The Twelve Days of Christmas!

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When I was still in high school, my siblings and I decided to sing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" for our parents' wedding anniversary!  I was learning a lot of music in school, and I had become fairly confident with writing 4-part harmony, so once the holidays came round, I frantically ruled my own manuscript paper, and made the arrangement of the popular carol.  Let's face it: there are only nine distinct bars of music that are repeated over and over again, so it was not very difficult to work out, and not difficult for my siblings and me to learn.  It was a screaming success, back then, and it was performed again and again at holiday family gatherings, but I had all but forgotten it, until my Uncle recently played me a cassette recording of it!  Back then, it had been taped on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and had been re-recorded into the cassette player about fifteen years ago.

I decided to transcribe it into notation in my computer, and here it is!

Notes:

(1) The fabulous glissando in the 11^th day was intended to be played by a trombone!  Generally speaking, the group on the left channel was intended to be flute, clarinet, trombone, and bassoon, to fill in the tenor, but for some reason the trombone sound was not smooth enough, so I ended up using a bass clarinet.  Unfortunately, the bass clarinet can't really do a glissando, so it sounds a bit silly.

(2) Initially, as I said, the piece was intended to be sung, and when I put it into the computer last week, I imagined it being sung by a choir, with the verses being alternated between three quartets, with everyone joining in for the opening lines, and "And a partridge in a pear tree!"  But it was too difficult to come up with three contrasting instrumental quartets, so I'm making do with just two.  I must say that the double-reeds on the left channel really sound wonderful.

(3) Notice the use of staccato.  I think I've overdone it, but it does add something to the performance, and makes it a little more familiar when compared with the sung lyrics.

Do enjoy it, and feel free to use this arrangement anytime.  I'll post the sheet music somewhere convenient, if anyone is interested.

Arch

Fox News's Megyn Kelly states that Jesus (and Santa Claus) were White Men

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The whole concept of race, as exemplified by the question of whether a given person is white (or perhaps I should put that in quotes: "white") is shrouded in vagueness.  Is Megyn Kelly white?  She would probably feel very put upon if we were to conclude that the issue is in doubt, but for people like Ms Kelly, it is desperately important to be classified as white, which is why she is probably such a prominent figure at Fox News.  They need people who see things in black and white, pun intended, and Megyn is cute, and she has a cute name, so, there you go!

It seems to be, without getting too technical, that the label "belonging to the white race" means, today, that someone has a majority of genes inherited from the peoples of Western Europe.  This, unfortunately, excludes the Hebrew peoples, among whom we consider the historical Jesus to have been born.  Israeli people of today, of course, have a significant proportion of European ancestry, courtesy of their protracted exile in Europe.  While Hebrew folks of the Year Dot were probably of at least partly Caucasian ethnicity, they were hardly any more white than Mahmoud Abbas or Benjamin Netanyahu, and it is to Ms Kelly's credit that her concept of whiteness stretches so wide.  Incidentally, Mr Netanyahu probably has more European ancestry than he cares to admit.

I think most rational people, Christian or otherwise, are just as concerned about any attempts to classify Jesus according to American ethnical categories as Megyn Kelly is upset about Jesus being anything but white.  Jesus's color is entirely in the eyes of the beholder, and the Romans of Jesus's time would have seen Jesus as most definitely black, if they were familiar with the concept of color (and they probably were).

From an social-anthropological perspective, the particularly pernicious twist given to the somewhat naive concept of color in the late seventeenth century in England and Western Europe, and elevated to almost maniacal heights in some parts of the US, almost certainly served as a justification of slavery, especially among Christian intellectuals, who may have been secretly troubled by the morals of the practice.  In any case, the convenience of racism was eagerly embraced by people of lesser intellectual capacity, so much so that it became part and parcel of their self-esteem.  Today, a century removed from the economic necessity of the fiction of racial differences, the concept of race is still a major part of the concept-world of many influential people, such as Megyn Kelly, evidently, who appear to use race as one of the ways they use to explain the world to themselves and each other.  Ms Kelly was at pains to emphasize to young people in her audience that, in fact, both Santa Claus and Jesus were white men.  What does that mean?  Perhaps it means that, despite the fact that our President is black, and seems to be accomplishing a lot more than all the white presidents who preceded him, we still have white people to be proud of?  This appears to give us a rather dismal glimpse into what goes on inside Megyn Kelly's confused head!

Let me repeat to anyone who is still confused: White people have nothing to be ashamed of.  Failures of white folks and successes of black folks have less to do with their race than with their individual motivations, their personal histories and circumstances, and their upbringing and education.  Any mental adjusting Megyn Kelly accomplishes is not likely to be very useful to most members of US society.

Health Care

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The amount of hype, both pro and con, concerning Obamacare/ACA is stupefying.  I'm not making fun of it; after all, this is one of the boldest moves in cultural advancement since Franklin Roosevelt was president, in the USA.  Some folks see it as wrong-headed, and a precursor to a Byzantine government bureaucracy that will destroy every cent of discretionary income anyone might hope to earn in the future.  This fear is completely justified, because Americans have, among them, some of the most creative gangsters outside Russia, and they will surely find ways to siphon off some of the money that has to go back and forth in the Health Care industry of the future, just as they did for food stamps, alcohol, firearms and tobacco, and, best of all, drugs.  (Drugs are so much fun that the CIA got into it, and never got out.)

One problem is that health care professionals command such high salaries.  Medical college is far more expensive, ounce for ounce, than other sorts of education, and everything to do with health care is just more expensive, by association.  A friend of mine recently said that the profit margin for certain insurance companies is around 3.5%, which they know from studying the public information on the companies.  But of course!  Most of the money is eaten up by the high salaries, which are all classified as expenses.

Health professionals in other countries are not paid as much, even allowing for the different standards of living.  When one examines the process through which a kid goes to become a doctor, you begin to see why.

First, a would-be doctor has to get a bachelor's degree.  It need not be in science; in theory, a philosophy major could become an MD, provided he or she takes the required coursework.  Many of these kids are driven by a combination of relentless parental pressure, an insatiable greed for money, a need for social advancement, and a modicum of altruism.

Secondly, because of the high admission standards of the leading medical schools, these students apply a great deal of pressure on their instructors to give them high grades, pointing out that all the extra coursework they're taking is not because they're intrinsically interested in it, but because it is needed by the fact that they're Pre-Med, a state that has lost some of its shine in recent decades (but of course, these kids haven't got the memo).  They must "take" college physics, which means they must also "take" Calculus, something about which roughly half of them care less than nothing.  But those of them who can drive their sheer hate of the subject into maniacal memorization actually do better than physics majors, which shows that hate is a more powerful force than love!  Heh-heh.

Thirdly, now that a vast host of students are applying for entrance into Medical School, these schools can demand almost unbelievably high admission standards, in terms of coursework and grade point averages.  They don't care that the applicants despise practically everything they've ever learned; they know that the successful applicants can take an enormous amount of academic punishment and bullying, which makes it easy for their teachers, who need not put a great deal of effort into the process of teaching.  Luckily for us, graduating competent doctors is a major deal, because the reputation of the school enables the students to be more easily employed.

Fourthly, Medical School professors are paid almost as high as football coaches, and have to carry, I don't doubt, a lot of mal-teaching insurance, which probably contributes to the fact that tuition at medical school is very costly.

Fifthly, students who don't make the grade for acceptance into Medical School end up elsewhere in the Health Care Industry, and because of likelihood of litigation in any branch of the industry, all these people carry their own malpractice insurance, and all of them demand high salaries.

Sixthly, possibly because they deal so closely with people in the medical professions, those employed by the Insurance Industry have historically commanded astronomical salaries.  A lot of the money that consumers pay into health insurance actually stays in the insurance companies, so that while shareholders may not net much out of their holdings in these companies, they're a very dependable source of income.

Finally, once a doctor establishes himself in some location, he or she finds, to his or her astonishment, that the health system administrators make a lot more money than the actual doctors.  The administrators, after all, must negotiate with insurance companies exactly how the moolah is divided up, and the remuneration of all concerned parties is most definitely proportional to the moolah concerned.  Not included in this list are the malpractice lawyers and ambulance-chasers of all stripes, who make money on a per-disaster basis!  It is a lovely win-lose situation that can hardly be improved upon.

[More later]

The Magnificat: The Hymn of Mary, the mother of Jesus

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Olivia Hussey as Mary

The Magnificat is a hymn, a sort of poetic declaration, by Mary the mother of Jesus, on the occasion of visiting a cousin, Elizabeth, who was to be the mother of John the Baptist.  It is interesting to study the words attributed to the womenfolk of Jesus: his mother Mary; Mary and Martha of Magdala, especially Mary, who was according to some accounts actually the wife of Jesus, and an important leader of the early church; the female relatives, according to legend, of Mary the mother of Jesus: her mother Anna, and her cousin Elizabeth.  Very little has come down to us about these last two, but there are a number of references to Mary Magdalene, if not direct quotes, enough to give us a small idea of what she was like.

