Dismal Manor remains an OOMA Telo subscriber and a Ting Wireless subscriber but has discontinued Google Voice service. We were running into voicemail configuration issues that caused two of the voice mail services to start talking to each other. Healthcare providers were unable to leave messages. This had to be fixed so Dismal Wizard got out the lopping shears.
This Sunday, I watched a Punch Brother’s live show. Yes watched Punch Brothers live streaming an hour-twenty or so of non-stop live music. Just five guys and a Neumann U-87 performing Oprey style like they always do on stage. Lots of tuning as keys changed. But tight and moved.
Punch Brothers engaged Mandolin.com a start up streaming production company to produce the show. Mandolin handled the lighting, video production, stream production, and content distribution and ticketing. The band prepared and practiced like they would for any live gig. Mandolin boffins and roadies handled all the tech for the show.
Publicity for the show. A Punch Brothers tweet, a Chris Thile retweet. Don’t know how big the crowd was. Dismal Manor was a sudden sailor for $25. Calvin needs shoes, what can I say?
Thanks to Apple for use of its Apple Silicon banner image. It’s a new dawn in Apple Land.
MacOS 11 Big Sur arrived at Dismal Manor. Its arrival was mostly uneventful after troubles with installation media download were resolved. Reference 1 gives an excellent guided tour (geeky) of Big Sur. Here, I’ll hit some first impressions.
On November 10, 2020 Apple announced new small MacBooks and a Mac Mini based on Apple Silicon M1, an Apple designed ARM system on a chip similar to those in iPad and iPhone but tweaked for larger computers. So what’s different and how should it affect your purchase plans?
Anyone spending time on YouTube and various fan sites has noticed the vast amount of click bait on the subject of the new M1 Macs. Most of it is some version of the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt video). We are trying hard not to add to it or to get out over our skis here at Dismal Manor.
Apple has done something great. It will get greater as software shops revise their products to best use the new hardware and Mac OS Big Sur. Present Day Production advises continuing with your current computational environment until your software suppliers have sorted their products for the new OS and hardware. But the M1 Mini and Big Sur are working well enough to purchase and begin exploration and migration planning. What they are finding is that the core product works but individual audio or video plugins may be fussy. Fussy is not good for shop margins or delivery commitments so they are holding short of the runway until their suppliers say they’re good to go on the M1.
Apple released its most popular computers first, the individual laptops and the workhorse Mac Mini. They held off on iMac, the larger MacBooks targeted to knowledge workers, and the custom machines used in the graphic arts and software development in the large.
These machines look familiar on the outside but are completely different inside. The processor architecture is different, the graphics subsystem architecture is different, and the memory is on the processor die. So why upset the world like this? The Cold Fusion video introduces the core ideas underlying the Apple Silicon product line.
Thanks to Five Thirty Eight and NPR for the use of the figures illustrating this post. And also thanks to Nate Silver for his innovative work in political election modeling. This article explains how to interpret the Five Thirty Eight election products. Thinking about probabilistic and statistical models is tricky stuff. What Nate is doing is essentially political weather forecasting.
This post explains how to think about mathematical models of things. The models can be dynamical system models like those used in weather forecasting, statistical models also used in weather forecasting, or statistical models as used in political prediction. Models are useful for a particular range of subject matter and most models are carefully crafted to be useful in a particular region of a subject matter domain.
While working as a nuclear reactor plant designer, we used different models to predict accident response of the reactor than the ones we used to design its control laws and tune its control systems. We used radically different models to design the contents of the fuel pellets and the zoning of pellets along a pin and build up of pins into modules and modules into a reactor core.
A model is an abstraction of some real world system that is useful in reasoning about and answering questions about the behavior of that real world system. This is true of all of the models described above and of the https://fivethirtyeight.com/ election model described after the break. When polling organizations sample the electorate, they collect information about respondents political opinions which are distilled into a statistical description of the electorate. Based on expressed preferences and responses to confirming questions, the pollster makes a model and reports preferences grouped by reported demographics. Remember, on the phone, no one knows you’re really a dog.
And remember that this post is about interpreting polls and poll based model results like those at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/
Dismal Manor Dispatches 