Boundary Conditions, Real and Imagined

Not sure it was inherently unstable ... it seems that they used wind tunnel type technology and also balanced the aircraft aerodynamically to ensure that the controlled warping of the wing was the only imbalance of forces thus producing the effect that todays ailerons might achieve.


Shortly after their receipt of the Smithsonian materials, the Wrights built their first aeronautical craft, a five-foot-wingspan biplane kite, in the summer of 1899. The Wrights chose to follow Lilienthal's lead of using gliders as a stepping stone towards a practical powered airplane. The 1899 kite was built as a preliminary test device to establish the viability of the control system that they planned to use in their first full-size glider. This means of control would be a central feature of the later successful powered airplane.

Rather than controlling the craft by altering the center of gravity by shifting the pilot's body weight as Lilienthal had done, the Wrights intended to balance their glider aerodynamically. They reasoned that if a wing generates lift when presented to an oncoming flow of air, producing differing amounts of lift on either end of the wing would cause one side to rise more than the other, which in turn would bank the entire aircraft. A mechanical means of inducing this differential lift would provide the pilot with effective lateral control of the airplane. The Wrights accomplished this by twisting, or warping, the tips of the wings in opposite directions via a series of lines attached to the outer edges of the wings that were manipulated by the pilot. The idea advanced aeronautical experimentation significantly because it provided an effective method of controlling an airplane in three-dimensional space and, because it was aerodynamically based, it did not limit the size of the aircraft as shifting body weight obviously did. The satisfactory performance of the 1899 kite demonstrated the practicality of the wing warping control system.

Rand 47 said:

JimKasson said:

In the early years of aviation, many European efforts, particularly in France, focused on inherent stability. The idea was that a flying machine should behave like a boat or a carriage: it should go where it was pointed and resist disturbances. The Wright Brothers, by contrast, approached flight as an inherently unstable process that required active control by the pilot at all times, more like balancing on a bicycle than steering a cart. Their breakthrough came not just from building an airframe or an engine, but from devising a system of three-axis control that let the pilot constantly correct the plane’s motion in pitch, roll, and yaw.

When the Wrights demonstrated their Flyer in Europe (notably at Le Mans in 1908), the flight world was stunned, not just by the duration and control of the flight, but by the apparent deliberate instability of the aircraft. What had once been assumed to be a requirement, that the machine must be inherently stable, was revealed to be a boundary condition of the problem that the Wrights had consciously rejected.

This is an illustration of how progress often comes not just from solving a problem within its perceived constraints, but from questioning whether those constraints are real or self-imposed.

Click to expand...

And, here’s an example of a completely artificial boundary condition that cannot be overcome, or ignored, without consequences. Fire engines are red. There’s no particular reason for this. The first fire engine in the US was blue. But it’s become a boundary condition of sorts. The most visible color, ergo the safest for visibility while responding Code 3, is international lime yellow-green. Many “progressive” fire departments started buying equipment in this color. The public failed to yield right of way, and ran into them more often than red ones. The artificial boundary condition was/is that people expect fire equipment to be RED.

Click to expand...

QWERTY

Hi,

Going to the WB museums in Kill Devil Hill, NC and Dayton, Ohio is very good. Going to the Glenn Curtiss museum in Hammondsport, NY is an eye opener.

But going to the US Air Force museum while in Dayton shows it all from end-to-end. Takes a lot of time to read everything. I hadn't been in many years. So many in fact, the place is more than double the size now of when I last went.

I will have to go back sooner rather than later and budget more time to read the other half.

Anyway, lots thinking outside of lots of boxes in all of those places. Or, as the aviation crowd says, lots of pushing of the envelope.

Stan

Many photographers are also musicians. I do not know exactly why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the structured interplay between intuition and craft that both arts require. In music, as in photography, boundary conditions define the creative space.

Stripped of overtones and chords for simplicity, music is a series of pitches and durations. In a world with no boundary conditions, any note could follow any other note, at any duration, with no organizing structure. But if you have ever heard purely random pitches and rhythms, you know how unsatisfying that can be. It becomes noise, not music.