There seem to be (at least) two sorts of people in America:  Those who call themselves Christians, but who are familiar with little of their holy book, The Bible; and those who are outside established Christianity, atheists and agnostics, who have grown up within Christian culture, and are, in fact, more familiar with the contents of, and the context for, much of the Bible.  I count myself among the latter.  As I was growing up, as I was saying to my wife just this morning, I found it a chore and a nuisance to read the Bible, or to have anything to do with it.  Somewhere along the way I decided that it was misguided in the extreme to believe in any sort of divine intervention in the affairs of humans, and it seems to me that it was at that moment that I found my affection for the Bible gradually growing!  It is impossible to actually hate a book written as a cooperative venture by so many, with such varied experiences, motivations and intentions.  I am no expert, but I understand that large chunks of the so-called Old Testament was written under the supervision of priests, around the time of the Exile in Babylon.  (Evidently a large portion of the Jewish people were taken as slaves to Babylon after a particularly successful conquest by the Babylonians.)  Nevertheless, despite the imposition of a particular political view on large portions of the Old Testament, it is difficult to believe that a single individual was able to make all the various books in the collection conform to his view, which makes for just a little more believability of events in it than would otherwise be the case.  But there are bigger problems with it, namely selection.  Over the course of time, various authorities have enforced which books are included in all the sub-collections of the Bible, and the history we have received is more skewed by the omissions in the collection than in what remains in it.

In the light of the checkered history of the book, it is highly amusing that fundamentalist Christians (or any Christians who believe in the veracity --if that’s the word I want here-- of the Bible) accept it as divinely inspired.  Perhaps they believe it to be so precisely because it is a compendium, and for reasons similar to the ones I offered, feel that it is a valuable document for understanding what Christianity is all about, or at least Theistic Christianity.  There are only apologetic terms for the rest of us who admire the life and the teachings of Jesus, except for the distortions that we believe have been deliberately introduced into the New Testament, to suggest that Jesus considered himself divine in any sense.  Or at least in a literal sense; after all, anyone can be divine in a metaphorical sense, as the Hindus are happy to point out.

Some decades ago, the Magnificat enjoyed greater popularity, since it was read as a sort of anti-establishment oration.  Here it is, according to one translation:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly!

He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty!

He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children for ever!

In simple English, it goes like this:

1. “Praise god, because he has noticed me, I who am nobody special!

2. “My name will go down in history, because I have been blessed by god.

3. “God has always been good to those who fear and obey him.

4. “He has shown his strength, and confounded the proud!

5. “He has humbled the powerful, and exalted the lowly.

6. “He has fed the hungry, but denied anything to the rich.

7.  “He has come to the rescue of his servant Israel,

         as he promised to Abraham and his descendants for ever!”

Lines 1 and 2 seem in line with hymns by women of Asia, to my knowledge, in the culture of the times when a proud woman was an abomination.  (I don’t know enough of the anthropology of New Testament times to be able to categorically state that this is true of women’s poetry of that era, and I’m sure Biblical scholars will be quick to point this out.)  They do seem to show that Mary was impressed with the importance of her unborn child, or that the writer of this poem, if not Mary herself, was at pains to represent Mary as being so impressed.

Lines 3, 4 and 5 are simple lines of praise in the tradition of the Psalms, but they begin the pattern of the next several lines which praise god for confounding the proud and humiliating the powerful, and supporting and supplying the weak and the meek.

At the time of the Roman Occupation, of course, as we learn from this same New Testament (and other Roman historical documents, such as Herodotus), the rich and powerful of Judaea were only as successful as their ability and willingness to collaborate with the Roman conquerors, and the poor had only their hope in god on their side.  The venom of any public utterance a woman would dare to make would have to be aimed not at the Romans, but at their own oppressive religious leaders, and to that extent, line 4 supports the belief that this hymn was composed by a woman, or was very carefully written as to be plausibly in the voice of a woman.

Despite the fact that the content of the hymn might have been entirely for the purpose of underlining that it was by whom it was purported to be, the subversive tone of it resonated with the authority-despising Christian youth of the 1960's, and it was a key text of the social gospel of that era.  It must have resonated even more among Korean, Filipino and Japanese Christians of that time, because of how Asian Christian women identified with the status of women in the time of Jesus.  It does appear that Asian women were more emancipated than their American counterparts of that time, and even today, in certain ways.  Witness that women have emerged as elected national leaders in Asia, while they are yet to do so in the USA.  However, US social anthropologists have been eager to point out reasons other than simple emancipation for this phenomenon.  (One very unfortunate reason must be pointed out: women of the Asian economic elite have been relatively far more emancipated than their poorer Asian cousins, and of course, most women who run for public office are generally economically well off.)

But, having said all that, it most certainly seems to me that this hymn was in fact written by a woman, and I just feel that at least some key phrases of it must have originated with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and must have been made popular by word of mouth in the early community of Jesus’s disciples!

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Allegro: From Brisk to Absolutely Frenzied

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In the Classical Era, and even the Baroque, the important opening and closing movements of most multi-movement works had a tempo (speed) indication of Allegro.  The Italian word means at least two different things: bright and brisk, or cheerful and merry.  In music, as an indication of tempo, it has come to mean fast, though it's understood not to be very fast.  Note that often, in Baroque Suites, the fast opening movement, the Overture, has a few "sentences" that are to be played Largo, that is, slowly and grandly, after which the briskness takes over.  Beethoven's famous Fifth Symphony, too, has such a largo opening, but evidently there is no actual special tempo indication for those opening phrases; there are only pauses after each five-note phrase.

Simply because of their slow pace, slow movements are easier to assimilate and appreciate.  They're often lyrical, that is, more important for their simple beauty than their deep feeling, though just as often, slow movements are full of feeling.  To avoid contradicting myself too much, let me just conjecture that the slow pace gives us more time to unravel the music in our minds, and so we tend to remember them in detail --at least the more interesting parts.  Fast movements, in contrast, have more notes (as someone is famously to have remarked to Mozart), and are more distinguished by their rhythmic energy than by the beauty of their themes.  But, again, many of Mozart's allegros are undeniably beautiful.  In this post, I'm only trying to draw your attention to allegros because I tend to usually talk about slow music almost exclusively.

One of the pieces I have been playing incessantly in recent days (to the annoyance of my family, no doubt) is the Fugue in A minor for the organ (BWV 543, fugue).  Here it is, played by E. Power Biggs.  Warning: there is a commercial before the clip begins.  This is a long movement, and not particularly in the same family of energetic compositions as I'm trying to describe today, so you might want to skip it.  But I do love this piece, because, as I have said before, it gives the feeling of a massive spinning object; it would be ideal to represent a spinning planet, for instance, in my humble opinion, of course.  But then, so would the Blue Danube.

The speed is actually slower than allegro; probably Andante, "At an easy pace."  The large number of short notes makes it appear as if it is being played fast, but measured by the rate at which the harmony changes, it is quite slow.  As many of you must remember, I transcribed this piece into notation, and then had it played by percussion instruments (a marimba and a xylophone, etc).  It seems a little more brisk in that instrumentation, because of the rhythm track I added, with great disrespect.

But the piece that set me off thinking about Allegros in general was the last movement from the Bach violin concerto for two violins, in D minor.  The movement begins with a startlingly syncopated entry by the violin section, and the energy never lets up for a moment.

The big propelling force of the movement is a series of very emphatic three-note phrases in bass that seem to go on forever.  This particular performance dates, I believe from the 1970s, though in order to get past the rigorous recording identifying routine of YouTube, the person who posted it has not revealed any details of the performance.  Performances of a few years later are likely to be faster, and even more energetic.

Aha, I found one.  This video quality is poor, but it's nevertheless very enjoyable.  (I love Ms Podger's dimples, and they're two very charming performers, all told.  The announcer goes into rhapsodies at the end of the piece, so keep watching.)

Another universal favorite among Bach's Allegros is the opening movement of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto for Flute, Violin, Harpsichord and orchestra (BWV 1050), which was enormously popular even among classical music non-lovers some decades ago.  In an earlier post I linked to a performance by Richter and his troops, but here is a performance by Diego Fasolis, with Il Barrochisti.  Equally good, from an earlier era, is the performance by Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert, possibly the best all-round performance of all six Brandenburg Concertos.

From the Symphonic repertoire, an allegro that comes to mind is the opening movement of the Eroica Symphony by Beethoven.  There are two crashing opening chords, followed by a crazy whirlwind of sheer energy.  When I was a kid, I loved the Fifth Symphony, but if I had to do it all over again, I would probably be persuaded to "favorite" the Eroica (Symphony No. 3 in E Flat).

Symphonies, as you will probably agree, get their fame because of the drama contained in them, and for this reason even a movement marked Allegro is likely to have its stops and starts, which detracts from the continuous sort of momentum that I'm trying to bring to your attention here.  The last movements of symphonies are typically marked presto, which means very fast, and of course these are more likely to be good choices for playing loud on a bright sunny day, to knock the socks off your neighbors.  (Or listen to with your headphones, and perforate your eardrums.)  But, you know, both Mozart and Bach managed to write Prestos that were quite sedate and well-behaved.  This is absolutely not what I'm looking for, but it is true nevertheless.

Come to think of it, the last movement of Mozart's Concerto No. 23 in A major is marked Allegro Assai (very fast, but obviously not as fast as presto), and is just the sort of Allegro that I'm trying to bring to your attention!  Can you imagine being a fantastic pianist, playing this piece with a smile at the audience?  How does he do it, everyone is thinking, while you're thinking, they have no idea how long it took.

The only clip of this movement I could find free of advertisements is this one.  The playing is great, and it illustrates what I was trying to describe very well.  A good piece played moderately competently is all I ask for.  (There is a possibility that the actual performance is by Chick Corea, or the performer may have borrowed them from Chick Correa's performance on CD.  The video is so bad that I can't tell.)

