Further testing indicated that the taste was neither enhanced nor diminished, but remained ‘‘very much like a pickle.’’ Our conclusion is that the culinary potential of electrical stimulation is limited.
> “I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-five hours a week—in other words, three full days or five half days. Even after I returned from Paris or India in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s, I could take care of my family by working no more than three or four days a week.”
Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have the same opportunity? I think now there is such a great imbalance in cost of living and pay rates, it may no longer be possible to follow a similar path and get similar results.
Sure, you could move out to rural nowhere, where housing costs next to nothing. Find some part time job, and live your life.
I'm from a place like that, and a bunch of my old classmates from HS have lived like that their entire adult lives working part time. They work 2-3-4 days a week.
Of course, you'll be sacrificing lots of materialistic things, but that's a given.
If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. vatys isn't asking if you can make any living this way, because of course you can. The specific conditions that allowed Philip Glass to work part time jobs and still live in the same city as people like Steve Reich and institutions like The Kitchen don't exist anymore.
> If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass.
I'm not so sure. A lot of art comes out of "affordable areas" — sometimes small college-town ghettos like Athens, Georgia, for example. Why couldn't we get a Philip Glass from Manhattan, Kansas?
Why not indeed? If there is an orchestra's worth of musicians available and an audience there with the taste and curiosity necessary to support avant garde performing arts, anything can happen. It's easier now than ever to put a band together in your college town or even record and release music without ever leaving your bedroom, but beyond that scale you still need a critical mass of creative collaborators all in one place to pull it off.
There are orchestras everywhere. Because musicians want to play and directors want to direct and any random school has a performance hall. Whether they are all that good is another question, but that's true of big cities in the US also. And audience is still another question: I expect you don't get to have all that much of an audience until you have somewhat made it. No doubt Philip Glass didn't start with much of an audience.
Most artists that try to invent something new start with essentially no audience. They don't create that for the big bucks.
And they can all post videos of performances on YouTube. You don’t even need to have an orchestra perform a work for an extended time before you can find an audience. I would think that this would make it more likely for new composers to be able to find success than before. You don’t necessarily need to be in an NYC or Boston like before.
"Big bucks" is the last thing I'm talking about. I'm not talking about symphony subscribers and other blue hairs in a concert hall. I'm talking about an audience of creative peers.
Okay that's an interesting one. Any artists trying to create something new and different around here? How does it work with the "peers" around you? How does it work with other artists, art writers, gallerists, patrons, etc?
What I have noticed of this, and my readings seem to point to the reaction of people around someone in an uncharted direction like PG being a mix of "bemused but admirative and encouraging", and "ignored". And what proportion of the "peers" is now online? IG and such? (For an artist in my life, IG seemed to be an essential lifeline. A main connection.)
He roamed as a hobo for years during the Great Depression. The text for Barstow is graffiti that he saw scrawled on highway railings during that time. It's featured in most music history books that cover the 20th century. (Also, many of the instruments he invented are visual works of art, in addition to being musically beautiful.) And if you liked the recent HN article on just intonation, well... let's just say you're gonna love Harry Partch!
There's also Conlon Nancarrow, who got pissed at the U.S. harrassing him when he got back from fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He moved to Mexico City and hand-punched player piano rolls in seclusion, for decades.
Other composers and musicians made pilgrimages to his studio, just to hear what it sounds like when, say, a 12-voice canon has each voice moving at different tempo.[1]
Nancarrow received the MacArthur fellowship back in 1982. At one point there was a piano duo who taught themselves to play a selection of his pieces as a four-hands duet for one piano.
People who care about music will find interesting musicians, no matter where they live. This goes back at least to J.S. Bach, who reportedly walking hundreds of miles to listen to Buxtehude improvise at the organ.
1: and what are the proportions for the voices of that canon? You guessed it-- they're the ratios from a just intonation chromatic scale, which Nancarrow probably got from a book by Henry Cowell (New Musical Resources, IIRC).
