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  Here’s a little #musictheory observation I made recently. First some set up: there are essentially only two generators of the 12 tone scale: m2 (minor second) and P5 (perfect fifth). By “generator” I mean you get all 12 notes by repeatedly moving up by those intervals. Repeat m2 gets you the chromatic scale C Db D Eb …; and P5 gives the circle of 5ths: C G D A …. Put these side by side and you get (C,C), (Db,G), (D,D), (Eb,A)… so unison, tritone, unison, tritone, … Tension and release!

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  @MichaelEMann@fediscience.org @oliversampson@sigmoid.social That is a powerful way to demonstrate a worrying point.

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  @KathyReid@aus.social Congratulations!

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  You know that stereotypical diagram of atoms as electrons orbiting a pack of protons and neutrons? That’s less than 100 years old. Before 1932 and the discovery of the neutron by Chadwick we thought atoms were indivisible or at best a “pudding” or some system of only positive and negative pieces. I feel like I must have learnt this at some point at school but hadn’t quite appreciated how recent the discovery was. I guess as you get older what constitutes “a long time ago” gets longer.

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  @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange @cstross@wandering.shop This is a common misconception. The “B.” here is really the set of all expansions for which Benoit B. Mandelbrot converges (e.g., when “B.” stands for “Gaston M. Julia”).

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  @mhoye @jonathankoren @rmondello Surprising fact: exactly the same algorithm works even better for many other problems: perfect numbers, powers of two, busy beaver, etc.

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  This video is a massive hit of nostalgia for me. Starfish by The Church was probably the first album I got obsessed with in high school and prompted me to learn guitar. I ended up getting the official tabs book for the album and spent hours and hours learning all the riffs and chords. Great to see it still getting the attention it deserves as a unique piece of Australian music. https://youtu.be/GrKhIn6FLTA

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  The Earth's orbital period is 365.256 days or 31,558,150 seconds and so has a frequency of 3.169 x 10⁻⁸ Hz which is a Db 33 octaves below middle C that is flat by 31 cents. The Earth's rotational period is 23h 56m 4s or 86,164 seconds and so has a frequency of 1.161 x 10⁻⁵ Hz which is G 24 octaves below middle C that is flat by 11 cents. So here we are, floating in space on a slightly flat and slightly out of tune tritone.

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  Augie March at the Croxton in Melbourne commemorating 20 years since the release of Moo You Bloody Choir and playing through the whole album. Shambolic but sublime.

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  I visited ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image) in Melbourne this afternoon – a wonderful, free museum of film and gaming history. This small exhibit of books caught my eye and it took me a few moments before I was hit by a wave of recognition: I had owned and/or borrowed all four of these books when I was 10 and basically learned how to program my Commodore Vic-20 from them. It quite a jolt to have personal history and curated history overlap in such a specific way!

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  TIL about the “Free Speech Flag”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag It’s an encoding of a secret key – 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 – that was used to copy protect HD DVDs and Blue Ray discs in the mid-2000s. This key was considered a so called “illegal number” since publishing it was tantamount to breaking a legally protected encryption scheme. The flag consists of five colours whose RGB hex values are the first 15 bytes of the secret key and the C0 is printed...

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  OH: “What is it about DNS that people find so difficult? It’s just cache invalidation and naming things.”