A well-known Presto is the overture to The Marriage of Figaro.  (I inserted the first page from the score at right, just for fun.)  The recording featured by Steve Smalin is among the best out there: fast and incisive playing by some anonymous orchestra.  The unison introduction is now legendary, and widely copied; not very successfully, in my opinion.  I have to admit that this movement almost defines what Presto is in my mind, though other Mozart Prestos (or is it presti?) come very close.

The last movement of Beethoven's delightful Sonata Pathetique is one of my favorites, and anyone who has kept reading this blog knows this well!  I'm a dog of few tricks, and keep putting those few tricks before my readers repeatedly, hoping that they will connect with them eventually!

Well, that's all I have for the moment; I have to go administer a test to a bunch of reluctant undergraduates.  (When I tell them that I loved tests as a kid, they look at me as though I've got a hole in my head.  Once I had come to terms with the fact that I just didn't do brilliantly on tests, I began to enjoy them, especially since I realized that I could actually figure some of the material out in real time, as they say.  Figuring something out in real time, of course, is something my students would almost never try to do, except for a few reckless souls, who don't really have a prayer.)

I try to explain to everyone that education is about trying to understand the world, and understand people, even if you start out despising them.  As a youth I could never quite get why some of the adults I so admired just looked at the world with rose-tinted glasses.  Their glasses were so utterly and invariably half-full (as opposed to being half empty, that is) that I just wanted to strangle them.  But here I am, doing the same thing.  Make no mistake: I know precisely how the world falls short of where and what it should be, but I still mostly love it.  And loving music and art and theatre, of course, is part of embracing the whole crazy pile of junk our planet and its inhabitants has become!  YouTube and Facebook, and all the things we love to hate are all part of the fascinating kaleidoscope of maniacal foolishness that is the world in which we live.

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Education in America Part II: College

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Dear Abby:

Last week I waxed poetic on the theme that American Education is in trouble, following up on several earlier posts that concluded pretty much the same thing.  Trying to improvise a fee-for-service version of the world’s most important activity: educating the young, the US has found, to its dismay that, businessmen on up, everyone wants to make a buck from the woes of the Education disaster, but no one really knows how to fix it.  The party that has to gain is The American People itself.  But The American People has no voice, and does not have the expertise, and last of all, does not have the political power or the will to change the game.

Turning to College education, our friend Rebecca Schuman writing in Slate magazine has a scathing indictment of tertiary education in the Greatest Nation On Earth.  She says that it is overpriced, and often deceitful.  The deceit comes in certain colleges that have been set up to provide what they consider a utilitarian college education for those who cannot afford the inflated price tags of typical institutions.  But these schools only deliver a mockery of education.  She calculates that, on the average, the college degree cost has increased 500% from what it was 19 years ago.  Compounded annually—I’m delighted that I can do this—it works out to an annual rate of increase of —just a second, please— 8.84%.  This is a lot more than the overall annual rate of inflation.

She knows what she’s talking about.  Where does the money go?  Not to professors.  To (1) Presidents and administrators, who demand wages comparable to CEO’s of big businesses, (2) expensive cosmetic touches —landscaping and pretty buildings, and (3) comfortable housing and expensive facilities for the students, who, she says, are more than likely to trash them anyway!  Read the (very short) Slate feature, for the full impact of Rebecca Schuman’s wit.

Colleges are well practiced at explaining these expenditures.  Presidents and administrators are hired in order to generate funds for the school.  In fact the only function of many college presidents is to give an occasional speech, and make the rounds, collecting money from alumni and well-wishers.  The grounds and buildings, and the fancy facilities (including football fields) are to attract rich parents to enroll their offspring at the institutions concerned.

It is easy to believe that this sort of thinking presumes a very low estimate of the intelligence of parents of prospective students, but the strategy seems to work at many schools.  Parents often judge the quality of a school by the attractiveness of the buildings.  Rebecca S suggests that schools should go on a revenue diet, because kids are happy to get away from home anyway, and will be perfectly happy to camp out practically anywhere.  On the other hand, she probably underestimates just how much of an attraction the opportunity to play varsity sports is, certainly among some of the muscleheads who provide most of the dollars of typical colleges.  Yes; kids will actually pay to play football in college, and yes, girls will actually pay to attend a school with football players.  I wish it were not so.

It was just today over supper that I was deploring the situation in which I found myself in Calculus 3.  I was trying to explain to my class why something was so.  But a significant number of students gave me the distinct impression that all they wanted to know was what to do.  (They were impatiently waiting for me to tell them what the next step is, rather than to guide them towards arriving at the next step themselves.)  Now, knowing what to do is just a small part of the whole task set before a student.  In a technical school, all you need to know is: what to do.  Just turn the wrench three turns, or whatever.  But in college, the faculty wants to tell you what the situation is, or what makes the setup be the way it is, which in turn requires doing whatever needs to be done.  But the mindset of some of my students tells me that they belong not even in technical school, but in a factory, with an instruction book, preferably one with pictures.  I can’t deal with this “Just the answers, man,” attitude.  Education is not just a collection of recipes.  Only amateur cooks are interested merely in recipes.  Is it surprising that education is in such a sorry state, if all the teachers were, in their youth, just interested in recipes?  Why, it is like learning everything from amateur cooks!  Or worse, like a medical school where the students are taught:

Step one: give them an Aspirin, and ask them to call you in the morning.  (If they don’t call, they’re better, or maybe dead.  If they do call, go to step 2.)
Step two: order a whole lot of tests, and have them come back when the results are in.  (If they don’t come back, they’re either dead, or better, or they can’t afford the tests.  If they do come back, go to step 3.)
You get the idea.  Medical practice by recipe!  Thank goodness doctors don’t do this.  Hopefully.

“Disgusted in Pennsylvania”

Education in America: Lots of Differing Views

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I’m most definitely trying to be non-judgmental, and trying to present as balanced a view as possible, but no matter which way you may look at the matter, someone is going to get upset.

Firstly, I had a talk with A, an immigrant who came to the US 40 years ago on the promise of a place as a teacher at an elementary school.  She had lots of adventures teaching second grade, but it left a very negative impression of the level of preparedness of her colleagues, just as products of the education system firstly, and as teachers in their chosen area secondly.

Then I had a talk with B, a brother-in-law, who teaches science in secondary school, who is good at what he does, and loves his work, but has very negative opinions of the administrators at his school.  He teaches in New York State, and because of the Regents' Examinations that are routine in that state, the Federally mandated testing programs do not make him and his fellow teachers anxious.  He concedes that the constant testing gets his colleagues down, essentially because the tests are seen as a way of winnowing out teachers.

Teachers in other countries (C), no matter how tactfully they phrase it, tend to be aghast at the quality of US teachers not because they see them as uninterested in teaching, or unconcerned about their students, but because of the variation in their level of preparedness, echoing the opinion of A above.  Furthermore, there is a general suspicion across the USA (D) that it is not the best students who go into teaching in the US, but the most mediocre.  There is only anecdotal evidence for this; obviously some of the brightest people many of us know—and I know a host of these—are teachers.  But we have to see the statistics.  Is it the case that the brightest among our classmates in college and high school chose to go into occupations other than teaching?  You tell me.

Finally, there is my own observation of my own students, year after year.  One thing I have noticed is that their geometry preparation, to select just one little area, is highly variable.  Instead of actually teaching my students advanced topics in geometry above and beyond what is required of them to teach in high school (which is what is supposed to happen), I find myself trying to make sure that they're not afraid of high school geometry.  It should be possible for me to give them a quick review of high-school geometry in three weeks, and go on to showing them the delights of other topics, such as hyperbolic geometry, projective geometry, and solid geometry, just so that they could have a context for the traditional geometry that they do have to teach someday.  Similarly, in college, a would be high-school history teacher, for instance, must learn history above and beyond the historic facts that they have to deliver in high school.  Can we have an elementary teacher just know his or her mathematics facts up to the twelve-times table, and no more?  We insist that all teachers must have a robust knowledge of algebra, geometry, and, ideally, a little calculus.  But unfortunately, most elementary teachers live in deadly fear of any and all mathematics other than the little arithmetic that they are called upon to teach, and what is more, there is a vast host of citizenry out there whose considered opinion on the matter is that an elementary teacher need not know much more than simple arithmetic.

That's all fine and dandy, but you must know that elementary teachers in most other countries are significantly better prepared in mathematics than the vast majority of elementary teachers in the US.  This is especially true of teachers in Japan, Germany, Finland, and other countries with which we have set out to compete in education excellence.

I hope no particular teacher feels insulted by any of this; unfortunately the variation in teacher quality in the US is enormous.  There are bound to be countless teachers out there who are exceptions to anything I've described above.  But, by the same token, I daresay that there are teachers out there who don’t know their right hands from their left, and who have in their incapable hands the future of any number of future citizens.

What’s the bottom line?

If the US is to improve the quality of it’s schools, the following has to be done.

(1) We cannot privatize education.  We must bring it up from the bottom, because teaching is so poorly paid that it is very likely that it is those in the worst schools that are inspired to teach, and we must make the worst schools better than they are.  We must make all schools better than they are.

(2) We must pay teachers better.  Taxes must be raised, and salaries improved, and teachers must be given the respect that will encourage young people to consider teaching a good career.  Without respect for learning, nothing can happen.