Em... Harry Parch was living off Guggenheim and Carnegie grants at the start of the great depression. He was also celebrated and known in New York early in his career (while working menial jobs). He absolutely didn't rise from obscurity while living in a rural area. He was still receiving grants while travelling as a 'hobo' at the height of the great depression. He wasn't exactly cosplaying poverty, but it's a total mischaracterisation to craft a narrative where he was discovered while living that life.
> People who care about music will find interesting musicians, no matter where they live
This is the 'just world hypothesis' and survivorship bias combined. Some very talented people will be discovered despite their circumstances. An enormously larger number will not. You won't know you don't know them.
Congratulations, you missed the point of the comment while also being unnecessarily condescending! Another internet point!
The commenter remarked "we would never have heard of Philip Glass." Who among the laity would have heard of Philip Glass and the people you listed? I expect that Venn diagram is really two circles.
100% - but people don’t want to make those sacrifices. They want to live and do what they’ve always done. It has and likely always will be possible to pick up stumps and move somewhere very cheap and get on with a personal creative endeavour - not many have the courage though.
Orchestral music composition and performance is quite different from painting and writing. When you are dependent on a large amounts of other highly skilled people to create and perform it makes it really hard to live out in nowhere.
These days internet and digital production can ease a lot of the rural isolation. But for many (most?) people it is essential to be in and around the art scene to be able to create and maintain focus and motivation to work on their art. Especially when starting a career it is important to meet and see other artists and art.
I'm sorry, but I don't hold them in high regard as artists. They're part of the "western/southern frontier" crowd that encapsulated the zeitgeists of their environments, rather than create something that transcended it. The "frontier" is a notable and interesting subject in itself, but it has only peripheral cultural value to... civilization.
Much of O’Keeffe’s work relates to gender in a way that was counter to the zeitgeist of the contemporaneous southwest. Johnson more or less embodied a nascent Delta blues, defining it on wax, then died. It was too early in the codification for there be something to transcend. His career was like 9 months long. McCarthy I don’t know, can’t read because I don’t like the violence.
Nonetheless your final point is far more vapid because the frontier is where civilization is created and destroyed. It is where norms, values and modes of production of some civilization are placed with decreasing amounts of their domestic support, and usually in increasing conflict with a different civilization, so that it becomes clear what aspects have some more fundamental truth or at least robustness, and what is simply town and gown, responding to the ever shifting attentions of easily bored patrons.
In New York particularly this could maybe work. They have strong blue collar unions so benefits and pay would be actually livable. Plumbing anywhere is pretty viable. Faulkner worked in construction and did a similar thing. I am working in tech to fund my creative pursuits, an industry on its way to being blue collar
Not at all. Do you know what it actually takes to get in to those blue collar unions in NYC? It's not at all a "I can just show up, with no experience, and convince a business owner to give me a job" like Glass did.
IME, my impression, is that far more people today are in 'survival' mode - the fight/fligh/freeze response: not trying to create, build, and self-actualize but to survive, and ridiculing - as people in that mode do - art, humanities (and humanitarianism), knowledge, etc. Advocating the value in those things is now transgressive, IME. 'That's all pointless!' they say - and yes it's pointless if your only goal is to survive a week or maybe a year, and make nothing better of the world.
In my experience, that attitude for me was due to the devaluing of spirituality and the resulting overemphasis on rationality.
Funny thing is in hindsight, I didn’t realise how much my “rational” attitude was informed by the Protestant work ethic pervading secular society. It’s like we threw away the god part but kept the part where we’re all “sinners” until we prove ourselves worthy through work.
Instead of appreciating the natural beauty in the world as it is, I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world. From that latter, small view, art was difficult to appreciate.
> I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world
I was there too, and I see others doing it. I think that when we look externally for our value, we end up sacrificing a lot of ourselves for someone else's approval.
