All of SolAlium's Comments + Replies

Loved the essay; had a surprisingly negative emotional response to seeing what feels like unnecessary cruelty to poetry at the end though!

The act of taking someone else's poem, changing a mere three words of it (in a way that is both unnecessary and aesthetically detrimental) and then crediting oneself as the author feels icky.

Would the unbastardised verse from Invictus by Henley himself not have worked here?

"It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul."

1linkbowser12
I would want to remind any reader of poetry that vast swaths of poetry lift entire lines, structures, and meters from other poems. This is not a new thing to be done in the space of poetry and I found that this version of the poem respects the original by allowing the careful reader (such as yourself) to look up the original and compare the two.
4Raemon
I found Kenzie's version of it moving specifically because of the deliberate difference and wouldn't have felt motivated to include the original at all. I do realize it doesn't actually change the semantic content, but it felt surprisingly poetic on it's own and connected it more clearly to other ideas I cared about. But, I wasn't at all trying to deny Henley credit and have added him there.
SolAlium126

It's less about the tuning of the piano itself than the knock on effect it has on the pianist. Even if the audience can barely tell the difference, the pianist themself certainly could, as could the conductor!

Tuning the instrument may well have had a large effect on the audience's experience overall, because the pianist will play much better on an instrument they enjoy playing - it's a totally different experience hearing someone perform while they're enjoying their own art, vs someone who's distracted by an annoying F# that sounds slightly off in every scale.

4Garrett Baker
Yeah, I would also imagine that'd be the dominant factor in the real world.

How did this system actually track calories? Detecting that the user is consuming food seems like a fairly solvable problem; tracking what they're eating - which is going to have order-of-magnitude effects on caloric intake - seems like a much harder problem. 

I can't seen any obvious ways to do it, other than by requiring significant user input, and that would rather negate any benefits that a passive, low effort tracker had.

Am I missing something here?

(Was it a "beep to remind you not to snack" device, rather than a calorie tracker?)

5lsusr
It didn't track calories. It tracked bites. The problem we were attacking was eating awareness and frequency. It might've been possible to track food types too but we didn't get that far. Yes. Even a tool like this was useful enough that people repeatedly and independently, on their own initiative, asked us to build it for them. They were all from the same demographic: women, often stay-at-home, between the ages of 30 and 50. Their problem, as they saw it, wasn't eating calorie-dense food. It was frequent unconscious snacking.
2Measure
I read it as "beep to remind you to log what you're eating".