As always, I have to post photos of my travels.
Day 1: Beautiful sunset from a house on a hill
Day 2: Me in front of a church
Figure 1: Español Attack v0.1
by Javantea, AltSci Concepts
Text version
Histogram version
I produced this learning tool before coming to Mexico. From basic knowledge of the language to a set of words and sentences I can throw together, this page of common words can help you train yourself what to learn first. I have done this type of language learning guide before. I also created a very nice Twitter - Google translate mashup, but both services were modified, the Google translate API became a pay API which broke my mashup.
This page represents the output of a histogram of words used in a small corpus of Spanish. This mathematical concept is quite easy to understand for linguists: tally each word used, sort by highest tally. I wrote a piece of software that does this for any corpus, including HTML and foreign texts.
Javantea out.
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Nov 19, 2013
I'm in Mexico for a few weeks vacation. I'll be blogging at this new blog here until Dec 2, 2013.
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Oct 22, 2013
Tonight I practiced drums until I felt like I could fairly easily reproduce all patterns given to me by my instructor at low speed. Some of them I can do at full speed (which for me is around 100-120 bpm). Of course not everyone agrees that full speed is 100-120 bpm, but that's another discussion. Tomorrow when I take my second drum lesson, I should be past the eighth note feet and the first beginning rudiments. I recorded the practice with arecordmidi (alsa's command-line midi recorder) and Rosegarden. If I clean these up or perhaps after my next review of those beats, I should have a handful of very good rock beats. I have seen these beats repeatedly in Rock Band songs because they are so common to rhythm. I've decided to do 2 hours of lessons in November despite planning a long vacation around Thanksgiving.
So I decided to spend a few minutes recording a quick jam, kinda like the ones I've been doing at the EMP. I only recorded for 4 minutes (a song at most) but I spent a lot of time listening to it. I decided to quantize it to 16th notes (something I can totally do but not totally reliably) and listen to it. It's a lot better than the original in many respects. The rhythm really comes together and the worst part about it is that the quantizing will cause there to be gaps that drop the beat for a short bit. That can be fixed really easily. Then I quantized to 8th notes (something I am quite good at now, but am still working on) and it turned out really good. There are the rests which make the rhythm drop from time to time, but if you only listen for things you like, you get a quite reasonable drum session. There are different sections and no single rhythm last more than a few measures. That's by design. I don't want people to think of my beats as being regular. Of course there's rhythm to be maintained which is why I have a pretty steady backbeat with the hi-hat and snare for many parts. What I was really exercising was my control over choice of rhythm, bass variety, and breaking the tempo. Why would I want to change the rhythm rapidly? I'm trying to give the listener something to distract them. They aren't going to get a steady beat from me. Of course part of art is being able to do anything and choosing to do something you want to do. So that's why I'm practicing and taking lessons. Once I can keep a beat and mess around, I will make some pretty crazy stuff. Until then you are stuck with this. Since I want to conserve disk space on my server, I'm not making flac or mp3 available, just Ogg Vorbis and midi. Let me know if you'd like either of the other formats and I'll post them. As usual, these files are available under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
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