Geek Open Mic Night-October 8,2014 presentation discussion

I attended Geek Open Mic Night on October 8, 2014. There were a variety of presenters who just wanted to share subjects that interested them. Three people shared their material and spoke about 30 minutes each. The first presenter was a woman who spoke about statistics. She focused on the importance of normal distribution and generally just explained how statistics worked.

The second presenter was the woman who organized the Geek Open Mic Night. Her material was about randomness. She explained how physics played a part in randomness with the topic of angular momentum. She discussed the "same side bias" and the probability research of Persi Diaconis. Prior to attending hearing her presentation, I had no idea that the subject of probability was so vast.

The final presenter was a saxophonist and he also was a composer of chance factor. Chance factor is a type of genre. He brought with him his computer to show a program called Max which he used to generate this chance music. He said it was developed  in the Paris Center for Music and Science, and essentially he was able to compose music through this generated system. Interestingly enough, the computer recognized notes he would play (soft or loud) and then he could also tell the system to change this and that at a particular segment of the music. I myself am a classical pianist, so hearing this genre of music was very appealing! I'd never heard of it before until then.

Overall, I think the Geek Open Mic night was insightful. It's always fun to learn new material, and it's even better to already sort of know it and hear about it again. I thoroughly enjoyed my time. The next open mic night is going to be next year. Anyone is welcome to present!