Yet another trio

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In the last post, I introduced altogether 4 trios by J. S. Bach: [1] a movement from Cantata 140 for tenor chorus, obbligato violin, and basso continuo (a keyboard instrument with the bass possibly reinforced with cello or double bass),  [2] another movement, from Cantata, 85 again for tenor, a melody for two violins and viola (I'm still not clear about the scoring of the original movement) and basso continuo, [3] a trio sonata, BWV 525 in E Flat for organ, to which I added [4] the Trio Sonata from the Musical Offering, for Flute, Violin, and basso continuo.

I had forgotten to include another favorite movement, one of the first that I actually owned: this one is the slow movement from the beautiful Triple Concerto in A minor for Flute, Violin and Harpsichord.  In the middle movement, only the soloists play, possibly with a cello doubling the bass line of the harpsichord.  I have heard the piece played with the cello and without, and it sounds fine either way, and we won't get into big arguments about which way is correct, because sufficiently many others have expended a lot of energy arguing both sides, without settling it one way or another.  My suspicion is that it was performed either way, depending on the acoustics of the venue, and how powerful the bass of the harpsichord might have been.  (By the way, the German term for harpsichord is Klavier or Clavier, and the French and Italian term was Clavecin, or Cembalo.)

Here is a passable performance on YouTube.

If you listen through this piece, and also the Musical Offering trio, you will notice something interesting.  Each part can be split into several recognizable sections, which are recycled over and over throughout the piece.  Furthermore, the sections in all three parts are often the same; in other words, Bach built the entire movement by assigning certain blocks of tunes to the three instruments, and rearranging them differently in vertical blocks.  This technique did mean that Bach had to do less writing on the whole, but obviously the melodies had to be adjusted to fit the harmony.  But also, it made sure that the three instruments each got to play every melodic theme (making obvious allowances for the special duties of the bass line).  Isn't that interesting?

Here are the first three pages of screen captures of the score, with the various themes color coded.  The chromatic Royal Theme is in purple.  (This is the slow theme that goes up in an arpeggion--a broken chord--then creeps down in semitones; very distinctive.)

I gave up that idea; instead, I annotated the video I had originally made of the Allegro of the Trio Sonata of the Musical Offering, to include graphics that highlight the themes.  I found it too difficult to do a good job of it, so some of the highlighting doesn't last as long as it must, and I failed to indicate the recapitulation of the main theme at the very end.  Still, this highlighting tool provided by YouTube itself is moderately handy for minor annotations, and I have probably horribly abused it.  Here it is again:


So, there you go.

Three Trios by J. S. Bach

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While I was putting a well-known Bach piece into Finale the other day (well, PrintMusic, anyway), I noticed that really, the movement was in just 3 parts.  (Note: this is different than a 3-part sermon, or something similar.  A piece of music "in 3 parts" means that there are 3 lines of music.  For 3 sections we would say, 3 sections, or 3 movements, or something like that.)  Perhaps fortuitously, it turns out that many of the pieces I’m most nostalgic for are trios, that is, written in 3 parts.  Now, bear in mind that with J. S. Bach, specifically, and also with other composer of the Baroque period, instrumentation is not rigid; they indicate the essential instruments--the featured players, called the obbligato parts--but also might indicate that there has to be something like what we would call today “the rhythm section,” which was a bass instrument--usually a double bass, or a bass and a cello, or a bass and a cello and a bassoon-- as well as a harpsichord, organ, or lute, or any or all of those, depending on how big the rest of the orchestra was.  This was called the continuo.  However, very often the music for obbligato instruments were harmonically complete, and made the continuo actually redundant.  At other times, Bach wrote a piece to be performed with only three parts; actually the only instances I know are organ pieces.  So when I call a particular piece a trio, I intend to mean that the piece was either an organ piece written in precisely three parts, or that it could be reduced to three parts (by leaving out all, or some, of the Continuo).  I’ll try to make the situation clear in each instance, but really, you probably don’t care.

BWV 140  One of the most famous Cantatas of J. S. Bach (and his cantatas were by far the largest and most important portion of his compositional output,) is Cantata No. 140: Sleepers wake, for night is flying.  It was written in Leipzig (where Bach spent the last several decades of his life) and was based on a hymn of the well-known hymnodist Philipp Nokolai.  Somehow, this very four-square hymn-tune of Nikolai’s, as well as the magnificent cantata by Bach, has caught the fancy of people the world over, not least in English-speaking countries, and several movements from it are performed frequently.

