I have a degree in math and a degree in cs. I fucking love nonsense.
Even in the best case scenarios you still have “I was a modern nazi” as a documented thing you did that you could end up needing to explain for the rest of your life. How plausible does “Oh, but I was secretly one of the good guys!” sound to you?
Even if the argument doesn’t persuade them at the time it still makes sense to point it out to them so that they are (hopefully) aware of it later.
Vigier is pretty famous for making fretless guitars but they are also pretty pricey afaik. It’s not particularly hard to convert an existing guitar if you have any glass workers in your area willing to cut a mirror board.
I did roughly this way back in 2009 on a cheapo strat clone with a bolt-on neck:
Have a piece of mirror cut in the shape of the fretboard on the current neck.
Remove the frets from your old fretboard with pliers.
Fill the fret slots with wood filler.
Sand the whole thing down flat.
You can remove the fretboard entirely to swap it with the mirror board if you like, but sanding the whole thing down to the desired height seemed simpler to me at the time. You also retain vaguely useful “guide” marks from where the fret slots used to be with this approach.
Note that the height/width of your new board needs to play well with your nut/bridge height and whether or not you removed the old board. You also want a piece of mirror thick enough not to crack.
Epoxy the mirror board to the neck.
Sand off any excess epoxy and buff the sides smooth.
This approach worked okay for me at the time. I don’t recall any exact materials or measurements I used since I did this over a decade ago. I mostly just winged it and tried to use common sense.
I will say the whole process is pretty finicky. A lot of small things contribute to playability in general. Choice of strings (roundwound, flatwound, different gauges), nut/bridge height, truss rod adjustments, neck shims etc. There’s also the worry of cracking the glass from an overzealous truss rod adjustment and effectively breaking the whole neck (though this never actually happened to me).
The main issue I noticed playing fretless electric is that sustain is reduced. On a typical electric guitar the string vibrates between the metal fret and bridge materials (ignoring the nut). These materials are fairly hard, but on a fretless instrument the string vibrates between your much softer finger tips and the bridge. Perhaps a compressor pedal or some type of sustainer system would help?
If you pay attention to vigier recordings they tend to do really well with sustain. So their typical setup might be worth researching and trying to mimic.
For a toy DIY project to experiment with it’s fairly fun, but I wouldn’t expect anything game changing. Getting a nice sounding + nice to play set-up is challenging and involves a lot of nitty-gritty details.
As a side note, you could technically stop at step 4, though you’d probably want to sand things to a particular radius rather than flat. This is a common approach bass players take to convert fretted basses to fretless basses. There are many guides on how to do this online.
Disclaimers: This was something I did nearly 15 years ago as a teenager after reading quite a lot of random internet posts on it. Don’t use my rambling as a source if you decide to try this. Use a real guide (there are many for fretted to fretless bass conversion guides that would apply for the first 4-ish steps for example). I am not responsible for gear you break or money you waste.
You could also just buy a slide for cheap if you’re into that.
Ain’t nothin’ but a heartache.
The punchline here is a little compact. I don’t feel like it really gives the closure I need. Maybe if the basis for the joke had more continuity the humor would be less discrete.
Just kidding.
Some software can be pretty resilient. I ended up watching this video here recently about running doom using different values for the constant pi that was pretty nifty.
Yes, informally in the sense that the error between the two numbers is “arbitrarily small”. Sometimes in introductory real analysis courses you see an exercise like: “prove if x, y are real numbers such that x=y, then for any real epsilon > 0 we have |x - y| < epsilon.” Which is a more rigorous way to say roughly the same thing. Going back to informality, if you give any required degree of accuracy (epsilon), then the error between x and y (which are the same number), is less than your required degree of accuracy
He is right. 1 approximates 1 to any accuracy you like.
