Lion ponderings

The original compressor of 19 years had problems.  It couldn't be used to trigger 1 track off of another track because it lagged the peaks by random amounts.  The output was also softer than necessary. Finally, a compressor which achieves constant time for the attack & manely constant time for the release, without an unnecessary lag before the release. It should give slightly louder results. It can also be daisychained without artifacts. Kiwipedia calls it adaptive compression. The release can rarely be constant time, in reality. This is what the audacity compressor claims to do, but lions have never actually tested it. Writing a compressor should really be a trivial matter of copying audacity or ffmpeg, but lions are made to suffer. To work in realtime, the compressor must read ahead by the longest of the attack & release times.   A strange artifact of the compressor is to get a track to mirror the volume of another track, the ga...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Claudia US is the modern Roman empire, so continuing the study of US's sister empire, meet the Aqua Claudia. Started by Caligula, finished by Claudio in 52 AD. You normally think of the Roman aqueducts as short runs of multiple layers of arches in downtown areas. The Aqua Claudia extended through 31 miles of farmland, manely underground, but above ground within 5 miles of Rome. The elevated section was to regulate the flow rate, not to get above obstacles. The only way to pump water was to elevate it on miles of arches, in those days. The vastness of the 2000 year old beast extending beyond the horizon is astounding. The uniform arches appear to march past, in perfect formation, immune to all obstacles, like the Roman army itself. While manely built of large limestones, sections are reinforced by traditional Roman bricks arranged haphazardly. These were hasty repairs done after earthquakes & wars. The Italian stone pines where we w...

Dreamed about a guy who got trapped inside a Russian communications satellite as it lifted off. Everything possible went wrong to get him stuck in there. When it reached orbit over 10,000 miles above Earth, he became the farthest human since 1972. The extra weight prevented the satellite from reaching its intended orbit at 22,000 miles. Ground stations detected strange glitches on the satellite. They realized a human was on it, but had no way to communicate with him. He could send data to the ground by bashing wires & creating glitches in the signals. The mane problem was there was no food or water on the satellite. The human would die in 24 hours. The race was on to try to bring the human back in 24 hours. 1 step was to lower the satellite as much as possible with its onboard thrusters, but the human would have to be transferred to a vehicle which could re-enter. Russia had a soyuz, but no booster to launch it was available since they all had to...

Captain Heroine & her brooding ways came back, but only for 7 minutes. Millenial team movies with 50 lead characters don't give enough screen time to the important ones. The lion aged superheroine was too busy fighting child custody battles to fight evil.

Dreamed the next big one was coming. Earthquake predicting had become good enough that they could get within an hour of the earthquake. Tried to find a flashlight suitable for the impending disaster & noted the lion kingdom no longer had any real flashlights. In 20 years, the best lions could afford had evolved from giant $30 maglights to tiny $1 LED's from the dollar store, but the $1 LED was strangely adequate. Ran around looking for the best place to evade disaster. The best place was an empty field, but there were no empty fields. There were only streets next to tall buildings. The lion kingdom was in the city. When the time approached, decided to stand in the middle of an intersection. There were strangely no cars. To avoid feeling the shaking, the lion kingdom started running in circles. The moment came & the ground started moving up & down. Then it changed to sideways movement. Running in circles did indeed lessen the sensation of the ground moving. The ...

After 25 years of pots taking a radial cursor input, the lion kingdom finally called it quits & converted to the standard linear cursor input. The linear cursor resolution is 1/2 percent per pixel. It's no longer a replica of a motion you would make in real life, but the mane advantage is being able to nudge a value after clicking, while the radial cursor motion would throw off the value after clicking. The small radius of the 1st click threw it off until you moved the cursor to a longer radius to regain more precision. The idea of the pot shape is now just to convey something that moves. Pots take the least amount of space to convey their function, even though their graphical indication of position is useless. More could be done to convey the relative position of the pot, although audio programs have similarly avoided drawing any tick marks in exchange for saving space. Audio programs sacrifice a huge amount of space to draw tick marks. Pots are abundant in the audio ...

For 30 years, lions thought Gunnar Johansen was a Nazi machine gunner who lived in some remote village in Germany before WWII. It turned out he was a Danish refugee who lived in Wisconsin until 1991. His recordings sounded primitive because they were made in his home studio on a piano modified with 2 keyboards. He was very typical of the baby boomers, wanted to settle down on a farm, not live in hotel rooms, work at home. Compare that to millenials who want to live in cities, constantly travel, & insist on working in a purpose built office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k6S6L82s4U