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KenElevenShadows

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Posts posted by KenElevenShadows

    Thinking about Keith Emerson

    in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage

    Posted

    Mayo Clinic:

     

    As with many mental disorders, a variety of factors may be involved, such as:

     

    Biological differences. People with depression appear to have physical changes in their brains. The significance of these changes is still uncertain, but may eventually help pinpoint causes.

     

    Brain chemistry. Neurotransmitters are naturally occurring brain chemicals that likely play a role in depression. Recent research indicates that changes in the function and effect of these neurotransmitters and how they interact with neurocircuits involved in maintaining mood stability may play a significant role in depression and its treatment.

     

    Hormones. Changes in the body's balance of hormones may be involved in causing or triggering depression. Hormone changes can result with pregnancy and during the weeks or months after delivery (postpartum) and from thyroid problems, menopause or a number of other conditions.

     

    Inherited traits. Depression is more common in people whose blood relatives also have this condition. Researchers are trying to find genes that may be involved in causing depression.

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1

    Official NFL Thread 2024-2025

    in The Keyboard Corner

    Posted

    On 3/20/2024 at 2:22 AM, Geoff Grace said:

     

    I wonder if the hopping mad fans have considered the possibility that by doing right by Justin Fields, the Bears could be viewed as a more attractive destination for free agents, who might think they'd get better treatment by Chicago than other teams. If they can land top players by treating them better, maybe it's worth the short term loss of not getting the most team-friendly deal in the trade.

     

     

    At this point, none of the NFC North teams look bad to me. The Lions are the best they've been in ages, and the Bears and Packers are on the rise. Even though the Vikings lost Kirk Cousins, they look poised to move up in the draft and grab a top prospect. It seems at least possible that three teams in this division could make the playoffs next season.

     

    Best,

     

    Geoff

     

    I think that's what's going on as well as hopefully the idea of actually trying to treat people with some respect since essentially, you're booting someone out who never had a fair shake, decent coaching, or a decent team.

     

    The Bears have a way of screwing things up, but since they have a new regime, I'm hoping that this time, things are different.

    • Like 1

    Official NFL Thread 2024-2025

    in The Keyboard Corner

    Posted

    On 3/16/2024 at 4:36 PM, Geoff Grace said:

    The Justin Fields question has been answered:


    Sources: Bears trading QB Justin Fields to Steelers

     

    Russell Wilson is still expected to be first string, with Fields apprenticing.

     

    I had hoped that Caleb Williams would wind up on his home town team, but it doesn't seem likely now.

     

     

    Poles said he would "do right" by Justin Fields, and apparently, given the market, this meant turning down at least four other teams and having Fields go to the Steelers like he wanted, as he is a huge Wilson fan and is with a strong organization/coaching staff and is in a strong position to be the starting QB next year (if not this year). This would explain in part why Fields was traded traded for a bag of chips and a hot dog.

     

    A lot of Chicago Bears fans are hopping mad over it, but you know, it's the NFL and...it's just business. At least Poles didn't screw him over and seemingly had the team take a slight loss to get Fields where he wanted to go, so there's some integrity in that. 

     

    Hopefully Caleb Williams or whoever becomes the Bears QB balls out. The team now looks to be strong. This is something Fields never had. But Williams (or whoever) inherits this and has a decent chance of succeeding, assuming the new OC Waldron is halfway decent.

    Current AI methods for copy cat pop

    in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage

    Posted

    8 hours ago, Stokely said:

    I don't find it fascinating, I find it pretty awful in principle.  

    Not so much for music.  People have been running tracks and faking performances for ages now, this is just the evolution of that.

    Mainly because I don't feel that human societies are well-equipped to handle the vast amounts of free time we are about to have, provided we make it through climate change upheavals and other challenges as a high-tech society.  If you ain't living to work, you are worthless is something I've heard from many people basically.   Something will have to give.

     

    I find it fascinating. And I find it awful.

     

    You seriously think that people are going to have vast amounts of free time? This has been the promise of technology for how many decades now, and what has happened? People in the United States work more hours and make less money than ever before. Remember 40 years ago when we used to say, "Oh hey, look at the Japanese! They work like donkeys and have so much pressure! We certainly don't want to be like that!" Notice how no one says that any more? That's because we blew past them years ago. 

