learning on are you electronichttps://www.areyouelectronic.com/tags/learning/Recent content in learning on are you electronicHugoen-USjustin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)Fri, 29 May 2026 18:59:30 -0700grab bag vol. 3https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/grab-bag-vol-3/Fri, 29 May 2026 18:59:30 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/grab-bag-vol-3/Hello once again RSS Clubbers, and welcome email subscribers! This week I am sharing a few open questions that I have pondered lately. Please enjoy this week’s grab bag, another peek behind the curtain.

  1. What is the source of the infrasonic rumble? You may or may not know that I have a hobby of making field recordings, especially long playing ones. This one, from Quicksilver-Almaden park, is especially boring (which is ideal), and if I remember correctly I tried to mitigate the low frequencies with a high-pass filter, yet the lowest frequencies are still there. At the time I recorded that one, I thought it was “just San Jose” off in the distance. But in the Butano posts, I mention that there is a noticeable low frequency “rumble in the distance”. Maybe it’s two different sources, waves crashing on the coast for one and city noise for the other. I do not know.

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    Hello once again RSS Clubbers, and welcome email subscribers! This week I am sharing a few open questions that I have pondered lately. Please enjoy this week’s grab bag, another peek behind the curtain.

    1. What is the source of the infrasonic rumble? You may or may not know that I have a hobby of making field recordings, especially long playing ones. This one, from Quicksilver-Almaden park, is especially boring (which is ideal), and if I remember correctly I tried to mitigate the low frequencies with a high-pass filter, yet the lowest frequencies are still there. At the time I recorded that one, I thought it was “just San Jose” off in the distance. But in the Butano posts, I mention that there is a noticeable low frequency “rumble in the distance”. Maybe it’s two different sources, waves crashing on the coast for one and city noise for the other. I do not know.

    2. Does Virginia Woolf always use so many new-to-me words? Is this unique to her or is it a historical remove thing (i.e. has the common vocabulary diverged in the ~100 years between me-the-reader and her-the-author)? Last week I read The Death of the Moth. Jeff pointed out that there were quite a few unusual words. I had noticed this in the reading and simply moved on, but it is worth pondering a bit more. In the first paragraph alone, I counted four unfamiliar words: benignant1, share2, down3, and vociferation4. There are only five paragraphs in the whole piece. Is this normal? I love it!5 I should read more Woolf to find out. Luckily there are two other essays in my edition of The Norton Reader, so I can get some signal with minimal effort or investment.

    3. Is the fork the most likely object in the dishwasher to hurt you? The only time I have been injured while unloading the dishwasher was by jamming a fork under my fingernail because I didn’t see its edge-on appearance. Like Abbott’s Triangles,6 forks disappear when viewed from certain directions. Knives are another leading candidate for injury-causers, even butter and table knives can cut you. But, forks go up and knives go down in the dishwasher’s silverware rack thing, so knives are in the safe direction. I was not being as careful as usual that day; it hurt! How common is this injury? Is something else more likely to send you searching for a bandaid, and we just don’t put that thing in out dishwasher? Who keeps this sort of statistics?

    4. I observe that traffic seems to slow down significantly on Fridays and Sundays. Is traffic really slower on those days? Everyone sure takes their time around the SFBA when getting from point A to point B, especially on the freeways. On the other hand, it’s probably just me, I’m the one still in a hurry, just 5% more than everyone else. Do you see this in your neck of the woods? What’s the reason, what is driving this phenomenon?

    A few thin strips of rubber scattered on wet ashphault. A bright white parking strip line bisects the frame vertically.
    Seen this week, during the very unusual for late May rain.

