Month: April 2013

New Twitter accounts for DSP and music theory

Posted on by John

I’ve started two new Twitter accounts this week: @DSP_fact and @MusicTheoryTip.

DSP_fact is for DSP, digital signal processing: filters, Fourier analysis, convolution, sampling, wavelets, etc.

MusicTheoryTip is for basic music theory with a little bias toward jazz. It’ll tweet about harmony, scales, tuning, notation, etc.

Here’s a full list of my 15 daily tip twitter accounts.

If you’re interested in one of these accounts but don’t use Twitter, you can subscribe to a Twitter account via RSS just as you’d subscribe to a blog.

If you’re using Google Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds, you’ll need to switch to something else by July 1. Here are 18 alternatives.

Social networks in fact and fiction

Posted on by John

SIAM News arrived this afternoon and had an interesting story on the front page: Applying math to myth helps separate fact from fiction.

In a nutshell, the authors hope to get some insight into whether a myth is based on fact by seeing whether the social network of characters in the myth looks more like a real social network or like the social network in a work of deliberate fiction. For instance, the social networks of the Iliad and Beowulf look more like actual social networks than does the social network of Harry Potter. Real social networks follow a power law distribution more closely than do social networks in works of fiction.

This could be interesting. For example, the article points out that some scholars believe Beowulf has a basis in historical events, though they don’t believe that Beowulf the character corresponds to a historical person. The network approach lends support to this position: the Beowulf social network looks more realistic when Beowulf himself is removed.

It seems however that an accurate historical account might have a suspicious social network, not because the events in it were made up but because they were filtered according to what the historian thought was important.

Which Unicode characters can you depend on?

Posted on by John

Unicode is supported everywhere, but font support for Unicode characters is sparse. When you use any slightly uncommon character, you have no guarantee someone else will be able to see it.

I’m starting a Twitter account @MusicTheoryTip and so I wanted to know whether I could count on followers seeing music symbols. I asked whether people could see ♭ (flat, U+266D), ♮ (natural, U+266E), and ♯ (sharp, U+266F). Most people could see all three symbols, from desktop or phone, browser or Twitter app. However, several were unable to see the natural sign from an Android phone, whether using a browser or a Twitter app. One person said none of the symbols show up on his Blackberry.

[Update: I gave @MusicTheoryTip over to someone else, and they didn’t keep it up for long.]

I also asked @diff_eq followers whether they could see the math symbols ∂ (partial, U+2202), Δ (Delta, U+0394), and ∇ (gradient, U+2207). One person said he couldn’t see the gradient symbol, but the rest of the feedback was positive.

So what characters can you count on nearly everyone being able to see? To answer this question, I looked at the characters in the intersection of several common fonts: Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, and Droid Sans. My thought was that this would make a very conservative set of characters.

There are 585 characters supported by all the fonts listed above. Most of the characters with code points up to U+01FF are included. This range includes the code blocks for Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, and some of Latin Extended-B.

The rest of the characters in the intersection are Greek and Cyrillic letters and a few scattered symbols. Flat, natural, sharp, and gradient didn’t make the cut.

There are a dozen math symbols included:

0x2202 ∂
0x2206 ∆
0x220F ∏
0x2211 ∑
0x2212 −
0x221A √
0x221E ∞
0x222B ∫
0x2248 ≈
0x2260 ≠
0x2264 ≤
0x2265 ≥

Interestingly, even in such a conservative set of characters, there are a three characters included for semantic distinction: the minus sign (i.e. not a hyphen), the difference operator (i.e. not the Greek letter Delta), and the summation operator (i.e. not the Greek letter Sigma).

And in case you’re interested, here’s the complete list of the Unicode characters in the intersection of the fonts listed here. (Update: Added notes to indicate the start of a new code block and listed some of the isolated characters.)

0x0009           Basic Latin
0x000d
0x0020 - 0x007e 
0x00a0 - 0x017f  Latin-1 supplement
0x0192	         
0x01fa - 0x01ff
0x0218 - 0x0219  
0x02c6 - 0x02c7  
0x02c9
0x02d8 - 0x02dd 
0x0300 - 0x0301 
0x0384 - 0x038a  Greek and Coptic
0x038c
0x038e - 0x03a1
0x03a3 - 0x03ce
0x0401 - 0x040c 
0x040e - 0x044f  Cyrillic
0x0451 - 0x045c
0x045e - 0x045f
0x0490 - 0x0491
0x1e80 - 0x1e85  Latin extended additional
0x1ef2 - 0x1ef3
0x200c - 0x200f  General punctuation
0x2013 - 0x2015
0x2017 - 0x201e
0x2020 - 0x2022
0x2026
0x2028 - 0x202e
0x2030
0x2032 - 0x2033
0x2039 - 0x203a
0x203c
0x2044
0x206a - 0x206f  
0x207f           
0x20a3 - 0x20a4  Currency symbols ₣ ₤
0x20a7           ₧
0x20ac           €
0x2105           Letterlike symbols ℅
0x2116           №
0x2122           ™
0x2126           Ω
0x212e           ℮
0x215b - 0x215e  ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞
0x2202 	         Mathematical operators ∂
0x2206           ∆
0x220f           ∏
0x2211 - 0x2212  ∑ −
0x221a           √
0x221e           ∞
0x222b           ∫
0x2248           ≈
0x2260           ≠
0x2264 - 0x2265  ≤ ≥
0x25ca           Box drawing ◊
0xfb01 - 0xfb02  Alphabetic presentation forms fi fl

Slabs of time

Posted on by John

From Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. … Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

I haven’t written a novel, and probably never will, but Stephenson’s remarks describe my experience doing math and especially developing software. I can do simple, routine work in short blocks of time, but I need larger blocks of time to work on complex projects or to be more creative.

Related post: Four hours of concentration

Baroque computers

Posted on by John

From an interview with Neal Stephenson, giving some background for his Baroque Cycle:

Leibniz [1646-1716] actually thought about symbolic logic and why it was powerful and how it could be put to use. He went from that to building a machine that could carry out logical operations on bits. He knew about binary arithmetic. I found that quite startling. Up till then I hadn’t been that well informed about the history of logic and computing. I hadn’t been aware that anyone was thinking about those things so far in the past. I thought it all started with [Alan] Turing. So, I had computers in the 17th century.

Like Silicon Valley only better

Posted on by John

I’m in Durham, North Carolina this morning, part of  Research Triangle. Last night I spoke at a Research Triangle Analysts meeting and this morning I’m giving at talk at RTI.

Just like Austin and Salt Lake City, Research Triangle wants to be another Silicon Valley, only with lower taxes and a lower cost of living.

It appears the Silicon Valley wannabes are doing well. I don’t know whether they are drawing companies away from Silicon Valley, but they’re growing.

Silicon Vally’s sales pitch is that geography matters at lot. You need to be where the venture capitalists, other tech companies, and lots of potential employees are.

Areas like Research Triangle make a more moderate argument. They also want to say that geography matters. If geography doesn’t matter, then why move to Durham? But they also want to argue that geography doesn’t matter so much that you need to pay California taxes and rent.

I think the future is on their side. Geography matters, and always will, though not as much as it used to. It’s not necessary (or even possible) to have everyone you work with in one area. I expect Silicon Valley will continue to thrive, but more affordable alternatives may grow faster.

Physical versus medical modeling

Posted on by John

Modeling is more fun when you have some confidence in your modeling assumptions. I’ve been working with models of physical systems lately and it’s been more enjoyable than the biostatistical modeling I’ve done over the last few years.

I have more confidence that my results might reflect reality. I also have more confidence that if my results don’t reflect reality, I’ll find out.

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