The fourth movement, particularly, is an amazingly vigorous piece of writing, and it is set for either a Tenor soloist, or, as sung today, a chorus of tenors (which might have been as few as four), with an incredibly catchy counter-melody in the violin.  The piece is therefore the tenor melody (the hymn-tune), the violin melody, and a bass line, and chords on the organ, or a theorbo (a kind of big old-time precursor of the guitar), and that’s all.  It’s a trio!  When you hear it performed nowadays, it’s easy to forget that there are only three essential parts actually written out by Bach; the rest is made up by the performers (according to strict rules, however).  This is the first piece I'm going to introduce today, in the spare trio version.  At the end, there is a link to a complete, grand realization of the same piece, followed by a verse of the basic Nikolai hymn, performed by a full orchestra, just so you can hear how much potential there was in the hymn, to begin with.   It is a very irregular meter: 8,10,8,8,10,8,6,6,4,8,8.



I can’t resist the temptation to comment on the violin melody, which is, to say the very least, jaunty in the extreme.  I actually wrote out the ornaments: mordents, trills, grace-notes --the little notes that lead up to the main note-- then had to get rid of them and put in the notation for the ornaments, which is harder in this editor than to do them by hand.  They make the music score look somewhat cluttered, but believe me, nowhere as cluttered as if the notes were actually written out.  In a couple of places I had forgotten to replace the written-out notes with the ornament notation.

As you might be aware, the last several decades have been occupied with the authenticity movement, which tries especially hard to perform period pieces (and this one is certain a case in point) as they were probably performed at the time they were written.  There is a certain amount of indirect evidence to show that, for instance, pieces were taken generally faster than they were in the first half of the last century, when there was a huge explosion of interest in Baroque music, but in which the performances were clearly too slow for the modern ear to make sense of the complex musical textures.  However, the various authorities overstated their cases, in my humble opinion, and the performances of the 1960's and 1970's were actually a little too fast.  Other issues that came under the scrutiny of the authenticists were: instruments (and rightly so; many beautiful 18th century instruments had been converted to use steel strings, for instance, and a number of brave owners of Stradivarius violins took the leap to convert the instruments back to what they would have been before they were upgraded, and put gut strings back on them, and so forth), and ornamentation.  It is clear that a lot of ornamentation was ad lib, and my choices for ornamentation may or may not meet with the approval of the authorities.  But the authorities do not have much of a leg to stand on, since all the evidence is indirect.  I have erred in the direction of possibly over-ornamentation.  But it is a very florid melody, and would probably have been performed with a little more zip than some purists would have liked, and that’s how you’re going to hear it.  Note: Bach wrote an organ piece based on this movement, written out as a pure trio.  The version in the video clip above is essentially the organ trio written out for strings and trombone.  The version linked at the end of the post is the cantata movement, with the continuo played by the organ, and the tenor voices again given to the chorus trombones.

BWV 85  Even before I studied the piece above, I had been working with another aria, namely the tenor aria from Cantata 85.  This one is less well known, but the aria was noticed by Sir William Walton, the British Composer, and used in his ballet suite, The Wise Virgins.  Family friends of my youth had an album of the ballet suite, and I got to know and love this beautiful trio.

The text of the aria (or “song”) can be translated as “Behold what His love can do!”, and is on the one hand a sweet pastorale.  On the other hand, the frequent jumps of a fourth (two notes with two notes between them) are associated generally with what we call “jigs”, the lively dances that sailors are suppose to have indulged in in olden days, when they had their ration of rum, or a dance of villagers is a festive mood.  Which is it: a pastorale, or a jig?  Many Bach tunes are to dance meters, but morphed by Bach so that they have more serious or contemplative moods.  Pay attention to the bass line: in this piece, as in the first one, the bass is clear and confident and solid, a familiar and expected characteristic of a Bach bass line, and for some people, including myself, the most important line in the harmony.

Caution: in the performance below, the top melody has been divided between two instruments!  It is still in fact a trio, the two instruments (a flute and an oboe, actually) are just sharing the part.  I could have (with a little work) shown the video with just three lines of music, but it would have been a little tiresome.



The two upper melodies twine about each other, almost as if this were a love-song.  Once you notice these things, you want to hear the piece over and over again.  (By the way, for those who are just learning to follow music, those little curves over the notes are of two kinds: the black / white curves connect a note at the end of one measure with the same note continued in the beginning of the next measure, making a single, long note.  The colored curves over a group of notes are phrasing marks, and are, in the case of string music, actually bowing indications; the group is all to be played up-bow, with a single bowing, or down-bow.  In this performance, of course, it is not a real violin, just a violin sound.  Somehow the software is able to fake bowing; don't ask me how!)