(3) We must break the death-grip that publishers of textbooks have on the schools.  Wonderful texts are available, even in the US, because they are sent abroad by UNESCO and other organizations to be used in the Third World.  They can be used here.

(4) Testing must be continued, but on a voluntary basis.

(5) Testing of Pre-Service teachers must be conducted before they are certified to teach, and after a teacher is hired, it seems appropriate that raises in salary and other benefits may be tied to testing of the teacher.  We do know that teachers of any sort are difficult to find, because the pay is low, and teachers are often treated poorly by students, parents and administration.  But this trick of hiring anyone to be a teacher, and then persecuting them after they’re hired must stop.

Most importantly, I think teacher salaries must be raised gradually to levels competing with any professionals.  If this does not happen, only second-rate candidates will offer to be teachers.  And, as a liberal, I believe that excellence in teaching has to be a national initiative, because otherwise the best in every state will migrate to states with the best jobs, so that no state will have an incentive to improve its schools, for why bother to teach a kid who's going to leave the state anyway?  Teacher salaries should be paid by the Federal Government.

I suppose it's too much to ask.

Arch

Angst in Academia: Professors who Ditch their Jobs

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I take up this topic reluctantly, because I write this Blog not as a member of an academic institution, and most certainly not as a representative of Academe, or one who is in any way typical of the academic.  I see myself more as someone akin to a high-school teacher, albeit a more educated one, especially since my students are more likely to take up a job outside academe than to pursue an academic career.

A posed photograph that accompanied the Slate post

A recent article in Slate magazine by Rebecca Schumann (about whom I know next to nothing, to my shame,) highlights both the large number of professors who leave academia in disgust or dissatisfaction, either before or even after receiving tenure, and the large number of articles these people have written, to explain their reasons.  So much so that Rebecca S. suggests that “Why I Quit Academia” could well become a sub-genre of the American Essay.

I’m admittedly an outsider to the society of professional intellectuals.  I was more interested in what was going on inside the heads of my unworthy students than inside my own head, or even inside the heads of my colleagues.  I have known, in a vague kind of way, that many of those in the humanities (I suppose I ought to capitalize that): Philosophy, Literature, and History (and, at our own institution, Religion, which is a shame,) are accustomed to thinking deeply, and no doubt are convinced that it is better not to think at all than not to think deeply.  They talk of Kafka and Wittgenstein, and are probably acutely concerned about how the thinking of these gentlemen may be translated into something that can apply to the world of today.  But, as I confessed earlier, I am completely devoid of philosophical angst; I was content to know that it was in good hands.

But why are people leaving academe, and why are they making a fuss about it?

There is general belief that in many instances, American universities reward mediocrity than excellence, especially if the mediocrity is accompanied by an easygoing disposition, and the excellence with perhaps an irascible nature.  It is hard to discern whether this opinion is the result of unhappy experiences in seeking tenure, or whether there is a trend in this direction because of the way tenure works and is awarded in typical universities.  Let’s face it: giving tenure to some curmudgeon dooms a department to potentially years of suffering.

There is belief that the trends in the hiring of Administrators disgusts and offends the faculty of many institutions.  Some big universities have hired CEOs of big corporations as their presidents, and to be honest, a lot of universities are beginning to see themselves are being more able to cope with the problems of funding with a corporate boss at its head.  (As I observed in an earlier post, universities have been driven to desperation deliberately by certain vicious elements among political conservatives and certain business interests, and universities don’t often have the insight to see what is happening to them.)

There are issues that were not discussed in Ms Schuman’s post (or article).  Faculty who are concerned with teaching (as opposed to only research) are anxious about whether succeeding generations of incoming students are able to cope with the material they have to offer.  It is irksome to have to review and re-deliver information that should have been absorbed years earlier by students, and to re-teach skills that should have been acquired long before coming into college.  This is what will drive me from the “groves of Academia,” though the hiring practices at my institution could begin to play a role sooner or later.  There is a steady pressure to lower standards that never lets up.

Something that infuriates almost every colleague I know is the attention given to university athletics.  Honestly, the athletics programs at many schools is a source of income, and the old hands in the Admissions Office know that they would have a tough time beating the bushes for prospective freshmen if not for the hordes that want to play football for the school.  Well, f%#$ football, I say.  In the same line of thinking, the relentless marketing that the school needs to deploy grinds me down.  The TV spots, the endless magazines, the constant presence of photographers in the classroom ... all this promotion is undignified at best, and often disgusting.

I can’t do justice to the whole subject of the brain drain that is at the heart of the phenomenon I’m trying to report on, because many of this category of academic took up their fields because of the kind of subject they were in; there was little for a philosopher to do, outside of a university, in a different way than there is little for a mathematician to do outside the mathematics classroom; while I would much rather teach mathematics than have to jockey a calculator for some building contractor, I do have other options.  Leaving academe is not death to me.  And now, it appears, leaving academe was not death to a lot of these others, either.

Still, we have to be concerned.  The university was an essential part, a very special part of the world in which I grew up, just as was the library, the concert hall, or the museum.  It seems desperately important, to me, that the institution of the University should be rescued from extinction, and not by commercializing it, either.  I would suggest that it was the attempt to Free-Enterprise-ify the university that began the spiral of decay that this most recent essay illuminates.  We cannot insist that all members of our society must be productive enough to satisfy some arbitrary criteria.  It does take all sorts.  But can we keep them all in the style to which they’re accustomed?  Why, or why not?  Describe.

Arch.

The Future of the Republican Party after 2013

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The Republican Party as we have known it since the end of the last Century is an uneasy alliance of libertarians (who aren’t familiar with the term), fiscal conservatives (who disapprove of “government run wild,” and unbalanced budgets), Christian conservatives (who oppose abortion, and various medical practices they deem contrary to their religious principles, and, in some extreme cases, teaching Evolution in schools as an accepted theory), and neo-conservatives (a term which has come to stand for those who are eager to establish the USA as the primary military power on the planet).  All of  these groups have forgotten that the only reason they have banded together is because they oppose some principle for which the Democrats have stood.  Of late, the so-called Tea Partyers have received a lot of attention, but they are really people of a poorer economic class than traditional Republicans (who, it seems to me, have traditionally come from the educated upper-middle class), but who have been persuaded that taxes go towards helping poor minorities rather than poor white Americans (which, incidentally, is very far from the truth).  So being a supporter of the Tea Party (which is probably only a party in the loosest sense of the word) is actually more a matter of posturing than philosophical congruency, because it appears to suggest that individual in that group make enough money for their tax bill to be a great burden.

A photograph published in the British tabloid
The Daily Mail

But as the Republican Party regards the extremes to which it is being driven with horror, things are going to change.  Not everyone in the GOP is anxious to win every election at any cost.  In the excitement of election season it might briefly appear that crushing the Democrats, responding to their rhetoric with vicious lies, and smearing their bleeding-heart candidates is an excellent idea.  But Republicans of a more moderate hue, who depend on the Democrats to look after the interests of the poor and indigent, widows and orphans, and the lonely and the unloved, (whose interests are boring, at best, and a nuisance most times,) do not, I believe, have their hearts behind crushing the Democrat Party utterly and setting up the structure of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House in such a way as to allow the GOP to do anything it wants.  (Allowing the GOP to do anything it wants very likely looks more unpleasant by the minute, even to them.)

John McCain is only the most visible Republican to reject the party strategy, dictated by the extreme Right, as unacceptable, and not useful.  As someone said, the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) regulates the Insurance Industry, not Health Care.  The Health Insurance Industry is being viewed more as a national utility, rather than a lightly-regulated business.  Why would anyone be opposed to this move?  Merely to oppose the Democrats.

While I’m not absolutely confident about the prospects of seeing the Republican Party come apart at the seams, it is quite possible.  If the much-talked-about Default comes to be, and if it cannot be successfully pinned on President Obama, then the GOP will have a great deal of mud on its face, and they’re furiously applying detergent to forestall or minimize this mudpack.  Poisoning the well never worked for anyone who wanted to take leadership.

We have to wait and see.

[Added later:

it has just come to light that late at night on September 3oth, the House moved to remove the privilege of any House member to call for a Senate amendment to a House bill to be opened for debate.  In other words, the GOP changed the House rules so that only Eddie Cantor or his designee can bring the Senate amended spending Bill to a vote.  So, once again, the GOP has tricked the Democrats into being helpless to move the spending bill forward.

It will take a Democrat majority in the House to restore the House Rules to their former level of reasonability (or unreasonability), and the Democrats will have their work cut out for them to ensure that this happens.  Gerrymandering is a terrible thing.]

[Added yet later:

Apparently the Senate and the House have come to an agreement over a compromise spending bill on which a vote will be taken around 7:00 P.M. today.  We are told that the bill contains most of what was originally in the Senate spending bill.  Texas senator Ted Cruz has promised not to filibuster the vote, but he is unreliable and not to be trusted.]

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How Republicans have Set out to Change the Game in Washington

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Some of the things that have been happening from the time of Clinton in the White House, and even earlier, have been done under our very noses, but I failed to see their implications.

For twenty years, we know, Republicans have been Gerrymandering all over the US, changing the shape of electoral districts.  Democrats may have also indulged in this little game, but the GOP has embraced the practice wholesale.  As a result, as a commenter on a recent piece on the New York Times website observed, (and even the young fellow in the video I linked a couple of days ago mentioned,) there are an enormous number of Congressional seats that will remain solidly Republican for the foreseeable future (unless, of course, further Gerrymandering takes place, but that is a two-edged sword).

