Comments on: Friday Cat Blogging

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 04:30:31 +0000

GF must have smelled somecat she didn’t approve of on your hand, OWL.

While Property has some white on her face, her undercoat is fawn/beige colored. She is a very muted three-color cat.

By: oldwhitelady

oldwhitelady — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 03:28:38 +0000

Beautiful! They are such pretty kitties. Property’s markings are so striking! How nice that she wants to make sure mom is clean. My kitties groom each other, once in a while. Today, Grey Feather licked my hand a couple times then bit it.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 05:30:45 +0000

Badtux, I used to hear that from the Airman who worked for me, when I bailed them out. Yes, I think “voters remorse” is taking hold of a lot of the country. The parliamentary system is much better for dealing with that sort of problem.

The biggest problem I have with many web sites is the apparent belief that the more you can get on a page, the better, so people use small sans serif fonts with minimal spacing. When you inject math into the mix, it gets worse.

T_EX does a great job, but you can defeat the purpose if you specify a tiny font.

There is nothing wrong with hand-written work, as long as the “scribe” makes the effort to be legible. Whether text or notation, it tends to be larger and easier to read than much of what is printed today.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 02:19:07 +0000

Bryan, hipparchia... Bryan, the (in)famous Real Book... the 3-volume fake book that every jazz musician owns a copy of, legal or not (these days there's a copyright-legal edition available; in my early days, I bought mine out of the trunk of someone's car)... is hand-copied by a number of copyists; most of them produced quite legible parts. Hipparchia, this spring I experimented with T_EX, Donald Knuth's typesetting language, in an implementation called T_EXmaker; it produces beautifully legible mathematics. Why was I doing that? because a good friend of mine is a mathematician, and he asked me to proofread a paper of his which was typeset in T_EX. Let me know if you need any advice ("help" is too strong a word) getting started.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 17:30:30 +0000

the only response to asking why a cat did something would be: “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Hmm, I knew some kids, both growing up and when I was teaching, who were like that. They’d do something just completely stupid and impulsive, and I’d ask’em, “Why did you do that?!” “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Probably the same kinda folks who voted for Teabaggers in 2010 in Wisconsin, now that I think about it. Talk about buyer’s remorse! Too bad Costco won’t take used Teabaggers back…

– Badtux the Snarky Penguin

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 13:43:14 +0000

more tightly spaced than the handwritten forms.

i think this is one of the reasons i don’t like math-writing software and seeing math equations on the computer screen.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 05:17:07 +0000

Just based on the visual aspect, Steve, the hand-copied always looked more readable to me. Most of the printed stuff seemed smaller and more tightly spaced than the handwritten forms.

I feel certain, Badtux, if we developed a cat-human translator the only response to asking why a cat did something would be: “Well, I seemed like a good idea at the time.”

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 03:38:02 +0000

But that is probably over-thinking the situation.

Indeed. Cats do what cats do because they can. That’s all the reason a cat needs :).

– Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 03:23:44 +0000

I believe the paper I used for my one and only orchestration project in school was 16 staves, though it may have been 20. You may not be able to get window-sized staff paper, but it comes in pretty large sizes. A lot of people still use it for writing arrangements on the road; it’s not exactly easy to use score prep s/w on your laptop while bouncing along in a tour bus, and even if you could, you’d still have to go by a Kinko’s to print the score and parts. Human copyists work cheap, and the best of them produce parts not distinguishable from commercially printed music.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 01:44:02 +0000

I didn’t know they had music paper in a size that large, Steve.

It would be wasted on the pair, as Property is near mute, and Ringo chirps or chatters, nothing that would be associated with music.

Now, Sox can give a Siamese a run their money in the sound department with a nerve grating tenor, but these two only make noise when they knock things over.