It's not the size, it's how you sue it.

Yes. Clearly Netflix will 'destroy the internet'.

Update on my own thread: All Windows Mobile devices can be safely ruled out:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/pocketscrobbler/index.php?title=Will_you_support_MusicBrainz-IDs_in_the_future%3F

Last I checked, Musicbrainz wouldn't allow this sort of thing either. Mind you, specifically I was asking about bittorrent 'compiliations' of pre-existing material where, arguably, the set and ordering chosen results in a new work. I'm not sure if they would allow a torrent-only album under 'other' under the current practices:

            http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/ReleaseType [musicbrainz.org]

            But at least Musicbrainz is rather 'open' and allows dissent among the community on such topics--this leads to the obvious question, then: why isn't there a centralized 'open' metadata database like this for *all* forms of media: music, scores, movies, television, books, magazines, journal articles, encyclopedias, video games,etc...

I don't know much about programming, so I'm wondering:

To what extent does Rhomobile solve this question?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhomobile

It claims you can write something that compiles for all devices. What are the limitations to this approach?

Since you're interested in Neuroscience and AI a masters in Cognitive Science is a relevant option. Every school's cogsci program is different,but they're all *very* flexible. Check out UCSD, Indiana, MIT, Carleton, Arizona, etc.

Both the Kindle and the iPad are a joke when it comes to academic work. At the very least, they need to duplicate the kind of functionality you can get from bluebeam and onenote running on a convertible tablet PC:

- freehand inking on pdfs
- the ability to TYPE pop-up notes
- audio recordings you can sync with notes a la onenote
- hotkeys for various highlighter colors (I use a 9-color system which would be impractical with physical highlighters)
- hierarchical bookmarks allowing you to make clickable outlines of an articlegreat for reviewing! (ideally they would improve this by making a more freely formatted 'notes' pane that can be hyperlinked to the bookideally with audio support like onenote's)
- insert lined paper into a book (i.e. for doing math problems in a math textbook)
- the ability to very quickly pull up paper for rough work (i.e. win+N for onenote)
- something like zotero for unified management of pdf and html references (i.e not mendely)

This depends on the strings: you can handwrite many mathematical expressions more quickly than you can type them in most setups. This is especially true for things with a lot of super/sub scripts. It's *especially* true for symbols not in the character sets available to you.

Also, sometimes the same *content* can be recorded more quickly as handwritten math/logic than as typed strings.

Sometimes handwriting is faster, sometimes typing is faster.

Therefore, the fastest setup is one where you can switch between handwriting and typing seamlessly, such as on a tablet PC on some sort of stand situated like an easel with an external keyboard at elbow height, or at a desktop with a keyboard and graphics tabletin which case, for the monitor position, you don't have to compromise between what's good for your hands/arms and what's good for your eyes/neck/back.

I think that part of the reason that cursive is so 'illegible' to us nowadays is that we are surrounded by print, probably much more so than our forefathers--and handwriting just doesn't look enough like Times New Roman. Somehow I doubt it's any intrinsic property of cursive scripts--in one study of reading speed for various fonts, there was one guy who was an outlier in that he read fastest in some weird Fraktur font--turns out that's what his school books were in...

Steven Pinker is how I found Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Linguistics. Best popular writer on the subjects, even if you dislike his theories. His writing on Philosophy is a little weaker, but still engaging.

"It's not a hardware breakthrough that'll create a true AI - it's an algorithm breakthrough that's required. Faster computers might be nice - but it'll always comes down to the algorithm. "

If you mean *strong* AI, a better algorithm may, in fact, create strong AI, but we'd never know it, until we can learn under what conditions a system would be conscious.

You're right that the GP is misusing the word 'harmonics', but the NYT article is probably not talking about combinations of tones produced by two flues when they say 'harmonic' either--they probably just mean that the scale itself sounds 'nice', which actually follows the more ancient sense of the word 'harmonics' which, for the ancient Greeks, was the study of tunings, temperaments, and scale designs. In other words, the scale sounds like modern music because it's a pentatonic scale.

Which brings me to what you were saying about music universals--there is, indeed, much cultural variation, but there are a number of commonalities--the pentatonic scale, is actually supposed to have been arrived at independently in many cultures, which isn't that surprising because it's what you get if you iterate the 'simplest' interval other than the octave, and the diatonic scales come from iterating that twice more.

There are also lots of universals about interval choice--melodically or harmonically, simple ratio intervals like 5ths are usually preferred, and you aren't going to find a culture that prefers minor 9th leaps to perfect 5th leaps, except Webern et al., of course.

There are also general cognitive constraints--for instance, most cultures have 5-7 note scales, which is supposedly tied to the size of working memory.

The reality is this: it is already a difficult compromise choosing audio software to work with on PC or Mac platforms. Only people who aren't serious about their work really have time to worry about linux solutions here. Composers are only just now beginning to see anything like a move towards a merger of sequencers and notation programs, with Sibelius and Finale adding limited audio support and Cubase adding better support for orchestral articulations and some improved notation capabilities. Protools added some code taken from Sibelius but it's still rudimentary. Competition in terms of features is very tight between these various alternatives, and it's not like OpenOfficeâ'it can't just do 'more or less, the main tasks we need'. The open source software has to actually be *better* than the existing options. Whenever I wonder again about this I just compare the 'new' features in the most recent version of Cubase or Sibelius to the most recent features in the open source alternatives and I can only laugh...

Her said 'also', not 'therefore'...