is "softened" to become the minor third, and so on.

theOnlieston 4chan demands 4chan.com domain name

My favorite example of this is the Waffle House (24-hour dive). In Indiana, "Waffle House" was already taken, so the national chain had to use "Waffle & Steak" instead. Of course, since we used to call the Waffle House "WaHo," this leads to the MUCH better name "WaSte"!

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_house#Waffle_.26_Steak

theOnlieston Why Use Make? (2013)

If someone's argument is that info is hard to learn, it's pretty unlikely they're also an Emacs user (the standalone info uses emacs keybindings by default).

theOnlieston GitHub's language detection is broken

Earlier this morning when I looked it looked like OP said...it looks like something has changed in the three hours or so intervening.

theOnlieston Q – Execute SQL on text. Supports joins across files, RPM available

> As an added bonus it supports some Python and PCRE-specific extensions.

This is a bit of a strange thing to say, since nearly all of the advanced regex features showed up in Perl first. PCRE stands for "Perl-compliant regular expressions," so there's certainly no extensions there that didn't originally come from Perl. I'm less sure about Python, but I get the sense that they borrow from Perl regular expressions as well.