Is 'rationality' the right word here (I see you put it in quotes)? It doesn't seem rational or based on reason, more a social custom.
While I understand the purpose of HN is to have meaningful and in-depth discussion, and simply stating an opinion doesn't really contribute much, this is something which is so obviously bad and gives such a visceral reaction that the negative opinion outshines anything else I could say about it.
The amount of shooting is influenced by circumstances. That is to say, if one side doesn't have to risk people dying, then they may be more willing to start a war.
For a given amount of shooting, the number of civilian casualties is not necessarily constant. It's possible that AI may be more prone to targeting civilians or makes it easier to get away politically with killing civilians.
Not all shooting is equally effective. It's possible that AI weapons may give some faction the ability to crush anyone who opposes them.
What about AI bombers, which is just a step away from AI fighters (and is probably significantly easier to implement)? Civilians could absolutely be on the receiving end there.
Well, my preference would be world peace and end to this wasting resource. However I suppose that's quite the pipe dream isn's it?
More seriously tho, here is a positive I can come up with: Race to the bottom on bots and AI, lots and lots of bots and AI, lots and lots of upgrades and updates all the time, and then a MAD stalemate situation again because it becomes it's too difficult to assess the capabilities of the other countries AIs. If that bought us years of peace because everyone was to scare to fight, I'm ok-ish with that (although I doubt it's what will happen).
War is cheapened by lack of bloodshed. Part of what keeps a peaceful state of affairs os the pack of a stomach for the consequences of war as projected through your human actors.
Ironically, all this does is guarantee a greater willingness to reach for the violent solution.
Reminds me of an old sci-fi story where the U.S. and U.S.S.R. both create self-replicating autonomous machine armies and flee underground to let the machines duke it out.
The machines eventually realize fighting each other is pointless, and both start just making sure the humans don't surface until they are capable of living without being crazy asshats. Wish I could remember the title.
As with virtually any military development in world with multiple mutually hostile actors, it doesn't really matter how much we dislike it. If it gives actual advantage in combat, it will be deployed by someone. Once it is deployed by anyone, other actors will have to catch up if they want to continue existing.
Virtually reaching for things far away might be interesting.
I've alway been on the fence about VR, even for games, and never found any experiences to be compelling after a few minutes of fun.
However, one thing that struck me about Half-Life Alyx was the "magic" feeling of the Gravity Gloves in the game. In the game you point and reach for something, flick back, and it flies into your hand. It's very satisfying and intuitive, and possibly my favorite aspect of the design of that game.
I'm not sure if this would translate well out of a game design and into "real world" mixed reality, but it's an interesting thought.
I see them used in pro/prosumer audio equipment, synthesizers, and effects, which is relatively low volume and medium-to-high budget. FPGAs (and CPLDs, µC+AFE, etc) are great for these applications because they have great capabilities you might otherwise need a pile of discrete components or a custom chip for, but it doesn’t make sense to design fully custom silicon if you’re only ever going to sell about 50-500 of something.
So sure, prototyping and military, but there are other uses as well. But none of them are super high-volume because once you’re selling millions of something you should be designing your own chips.
When I signed up for 23andme many years ago, it was via a friend in another country, who re-mailed it for me under a fake name and paid in cash. For some time I would log in through a locale-specific 23andme sub-domain until they eventually merged it all together.
It wasn't long before they figured out who I was and placed me within my family tree. My fake name now lives among near and distant relatives I was not aware had signed up themselves or their parents/grandparents. They know who I am, who my siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles are, etc. This was always going to happen as soon as I sent them my sample.
I never believed my anonymity trick would truly work, I just wanted to make it sufficiently difficult for when 23andme inevitably sold out, got gobbled up, or turned evil. I learned what I wanted from the service, and have only logged in once a year or so since to see if they updated any findings or disease studies.
While I truly appreciate the concept of bringing privacy and anonymity to this field, it's worth considering we are all quite easy to identify using these samples.