     

     

    5 hours ago, Thethirdapple said:

     

    I leave it to those who have a stake in the game and are far more talented...

     

     

    PEACE

    _

    _

    _

     

    Great Eno quote.

    • Like 1

    Current AI methods for copy cat pop

    in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage

    Posted

    19 hours ago, KuruPrionz said:

    I agree that the process is fascinating. I don't have much to say about the music, it isn't my thing but that's irrelevant if others like it. 

    He managed to fool another producer, I'll give him that. 

     

    That's not my kind of music either, and I am not so familiar with Dua Lipa that I could say, "Oh yeah, he totally nailed that!" But the music was bumpin', I'll give him that.

     

    I was interested to see how he problem-solved some of that, and generally went about imitating an artist's vibe.

     

    I don't like that one can do this, but it doesn't stop the process from being fascinating. I'm just not going to keep doing the "Harumph! You kids get off my damn lawn!" thing because everyone is here to do that for me. :D 

    • Like 1
    • Haha 1

    Ray Kurzweil predicts humans can transform into an eagle by 2045

    in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage

    Posted

    I didn't mean to crap on his predictions, only to suggest that he might be a bit optimistic in the growth of technology. When you look at this, even when he gets it "wrong", it's still not always far off, it's just earlier than the technology evolved.

     

    https://medium.com/@sgunnisonmiller/ray-kurzweils-prediction-scorecard-7d40ee2ff42a

     

    These are the predictions he got wrong, for example, according to medium.com:

     

    Quote

    COMPUTERS SOUND FULLY HUMAN

    This is a hard call as there are some well-doctored deep fakes out there. Furthermore, we all have access to some very advanced voice generators, such as WellSaid Labs and soon Microsoft’s VALL-E, which are difficult to discern as artificial voices in short bursts. However, “fully human” is a high bar and if we listen long enough to these voices, we can still detect a tinge of automation, and this is a milestone Kurzweil thought we’d surpass by 2009.

     

    AI-ROBOTIC DISABILITY ASSISTANCE

    Kurzweil envisioned a 2019 where people with disabilities had very helpful computerized assists. Someone with a spinal cord injury could walk upstairs, blind people could wear special glasses that helped them interpret the world around them, and the deaf could see words spoken to them as people were talking. While we see impressive advancements of this type of tech on YouTube now (such as exoskeletons that help people walk or sunglasses for the deaf), they aren’t commonplace unfortunately.

     

    BOOKS WILL BECOME OBSOLETE

    Print isn’t dead. In a 2022 study, it was revealed that people still prefer paper books (65%) over E-Books (21%), and these purchases of tangible books vastly outnumber that of digital books too. So while devices like DVD Players, Tivos, non-phone cameras, and other recent tech are quickly fading, it may take a lot for simple words on paper to ever disappear. Do we need all these physical books, probably not, but it is our original form of media, and it may be more ingrained in humanity than we realize.

     

    AI TAKES THE STEERING WHEEL

    Kurzweil was not alone in this prediction. Many futurists felt that computers would be doing most of the driving by now. True, some modern cars can drive themselves in limited capacities. My Honda, for instance, knows how to stay in its own highway lane and can make speed adjustments when put on cruise control.

    There are even arguments that autonomous vehicles are safer than human-driven ones.

     

    Despite the impressive features, the technology keeps running into roadblocks. One CNN Business article put it this way back in November 2022: “The technology could do impressive things but mastering all the situations we face as human drivers is tough.” Even the CEO of Waymo LLC (formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project) has said it will be decades before the roads are taken over by AI.

     

    VR EYEWEAR IS EVERYWHERE

    Kurzweil had this whole vision that by this time we’d be wearing 3-D VR glasses or contact lenses. And this eyewear was going to send digital displays right into our retina. He brought up these VR glasses many times in his predictions, describing a world where wherever we looked, we could do our emails, search the web, watch TV shows, play augmented-reality video games, and even interact with virtual assistants. Everything we’d see would be half reality and half computerized visualizations.

    Today the technologies for “Virtual Retinal Displays” and “projections” do exist, but not in the way Kurzweil foresaw. What’s more, the idea of computerized eyewear hasn’t become a tech people wanted, let alone needed.