This means that, in these districts, the “only meaningful elections”, to quote the gentleman whose comment sparked off this blog post of mine, “are the GOP primaries” in which the candidate is selected.  This means, of course, that the successful candidate will most likely be the most extreme, least-likely to compromise, reddest of the red among those contending for the party candidacy, in order to present him- or herself as the most Republican among them.  In other words, Republicans will be electing a large number of members of the House who will never compromise, and never work with Democrats on any initiative, no matter how beneficial to the country, or how beneficial to even their own electorate.  The road on which the GOP has set itself is the road for success of the Party, and, not entirely by design, the road of disaster for the USA.  To be fair, they, of course, see the success of the GOP as the salvation of the Nation.

Rank and file Republicans, and, most notably, Tea-Party Republicans, are completely on board with this agenda, even if they don’t see the long-term implications of it.  The GOP is the party of Big Business (though most of them probably don’t see themselves as such), and if Big Business is to increase its profits, the money will come from the American People first (though, again, they may fully intend to get it from other nations, or “Trading Partners”).  But it will be a long, long time before Tea Partyers become disillusioned with the GOP.

Another, separate point made by an observer is that this ploy of threatening to default on the National Debt is not a move intended by the framers of the Constitution.  While we may disagree on whether the original intent of the Liberties, or the Human Rights in the Constitution are as they are understood today, it is an entirely different matter to alter the balance of powers of the three branches of government by these blackmail measures of defaulting on the obligations of the Treasury.  (It could never have been foreseen, two centuries ago, that the national debt would ever reach these proportions, or that the currency structure of World Trade would evolve into what it is today.)  So the GOP has set out to upset the balance in Washington, hoping that things will tumble to their advantage.

A retired caboose from the PA Railroad,
absolutely nothing to do with the blog post.

There is at least a little belief that the GOP is being manipulated by a very few individuals to their own advantage: and the names of the usual suspects keep cropping up, such as the Koch Brothers.  That brings us into the realm of Conspiracy Theory, which is an embarrassment I prefer to avoid.  But my sorrow for what the GOP has become is probably ill-advised.  There will always be people who feel that it is their duty to think first, and only of their own interests, and the two parties being what they are, the Republican Party is now their home.  But it is sad that though even in Republican households, idealists are growing up, questioning the motives and the principles of their parents, the structure these youth will inherit will forever favor dysfunctional politicians, whose agenda will for a long time be focused on programs that ultimately bring about widespread suffering.  Unless something extremely creative is done to forestall this crisis from arriving, things are going to get a lot worse before they become briefly better.  But look on the bright side: the weather today was perfect!

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Focus on Education: Diane Ravitch

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I have no right to address this issue, because I’m reacting to a report of a book by Diane Ravitch (see here for a brief bio, and a summary of her latest ideas)  that I have not read. This author seems to be saying most of the things that I have tried to say, and has said them better, and has more information with which to support her points. Rather than state that she has said these things, (which she may have), I’m saying them for myself.

The furious testing that goes on is misguided. I’m not at all against tests; I think they allow students to know how good they are. But that’s all they should do; they should not be used for anything else. They should certainly not be used to assess teaching. It is unfortunate that there are no better ways to tell whether a teacher is doing his or her job than to assess his or her students —and in the fee-for-service atmosphere that we find at the present time, there doesn’t seem to be an alternative—there is nothing that can be done, as far as I can see. If tests are going to be administered, someone is sure to use them in a way that they find convenient. All over the world, it seems that tests are poisoning the water of education, and as tests become increasingly indispensable for establishing the value of people, other abuses inevitably come into play: private tutoring, available only to those that can afford it, and, I’m sure, someday corruption and bribery will not be far behind.
Teaching is a profession that seems to destroy those who take it up. The social climate is such that so much hangs on the outcome of education that everyone looks for a scapegoat, and the teacher is a natural one. Don’t be too surprised if very soon only the scum of the earth will take up teaching. No amount of marketing or PR will serve to persuade any but the most gullible into the trap of taking up teaching. You truly have to be naïve to want to submit to the humiliation of being a teacher in the United States of America, the land of the brave, and the home of the constant testing!

The effectively privatizing of education, towards which the US is being pushed, by commercial interests, obviously, will inevitably create economic stratification of education as much as there is stratification in other aspects of society. While society rebelled against racial segregation in the sixties, today segregation of all sorts is being encouraged by the conservative elements among us, and the very people who are aghast at the increase in the use of Spanish across America, and at the access that the underprivileged have for all sorts of goods and services, will prefer to have their children educated in an environment free of what are probably perceived as the marginal elements of society. The rush to embrace Charter Schools, Diane Ravitch seems to say, is just the desire to have minority-free classrooms in disguise. Even if such a motive is furthest from your mind, be careful: to have poverty and diversity hidden from your child’s eyes is not the best thing for your child.

I had forgotten what a broadening thing it was, to have a college education. Those of us who have had the privilege of schooling beyond the twelfth grade sometimes forget how different the world is as we see it, from how it must seem to those who only learn about the world outside through the distorting lens of the Evening News, or worse, Fox News. Or through telescopes from their bedrooms.  Some of the inexplicable attitudes of people like the former governor of Alaska become a little more understandable. The attitudes of conservative members of Congress who have actually had an education are truly inexplicable.

The main job of a teacher, as I see it, is to teach the student to understand and love the world, all of it, all that it has been, and all that it is now, and to delight in how things work (when they do work). But that will not happen, because it isn’t profitable.

I was recently made aware of several books that had titles something like: How Science Poisons Everything, in opposition to another book that said something like: God Isn’t So Great. It’s time someone wrote a book titled How Business Poisons Everything, or How the Profit Motive Destroys Everything We Hold Dear, Including Education, Society, Our Homes, Our Children, Our Government, And World Peace. So There.

[Added later]

AND ANOTHER THING.
We’re told that Diane Ravitch has come out against not only No Child Left Behind, but also Obama’s program and slogan: Race to the Top.  If you read Ms Ravitch’s bio, you learn that she was educated at Wellesley, an excellent, very selective East Coast college (no criticism there; I live on the East Coast myself) which was, until a few decades ago, a women-only institution.  If we go on the assumption that her elitist education had an impact on her thinking, we might begin to understand why she first supported clumsy initiatives like No Child Left Behind, and then abandoned them.

Any idealist who has received a good education knows that there is an amazing amount of things out there that would be even more amazing if people weren’t so dumb.  And certainly, ignorance is the greater part of dumbness.  So it isn’t surprising that anyone with any sort of heart who’s been to college wants to set out to change the world; and plans brimming with energy, like No Child Left Behind, promise to be almost the only thing that’s going to make any sort of difference in the monolithic monument to stupidity that US schools appear to be, from the outside.

The inside, too.  Except for a few cracks here and there, and a little intelligent erosion around the edges —and let us be grateful to the intelligent termites who have kept working at the pile of petrified crap for so long— the monument survives.

There is some suspicion that politicians in office are sort of divided on the issue of education.  It seems obvious that cynically, an ignorant electorate is to be desired, because they will believe anything.  But it is not easy to pile lies upon lies, because lies are harder to defend than the truth, and so there is something to be said for an intelligent, educated, well-informed electorate, which is able to knowledgeably judge what the issues are, and judge how well you have addressed them.  When it comes to competing with foreign technology, though, we have two options: import educated labor, or educate our own.  Neither option is easy, with folks being as lazy, and as hostile to all things non-American as they are!

It is not that the rest of us want our youth to remain ignorant.  It is just that the American approach had become: leave it to the professionals.  If they don’t fix it, sue them.  We forget that we can’t do that in every case, but we continue to do that, because it is the lazy thing to do.  I don’t know what Ms Ravitch advocates; there is no simple fix.  The road to good education is long, and it takes first raising a generation of young people who value education for its own sake, who must grow up to become teachers who value teaching because of their love of children and their hate of ignorance, and their faith in a better world, and become parents who are actually interested in what their kids are learning each day, and know the constraints under which their friends, the teachers, work.

I know.  I know.  It’ll never work.  Perhaps something like No Child Left Behind might be easier. . . every decade or so . . .

Arch
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A jolly tune from Switzerland

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This is a tune my mother taught me!  It apparently isn’t as well known today as it was several decades ago.  I played it for my wife, and she says it definitely sounds very Alpine, and she can almost imagine some fellows in Lederhosen and feathers in their hats furiously playing it on their brass instruments, but she had never heard it before.

It is called Weggis Song, and the first line goes: “Von Luzern auf Weggis zu, Hul-di-ri-di-ya hul-di-ri-ya!”  Most of the song is “Hul - dee - ree - dee-ya, huldiri deeya hudiriya!”  The song is intended for yodeling, of all things, so these are just nonsense syllables.  We were supposed to sing the tune very fast, to make the yodeling more effective.


Arch

Osculating Circles, Serenade, Reverse Video, and all that Jazz (Not)

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Well, dear readers, I’m blowing my own horn here once again, mostly because I want to drum up some viewers for a little YouTube video I put up which, I think (but I’m biased), is a particularly nice piece of work, and because I think there’s so much to talk about.

