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2024
10 articles on this page- Inner Echo: On Making Mental Illness Visible, and What That Even Means I am on the spectrum. This post asks what “making mental illness visible” can realistically mean and describes inner-echo, an unvalidated audiovisual metaphor project—not a simulation, diagnostic instrument, or therapy.
- After the Connection Is Stable, the Hard Part Begins A third post in the networked music performance series. Technical latency and institutional infrastructure are only part of the problem. This practice-informed account describes one curriculum’s use of progressive tasks, reflection and portfolios without treating observations as measured learning effects.
- Primes Are Energy Levels: The Montgomery-Odlyzko Conjecture In October 2024, the largest known prime was announced — 41 million digits, found by a GPU-assisted GIMPS search. But the deepest prime story is not about record-breaking numbers. It is about a 1972 teatime conversation at the Institute for Advanced Study, a pair correlation formula, and the suspicion — numerically confirmed to extraordinary precision — that the zeros of the Riemann zeta function are the energy levels of an undiscovered quantum system.
- The Hamiltonian of Intelligence: From Spin Glasses to Neural Networks On October 8, 2024, Hopfield and Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The Hopfield energy has Ising form, and Boltzmann machines import statistical- mechanical distributions. Those are genuine mathematical connections, but they do not make transformers, AlphaFold, protein folding, and spin glasses one causal lineage or universality class.
- Three Rs in Strawberry: What the Viral Counting Test Actually Reveals The viral “three Rs in strawberry” test exposes a real mismatch between token-level input and character-level operations. It does not, by itself, identify one tokenizer boundary or explain any particular model response.
- Why Cats Purr at 25 Hz: Vocal Fold Pads and the Physics of Self-Sustained Oscillation A 2023 Current Biology experiment showed that excised cat larynges can produce purr-like low-frequency oscillations under airflow without neural input. Connective-tissue pads are a plausible contributing mechanism, not a settled complete account; frequency overlap does not establish bone healing in cats.
- The Invisible Entrance Fee: On Privilege, Education, and the Institutions That Reproduce Both Education is supposed to reward merit, yet German PISA outcomes remain strongly associated with socioeconomic background. Bourdieu’s theory of capital offers one account of how institutions can reproduce advantage; it is an interpretive framework, not the only causal explanation.
- Why 44,100? The Accidental Physics of the CD Sampling Rate The CD sampling rate grew out of 1970s video-based PCM recorders. PAL-compatible equipment used 44.1 kHz; colour NTSC equipment used the nearby 44.056 kHz. Sony and Philips then chose one rate for the disc: 44.1 kHz.
- How Cats Drink: Inertia, Gravity, and the Froude Number at the Tip of a Tongue Cats use the dorsal surface of the tongue tip to entrain a liquid column, then close the jaw before gravity and pinch-off remove it. Reis and colleagues modelled the timing with inertia, gravity, a Froude number, and the tongue’s travel geometry. The relevant domestic-cat parameter is a modified Froude number near 0.4—not the simple Froude number near one.
- The Boring Parts of Networked Music Performance A follow-up to the August 2023 latency post. The numbers were fine. The hard part turned out to be everything else: governance, maintenance, invisible labour, and why a technically functional Digital Music Lab can become unusable without sustained stewardship.