Howard A. Landman is a mathematician, engineer, scientist, and sometimes artist and poet living in Fort Collins, Colorado.
September 25th: The hostel breakfast was uninspired, so I will spare you a boring photo. Main target for the day was the Deutsches Museum. It had a surprising number of technical exhibits on ships, planes, and electricity.
There was a large section on Informatics / Computer Science.
We needed a lunch break, so walked across the river.
We found a simple dinner of potato pancakes.
Then we walked around town a little.
Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung! O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum in Ohr! Und alles schwieg. Doch selbst in der Verschweigung ging neuer Anfang, Wink und Wandlung vor. Tiere aus Stille drangen aus dem klaren gelösten Wald von Lager und Genist; und da ergab sich, daß sie nicht aus List und nicht aus Angst in sich so leise waren, sondern aus Hören. Brüllen, Schrei, Geröhr schien klein in ihren Herzen. Und wo eben kaum ein Hütte war, dies zu empfangen, ein Unterschlupf aus dunkelstem Verlangen mit einem Zugang, dessen Pfosten beben, - da schufst du ihnen Tempel im Gehör.
A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence! Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear! And all grew hushed. But in that very silence a new beginning, sign and change appeared. Quiet creatures gathered from the clear unhurried forest, out of lair and nest; and so it must have been, their stealthiness was not born out of cunning or of fear, but just from hearing. Bellow, cry, and roar seemed tiny in their hearts. And where before there barely stood a hut to take this in, a hiding place of deepest darkest yens, and with an entryway whose doorposts trembled - you built for them an auditory temple.
line 1: “Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung!”: The poem opens with the image of a tree, not passively being tall, but actively climbing. Both “stieg” and “Übersteigung” derive from “steigen” (to climb). So one would like the translation of “stieg” to be similarly active, and if possible, be echoed in the translation of “Übersteigung” (transcendence). I think “ascended” is about as good as one can get; Stephen Mitchell discovered this before me.
Rilke uses the tree metaphor frequently in Orpheus (often, as here and even more strongly in I,17, with a sense of rapid upward movement suggesting apotheosis). In other sonnets, Rilke develops particular aspects of the tree, especially the roots (= earth = graves = the dead) which appear in I,6 I,14 I,17 I,21 and II,27. The tree/upward motion motif also occurs in Rilke’s earlier “I find you there …” from The Book Of Hours (1905).
Line 5: “drangen”: “Drangen” can mean “penetrate”, but often in the relatively passive sense of “get through” or “come through”, so the P-word seems a bit too active and violent. Here the meaning is perhaps closer to “emerge (from)”.
Line 6: “gelösten”: The most literal translation of “gelösten” would be “loosened”, but it can also mean “relaxed”, “sluggish”, “slack”, “lax”, or “lazy”. That this is applied to the forest, and not to the animals, makes choosing an interpretation more difficult. Putting too much emphasis on slowness (“sluggish”? “lethargic”?) seems wrong; so does putting too much emphasis on laziness (“indolent”? “shiftless”?). Better and more balanced choices include “languid”, “relaxed”, or “tranquil”.
Line 14: “Tempel im Gehör”: Over and over, Rilke’s poems lead us through familiar territory, and then suddenly in the last few lines leave us teetering on the edge of a vast abyss, “swaying in clearness”. It’s a bit like turning a corner in your own neighborhood and finding yourself on the brink of the Grand Canyon. Here, he first describes a cramped, primitive, rickety lean-to to represent the animals’ sense of hearing before Orpheus, whose effort then replaces it with a temple which is more solid, more elegant – and more spacious.
Copyright ©1998,1999,2000,2021 Howard A. Landman
Bringing the HForce LED light bar I designed to Turn-Table Tuesday at Hodi’s 1/17. This will be it’s first official appearance as part of a show; guess it’s finally out of beta. 
The show is FREE, come on down!
UPDATE January 18 2017: The HForce LED bar behaved well, except that yesterday’s code changes had the rather odd side-effect of making it prefer dim pastel backgrounds. Lots of washed-out teal and pink. Today I will try to figure out why that happened. Not unpleasant, just unexpected. It was supposed to fade to black more often. Where art and software meet, strange things happen. Thanks to Bri for inviting me, Brandon for being the main VJ, and the guy who said “You’re my hero, man! I hope I’m still dancing when I’m your age.”
I finally *did* get to field-test the LED system at Hodi’s this week. Mostly, it went very well. Sound response was good and the auto-level-setting code handled the extremely loud bass just fine. The battery pack was still above 75% after 2 hours of continuous use. Neither Raspbian nor the program ever crashed.
The LEDs were way too bright even at 1/4 max brightness; I recoded that down to 1/8, which was only a *little* too bright, but I’m not happy that that effectively restricts me to 5 bits of brightness resolution. It might be better to put the system behind tinted glass or plastic and crank it up, although low brightness levels are very nice for battery life and system voltage margins.
The code that fades the display to black when there’s “silence” turned out to misbehave slightly when I lowered the brightness to 1/8, so I had to add a couple of lines to be sensitive to that and “do the right thing” for different brightness levels.
I also got to unplug the system from monitor/keyboard/mouse and wear it as a belt while dancing, which was nice. I took video on my iPhone 4, but its camera was not designed for such extreme contrast, and so didn’t show the colors very well.
Zac Rachid was in the audience and we discussed using the system or something like it at his October show. It’s too early to tell what form that might take.
I didn’t actually get to test my LED strip last night. I decided it would be really cool if I didn’t need to have it attached to a monitor, because my only HDMI monitor is 23″ and a pain to lug around.
First I got an SSH app for my iPhone. Then I got my Pi’s IP address. Then I logged in from the phone and ran the LED driver app remotely. So far, so great. Huge progress in only an hour of work.
But then I realized that, without a monitor on it, I wouldn’t know what the Pi’s IP address was on someone else’s wifi. Worse, there might not even BE wifi. So I decided to turn the Pi into its own wifi hotspot so I could just connect to it directly. The first steps went well; I could see the Pi as a wifi source. But I must have done something stupid, because I can’t log into it AND it now cannot connect to the internet itself. So I need to undo all that wifi stuff today and start over.
All you Go programmers whose program crashed when playing against Poka, and whom I chided for changing your code the night before a tournament instead of just testing it to make sure everything worked? Feel free to laugh now.
Planning to beta-test my Raspberry Pi 3 / DotStar LED strip project at Hodi’s Tuesday night. Come on by and let me know what you think.
We believe in simply exposing our merchandise to the danger of being evaluated.
John Peers (“the Monty Python of the computer industry”), Computerworld, May 28, 1975
Got Kaleidoscope functionality working. This allows me to reflect parts of the display onto others, for example to force mirror symmetry, without disturbing the underlying image computations. This is something that I would have liked to see in G-Force, but that Andy never implemented, so it’s one of the areas where I’m trying to go beyond him. And, apparently, succeeding.
Last night, I found out that the Otterbox Digital Dome at FCMOD has a commercial license for G-Force (and Whitecap and Aeon), and they’ve already worked out the technical details for mapping those onto their 4K x 4K pixel spherical screen. That means I can just bring my config set on a USB stick and VJ using their SW and computer. Any EDM folks interested in rocking the dome? I am so stoked …
I’ve never been a huge fan of Kevin Bacon, but he scores a big brownie point with me for this lovely cover of Paul Weller‘s “Above The Clouds” with Daryl Hall.
I got to DJ a little at the RRC pre-NYE party on 12/30. Crowd was mixed including some very young children, which influenced my song selections. Set list:
Energy and Time 