Western music is built on a system of scales, organized into octaves based on the twelfth root of two. From the twelve tones in an octave, composers select subsets, typically five or seven notes, to form a working scale for a piece. They select a key from a limited set of them. They adopt a time signature. These choices limit their freedom, but in doing so, they define a space where structure and surprise can coexist. Even jazz, often considered the most freeform of musical genres, works within these same boundaries. The magic of jazz is often in how the artist dances near the edge of those constraints, without fully abandoning them.

JimKasson said:

QWERTY

Click to expand...

Perhaps the ultimate artificial boundary...

JimKasson said:

Many photographers are also musicians. I do not know exactly why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the structured interplay between intuition and craft that both arts require. In music, as in photography, boundary conditions define the creative space.

Stripped of overtones and chords for simplicity, music is a series of pitches and durations. In a world with no boundary conditions, any note could follow any other note, at any duration, with no organizing structure. But if you have ever heard purely random pitches and rhythms, you know how unsatisfying that can be. It becomes noise, not music.

Western music is built on a system of scales, organized into octaves based on the twelfth root of two. From the twelve tones in an octave, composers select subsets, typically five or seven notes, to form a working scale for a piece. They select a key from a limited set of them. They adopt a time signature. These choices limit their freedom, but in doing so, they define a space where structure and surprise can coexist. Even jazz, often considered the most freeform of musical genres, works within these same boundaries. The magic of jazz is often in how the artist dances near the edge of those constraints, without fully abandoning them.

Click to expand...

I've experimented on my cat. She definitely doesn't get music of any style. She doesn't get intervals, she doesn't get rhythm, she doesn't get beat. She doesn't tap a foot in time with the music, nod her head or twitch her tail. It's all noise to her.

Which is interesting because music is built on regularity and mathematical relationships. So why do people get music (even jazz ) and animals don't?

--
2024: Awarded Royal Photographic Society LRPS Distinction
Photo of the day: https://www.whisperingcat.co.uk/wp/photo-of-the-day-2025/
Website: https://www.whisperingcat.co.uk/wp/
DPReview gallery: https://www.dpreview.com/galleries/0286305481
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmillier/ (very old!)

Boundary conditions, real and imagined, should always be challenged.

I came to this particular forum because of what has become my "dream camera" the GFX100RF. The A7CR should have been my dream camera, but it falls short because of the ridiculous grip I needed to add to it to have it work for me. Adding the grip completly throws of the aesthetic, and makes the camera less desirable to shoot unless I have nothing else to use. The exception is that it is an exceptional video producing piece of equipment. This plus the option to change lenses should have made this the ideal camera, BUT it wasn't "flat".





What does this have to do with boundaries? Well a MF camera that is slower than a full frame without IBIS, and costs more, has several boundaries that would prevent it from being an excellent everyday carry camera for documenting life.



Rather than boundaries, I have found them to be instruments to help me make the most out of 100MP sensor. The "boundaries" become gateways to using the camera in a way not common to those affected by traditional MF boundaries. 4k video, digital stabilization, crops, different ratios, all in real time open one up to creative options that one can share quicker than one can using traditional post processing methods. AND you can do this without discarding the the traditional ways.



My a7cr produces photos that are remarkable, my RF produces far more remarkable photos because it doesn't have the boundaries of tradition, and because of that it has more opportunities to take remarkable pictures.

JimKasson said:

Many photographers are also musicians. I do not know exactly why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the structured interplay between intuition and craft that both arts require. In music, as in photography, boundary conditions define the creative space.

Stripped of overtones and chords for simplicity, music is a series of pitches and durations. In a world with no boundary conditions, any note could follow any other note, at any duration, with no organizing structure. But if you have ever heard purely random pitches and rhythms, you know how unsatisfying that can be. It becomes noise, not music.

Western music is built on a system of scales, organized into octaves based on the twelfth root of two. From the twelve tones in an octave, composers select subsets, typically five or seven notes, to form a working scale for a piece. They select a key from a limited set of them. They adopt a time signature. These choices limit their freedom, but in doing so, they define a space where structure and surprise can coexist. Even jazz, often considered the most freeform of musical genres, works within these same boundaries. The magic of jazz is often in how the artist dances near the edge of those constraints, without fully abandoning them.

