Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Left-to-Right HMM
“… is an HMM topology, in which no prior state can be reached from a current state. This property is used for instance to describe word models in speech recognition applications.”
[Bastian Hartmann in 'Human Worker Activity Recognition in Industrial Environments']
Shout Louder!
”‘Shout louder!’ he [Elijah] tells them. ‘Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or on the can.’ For real: on the can. Most translations replace that last part with ‘traveling’, but scholars believe that’s a sanitized Hebrew euphemism for pooping. (1 Kings 18)”
(J. Boyett in Pochet Guide to the Bible.)
That rises the extremely important and very precariously discusses theological question: does God poops?
What if the universe was created as the result of-
Uh, never mind…
Wood Harmonics
“Rick works with his hands and ears, tapping here and there and listening. ‘You can hear the top open up as you sand it thinner,’ he says. He gives a grunt of satisfaction, holds the top by my ear, and taps it for me. It’s startlingly loud and resonant. Thumm. Then he taps around a bit and find another spot – thimm! – an octave higher. ‘They are called nodes,’ he says and immediately denies knowing anything about the propagation of wood harmonics. Actually, nobody understands the acoustics of musical instruments, he says. The really smart luthiers are the ones who will admit it.
(Tim Brookes in “Guitar: An American Life”.)