     

    AI-ROBOTIC HOUSEKEEPERS

    Kurzweil expected us to have a lot more than Roombas in 2023. He thought that we’d have one or more housekeeping robots in every home. To the relief of my two dogs, Roombas and their buddies haven’t caught on… unless you count a plain old dishwasher as a robot, in which case I’d argue it is the most amazing robot ever. How it cleans everything I cram in there always blows my mind.

     

    VR CAN BE FELT, NOT JUST SEEN AND HEARD

    Virtual Reality really only has audio and visual components at the moment. Kurzweil theorized that the technology would have gone a step further by now, in which we could feel the virtual environment by wearing special gloves and suits. This is called “haptic VR”, and while there have been some advancements in this vein, haptic technology is far from mainstream and it has a lot of challenges if it wants to match the audio-visuals we already experience in VR.

     

    AI-DRIVEN MEDICINE

    Probably Kurzweil’s most disappointing misses came in the field of medicine. He had some high hopes that by 2019 AI would help us “largely overcome the major diseases that kill 95 percent of us in the developed world” (predicted in 2006) and that life expectancy would be over 100.

    A lot of this hope came from the idea that “bioengineered treatments for cancer and heart disease [would] have greatly reduced the mortality from these diseases.” Clearly, we are far short on all these marks.

     

    HUMANS HAVE RELATIONSHIPS WITH AI

    Kurzweil probably wasn’t thinking that we’d be falling in love with our computers like in the film Her (with Joaquin Phoenix), but he did believe that relationships with AI would be much more prevalent at this point in time.

     

    He predicted that come 2019, we would verbally communicate with simulated people in full-blown back-and-forth conversations. He even thought there would be a visual element to these discussions, like head nods and gestures.

     

    On top of that, we would now be thinking of our digital counterparts as advisors, friends, and yes, some of us would even believe that our computers possess a human-level of consciousness. At present, I’d say we are far from that relationship stage, and it’s hard to know when, if ever, we will get there.

     

    45raykurzweil.jpg

    elevenshadows.net - I photographed Ray Kurzweil in 2010.

    Ray Kurzweil predicts humans can transform into an eagle by 2045

    in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage

    Posted

    I don't know if I am underestimating what we will be able to do with computational intelligences, or Kurzweil is overestimating what we do. i just don't see what he is describing as happening nearly that soon. 

     

    Regardless, if we should come across this sort of technology, the ramifications of that will be astounding. We think wrestling with AI "deep fakes" is concerning now...that's a much larger can of worms, ethically and otherwise. A fascinating can of worms, but a can of worms nonetheless.

    • Like 1

    Thinking about Keith Emerson

    in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage

    Posted

    70908kenlee_namm2014-hammond-keithemerso

    Keith Emerson, NAMM show, 2014. I believe this is one of the gigs that Dave mentions where you could see the frustration. I know what he could do, but quite frankly, his playing was still so much better than what most could ever hope to do.

     

    We don't know what demons people wrestle with on a daily basis. Maybe this will be another reminder of that, to maybe be a little less harsh to our fellow human beings and try to understand them a little more.

    Does Anyone Have Apple's Vision Pro Yet?

    in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage

    Posted

    16 minutes ago, Joe Muscara said:

    Are you talking about products like goggles and glasses? Because from what I've read, "wearables" generally includes things like the Apple Watch and AirPods, which I don't see resistance to.

    Yeah, mostly goggles and glasses. The watches had little resistance besides the usual crowd who are out of touch and resistant to anything new anyway. And I never considered AirPods or anything wearables since they aren't smart devices, but regardless, definitely I was not thinking of them when writing this. Goggles and glasses.

    • Like 1

    Exploring An Abandoned Hippie Commune in the Mountains - Wavy Gravy Hog Farm

    in The Big Picture

    Posted

    Exploring An Abandoned Hippie Commune in the Mountains - Wavy Gravy Hog Farm

     

    I hiked up through the mountains to check out Wavy Gravy's former hippie commune in Southern California. The Hog Farm has been abandoned for many years, and was interesting to explore. I had to hurry down the mountain due to unexpected rain, lightning, flash flood warnings, and hail.

    Wavy Gravy is perhaps best known as an activist, hippie commune leader, and entertainer, and is also known for his association with Woodstock and the Merry Pranksters.

     

     

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