Click to expand...

I like this take more than your original post...

Funny you mention the western music system (I have played violin/viola for over a decade as a child, and have recently started the guitar), I have always responded to the odd time signatures and discordant notes in pieces (Think Coltrane's Ascension and Om), more than traditional music flows.

I think one gets to a point where they are less concerned about boundaries, and more concerned about the simple pleasures. I find that a lot of eclectic personalities, know the boundaries and choose to ignore them because that is where the real pleasure is located. I think there is so much more adventure and release when one colors outside the lines (or plays in their own key or rhythm).

jhunna said:

JimKasson said:

Many photographers are also musicians. I do not know exactly why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the structured interplay between intuition and craft that both arts require. In music, as in photography, boundary conditions define the creative space.

Stripped of overtones and chords for simplicity, music is a series of pitches and durations. In a world with no boundary conditions, any note could follow any other note, at any duration, with no organizing structure. But if you have ever heard purely random pitches and rhythms, you know how unsatisfying that can be. It becomes noise, not music.

Western music is built on a system of scales, organized into octaves based on the twelfth root of two. From the twelve tones in an octave, composers select subsets, typically five or seven notes, to form a working scale for a piece. They select a key from a limited set of them. They adopt a time signature. These choices limit their freedom, but in doing so, they define a space where structure and surprise can coexist. Even jazz, often considered the most freeform of musical genres, works within these same boundaries. The magic of jazz is often in how the artist dances near the edge of those constraints, without fully abandoning them.

Click to expand...

I like this take more than your original post...

Funny you mention the western music system (I have played violin/viola for over a decade as a child, and have recently started the guitar), I have always responded to the odd time signatures and discordant notes in pieces (Think Coltrane's Ascension and Om), more than traditional music flows.

I think one gets to a point where they are less concerned about boundaries, and more concerned about the simple pleasures. I find that a lot of eclectic personalities, know the boundaries and choose to ignore them because that is where the real pleasure is located. I think there is so much more adventure and release when one colors outside the lines (or plays in their own key or rhythm).

Click to expand...

But do you play every note with a pitch or duration that is not related in any system to the notes that preceded of will follow it? If A is 440 Hz, do you play notes that are 805 and 1580 Hz? Is the duration of every bar unrelated to the bars before and after?

You say you playing odd time signatures. Like 5/4 or 7/8 or 11/16? That's fine, but that implies that you are playing in a time signature, which is a constraint.

--
https://blog.kasson.com

JimKasson said:

Rand 47 said:

JimKasson said:

In the early years of aviation, many European efforts, particularly in France, focused on inherent stability. The idea was that a flying machine should behave like a boat or a carriage: it should go where it was pointed and resist disturbances. The Wright Brothers, by contrast, approached flight as an inherently unstable process that required active control by the pilot at all times, more like balancing on a bicycle than steering a cart. Their breakthrough came not just from building an airframe or an engine, but from devising a system of three-axis control that let the pilot constantly correct the plane’s motion in pitch, roll, and yaw.

When the Wrights demonstrated their Flyer in Europe (notably at Le Mans in 1908), the flight world was stunned, not just by the duration and control of the flight, but by the apparent deliberate instability of the aircraft. What had once been assumed to be a requirement, that the machine must be inherently stable, was revealed to be a boundary condition of the problem that the Wrights had consciously rejected.

This is an illustration of how progress often comes not just from solving a problem within its perceived constraints, but from questioning whether those constraints are real or self-imposed.

Click to expand...

And, here’s an example of a completely artificial boundary condition that cannot be overcome, or ignored, without consequences. Fire engines are red. There’s no particular reason for this. The first fire engine in the US was blue. But it’s become a boundary condition of sorts. The most visible color, ergo the safest for visibility while responding Code 3, is international lime yellow-green. Many “progressive” fire departments started buying equipment in this color. The public failed to yield right of way, and ran into them more often than red ones. The artificial boundary condition was/is that people expect fire equipment to be RED.

Click to expand...

QWERTY

Click to expand...

Funny. I was going to mention the fact that QWERTY keyboards are not materially slower to use than Dvorak keyboards.

