Ground Bogo

There is no real life, only AFK

The following idea for a male decision making model hit me during a lazy Thursday afternoon (it’s not like I remember the day, but it must have been a Thursday since ideas such as this one can only come during that depressingly insignificant day). I was riding the bus back home, and I was thinking about the voiced speech part of a model that I had to code up for one of my ongoing projects. If you don’t care about the technical stuff or are afraid of it, skip the following text all the way until after the first diagram. Anyway, the human speechy-makie-thingy (for the lack of a better expression or the unwillingness of the author to make this post too technical or formal) basically consists of two things: the larynx, aka the “voice box” that flaps around and produces the raw sound, and the vocal tract as well as all the bunch of stuff after (tongue, lips, etc.) that shapes the raw sound into the sounds that we want to produce. The larynx flaps around like crazy with no definite pattern (pretty much like a salmon thrown on the beach of the Japanese coast by a giant tsunami caused by an earthquake which was in turn caused by a giant shield volcano eruption somewhere in the Pacific and yes I love brackets and I make them huge now go and read the first part of the sentence again since you probably forgot it and lost my train of thought) when we are using unvoices speech (letters like p, t, k, etc.), and does some periodic shit when we are using voiced speech (mostly vowels). All of this can be fit into a simple (or not so simple, I don’t know) model where the stuff that the larynx produces is simulated by either white noise (for unvoiced) or periodic impulse train (for voiced speech). Then this data is passed through a digital filter that simulates the vocal tract plus the rest of the crap after, and voila! Speech! Humanity! Evolution! I made a figure too, for those that need a kick to fire up their imagination, plus I could conveniently modify it and use it in my thesis paper one day. I just hope that nobody realises I am using the same material in my uber-official papers as well as my share-your-mental-diarrhea blog. Read the rest of this entry »

I sincerely hope my parents never get to read this post, since it will reveal some inconvenient truths about the education systems that I have encountered so far in my life. This is a general rule about any post in this blog, but I’d like to state this explicitly once again: everything here has to deal with the places I’ve been to and the things I’ve personally experienced. My story, as intriguing (or boring) as it may be, could be and probably is very different than your story. Or maybe not, I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Fuck it, lets just start this shit up. Mom and dad, this is what you actually payed for…
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The enjoyment you get from a movie is heavily dependent on the expectations that you have beforehand. Sometimes you need to expect less in order to be satisfied and even pleasantly surprised. It was clear to me from the start that to enjoy this movie, I had to turn my brain off for 2 hours and just assimilate the way various weird and supposedly scary monsters impale themselves on the sword of Jake Sully from Avatar. You know, double the action, triple the excitement, special effects and all that jazz…

Trust me, when I was in the theater, I was more brain-dead than blond zombie hooker, and yet this time it didn’t really cut it out for me. Things in this movie have gone so wrong that even if you approach it with no expectations whatsoever, you will still be disappointed. I’m not even sure where I should begin the bashing. Let’s see, how about we start with the…

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