On second thoughts, I’m not going to talk very much about all that has to be talked about.  At time of writing, the Republican dominated Congress has voted to Sequester, which is a system of automatic and arbitrary cuts in the Federal budgets and services settled upon a couple of decades ago.  The branches of the Federal Government that are cut are those considered inessential, such as Food Stamps, the Federal Parks (certain forest preserves and recreation areas, for those of you who are so lucky as to live abroad), and such things that do not actually discomfit actual Members of Congress, some of whom are among the most vile individuals on the face of the Earth, both ignorant and vicious, while others are merely team players, who have found themselves on the wrong team.

The reason for the Sequester is that the new Health Plan put in place by Democrats and President Obama to provide reasonable health care for most members of American society (and still provide a handsome profit for Insurance Companies) needs a certain amount of government funding to get started.  (As will all insurance schemes, you have to provide a certain amount of startup money.)

Here is an explanation of what is going on through one possible interpretation:


And why do the Republicans want to not fund the health plan?  One reason, supposedly, is because it provides government funding for birth control.  The Pope has declared that religious preoccupation with birth control is disproportionate to its importance.  But certain (very small, but vociferous) sectors of American society are outspoken about the Principle that the government should not participate in birth control.  Ironically, the USA funds birth control in foreign countries.

There has been an onslaught of media advertising that provides a mixture of misleading information and outright lies about the new health plan, urging private individuals to stay away from it.  But it appears that large numbers of people are signing up nevertheless, which means that government funding is not as important as it might have been if people did not sign up.  The American people seem to have weighed in on the side of the new health plan, called the Affordable Care Act, officially, and Obamacare unofficially.  If it goes on to be a great success, the next step for the Republicans, who are now in the majority (the Act was passed in the previous session of Congress, which was dominated by the Democrats) will be to make some minor changes in the law, and relabel it the American Apple Pie Act, or something like that, and take credit for its success.  The changes might be as little as allowing condoms, but not contraceptives, or something equally stupid.  When private companies use marketing tricks to deceive customers it is irritating, but when Congress plays with words and tinkers with the truth, it is truly disgusting.  I sincerely hope the Democrats never indulge in Marketing.

Osculating Circles

An osculating circle is a simple thing.  Suppose we have a curve C, and some point P on the curve.  If you pick three points on the curve, you can easily make a circle pass through those three points.  Now if you make the three points all move to P, the circle gradually becomes the osculating circle at P, which is a circle that matches the shape of the curve perfectly just at the point P.  The radius of this circle is called the radius of curvature of the curve C at the point P.

In the figure we have a curve, in pale blue, unfortunately, and three points F, G, and H.  We also show the circle through those points, and how it was made, using perpendicular bisectors, and so forth.  Now imagine F and H moving towards G.  As you can see, the circle will not change very much, and becomes the osculating circle at G.  This can be done at any point, really; at flat points of the curve, such as F, the circle will be large; at point where the curve turns rapidly, such as A, the circle will be very tight.  In fact, it will be precisely the circle along which you would be driving, briefly, if the curve was a road.

I forgot to say: wherever the curve turns sharply, the Osculating Circle will be small, wherever the road curves hardly at all, the Osculating Circle will be enormous.  The smaller the radius, the tighter the curve.  (Each point has its own osculating circle.)  The video was made by tracing the osculating circles; in other words, the circles remain as the point moves on, so that there are hundreds of circles, which were set to fade gradually (but don’t seem to fade at all, unfortunately). [Added later: I figured out why there was no fading; I had forgotten to click in an important box.]

In the video below, the point A moves along the curve, taking the osculating circle with it.




Meanwhile, down at the farm, my friend is a horn player, and I had visited their home back in the Fall of 2010 --Rally to Restore Sanity, remember?-- and played them a MIDI version of my Serenade, my only original composition --except for an early Chorale-prelude.  Just the other day, my friend said that she had begun playing in a wind quintet (Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn, and Bassoon), and may she play my Serenade with her gang, just for fun?

A typical woodwind quintet:
the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet

To have my Serenade really played live!  OMG!  Of course, I had to make it worth playing by a quintet, which meant that it had to be rewritten in true 5-voice form.  (The piece I had written was in four parts, which is the easiest thing to do, with the bass being doubled.  That doesn’t really count as 5 parts.)

For the first time I found myself actually engaging with issues of instrumentation: how high can a bassoon go, how low, how long can they play without taking a breath?  Suffice it to say that I had to rewrite the harmony extensively to keep it more or less the same, and to make sure all the parts were within the ranges of the instruments, and that each of the parts was fairly interesting to play.  So that’s what you’re hearing, going on behind the osculating circles.  No, not a live performance, but the new rewritten composition, played by MIDI sequencer.  If and when the live performance actually takes place (possibly even this weekend), and if the parts are all in feasible ranges, and if they happen to record the performance, I will post it here!!!

[Added later:  The Quintet was performed, but it sounded so bad that they never recorded it.  So I have to be content with the version played by software :( ]

Arch

Is there a concerted attack on the Higher Education System of the US?

A recent article in a website called Alternet, puts forward the idea that conservative and capitalist forces have set out to destroy higher education systematically.

The argument goes like this: During the Sixties, the Universities were a source of protest, anti-establishment sentiment, suspicion of Big Business, anti-war propaganda, and support for diversity, sexual liberation, protest against racism and against exclusionary policies at all levels, in short, everything that stood against traditional motherhood and Apple Pie.  The conservative elements--rightly--identified this left-leaning thought with Universities specifically, and post secondary education generally.  The author (not identified clearly on the site) suggests that a movement was put in place at least thirty years ago, to effectively destroy higher education as it existed then, and replace it with something friendlier towards Business, the Armed Forces, and conservatives, or the so-called Business-Industrial Complex, though it was not identified as such in the article.

The article describes how the author believes the Universities were set on the Road to Destruction in 5 Steps.

Step 1:   Defund higher education.
Step 2:  Impoverish professors.
Step 3:  Move in a managerial class to "prefessionalize" university administration.
Step 4:  Move in Corporate structure, and corporate money.
Step 5:  Destroy the Students.

While we may think that the path of higher education, generally, and the paths of practically everything, has followed this path ever since Ronald Reagan took office, there is reason to believe that certain individuals had actually planned this route, notably one Lewis Powell, who joined the Supreme Court in 1971, who is reputed to have sent something now called the Powell Memorandum, which declared that the Universities were the source of a concerted attack on the Free Enterprise System, and called on a concerted counter-attack, in terms of increasing the power of the Congressional Lobby, and its ability to shape the priorities of members of Congress.  The article quotes Anna Victoria, who points out (Pluck Magazine) that this agenda bore fruit, as Universities had to turn to private sources for funding.  Private funders, of course, use their leverage to influence the tone of activity in the schools that they fund.

The (identity unknown) author of the Alternet "Five Steps" article compares the anti-education procedure adopted by US Business as being a subtle variant of the Chinese action of sending dissending intellectuals to "re-education" camps.  Though the condition of the US 'professoriate' is not visibly as pathetic as that of either Russian or Chinese intellectuals in the decades of the fifties and sixties, one can indeed see that while, on the one hand, University Presidents (and football coaches) do enjoy fabulous salaries, most other professors earn far less than one would expect with salaries of the 1960s adjusted for inflation.  Professors are being bullied into cooperation with Business.

Though it is difficult to see the entire problem of higher education in the framework of the Five Steps article, it is nevertheless easy to imagine that certain parties, at least, have incorporated the idea of the destruction of universities into their private agendas; in other words, I do not see the entire sad recent history of Academe in the US as the story of victims of a conspiracy.  But I do have to admit that any conspiracy one can imagine on the part of Business can easily be true; there are so many instances of business organizations that seem to compete on the surface, but which have cooperated in order to destroy some common enemy.  All that remains for us to believe is whether American Higher Education is seen as The Enemy of Big Business.  Well, that certainly seems to be a no-brainer.  Big Business seems friendlier towards Community Colleges than big universities, because the latter have, historically, been full of intellectuals with a liberal bias, if not outright socialists.

I don't know whether I'm truly upset at the picture being painted here.  While it is true that the universities have nurtured liberal values for many decades, it seems to me that today, perhaps by the success of the grand design put forward by the Five Steps article, the big universities are nurturing fewer liberals than simply a lot of people who whine all the time.  If we're going to have a free enterprise system, it makes sense that we must educate our workers in the way that will be most useful to the bosses who will hire them.  If we don't like that plan, we have to jettison the free enterprise system entirely.  In other words, you can't have the pleasures and surpluses of Capitalist Society, and the freedom of thought of a Socialist Society at the same time.  The big contradiction we've clung to so far is that it is possible to keep Big Business happy, and keep Poor Workers happy, and Socialist Professors rolling in lucrative grants, all at the same time.  Marx knew this, and he said that the whole world has to be Socialist, or the whole world has to be Capitalist.  Otherwise, the Capitalist businesses will suck the socialists dry.  And looking at Cuba and Mexico, we know that it is true.  What about China?  They chose Capitalism.

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Under Attack: Obamacare!

The far right extreme of the GOP (or SOP: Silly Old Party) is attacking the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, furiously.  There was a 21-hour address by Ted Cruz of Texas, that brought in such relevant themes as Naziism, and Eggs and Green Ham, and Freedom, all to speak in favor of de-funding the Act.