Eigenvectors, values, spaces etc are all pretty simple as basic definitions. They just turn out to be essential for the proofs of a lot of nice results in my opinion. Stuff like matrix diagonalization, gram schmidt orthogonalization, polar decomposition, singular value decomposition, pseudoinverses, the spectral theorem, jordan canonical form, rational canonical form, sylvesters law of inertia, a bunch of nice facts about orthogonal and normal operators, some nifty eigenvalue based formulas for the determinant and trace etc.
Your second point. I’m guessing you’re equating science and religion? Which is a terrible argument. We can see and do science using our own brains and so, I’m just going to leave this one alone.
I’m not so much trying to equate science and religion but to argue against the claim that religion specifically is the issue, as far as your comment about certain religions taking credit for your own work. All sorts of institutions besides religion and science can and will attempt to do this.
The theists that would say I don’t deserve credit for my accomplishments are the self hating humans I was referring to. They think we are too weak to do anything for ourselves. It also gives them plausible deniability when they do something fucked up. The good and the bad. It was all me baby.
I still think this is an overgeneralization of theistic positions. I get that some theists would do this. They are shitty for that. But plenty of non-theists would do the same. There have been millions of theists throughout all of human history. It just doesn’t make sense to me to chalk this kind of thing up to being uniquely a theist thing.
Failing to think critically is something that happens to all of us from time to time. The difference is that religion is used to cause a mass directed lapse in critical thinking. As an example “god doesn’t like gay people because it says so in the bible. so all gay people bad”. When someone thinking critically would just judge individuals based on their own merit. Regardless of who they decide makes them happy.
I understand your point here, but this seems more like a point against abuses by religious institutions specifically. There’s a difference between some extremist christian cult telling people they ought to murder gay people and some random innocent person believing the earth was created by a small women on mars who dispenses cotton candy from her hair. Condemnation of religion by many people often includes the latter case I mentioned despite it being pretty harmless.
So, you aren’t wrong. Boy Scouts comes to mind. But I feel like there is something especially egregious about someone telling you they’re going to save your soul, but the whole time they’re fucking your kid. Ya know what I mean? Not very holy of them.
I totally agree with you on this.
This is not inherent to all religions. Some particular religions are intolerant of other beliefs. Some aren’t. I’m not sure of “most”, you’d actually have to start listing out religions and gathering evidence for that claim.
There is nothing inherently “good” about religion at all. Honestly, I believe it cheapens the human race. It says that humans aren’t strong enough on their own. They NEED the guidance and help of invisible beings to do the things they do
It’s arguable whether anything is inherently good at all.
The idea that belief in a god cheapens the human race, or that belief in a god makes people weak isn’t any different from saying belief in natural forces that we analyze scientifically cheapens the human race or makes people weaker in some sense.
God had no part in it. God doesn’t deserve the credit. I put in the work.
Scientific arguments can be made for why your success isn’t truly your own either. I.e. socioeconomic class, geographical proximity to resources, nature vs nurture arguments etc.
On top of that, not all theists would say you don’t deserve credit for your hard work.
But the main problem with religion is that it is an override switch for critical thinking. Things that are obviously, and proven to be helpful and right. They can become muddy at best and downright wrong when viewed through the lens of religion.
Failing to think critically is not an issue solely held by theists. Atheists can and regularly do fail at this. Normal people of all types fail at this often. The assumption that theism implies a failure to think critically is just wrong. Most theistic beliefs can easily be made consistent with scientific thinking for what it’s worth.
In the end the small positives aren’t worth the negatives, and for those “good religious people” you still support machines that are into child marriage, child molestation, keeping women down, and hurting other humans just because your god said it’s cool.
I don’t think religious institutions are the only institutions that do these things. Perhaps I am wrong? But to claim these crimes are solely a theistic thing seems incorrect to me.
But even if they are, the institutions themselves and the religious beliefs are distinct. All religions really try to do is to explain things we don’t really have answers for. This is not inherently bad, atheists do this about as much as theists as far as I can tell.
Yes.