Ben Pieratt, Blog @pieratt - Tumblr Blog

true greatness. I said true greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier — when it's spelled with a lower case letter. That's how the hamming window came about.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, "Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further." The essence of science is cumulative.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

gimmickbook

pieratt

"Fido is for Fido. Fido is against no one. Fido is Youth. Fido has no age. Fido sees everything. Fido judges nothing. Fido is Innocent. Fido is Powerful. Fido comes from the past. Fido is the future."

– the Fido Dido credo

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost. — Karen Blixen, Babette's Feast

https://x.com/chetaslua/status/2046489044243403029 "🚨Image 2.0 is now online on ChatGPT and it's incredible! Just a few days ago even 3x3 grids would often struggle, now we can 10x10 the complexity, and it's near perfect! Prompt is image discription just click on image ALT button Credit - u/Alex__007"

this is the prompt: "Create a 10 × 10 grid of 100 different topics representing recent technological progress. Use a realistic, polished editorial illustration style. Each topic should appear in its own square with a short clear label underneath. Keep the grid neat on a white background. Make every topic visually different and every label correctly spelled. Use these row themes: Row 1: AI models and agents Row 2: robotics Row 3: semiconductors and compute Row 4: networks and smart devices Row 5: biotech and health technology Row 6: energy and power systems Row 7: transport and autonomy Row 8: space and aerospace Row 9: manufacturing and materials Row 10: climate and environmental technology. Show each tile as a realistic mini-scene, product-class object, lab instrument, robot, chip, vehicle, or device that clearly conveys the topic. Keep the overall style consistent, modern, realistic, and visually impressive."

wow

[Verse 1] We three We're all alone Living in a memory My echo, my shadow and me

[Verse 2] We three We're not a crowd We're not even company My echo, my shadow and me

[Bridge] What good is the moonlight The silvery moonlight That shines above? I walk with my shadow I talk with my echo But where is the one I love?

[Verse 3] We three We'll wait for you Even till eternity My echo, my shadow and me

— We Three (My Echo, My Shadow and Me) The Ink Spots, 1946

Diagrams for minsky's finite state machine. Gorgeous. (+ screenshots of how closely this feels to the godmom binary system I'm slowly still working on, a bit shocked to see it reflected like this (*paused while I learn more and launch this next thing))

"fractions were basically cutting edge technology for a couple thousand years" - Imaginary Numbers are Real. Welch Labs

ooda loop / Vinay Gupta

Interviewer: If I had made that movie, I would have questioned the right of the Jesuit priests to come to Japan and impose their ideas on the Japanese. Shinoda: No, it was impossible for the Jesuits to impose their religion on the Japanese because of the animism believed in by this insular, island people. It was not to be destroyed by so severe a religion as Christianity. Christianity destroyed the Roman gods, but the Japanese gods were protected by the softness of Buddhism. Buddhism is so soft that it was absorbed into the Japanese culture of the time. The Japanese people believed that Buddhism could easily marry with Shinto, and thus Japanese culture is a mixed breed of both religions. Then Christianity came, but by this time the native animism of Shinto and Buddhism were already coexisting in harmony. I think that there was no room for an additional religion. All Eastern religions are in accordance with a belief in the oneness of man and nature, whereas Christianity deals with the relationship between one man and another. When movies, or film culture, were introduced into Japan they were already based on modern Western thought. But Japanese culture influenced the kind of films that would be made here, despite the Western origins of the cinema. I must categorize the films of the world into three distinct types. European films are based upon human psychology, American films upon action and the struggles of human beings, and Japanese films upon circumstance."

DepressedBergman on X: "Masahiro Shinoda explains why it was impossible for the Jesuits to impose their religion in Japan https://t.co/ZfCZcDZ7e6" / X

"In one particularly fascinating section, Buzsaki notes that the frequency of gamma waves is about 7x the frequency of theta waves. He shows how this means that the hippocampus (a sort of master regulator of short-term memory) can “call” conscious attention “as a function” seven times within one of its time steps, which he links to the old adage that you can fit seven plus or minus two items within short-term memory." https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-rhythms-of-the-brain /via zhuk

"I'm a gamer. I hire people to do subsymbolic stuff" says the hacker mastermind wrt killing people. Blackhat, almost great Michael Mann joint. Villain should have gotten more screen time.

"I contacted 75 of my peers anonymously via email. I said, "Send me a list of your 10 favorite unproduced screenplays. In exchange I will share with you the combined list that everybody mentioned." Copied and pasted those responses into a spreadsheet. Literally Microsoft Excel. Ran it through a pivot table, outputted it to PowerPoint, slapped a quasi-subversive name on it, and emailed it back out from my anonymous email address. I think it was Blacklist2005@hotmail or something. And it went viral in the industry almost immediately." https://niemanstoryboard.org/2025/06/19/the-black-list-franklin-leonard-based-on-true-story-hollywood/

"What lies in this book is perhaps more important as a whole than in its details. If you only have an hour to spend on it, it makes much more sense to read the whole book roughly in that hour, than to read only the first two chapters in detail. For this reason, I have arranged each chapter in such a way that you can read the whole chapter in a couple of minutes, simply by reading the headlines which are in italics. If you read the beginning and end of every chapter, and the italic headlines that lie between them, turning the pages almost as fast as you can, you will be able to get the overall structure of the book in less than an hour.

Then, if you want to go into detail, you will know where to go, but always in the context of the whole."

- The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander

"All our reasoning is nothing other than a combination of characters. And every calculus is a combination or transformation of characters. Thus reasoning itself is a certain kind of calculation, and calculation is nothing other than the orderly manipulation of symbols.

The combination of characters may occur in various ways — by aggregation, by division, by substitution, or by transposition. There is identity or similarity among characters whose signs correspond, and these relations may be expressed without regard to the intrinsic nature of the things signified.

...

Just as in arithmetic and algebra one may compute without contemplating the quantities in themselves, so in reasoning one may calculate without direct inspection of the concepts, provided the characters are properly constructed and the rules correctly applied.

Thus, if we possessed a perfectly constructed system of characters and a complete calculus governing their combinations, disputes in philosophy would be resolved by computation. For reasoning would become calculation, and truth would emerge from the lawful transformation of symbols." (source = I asked GPT to translate a scan of leibniz' notes https://digitale-sammlungen.gwlb.de/content/00068646/pdf/00000047.pdf) It's interesting because elsewhere the first line is translated as "All our reasoning is nothing but the joining and substituting of characters, whether these characters be words or symbols or images" I wonder who is right?

recordplayerbabyyyy

Eighth Heaven the Sphere of the Fixed Stars from Dante’s Divine Comedy, 1564

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