Quantum mini-sim + Voice interactives + Patreon pause policy

⏱(5 min read)

Hi all!  A quick update, in five parts:

1) Quantum mini-sim (👾 + 1 playable simulation you can play!)
2) Trans voice interactives (👾 + 2 crappy prototypes you can try!)
3) Patreon pausing policy
4) Wait what happened to my other projects
5) Rewards for Nov 2022

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1) Quantum mini-sim

My friend Mithuna Yoganathan recently made a science video, where she did the double-slit experiment at home... but with a fog machine, so you can actually see the interference of light's wavefunction in mid-air!

Inspired by this, I made a lil' quantum simulation, to help myself gain a better intuition:

👾 https://ncase.me/double-slit/ 

There's no science explanation in my sim. Go see Mithuna's video for that.

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2) Transgender voice interactives

A few of my upcoming projects will be all about voice! Reasons: 1) to help with my own, and my friends', voice gender dysphoria; 2) sound physics + digital signal processing is cool.

a) A live-biofeedback web app for voice training.

I teased this project years ago, shelved it, and now it's back. There already are some apps for trans voice training, but they all:

1) only track pitch, not other important stuff like resonance, open quotient, etc.

2) they require you look at the app to get feedback. I want to make an app that takes advantage of those cheap earphones-with-microphones –– so you can speak to folks face-to-face, the microphone picks it up, then gives you feedback through audio cues, in real-time!

Here's a crappy prototype: (only tested on Firefox on Mac OS)

👾 https://ncase.me/voice-crappy-prototype/ 

b) A voice synthesizer in the browser.

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
~ found on Richard Feynman's blackboard after his death

To help explain the physics of voice, I'm making a silly toy that synthesizes voices in your browser. It's inspired by the surreal explorable, Pink Trombone, but with more focus on what makes voices "masculine" or "feminine".

So far, I've made a crappy voice synthesizer (only tested in Firefox on Mac OS so far). Again, it has no instructions or explanation: 

👾  https://ncase.me/voice-synth-prototype 

c) A pop-science video on the science & art of voice modification.  

Someone I met recently, Aran Ink, is amazing at voice modification.  Here's a playlist of their voice acting demos, where they do voices from hyper-masculine to hyper-feminine: yes, it really is *all them*. 

I'll be collaborating with them to make a general-interest edu-YouTube video (in the style of Veritasium, etc) on the science & art of trans voice!  There's a surprising amount of physics involved in understanding voice.  I may even need to briefly explain what a Fourier Transform is.

Our collab video will also showcase the two trans-voice projects mentioned above, to visually explain important ideas!

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3) Patreon Pause Policy

If you didn't notice, I paused my Patreon for Nov 1st. You were not charged for your pledge earlier this month.

I know every time I pause my Patreon, some folks say, "but we wanna support you anyway!" Thank you sincerely, but honestly, I'd be more comfortable if I can pause my Patreon whenever I want to take a month off for any reason.  It's not guilt, it's just a reciprocity/social-contract drive.

So, here's my new personal Pausing Policy: (now also on my About page)

If in [month X]:
   I did not make a draft / prototype / project available to you,

Then:
   You won't be charged at start of [month X+1].

(So, since I didn't publish in October, you weren't charged on Nov 1st.  But since I did make available the above 3 prototypes this month, you'll be charged on Dec 1st.)

Alas, under Patreon's new billing system – which actually makes a lot of sense in every way except the following – I can't pause my Patreon without making it impossible for new folks to sign up.

The worst part is that they only tell new potential signups about it after they try to sign up, and the first error message they see is completely misleading:

(Then only after you close that message do you see this:)

Just "please try again", no option to let them sign up for now, then be charged when I unpause.

This sucks!  This means I can't take a break without turning new people away!  I'll write an email soon to Patreon about this, because it's a feature they used to have – it's how I could take a year-long sabbatical – and it's important to me, and any creator who wants to take long breaks.

My workaround for this last month was to pause my Patreon for five days, from Oct 31st to Nov 4th, since most of you are charged on the 1st.  This workaround won't work for long.

I hope Patreon will fix this, because Patreon has been a huge net-positive for me – and still definitely is! – but every other year something breaks about this platform.  Y'know, I've made (very small) crowdfunding sites before.  I know how to use the PayPal and Stripe APIs.  I could make my own, self-hosted, bare-bones, one-creator-only version of Patreon.  I can ragequit.  But that'd take me, like, 2 months, and it'd be annoying to get y'all to switch over.

But again, best-case scenario is Patreon just fixes this.

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4) Wait what happened to my other projects

Essays on virtue ethics/political polarization/social justice: wrote 20,000+ words, total unuseable brain-dump mess, shelving for now.

Interactive textbook: probably better if I just publish chapters as interactive blog posts over time, instead of all-in-one-go as a textbook. This way I can iterate on feedback, not commit to a specific table of contents, and it feels good to ship tiny things more often.

On that note, my tightest bottleneck to growing as a scholar/educator is how much time each project takes. So, I'd like to rework my pipeline, so I can make less-polished explorables / essays / videos quicker.  Like, "once every 2 weeks" quick.  We'll see.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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5) Patreon rewards for Nov 2022

• Wall of Thanks!
  
• Custom Polygon avatars!
  
• And a few days ago, I sent a drawing of a cat to you "Drawing Of A Cat" tier patrons.

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Anyway that's a braindump of what I'm up to.

I am once again thanking you for your financial support!

[insert snowman emoji here]
[i tried pasting one here twice, but both times i did it, it caused the Patreon new post page to crash. what the heck.]
~ Nicky