Jim DeMint who recently abandoned running for the Senate in favor of taking the reins of the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think-tank) has had the Foundation put up an enormous billboard in New York City that decries Obamacare, and urges readers to support de-funding it.  The list of Republican spokesmen (and women) calling for erasing Obamacare is too long to enumerate.

Why is Obamacare such a cause for concern among conservatives?
It is hard to guess.  What they claim is their reason for opposing it need not have a lot to do with why they actually want it destroyed.  I have a few guesses.

(*) Obamacare is a huge Democrat achievement, and if it works as it was planned (and remember, its success was estimated probabilistically, and a lot depends on behavior trends, as most insurance initiatives do; a lot of people acting irrationally can derail it), it will be a huge issue on the credit side for the Dems, and you can see Democrats, both great and small (mostly small, unfortunately) running on the strength of it for a decade.  "We brought you Obamacare!  Vote for me!" 

Obamacare is also a Republican loss.  They fought like dogs to sabotage it, and if they fail, it will be an enormous dent in their reputation.  They brought up everything from Freedom of Choice, motherhood and apple pie, and had to go to the extreme of painting the Insurance Industry as the saviours of the nation, to vilify the Bill (but of course they went right back and said, no, the Insurance Industry is the very devil incarnate, and the Bill was written by them, and is a piece of crap, etc, etc).  So in the puerile world of political point-scoring, Obamacare could be a huge smudge on the GOP scoresheet.

(*) The GOP has been heavily lobbied by the Insurance Industry.  This is senseless, really, because the Industry does not really lose such a lot.  There are controls of runaway profit-taking, I suppose, but it seems to me that the new law strengthens the industry, while reining in its lucrativity.  If the Insurance Industry fights the law, they are really making things harder for themselves.  After a year or two of Obamacare, I believe that the population will look at the Insurance Industry with a very jaundiced eye, but nevertheless I believe it will be in a comfortable position, if not going like gangbusters.

(*)  A few small businesses, and small-business organizations, have been persuaded early that the new law is to their disadvantage.  As far as I understand, while all businesses are given new responsibilities for the health care of their employees, they have also been given new financial help for that purpose.  In all fairness, I have to say that this is inappropriate; I am strongly of the opinion that Health Care is the responsibility of the State (the government, at any rate), but Congress —as it was constituted in 2004-2005— distrusted the Government bureaucracy, and decided that small businesses were more to be trusted with providing health care for the population.  This attitude has been nurtured by Business itself, and Business has only itself to blame for promulgating the myth that Business is more to be trusted than Government.  Yeah, right.  At any rate, now that various sectors of the Small Business whatchamacallit have taken the view that Obamacare is bad for Small Businesses, those who lied to Small Business in the first place have begun to believe it themselves.  Isn't that amazing?

(*)  Healthy young people have been incited to protest against the law, because it requires everyone to carry health insurance.  Some of the young people in my extended family were railing about the new law, and moaning that they could not afford to carry insurance (especially since some of them were unemployed), and, as you can imagine, young people are, generally speaking, not subject to the health problems of older people.  Furthermore, young people are perfectly happy to ignore whatever health problems they have.  And again, young people looking for employment are eager to present themselves as being in almost amazingly good health, even if they suspect that they might have a chronic condition, which of course must be kept from their prospective employers at all cost.

(*)  The people leading the Republican Party at the moment are some of the dimmest bulbs we have had in government for a century.  Let's face it: Health Care is a complex issue, and of all solutions to the problem of National Health Care, the one that was in fact adopted (by a Coalition of idealistic liberals, scaredy-cat Democrats who were nervous about the fallout from the bill —with good reason, in hindsight— cooperative Republicans, who were afraid of the backlash from their more conservative fellow-party members —with good reason— and meddling members of the Insurance Industry Lobby, who were anxious to make sure the law would not debilitate the Industry) is a compromise, and so even harder to figure out than such a law would have been if it was simple in design.  So, not too many people are able to read the law in its entirely and make sense of it.  We liberals —and forgive me for including you in this category— for the most part endorse the law because we have some faith in Obama and his team.  I have not read the law, and I'm afraid to start reading it now.  But such people as Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Rick Santorum (who isn't anything connected with any government body, at the moment) and the members of the conservative media have no hope of understanding it.  They do not have the mental equipment for it, and possibly not the vocabulary.  All they can do is to spot an isolated sentence here and there, and cling to them with furious indignation, misinterpret its intention and its consequences, and run to proclaim their hostility to it, and to the Act as a whole.

A big mistake that congressmen make, in poking holes in the law, is that they have of course forgotten what it was like before they had the fabulous health plan they enjoy as member of congress.  They object to the law because it makes it possible that a person may have to change their doctor.  Well, if your health plan is like my health plan, I have been forced to change my doctor any number of times, because my employer changes insurance providers every once in a while, and sometimes a health plan has a list of Preferred Providers, which means a new doctor.  We went to the extent of hanging on to our non-preferred doctor, just for the sake of continuity, despite the very real antipathy between our doctor and our insurance.  So far, so good.

A few Republicans, notably John McCain, have said that de-funding Obamacare is not a possibility.  Who knows; perhaps McCain has been in sympathy with a unified health care system for the USA all along, and simply did not bring it up for fear of being accused of being UnAmerican.  It seems to me that anyone who has served in the Armed Forces can only be in favor of Health Care Reform, both because of the health care they get as members of the Armed Forces, and the miserable health care they get once they're discharged.  Both Kerry and McCain and any real veterans (unlike George W. Bush) are likely to have their heads screwed on well enough to know a good thing when they see it.  There is no going back from Obamacare, unless we want bigger chaos than we have now.

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The Challenges of a Diet Guru, and their Roots in Education in the USA

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Suppose you want to educate your fellow-citizens about proper nutrition, weight-loss, and how diet influences the health of a typical modern human.  You want to become a Diet Guru.  In addition, since you’re performing a service, you’d like to make some money while you’re at it.

You look at all those who have tried before you, and failed, or those who have succeeded, but whose successful adherents have gone on to curse their diet guide, because they’ve gone off their diet, and put on more pounds than ever before.

In recent decades, many diets have been centered around gimmicks: Grapefruit, or what have you.  All of us recognize these gimmicks to be exactly what they are, but we have a sneaking suspicion that it just might work.  It’s like the people who go to church, who don’t believe in anything they hear there, but are nervous just in case some of it might be true, and they might get turned into a pillar of salt, or whatever.

Many emerging diet gurus have to deal with two things: gimmicks, and superstition.

Gimmicks
These have to do with marketing.  It doesn’t matter how good your mousetrap is.  It truly doesn’t.  All you have to do is to make a big fuss about it, and put up enormous billboards all over our little town, and (so the theory goes, and make no mistake: the Marketing gurus are total masters of persuading the public that marketing is all that matters, and if you’re selling your mousetrap to people who don’t have the time or the sense to check out their product, marketing is all that does seem to matter) the world will beat a mindless path to your door.  If you charge enough for your glitzy new mousetrap, it doesn’t matter if your product turns out to be totally useless: you’ve already made your money.  Foithermore, if you sold stock in your company, the stockholders are left footing the bill, or eating the losses.  Everybody knows this.  Or they should.

Superstition

This has to do with education, and also a little with marketing.  You see, the USA has achieved almost zero dropout rate in high school, by doing a few questionable things.  Firstly, everybody is taught a vast number of things in high school, all considered basic.  Since nobody is essentially allowed to drop out, these things are all pre-digested and fed to the students in tiny doses which they can easily swallow, but the vast majority of kids in school are not interested in any of this, and don’t have the mental equipment to really assimilate much of it, and therefore cannot remember it.

A basic part of grade school education is human physiology.  Everybody is taught how food is digested: fats, carbohydrates and proteins are digested in different ways, and at different points in the alimentary tract.  Everybody has heard the words Ptyalin, Bile, Lactase, Hydrochloric Acid, catalysis, and so on, but less than one in a hundred outside of the medical profession (or health-related professions) remembers any of that crap.

Everybody learns the circulatory system in school.  You know about the aorta, the pulmonary vein, the arteries, the capillaries, the veins, the lungs, the brain, the heart, the left ventricle, and so on and so forth.  Most people don’t give a damn about any of this.  You were told that the digested food enters the bloodstream, but you weren’t probably told that the food you eat keeps waltzing around your body until it gets either used up, or dumped somewhere.

If someone asks you, of course you exclaim that it is obvious that the food travels around your bloodstream until it is used up, or deposited somewhere.  That’s obvious, you iterate.  But just do not have a mental picture of a cheeseburger being helplessly hauled all over your body until some muscle mercifully puts it out of its misery by either burning it up, or allowing it to take a nap in its cells.  (A very long nap, which could last about 20 years.)

Instead of actually believing what they were taught in school, many folks end up believing various superstitions.  Americans are a superstitious people.  Many of the superstitions are about cholesterol and carbs and calories and steroids and sugars and saturated fats and Olive oil.

Many of these superstitions were actually created by diet gurus, or their marketing consultants.  Marketing consultants have rules of thumbs that help them sell things.  Unfortunately for all of us, many of us have discovered that our lives are made easier by using these same rules of thumb.  Things would be a lot easier if I used these rules of thumb, too, and many of my fellow-teachers use them too.  A major one is to create useful superstitions.  The superstitions, of course, are useful for the diet guru, or the teacher, but ultimately not for the consumer or the student.  It gets the consumer or the student doing the right thing quickly and easily, but once you want the consumer (or the student) thinking about the information in a more sophisticated way, the superstition actually gets in the way.

