[dba-Tech] Building a self-driving car

Arthur Fuller fuller.artful at gmail.com
Sat Jan 2 15:26:41 CST 2016


Good for her, Rocky. I cannot claim such immediate proficiency; it took me
several months to apprehend the wah-wah-wah discordancies and to resolve
them to wah-wah and ultimately wahhh-wahhhh. It's impossible to tune a
guitar or any other stringed instrument perfectly; you instead tune it to
the piece you're about to play In your case, stand-up bass, you've got
considerably more leeway, and even if the humidity undermines your current
settings, you as a skilled player can sharpen or flatten a note to suit,
with a mere half-centimeter shift to find the right harmonic shift. I
admire that sort of adept acuity immensely. Can't do it quite so quickly on
guitar, due to frets, but I deeply admire those such as yourself who
consider frets beneath your skill-set.

There is a piece, perhaps the most celebrated of all time, for solo violin,
called the Chaconne, from Bach's Partita in A minor, with a D Major section
that makes me weep, in the right hands. You have to play it with some
rubato to pull out the reluctant sadness in this superficially sunny
movement.

I've heard the Chaconne played on bass a couple of times. Can you do it? I
meant that as a mere hopeful question, not a challenge. It's probably my
fave piece in the world. I have about 30 versions, and opinions to match
them as to how well they unfolded the treasures in that ostensibly simple
8-chord walk through the park. But it continues to slay me, again and
again, since I first stumbled upon it about 50 years ago.

I wish I could write code that good. I fear that this is the province of
genius, and I don't live there. I'm competent but certainly not a genius.

A.

A.

On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 12:38 PM, Rocky Smolin <rockysmolin at bchacc.com>
wrote:

> A lost skill. Now that you can have a cheap Snark tuner clipped to the head
> and it shows you exactly where you are relative to the pitch you want.
>
> I recently taught my son's GF to play the uke.  First lesson - tuning, and
> I
> made her tune it by ear to see how good her pitch perception was. It was
> spot on.
>
> r
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: dba-Tech [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of
> Arthur Fuller
> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2016 8:40 AM
> To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
> Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Building a self-driving car
>
> Way back when, I owned a BMW 2003 ti. Man, I loved that car! I was so
> atuned
> to the music of its engine that I could slam-shift it through the four
> gears
> without touching the clutch pedal, and no gear-grinding at all, ever.
> Almost
> like tuning a guitar.
>
> Speaking of guitars, when I first began guitar it would take me a long time
> to successfully tune it. But a year later I could do it in a few seconds,
> and that has stuck with me over the decades. Recently I was in a nearby
> pawn
> shop looking for a guitar, and tried out about 5 of them, all of which
> needed tuning (surprise). I had brought my tuning fork with me and in the
> space of about 3 minutes had tuned them all. But I decided none was
> appropriate so I left empty-handed. But it was nice to realize that the
> skill of guitar-tuning, once mastered, never leaves you. And it's the same
> with manual transmissions. There's a joy to be hand in sensing the music
> inherent in them (well, actually, in the engine itself rather than the
> tranny). But you get the idea.
>
> On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 9:09 AM, Jon Tydda <jon at tydda.plus.com> wrote:
>
> > Manual transmissions aren't about efficiency, they're about fun :-)
> >
> >
> > Jon
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-- 
Arthur


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