Doppler9000 said:

Funny. I was going to mention the fact that QWERTY keyboards are not materially slower to use than Dvorak keyboards.

Click to expand...

For me, they are faster. There's a learning curve that inhibits Dvorak adaptation.

JimKasson said:

Doppler9000 said:

Funny. I was going to mention the fact that QWERTY keyboards are not materially slower to use than Dvorak keyboards.

Click to expand...

For me, they are faster. There's a learning curve that inhibits Dvorak adaptation.

Click to expand...

In the military I was trained as a cryptographer. All of the equipment was keyboard driven. I’d never typed before going to crypto school. 8 weeks, 8 hours a day, and it was 100 wpm w/o error or ever looking at the keyboard. It’s the only thing the military did for me that has lasting value, perhaps any value at all. If I had to learn another layout by touch, at this stage of my life, it would be downright awful. Funny thing is, that makes me an “unknowing” victim of an artificial boundary condition that I’d never even thought to think of as one.

It’s “everywhere!” LOL

Rand

Hi,

Unless it is QWERTZ.....

Stan

jhunna said:

Funny you mention the western music system (I have played violin/viola for over a decade as a child, and have recently started the guitar), I have always responded to the odd time signatures and discordant notes in pieces (Think Coltrane's Ascension and Om), more than traditional music flows.

I think one gets to a point where they are less concerned about boundaries, and more concerned about the simple pleasures. I find that a lot of eclectic personalities, know the boundaries and choose to ignore them because that is where the real pleasure is located. I think there is so much more adventure and release when one colors outside the lines (or plays in their own key or rhythm).

Click to expand...

Western music is deeply shaped by boundary conditions. These constraints both limit and define the musical possibilities available to composers and performers. Far from being restrictive in a negative sense, they provide a structure that makes music recognizable, communicable, and emotionally powerful. They define the musical grammar that composers work within, and skilled musicians often find their greatest creativity not in escaping the rules, but in exploring them deeply.

The foundation of most Western music is the chromatic scale, which consists of eleven distinct pitches per octave. These pitches are logarithmically spaced, meaning that each step in the scale corresponds to a frequency ratio of the twelfth root of two. If you multiply a frequency by that number twelve times, you arrive at exactly twice the original frequency, which defines the octave. This system, known as equal temperament, allows instruments to play in any key while preserving consistent harmonic relationships.

From this twelve-tone foundation, composers select subsets to form scales. The most common are the seven-note diatonic scales, such as the major and natural minor. These scales are familiar to Western ears and form the basis for centuries of musical tradition. Mathematically, one could imagine a seven-note scale built from intervals based on the eighth root of two, which would divide the octave more evenly. But music composed from such a scale would likely sound strange or ungrounded to someone accustomed to conventional Western tuning. The chromatic scale has become the default vocabulary, and departing from it requires intentionality and often a specialized audience.

Western music is generally organized using time signatures based on powers of two. Examples include 2/4, 4/4, and 8/8. These signatures govern how musical time is subdivided and how phrases are grouped. There are exceptions, of course, including compound and additive meters, but these are understood as deviations from a well-established norm. It is possible to construct time signatures based on ternary or other numeric systems, but such music would feel irregular or unanchored to Western listeners. The regular pulse of a 4/4 measure is not just a convenience. It is a shared frame of reference that allows coordination between musicians and builds expectations in the listener.

Even jazz, often held up as a freer and more spontaneous genre, works within these boundaries. A jazz musician improvises within a chord progression. The rhythm section adheres to a time signature, even if syncopation and swing complicate the pulse. The creativity lies in bending the rules without breaking them, in exploring the space inside a structure rather than ignoring it altogether.

Musical boundary conditions, like those in mathematics, photography, or engineering, do not just constrain creativity. They enable it. The rules define a space where creativity can flourish. If music were composed without any shared pitch system or rhythmic structure, it would be difficult to perform, hard to listen to, and nearly impossible to communicate. The more deeply one understands the constraints, the more interesting the work that can be done within them.

jhunna said:

JimKasson said:

QWERTY

Click to expand...

Perhaps the ultimate artificial boundary...

Click to expand...

Language itself is probably the ultimate boundary condition.