> While I truly appreciate the concept of bringing privacy and anonymity to this field, it's worth considering we are all quite easy to identify using these samples.
Yes, as long as they have the data. If a company would process the sample, send me a thumb drive of my information, and not retain a copy, that data can't leak because it doesn't exist.
Unfortunately this is just one step away from a blog post where the CEO apologizes for letting down their customers by keeping copies of all data in an unsecured s3 bucket that was downloaded in its entirety by a 13 year old "hacker".
If you prominently advertised that you don't retain data, but it turned out that you did and it got leaked, that's a straightforward case of fraud. Given that the services would be advertised over the internet, it probably counts as wire fraud which means the feds would get involved. On the other hand if they had permission to keep your data and they got hacked, it becomes a messy tort case where the plaintiffs has to prove that the company didn't try hard enough to secure the data. In other words, the point isn't to guarantee that your data won't be leaked/hacked, it's to make it straightforward to go after you if you decide to lie.
This is why I won't use any genome sequencing service that has a bunch of ancillary services attached (eg. analyzing your ancestry, or figuring out what diseases you're at risk for), and you have to request deletion of data. The fact they provide such services means that your data is getting automatically uploaded to the cloud, probably resulting in multiple copies to different systems/databases/vendors. Even though you can theoretically request deletion, all those copies means there's a non-negligible chance that there's a copy lying around in a decommissioned s3 bucket that they didn't delete. If they service promises sample -> sequencing machine -> lab computer -> [PGP encrypted email/mailed CD], that cuts the risk considerably.
Yes, I definitely considered that as well. Basically, I knew that 23andme data would eventually exist outside 23andme, whether that be via hack, acquisition, or eminent domain.
I accepted that and did it anyway, taking steps to at least not be directly associated with my sequence, even if my association can be inferred or derived later. My main concern is that their testing would identify something which in the future would be a "pre-existing condition" and get me denied medical care, but there is certainly a long list of other possible consequences.
At this point I don't trust any company or agency that collects and uses data, or the promises made in any privacy policy, but I also don't lose any sleep over it.
There used to be a way to request full data deletion on their website. Probably too late to do it now for people who are included in the hack, but could still be a good idea to do it asap.
I did the same, sans the cash payment. I REALLY wanted my DNA sequenced but they were the only consumer option at the time. Anonymous sequencing is the way to go. There's just too much opportunity for abuse or incompetence around my most private data.
…if you wanted full anonymity, why did you turn on DNA relative sharing? Why don’t you turn it off now? Or do you mean, you assume they could place your profile within a tree, if they wanted to?
Consider a service which promised to scan your genome, send you the data file, and delete the sample, and their copy of the file on confirmation of your receipt. This is still vulnerable to dishonesty, but only transiently.
There's nothing logically impossible about such a service, and I'd trust it modulo actual red flags. Too bad afaik nobody's offering it. Once they're archiving their copy I just don't see how they can credibly promise privacy in the longer term.
Last I looked it didn't seem really practical to just buy your own sequencer.
People are conditioned not care, but I seriously doubt that is avoid argument for not providing anonymity as a default product considering the risks when genome data is breached.
Surely, it’s not that costly to delete data? The only reason to keep this data is for ulterior motives like monetizing.
I'd pay more for credible privacy. You'd think this could support a small business, even assuming there's no angle for a grand VC-funded startup. (Yes, easy for me to say.)
Nebula actually did use to let you download your data and tell them to delete it. When I was looking last year, though, they'd moved to some new model (which I assume this post was about).
Paying anonymously does not resolve the problem of identity by descent / genetic relatedness for a service that retains your genetic data. As relatives sign up with any identifiable bit of information, your anonymity erodes.
If we took the entire core to the surface (without collapsing the Earth which is impossible) we would cover the Earth with iron and nickel to a depth of hundreds of km.
reply