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How Sensitive To Magnets Is Video Tape?

Posted on March 23, 2015 by anescient

Magnetic storage + strong permanent magnets = bad. I’ve never really tempted fate on that, but I happened to be disposing of an old MiniDV camcorder, I had a couple of tapes, and I saw a chance to get the straight truth.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged science | Leave a comment

Quick and Easy Gaussian Random Numbers

Posted on October 29, 2013 by anescient

Generating random numbers which fit a normal distribution is essential for stochastic optimization, especially for continuous evolutionary algorithms.

For high-quality results the weapon of choice is the Box–Muller transform. It’s a little expensive; it involves exponents and trigonometry and such. Recently I was working on an EA written in JavaScript, and I wanted to avoid using those functions. There’s actually a damn simple alternate method.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged computing, stochastic | Leave a comment

Main Sequence – The Ownership Society

Posted on July 20, 2013 by anescient

This album is excellent. It is strange and intelligent and off-beat and slick. It is not available for sale any more; the artist grants permission to distribute: e78cc2a231f3f2d6b1278f795b0346ae4b98c7e7

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged media | Leave a comment

My Stance On Piracy

Posted on July 2, 2013 by anescient

I’ve done my civic duty the past few weeks pushing another 150 gigabytes or so of MST3K out to the world. Full burn bandwidth overnight, polite moderation during business hours.

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This number may be the one and only place in the world where you can get all of this.
Keep circulating the tapes.