1.26.1 🔭 SketchUp Project, Music Reader Apps, Oldest Living Thing, Telescope Design

Welcome to this week's Wednesday email. I found some interesting STEM/STEAM links. Starting with a beginner SketchUp project that uses 2D shapes to create a 3D effect. And links about what software musicians use to play and compose music, what's the oldest living thing on earth, and a new telescope design. Did you know the Hubble telescope weighs as much as two elephants? There's also links about how software knows what to do with your code. Hope you find something useful. Definitely share if you do. Thanks for reading today!

SketchUp Project: Create Blurry Circles

To follow up on last week's Wednesday email, about 3D software, I want to share 3D SketchUp articles. They're great for kids who like to build things. This beginner level SketchUp project shows you how to create 2D circles and squares. The result is an interesting 3D effect. Next Wednesday, I'll share a creepy faces project.

Blurry Circles
https://kidscodecs.com/sketchup-blurry-circles/

History of SketchUp
https://mastersketchup.com/history-of-sketchup/

SketchUp for Kids
http://learningfromcities.blogspot.com/2014/01/sketchup-for-kids.html

How to Create Your First 3D Model in SketchUp: A Beginner-Friendly Introduction
https://i.materialise.com/blog/en/first-3d-model-in-sketchup-tutorial/

Finding, making, and using incredible SketchUp textures
https://blog.sketchup.com/article/finding-making-and-using-incredible-sketchup-textures

Bonnie Roskes
https://3dvinci.net/

Music Reader Apps

Recently, I went to a classical music concert to listen to a friend who plays violin. Sitting in the balcony looking down at the musicians, I realized there were two kinds of scores. Some had paper music scores to guide their performance. Others used an iPad or tablet with software to display the music they played.

This triggered a long time thought and question: What sorts of software and hardware do classical musicians use?

Asking a search engine that question yielded at two types of answers. One answer had software and hardware for composers. The other was a phrase, a hint buried in two search engine summaries: music reader apps. When I search online, I’m on the lookout for short magic phrases like music reader apps. Typically, these phrases are how people describe a thing familiar to them (but not me).

In searching for music reader apps, I found a lot of options for both iPads and Android tablets. But I also found at least one app that will read music scores and then play the score as actual music. It’s called ScanScore. I could not figure out the music reader app musicians like most. If you look for apps, always check update frequency, reviews, and privacy policies. And the most interesting solution I found? Using PDF readers to read PDF scores.

In looking through search results for composers, I also discovered notation software. It turns music scores into music. You know, the software plays a score. Several times I found Sibelius mentioned in forums. I also discovered a thoughtful essay about AI, computers, and classical music.

What’s one difference between paper scores and digital scores? At the end of each piece the orchestra played, I noticed the paper scores had a blank page. There were no blank pages on the tablet scores. It’s less work to tap the right side edge of a tablet to change the page. But I imagine musicians like to see the blank page. It tells you that your performance is almost done. It’s like a marathoner seeing the finish line up ahead.

Technology in Modern Classical Music composition
https://www.talkclassical.com/threads/technology-in-modern-classical-music-composition.89521/

How Artificial Intelligence Can Keep Classical Music in Business
https://mbrjournal.com/2023/07/25/how-artificial-intelligence-can-keep-classical-music-in-business/

forScore
https://forscore.co/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/forscore/id363738376
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/forscore/id363738376?see-all=customers-also-bought-apps

MobileSheets
https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zubersoft.mobilesheetspro

ScanScore
https://scan-score.com

Sheet Music Scanner
https://sheetmusicscanner.com/

What's the Oldest Living Thing on Earth?

The short answer, sort of, is Methuselah, a bristlecone pine tree in California’s White Mountains. It is estimated to be 4,850 years old. But there’s another bristlecone pine tree nearby estimated to be 5,000 years old. If you know a little history, and using our calendar system of BC and AD, that’s around 2,825 BC when Methuselah sprouted from the earth. That’s early to middle Bronze Age, what we call the third millennium BC. A lot of human history happened at that time, all over the world.

However, the longer answer turns out to be far more interesting than one tree. There’s lots of plants, trees, and animals that live far longer than us humans. And there’s also certain types of life called clonals that never really die. There’s Pando, for example, which is a collection of aspen trees that make up a single organism. Pando is the size of Vatican City and grew from one seed. It currently supports 47,000 aspen trees. Mushrooms also can be a single organism with parts that grow, live, and die while sharing the same genes.

Biological life living for centuries and millennia depends on strategies like clonals. Cold temperatures also slow growth: there's a sponge in the Antarctic estimated to be 15,000 years old. Or a shark in the North Atlantic hundreds of years old. A lack of predators also helps plants and animals live a long time.

