Notices by Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com), page 41

This SMBC comic is sooo wrong...

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/unicorns-3

The weather has "turned around" as we say in Norway. The Oslo area has had its first warm days, and the humidity has gone up. Spring is coming. It almost happens overnight, as if some kind of tropical weather system shifts gears and starts pumping hot humid air toward southeastern Norway. I live in a concrete building that heats up really easily, so I'm running the air conditioner now.

@ned You should read the Wikipedia article on Euler's formula.

Euler's formula is a bit of a mind-blower.

i² = -1 is the imaginary unit.

A complex number has two parts and is written a + bi, where a is real and b is imaginary. The imaginary axis is perpendicular to the real axis.

If you see them as vectors, multiplying two complex numbers adds their angles and multiplies their magnitudes. In other words, rotation and scaling.

@ned In any case, I think you'd have to make an editor that could manipulate abstract syntax trees directly to pull it off. The good thing about representing code as a data structure all the way to the compiler/interpreter is that you can display this data structure any way you want to. In other words, the formatting is carried out on the fly in the editor, where you can decide on your own display settings.

@ned Maybe like the Numbers spreadsheet on macOS, where referenced cells are represented as bubbles with text inside of them.

@ned I would want to improve the labelling of variables, but it's not clear how to do it without breaking the rules of mathematical notation. I think I might've seen whole words used as variables, but I'm not sure how you'd separate them. Maybe a different font or something.

@ned Yes. I would want it to improve a bit on the readability of mathematical expressions, though. Take this equation:

H(jω) = 1 + (G f) / (jω + f)

Can you tell, just by looking at it, what the function is for, and what the variables mean?

Programming languages are better at expressing meaning than algebra is. If I rewrite that as...

transferFunction(phaseVector) = 1 + (gain angularFrequency) / (phaseVector + angularFrequency)

...it's not quite as neat, but now you can understand it.

I found this plot of a U87Ai from Townsend Labs, belonging to an article I can't read because it's password protected. This is more like it. Actual measurements. This, averaged together for a large number of microphones, is what Neumann should be publishing as the frequency response for that microphone.

This is supposed to be the frequency response of a Neumann U 87. I don't buy it. Real frequency response curves don't look that neat, not even when averaged. This is a drawing of a frequency response curve. Neumann doesn't publish the actual measurements. It surprises me that no one's tested the living shit out of a U 87 in an anechoic chamber and published their findings, since it's such an iconic microphone.

Since this microwave oven is so hopeless, what I often end up doing is heat the food for the time it says on the box, but at 1200 instead of 750 or 800 watts. This overcooks it, but at least I don't have to wait longer.

I have a 1200-watt microwave oven that my sister gave to me years ago.

You'd think this would be better than the typical 800-watt oven, but it has a drawback: If you're following a recipe for an 800-watt oven and you reduce the cooking time, there's less time to distribute the heat, so you end up with parts severely over or undercooked. You have to reduce the power, but the next step down is 600 watts, and then you end up with a *slower* cooking time than usual.

As far as I can tell, the only reason we are stuck with clumsy notation for math in code is because we once used teletypes to write and run code, and they couldn't display formatted text.

I feel that computers should get better at handling text that isn't a simple string of characters in general.

Wouldn't it be cool if editors just worked directly on abstract syntax trees instead of text files? No more arguments over formatting; just reconfigure your editor.

I get why programming languages stick to plain text files, but I kind of wish there were more options. I want to insert mathematical expressions and have them look like they do in a math book. There is LaTeX but a C compiler can't parse that, and it's not very WYSIWYG.

What I'd ideally want is to have the whole stack (keyboards, editors, source code files, compilers) be adapted for it.

Also, variable names with greek letters and subscripts would be helpful.

@51rH0n3y84d93r No guide as such, but the starting point would be the formatting used in the Java API documentation. Since I learned Java, I've been using that formatting style everywhere else because I found it very readable. The parenthesis style feels like a natural extension of that, since expressions are a bit like blocks, and the arguments on each line isn't dissimilar to what you occasionally find in mathematics, when you divide, or multiple long equations are passed as arguments.

I'm stashing transfer functions for EQ filters. As it turns out, if you have a transfer function, that's all you really need to know to implement a filter digitally.

I still maintain that you can get pretty far with middle school math and a dash of self study.

I found a somewhat readable way of expressing complex algebra in code. These are transfer functions for equaliser filters.

#CardioidMEMSMicrophoneArray

Somehow, I'm not convinced that this is right...

If they ever make a 24-hour mathematics TV channel, they should name it Al Jabr.

I'm in desperate need of a more elegant way of expressing complex number arithmetic in JavaScript.

The most elegant syntax I can muster is a.op(b) and it's basically impossible to read. This would be so much easier if I could overload the arithmetic operators.