Carrolls well before Christmas

Sean M Carroll [one of several, apparently; ours is from the University of Chicago’s Fermi Institute] is rattling our collective cage, and hopefully the outcome will be more scientific breakthroughs.

Sean asks a question that I occasionally run across in very general terms: “Is our Universe natural?” — one a typical computer coder will answer with very strong negatives after two days of intensive debugging amongst frivolous new features — but here is answered very specifically.

The summary of Sean’s answer is “maybe — but it is definitely different to what we expected!”

The embedded detail is extensive but not mind-blowing; Sean delves (in detailed fashion) amongst a lot of physics, chemistry, cosmology, biology and so on, yet without making it imponderable. His tour of the unexpecteds is quite informative, and lots of interesting (to me, anyway) questions are raised and in various ways answered. People being people, I am sure that more effective answers are available but I am very glad that Mr Carroll has raised the ones he does.

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new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b

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