The oldest living thing on Earth
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40224991

Ask a Biologist: What is the oldest living thing on Earth?
https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/what-oldest-living-thing-earth

List of longest-living organisms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organisms

Early Life on Earth – Animal Origins
https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/life-science/early-life-earth-animal-origins

3rd Millenium BC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3rd_millennium_BC

OLDLIST, a database of old trees
http://www.rmtrr.org/oldlist.htm

Where to see the oldest living things on Earth
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/oldest-living-things/index.html

The Oldest Living Things in the World
https://www.atlasobscura.com/lists/worlds-oldest-living-things

Elements of Coding: Brackets, Semicolons, or Nothing, Oh My

This is the seventh in a series about common elements across programming languages. Once you learn one language, identifying these elements is a way to learn new languages quickly. Plus, you'll get a deeper understanding about the problems languages have to solve. And the trade offs languages make.

Last week explored the way programming languages parse and validate data using regular expressions. This week is about something called programming style, how languages use spaces, tabs, names, punctuation, and other devices to organize code.

Here’s a great example. Imagine if you had to read this code:

if hours < 24 and minutes < 60 and seconds < 60 then return True else return False end

Now imagine this code was written in a language with this simple indentation style:

if hours < 24 and minutes < 60 and seconds < 60 then
return True
else
return False
end

The second example is written in the Lua language which does not require semi-colons at the end of lines or indentation. This code also works when written in Lua:

if hours < 24 and minutes < 60 and seconds < 60 then
return True
else
return False
end

As you can see, a simple style rule to break code statements into individual lines makes it easier to read code. In the first example, a single line of code with no real breaks between statements is harder to read. For a programming language, however, it might be easy to read the single line of code.

There are two main ways to indent blocks of code: spaces and tabs. Because editing tools can count tabs differently, by default as well as through settings in the editing software, spaces are considered more reliable. Python, for example, uses indentation in groups of four white spaces per indentation level instead of tabs. Unless your editing software has the ability to see tabs, it can be difficult to code or maintain code that uses tabs instead of spaces.

The programming style for the C language is both everywhere and nowhere. Here is an if/elseif statement, for example, from one of the original style documents for the C language:

if (strcmp(reply, "yes") == EQUAL) {
statements for yes
...
} else if (strcmp(reply, "no") == EQUAL) {
statements for no
...
} else if (strcmp(reply, "maybe") == EQUAL) {
statements for maybe
...
} else {
statements for none of the above
...
}

Note the use of curly braces to mark off blocks of code, a style used in many languages like PHP and Java. The comparison statements also are common in many languages. Yet there appears to be no formal programming style document for C, only a variety of documents created over the years.

And here's an example of indentation and programming style in Python:

class Rectangle(Blob):

def __init__(self, width, height,
color='black', emphasis=None, highlight=0):
if (width == 0 and height == 0 and
color == 'red' and emphasis == 'strong' or
highlight > 100):
raise ValueError("sorry, you lose")
if width == 0 and height == 0 and (color == 'red' or
emphasis is None):
raise ValueError("I don't think so -- values are %s, %s" %
(width, height))
Blob.__init__(self, width, height,
color, emphasis, highlight)

Note the indentation used to clearly identify what belongs to the line above. This approach makes Python code highly readable, one of the key insights used to define the language. Also note there are no semi-colons in Python, only colons (:) are used to mark off blocks of code.

The links below give you an idea of how a few languages solve the problem of creating a consistent programming style. When you learn a new language, pay attention to how the new language uses spaces, tabs, and other elements to organize code.

Programming Style
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_style
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/pxk/417/notes/content/Cstyle.pdf

Coding Conventions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_conventions

Naming Conventions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_convention_(programming)

PEP 8: Style Guide for Python Code
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

Thin Lens Telescope Design

The Hubble and JWST telescopes are massive. Hubble weighs about two elephants, around 12000 pounds. The JWST is lighter, about one elephant worth of weight. Imagine the power needed to launch either one. Telescopes, not actual elephants. To me, telescopes also are big heavy tubes. JWST is different though, more like an open L-shaped folding phone.

Turns out that space telescope design is evolving. The next Hubble-like telescope will be too expensive to build, for example. And take decades to build.

This has astronomers thinking about other ways to create telescopes. One idea is to make a telescope from many thin lenses. The lenses would collect data into one source. And it would take less time and expense to create each thin lens. Plus more lenses would mean more data collected. Today the JWST can identify the atmosphere of faraway exoplanets. Thin lens telescopes should provide even greater details about habitable exoplanets.

This article describes the near future evolution of what's next in space telescopes.

A new, thin-lensed telescope design could far surpass JWST | Astronomy.com
https://www.astronomy.com/science/a-new-thin-lensed-telescope-design-could-far-surpass-james-webb/

JWST Specifications
https://webb.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/facts.html

Hubble Specifications
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/overview/hubble-by-the-numbers/

This Week

Our Sunday email this week will have fun often offbeat links about a runaway donkey (not Donkey from Shrek), QWERTY keyboard history, circular food systems, games and game theory, the history of microbiology, and how the square root of 2 became a number. Look for the email this Sunday.