    1. Two things: I am linking to Websters 1913 dictionary because a) it’s a good dictionary, b) it’s public domain, c) the website doesn’t have ads, d) it’s got an easy to remember url websters1913.com, and e) it’s contemporary to Woolf. Second, I was able to guess approximately the meanings of some of these words from context or familiarity with alternate suffixes on the same root,7 others I had to puzzle out, and yet more I simply moved on and triangulated back to them later in the piece. I think it was good for my brain. ↩︎

    2. I had always interpreted “plough share” to mean something about a portion of land. And to mean the blade of the plough. Woolf uses “share” here bare, without directly referring to the plough. That’s plow in Americanish, I think. I interpretted Woolf’s usage to mean that second one, but it could also mean the row that has been freshly cut by the plough. ↩︎

    3. The phrase Woolf uses is “…and the down beyond…”. Does she mean the hills on the other side of the fields? Does she mean the “way out there beyond the land I can see before me”? I’m pretty sure the former, maybe it was a common usage in rural England. Because the imagery in the paragraph surrounding this is very diverse and vivid I was even considering feathers for a moment. I settled on hills, like how Tolkien uses it. ↩︎

    4. This is obviously just a different suffix on “vociferous”. Yet I had never seen it before. Neither had Jeff. ↩︎

    5. I am a dictionary nerd. I have, like, so many dang dictionaries. ↩︎

    6. I am unsure of the political correctness / cancelled status / et cetera of the Flatland book. It is a satire written in the 1800s. I neither vouch for or against it, it is a historical document that has some interesting geometrical analogies and thought experiments. That is all. ↩︎

    7. Such as: benignant is obviously related to benign, and vociferation is obviously related to vociferous. But I am getting ahead of myself and possibly you too. ↩︎

    ]]>    mothshttps://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/moths/Wed, 20 May 2026 20:03:52 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/moths/There are almost no similes in Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.” To be precise, there is one asimile1 and two similes. That is not very many similes. These few similes all point into the frame, not out. None of them speak directly to the reader to explain anything that has just been described in the piece. At no point is that done. All the similes deepen the reader’s picture of the characters in the story.

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    There are almost no similes in Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.” To be precise, there is one asimile1 and two similes. That is not very many similes. These few similes all point into the frame, not out. None of them speak directly to the reader to explain anything that has just been described in the piece. At no point is that done. All the similes deepen the reader’s picture of the characters in the story.

    A small pale-tan moth at rest on a textured cream surface, wings folded narrow along its back.
    The humble day moth, agriphila straminella (image credit).

    So that’s what I learned. To get to that I had to first read the piece for the content, read the story. I did not expect to feel so much for a bug that had died over 80 years ago.2 It is exceptionally well written. I am not bothered at all that I read it approximately three times.

    I read it to try and learn something about the craft of writing. The part that I am working on right now is what I call “sketches”. My drafts tend to drift into talking to the reader about what I am trying to say. It breaks the spell. My copy of the Norton Reader puts them in the rhetorical genre called Describing.

    Woolf’s very short piece, just two facing pages, is a moving observation of herself, but universal, in the mode of description.

    1. An asimile is something I just made up. It’s short for anti-simile. A simile is of the form “x is like y”, ergo an asimile is of the form “x is not like y.” ↩︎

    2. I’m assuming here that Woolf wrote the piece in 1940 or ‘41, shortly before it was published. Also shortly before she died. I have no idea if that’s true, or if the piece is about a moth that died around the time that she wrote it and not 20 years earlier. Or if it’s even about any one particular moth that she witnessed passing at all. ↩︎

    ]]>    🤖 edu weekhttps://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/edu-week/Mon, 18 May 2026 11:51:09 -0700justin@areyouelectronic.com (Justin Garofoli)https://www.areyouelectronic.com/posts/2026/edu-week/<p>Lots of learning going on this week. The brain is kind of filling up and getting tired already, but the trainings continue to come in hot. I&rsquo;m interested to see how this turns out by the end of the week.</p>Tags: #moods #learning #ai · *duration:6h

    Lots of learning going on this week. The brain is kind of filling up and getting tired already, but the trainings continue to come in hot. I’m interested to see how this turns out by the end of the week.

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