An extreme example are anumeric languages, which do not have words for individual numbers but only for generic quantities like "one", "few", "many".

Apparently, speakers of these languages have difficulties in performing tasks involving numbers, e.g. one-to-one matching of two groups of objects if they can't see both groups at the same time.

PS @JimKasson, I feel you missed an opportunity here, thread should have been "Boundary conditions, real and imaginary"

JimKasson said:

jhunna said:

JimKasson said:

Many photographers are also musicians. I do not know exactly why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the structured interplay between intuition and craft that both arts require. In music, as in photography, boundary conditions define the creative space.

Stripped of overtones and chords for simplicity, music is a series of pitches and durations. In a world with no boundary conditions, any note could follow any other note, at any duration, with no organizing structure. But if you have ever heard purely random pitches and rhythms, you know how unsatisfying that can be. It becomes noise, not music.

Western music is built on a system of scales, organized into octaves based on the twelfth root of two. From the twelve tones in an octave, composers select subsets, typically five or seven notes, to form a working scale for a piece. They select a key from a limited set of them. They adopt a time signature. These choices limit their freedom, but in doing so, they define a space where structure and surprise can coexist. Even jazz, often considered the most freeform of musical genres, works within these same boundaries. The magic of jazz is often in how the artist dances near the edge of those constraints, without fully abandoning them.

Click to expand...

I like this take more than your original post...

Funny you mention the western music system (I have played violin/viola for over a decade as a child, and have recently started the guitar), I have always responded to the odd time signatures and discordant notes in pieces (Think Coltrane's Ascension and Om), more than traditional music flows.

I think one gets to a point where they are less concerned about boundaries, and more concerned about the simple pleasures. I find that a lot of eclectic personalities, know the boundaries and choose to ignore them because that is where the real pleasure is located. I think there is so much more adventure and release when one colors outside the lines (or plays in their own key or rhythm).

Click to expand...

But do you play every note with a pitch or duration that is not related in any system to the notes that preceded of will follow it? If A is 440 Hz, do you play notes that are 805 and 1580 Hz? Is the duration of every bar unrelated to the bars before and after?

You say you playing odd time signatures. Like 5/4 or 7/8 or 11/16? That's fine, but that implies that you are playing in a time signature, which is a constraint.

Click to expand...

Unless it is completely free form there will always be some constraints. My original comment was related to traditional musical boundaries. You can find traditional boundaries everywhere, and sometimes they are boring.

briggart said:

jhunna said:

JimKasson said:

QWERTY

Click to expand...

Perhaps the ultimate artificial boundary...

Click to expand...

Language itself is probably the ultimate boundary condition.

An extreme example are anumeric languages, which do not have words for individual numbers but only for generic quantities like "one", "few", "many".

Apparently, speakers of these languages have difficulties in performing tasks involving numbers, e.g. one-to-one matching of two groups of objects if they can't see both groups at the same time.

PS @JimKasson, I feel you missed an opportunity here, thread should have been "Boundary conditions, real and imaginary"

Click to expand...

Good one. Love math jokes. Love puns.

Hi,

Back in the days of landlines, which I still had one of despite having switched to cellular, I had an old answering machine. Since it was really just still there in case of a power outage - using a line powered phone - I could mess around a bit with the outgoing message:

I played a couple tones like the phone company used and said:

The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone ninety degrees and dial again.

i had removed the circuit that played the Go Beep, so usually there was just a short message recorded of the caller hanging up. But, and more often than I expected, there would be a message similar to:

I rotated the phone and redialled but I still get the same error message.

Stan Disbrow said:

Hi,

Back in the days of landlines, which I still had one of despite having switched to cellular, I had an old answering machine. Since it was really just still there in case of a power outage - using a line powered phone - I could mess around a bit with the outgoing message:

I played a couple tones like the phone company used and said:

The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone ninety degrees and dial again.

i had removed the circuit that played the Go Beep, so usually there was just a short message recorded of the caller hanging up. But, and more often than I expected, there would be a message similar to:

I rotated the phone and redialled but I still get the same error message.

Click to expand...

There's a Laplace Transform joke in there somewhere.

Boundaries are necessary, they are the starting point for dreams.