social.noyu.me

today i have been writing a program that reads a midi file. as is typical for me, i decided to write my own parser.

so i've been consulting the “standard midi files specification” and “midi 1.0 detailed specification”, neither of which i had ever read before. it's been pretty fun! they're written in a refreshingly informal and thoughtful style that makes the purpose and form of everything clear. the protocol and file format are remarkably well-designed… very efficient encodings for example

it's Monopoly Mermaid Monday!

(original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk8XGnKLhfU)

trance gender ♪

composers love to call a deliberate part of their score an "accidental"

IUPAC really need to be stopped. Four elements named after one Swedish village was already too many :/ :/ :/ this one doesn't even sound like a real element :/ :/ :/

A4 is the nicest note in MIDI

trying to sell an upright piano to a scotsman, but when i tell him the price he says it's grand

“inline pictures (which might be big)”

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0188.html

thirty years ago, they were discussing a new HTML tag: <img>

📹 “The process of making fake food. A 71-year-old craftsman who has been making fake food for 53 years.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9E77WZGCpQ

god save me, i'm going to become a miasma truther. here is a guy writing in 1765 about it:

By miasma is meant extremely subtle bodies that are believed to be the propagators of contagious diseases; people rather naturally thought that these small pieces of prodigiously attenuated material escaped from bodies infected by the disease and communicated it to non-infected people, penetrating their bodies after being spread through the air or more directly, passing immediately from the affected bodies to the non-infected; it is only by their effects that we have been able suspect their existence; a single man infected by the plague spread this disastrous illness through many countries.

(https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/did2222.0000.369?view=text;rgn=main)

nothing said here is incompatible with the germ theory of disease! the belief is that the air, and perhaps other things, could be contaminated by tiny particles that spread disease, which is… correct!

now, obviously they never were able to identify what these particles were, where they came from, or how they worked, given the technological limitations of the time prevented their detection. consequently, there are a lot of ideas associated with miasmas that were wrong. but the core idea was absolutely right. pre-industrial humanity was far smarter than we give it credit for.

(btw i encourage reading the rest of the part i quoted, it's quite interesting.)