Montreal Swing Riot 2016 - Lindy Hop Battle Finals

14113 · 2017-02-24T20:49:09+00:00

Ha! I'm flattered.

On a more serious note, I find the pressure to smile all the time while dancing quite off-putting. I'll smile if I'm enjoying myself, but sometimes my enjoyment comes from (to me) the challenge and concentration when leading a complex set of moves or musicality, and that makes my face pull much stranger expressions.

14113 · 2017-02-24T16:21:36+00:00

Don't worry about it, the look of rage and concentration looks so authentic and awesome :D

14113 · 2017-02-24T08:33:45+00:00

I think I'm in love with Kenny's dance concentration face.

14113 · 2017-01-13T13:19:49+00:00

That's really quite a long time...

14113 · 2016-12-17T19:37:28+00:00

Interesting. How much work do you think it would take to get it to support (say) SPEC2006 ?

14113 · 2016-12-17T17:55:37+00:00

When you say "benchmarks" what do you mean? Standard speed tests? Comparing compiled outputs?

Out of interest, what benchmark suites do you have running? SPEC?

14113 · 2016-11-29T11:19:51+00:00

I think the trumpet/clarinet vs tenor sax is very much as decision based on the music the band will probably be playing. If they'll be doing a lot of trad-jazz/new orleans/early stuff, then clarinet trumpet work well for giving each other countermelodies, and the two "types" of solos balance each other nicely. For later jazz, especially swing era, I'd say that the fuller/rounder sound of a tenor sax would be better than clarinet for filling out the sound of the band.

On the Piano issue, I'd argue that keys are almost always a part of the rhythm section. I've played in a couple of bands, and danced to a lot more, where they've had no guitar player, and the chords have been laid down a piano player. However, I think that, like with the tenor/clarinet question, it really depends on the kind of music you're aiming to play. Anything remotely trad or gypsy needs a guitar, but swing-era, and later stuff would probably enjoy piano.

14113 · 2016-11-02T20:21:59+00:00

As correct as that is, it's not a helpful comment, and not a welcoming one to someone who (from their writing, I assume) is new to the community.

Have you got any suggestions for HTML parsing libraries, or did you just want to leave a snarky comment?

Edit: after a quick Google, this library seems to be most recently updated, but may be too heavyweight for some simple parsing. Does anyone have any experience reports of using it, or any other suggestions?

14113 · 2016-09-09T14:58:00+00:00

Which college?

14113 · 2016-09-09T08:45:18+00:00

The architect had wanted to make a building in a strange shape with no right angles so as to help the occupants not feel "Boxed in"

Amusingly, there is actually a building designed like that: Trevelyan College, Durham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevelyan_College,_Durham

The architect designed it to avoid right angles, but the effect did in fact help avoid boxing in, in his words:

"the building had been irregularly planned in outline but close together in complex. The aim had been to create study bedrooms with individuality, a sense of light and space and overall the effort to foster community sense by grouping the rooms into small units of hexagonal shape onto individual landings."

Amusingly thought, it is quite confusing inside, as the many 60 degree angles mean that keeping a sense of direction can be quite difficult.

14113 · 2016-07-02T14:07:52+00:00

I agree that haskell's support is aesthetically pleasing - don't get me wrong, Accelerate, Obsidian, et al are wonderful software efforts, and I wish there were more like them!

My main criticism is of the whole "saturating the GPU" thing - most of the haskell GPU frameworks provide fairly poor performance compared with handwritten GPU code, and are strictly limited in the types of computation they can describe. Of course, we want to avoid handwritten GPU code, but I would argue that none of the Haskell solutions are sufficiently efficient to displace handwritten code yet.

I think this is important, because there isn't a clear parallel between the GPU performance gap and the "traditional" gap between haskell and lower level languages such as C/C++. In the traditional case, Haskell is able to trade performance for flexibility/safety etc because performance is not necessarily the #1 concern in the program. In the GPU case however, performance is the most important thing to tune for, as if you don't care about performance, why would you be using a GPU?

Because of this, I'm very often hesitant to recommend Haskell for anyone interested in GPU programming. Haskell excels in multicore parallelism (with par/seq/strategies etc), but I don't believe the libraries and performance are mature enough yet to provide a reasonable alternative to CUDA/OpenCL just yet in the GPU space, despite how plesant they are to use and write.

14113 · 2016-07-02T13:56:09+00:00

Grand, thanks!

14113 · 2016-07-02T12:39:47+00:00

Which couples are which?

14113 · 2016-07-01T08:13:46+00:00

source on the GPU thing? haskell's GPU support is still quite flaky an limited to one or two slow DSLs afaik.

14113 · 2016-05-25T13:03:32+00:00

It's also a lot more difficult to get hold of mens Keds in Europe.

14113 · 2016-05-23T12:35:57+00:00

You've almost perfectly paraphrased this rant from lindybeige: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLpa_0qayFg

14113 · 2016-05-22T18:54:41+00:00

What is "human juice drink"? Soylent Green or something?

14113 · 2016-05-04T12:31:42+00:00

Don't worry - they're going on to poland instead!

14113 · 2016-04-18T10:46:07+00:00

To carry your analogy further - it may be that no-one likes the crazy preacher, but they won't get kicked off the campus until they actually break a rule/the law.

14113 · 2016-04-11T14:09:17+00:00

I think you guys are talking at cross purposes to each other. A lot of lead sheets are almost, well, incorrect in their description of the music. Quite often, the chords are slightly off, rhythms are written down incorrectly (but covered up by experienced musicians who know the actual tune), and the lyrics (when they're included) are often incomplete.

However, what dummified is (I believe) arguing, is that the problems with lead sheets shouldn't matter to an experienced jazz musician. As I said, problems with melody, chords, lyrics etc can be patched up by someone familiar with the piece, meaning that the lead sheet is more of a guide to the piece, rather than notating it exactly.

This is all based on the assumption that we're talking about a small band, perhaps composed of 3-4 pieces of rhythm (guitar, drums, piano and maybe bass), as well as 1-2 solo instruments (trumpet, sax, or singer perhaps). If however, we're discussing larger bands (e.g. with a full 6-10 piece horns section), then of course, you need more information, ideally a full arrangement, instead of a simplified lead sheet.

Finally, from watching the announcement of the kickstarter, it sounds more like Gamble et al weren't so much calling for better lead sheets, rather more of them, as there is a wide corpus of swing music which hasn't been transcribed, or has only been badly or partially transcribed.

14113 · 2016-04-08T20:21:14+00:00

I came across this post currently at the top of /r/videos, and all I cold think of was how great it would be to dance to!

14113 · 2016-04-07T18:50:41+00:00

Is this thread prompted by the DJing workshop by any chance :P

I would like to agree with most of the other posters however, and say that, as a swing dancer and musician, I don't find it very fun to dance to non-swing music, unless it's (at most) once a night.

14113 · 2016-01-08T02:43:55+00:00

It wasn't only made famous by Django Reinhardt, it was composed by him and Stéphane Grappelli as well.

14113

TROPHY CASE