One of the most recent inventions is the idea that gluten is bad for you.  There are many reasons that gluten might be bad for one: Celiac Disease, if you have it, means that gluten aggravates it painfully.  For various reasons, it has been reasoned, that gluten is bad for everybody.  At present, as far as we know, only fewer than 1% of people have an adverse reaction to gluten.

However, you probably know that a lot of your friends are sort of addicted to pizza, or pasta.  Arguably, it is the elastic, chewy characteristic of pizza dough, and the sweet taste of the tomato sauce that makes pizza taste so good (though most of us are under the illusion that it is just the melted cheese that is the miracle ingredient).  Many of us are also addicted to bread (and butter!), so if a diet guru can turn you off of gluten, which means all sorts of bread products, that immediately removes a whole lot of pizza and bread from your diet, and we all know that all our friends who adore those two foods are well on their way to being Pilsbury Doughboys.

I do not know, not being in the inner circle of those who undertake food research, whether gluten is clinically addictive.  But it seems a far cry from educating people to avoid gluten because it is possibly addicting, (and because it is usually accompanied by a ton of starch!) to telling them that wheat is bad for them.  Gluten itself is a useful protein, and was an important component of the diet of vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists, for instance.  You may not approve of the denomination, but, for any of us not suffering from Celiac Disease, gluten seems to be, from what little I know, a perfectly reasonable food to be eaten in moderation.

Like my spouse, if you find it impossible to eat gluten in moderation, and if you find that eating a little gluten (in any bread or wheat you might eat) at any time of the day makes you hungry all day long, then clearly you could make greater loss in your weight (if you want that) by staying away from gluten, but remember: it is really the extra calories that we’re really trying to avoid.  If you happen to ingest a little gluten, there’s absolutely no need to induce vomiting.

But doesn’t it seem silly to you, to create a whole wheat is bad for you superstition, just to get you to avoid eating gluten, in order to lose weight?  Must we swallow lies, in order to do what is best for us?  This is what religion is, you see.  Don’t bully your sister, or Santa will give you coal for Christmas.  This is what we’ve come down to, because everyone wants to be treated like a kid, because being adult is just a little too difficult for us!  (In fact, one author actually made a point that whole wheat is very bad for us.  Why?  Because people tend to eat a little more whole wheat, believing that a lot of whole wheat is better than a little white bread.  Good calories do not offset bad calories.  Good calories are preferable to bad calories.  Choose between them, and eat just a little of the one you have chosen.  You cannot cancel out calories with calories, generally speaking.  They all add up.  But if you don’t exercise very much, every additional calorie is going to settle in for a long stay.

[How about negative calories?  You may have heard that certain foods, such as cauliflower and broccoli, actually use up more calories from your body than they contribute.  Is this true?  Yes.  These vegetables are mostly fiber, so they provide a feeling of satisfaction, or fullness in your stomach, without contributing calories.  They do have a little carbohydrate in them, but the stomach has to work so hard (and so long) to digest those foods that you use up more calories in digesting them than you get back from them.  Unfortunately they stay in your intestines so long undigested that they survive far, far down your 22 feet of guts, where certain sorts of bacteria get hold of them.  Unfortunately, the digestive process of these bacteria create a little gas, which many people feel uncomfortable about.  Eat broccoli or cauliflower early in the day, so that the methane finds its way out before you go to sleep, or you’ll be rolling about in bed.  Maybe.  Making like a gas well for an hour or two is probably well worth the loss in weight you might experience.]

You might know lots of other superstitions, that might have started out well-intended.  In fact, budding diet gurus, as I said, actually manufacture superstitions, to get their clients to lose weight, and experience seems to show that the superstition works better, at least in the short run, than the actual information.

So if you’re a diet guru wannabe, (1) you have to identify some old superstitions that are getting in your way, and mark them for attack.  (2) make up some new superstitions of your own, and keep hammering them.  The sexier they are, the better name you make for yourself.  Make your money, and leave town before your people go off their diets.

I know what I have to do to lose weight.

(1) I have to eat moderately.  Eating a big breakfast actually helps me eat less the rest of the day, so I eat an egg or two for breakfast, whenever I have the time to do it.  I start work at 7:45 on some days, and it’s hard to get motivated to eat in time to get to work.  I try to eat moderately at lunch, and very moderately at supper.

(2) Remember, your food finds its way into your arteries.  It’s that simple.  There is no special delivery system for food; food and oxygen slosh along together in the blood.  Blood is a mixture of Oxygen, protein, sugar, fat, water, and hormones, which are essentially switches for the body to respond to some condition in a concerted way (all at once).  In the mornings, when you’re walking about, the food can get used up fairly easily.  At night, if you’re asleep, not only does the food not get used up, it doesn’t travel far from your intestines (which is where they got into the blood, obviously), so it gets deposited close to your belly.  Men and women with big bellies (including me) eat late at night, and aren’t active after that last meal.  If you kept working for about an hour after your last meal for the day, doing the laundry, walking the dog, whatever, you’re less likely to develop a big belly, but you might gain weight uniformly all over, if you don’t use up the food efficiently.  If you use up all your dinner, you will not gain weight at all.

(3) I’m guessing here, but if you’re concerned about cholesterol, keeping active after each meal ensures that fat deposits are not made close to the heart, but (if they’re made at all) uniformly throughout the body.  Furthermore, occasional vigorous activity helps flush away fat deposits from the heart itself.  There is a certain amount of blood circulation going on in the walls of the heart itself, just like the engine oil that circulates around the pistons in your car engine.  (You must realize that the engine oil doesn’t normally go inside the pistons: that space is reserved for the gasoline-air mixture, which will be ruined by lubricating oil.)  The blood that the heart itself uses must be kept free-flowing, and fat deposits in the blood vessels of the heart means that it will start to have problems, and it usually signals blood starvation by flashes of pain.  If the blood is completely blocked, you have a heart attack.

Fat in the bloodstream is not good, but a tiny bit is ok.  Generally speaking, thin oils, like olive oil, is better than thick oil, like lard, and less oil is better than more oil.

(4) To get rid of stomach fat, exercise focused on the stomach has to be used.  If you lose weight all over your body, some of the stomach fat will go, too.  But if you want to do body-sculpting, you have to do some exercise that will use up the fat in your stomach.

Again, I’m no expert, but the body prefers to use sugar (specifically glucose, and other sugars must first be reduced to glucose) as fuel for doing work.  If you keep doing steady work for about 20 minutes, from what I have been told, the body begins to use stored-up fat reserves.  (Remember, this happens only after it has used sugar for a while.)  So --and I realize that this might be a superstition too, and I urge you to back this up with your own reading-- if you do 25 minutes of stomach exercises, you use up sugar for the first twenty minutes, and then burn stomach fat for the remaining 5 minutes.  Whichever muscle is being exercised, it grabs fat from the closest fat location.

If you’re suddenly required to lift a heavy weight, or to sprint a short distance, the body “burns up” protein to do it.  The burned protein creates lactic acid in the muscles, which manifests itself as a cramp.  Once the lactic acid is spread away from the muscle that had to bear the brunt of the exertion, the cramp subsides.  But, as you can see, doing sudden, intense exercise does not burn fat, but burns (or, more properly, consumes) a little of your muscle tissue.  Only steady exercise burns sugar and fat, so to help keep your heart healthy by flushing out fat deposits from the walls of your heart, you need (occasional) steady intense exercise.  This is why aerobic instructors make you do jumping jacks; it increases the heart rate dramatically, but doing one enormous jumping jack will probably just use up a little protein. The same goes with bench-pressing an enormous weight.

Very recently, I learned something very depressing.  Apparently all your stomach fat is not stored in the actual muscles of your stomach; a lot of it is stored around your organs: the liver, the heart, the pancreas, the kidneys, etc.  It is not really attached to any muscles you can exercise, so by working on your abdominals (my sources claim), you cannot get rid of all your belly fat.  On the other hand, when I try to feel how thick my abdominal muscles are, they do feel soft and flabby, so I don’t know whom to believe...

(5) It is obviously important to work with your own addictions and eating habits, and if    you’re so feeble-minded that you cannot succeed without swallowing some weird superstition, well, do what it takes.  There is a new diet making the rounds called the Wheat Belly Diet, which will probably work for those whose weakness is pasta, pizza and bread.  Once in a long while, it may be as well to give in to your cravings and eat an occasional pizza slice.  Some folks just do not do well with long periods of deprivation.

So, firstly, eating sensibly will ensure that I don’t gain any more weight.  To actually lose weight, I have to do some sort of exercise, and I walk the dog every once in a while.  This doesn’t really work, because she doesn’t keep up a steady pace, and stops to sniff at every tree and fire hydrant.  But a really long walk does burn up some calories, and some activity after supper helps me deposit my supper all over, rather than all near my guts.

If you’re a Diet Guru to be, do us all a favor, and encourage your clients to incorporate exercise in their regimen.  Diet alone will not work, unless you’re like, 15 years old, in which case you probably should not normally have a weight problem.

Finally, there was something I read that said that extra Insulin in the bloodstream encourages the conversion of carbohydrates and sugars in your bloodstream into fats.  Man, I’ve never heard a better argument for postponing the use of Insulin injections.  But if you need Insulin injections to keep your body functioning, I guess you have to cope with this additional problem.

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