In this performance, the pace is brisk, and you can perhaps understand my reference to it as being related, at least in certain characteristics, to a jig.  A more sedate (and actually more accurate) version is here, an earlier effort of mine, a lot more solemn and quiet, and heavily orchestrated.

BWV 525.  Bach wrote six so-called Trio Sonatas for the organ.  They were intended to be played in church wherever a non-liturgical piece was appropriate.  What is interesting about them is that they were strictly in three parts: the two hands playing two keyboards (as you know, Baroque organs already had at least two manuals, or keyboards for the hands, in addition to the pedals, to be played by the feet), and of course, the feet playing the bass on the pedals.  The two hands being on separate manuals allowed them to freely cross each other, enabling the composer to show his skill without being compromised by physical limitations.  I got it into my head to transcribe this piece for guitars, and that is what I’m presenting below.  Sorry about the minimal video; it is just an mp3 disguised as a video, for the purpose of giving you an example of a Bach trio actually consciously written as one.  Here it is:



Here is the link to the expanded performance of verse 4 of Sleepers, wake.

Added later:  I could not resist the temptation to add a fourth Bach trio, this one is from the Musicalische Opfer, the Musical Offering.  There is a story behind this work.

Bach’s son, Wilhelm Friedmann Bach (I think I have the right son; if not, please substitute a suitable son here, please!) was a principal musician in the court of King Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia.  Having heard of the skill of the older Bach, he had the son send for J. S. Bach on the occasion of the arrival of one of the new Fortepianos at the court.  J. S. Bach duly arrived at court after a long journey, and was invited to play the new instrument (or instruments), and to improvise on a certain theme he was given (by the King).

Bach is said to have made up a piece or two based on the theme, but said that he could do much better.  Returning home, he composed a number of musical canons and variations on the royal theme, including a lovely trio for Flute, Violin and Cello (plus, of course, harpsichord continuo).  I’m including the gorgeous second movement from the trio, the Allegro.  This next statement might not make much sense to most readers, but the style of the trio is very modern, for Bach.  His younger son Christian Bach was a leader in the (at the time) modern music movement, which moved from the Baroque style to the classical style of Haydn and Mozart.  The big difference is the tendency towards a more open, light and airy style.  The removal of the continuo makes it even less dense.  Bach lovers of course love the density of the older style, but this graceful movement shows what Bach might have done if he had chosen to write in the modern style:



OMG, as they say; I just discovered a version of this by electric guitars, using distortion.  Play this at your own risk.

Arch

MORE Hooked Up!

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I reported earlier on the technology consumption that is escalating in the Arch household.  Since then, as you might have anticipated, we have gone in for yet more technology, so that there is still more to report.

Totally pandering to the lazy reader, I’m going to summarize almost all of the information in the earlier post right here.

Phones

As I said in the earlier post, the two most popular types are Iphones, from Apple, and Droids, essentially from Google.  Google has also arranged with Samsung, the biggest manufacturer of hardware for Google (Google being essentially a software company), to make a phone called the Nexus, which does more than most smart phones.  But I wouldn’t know; I only own a regular Droid phone, made by Motorola, in case you were wondering.  (Below, whenever I say Droid, I might also mean a Nexus, or even an Android phone by some manufacturer such as HTC.)  The Ios interface for Iphones and the Android interface of  Droids are really operating systems, which are programs that run constantly, managing the services of the piece of hardware.

Iphones and Droids are the most popular instances of smart phones, and using the obvious abuse of terminology, a smart phone using the Apple Ios operating system is generally called an Iphone, and a smart phone using the Android operating system is often, but not always, called a Droid.  (Actually, they’re usually just called Android phones.)  Be aware that other operating systems or interfaces might be developed even as we speak, but at the moment Android and Ios dominate the market.

Smart phones are fully functional phones that can take calls as usual, but they can also connect up to the Internet. Older phones had a display screen, and a keypad.  Increasingly, phones have a touch-sensitive screen that throws up a keyboard when needed, so that a separate keyboard is not required.  (Note: if you crack the glass of the screen, replacements are available.  It is possible to replace it yourself, I’m told.)

Depending on your Plan, your phone calls, both incoming and outgoing, are metered, and you get billed.  In addition, when you use the Internet, you get billed for the time you’re connected to the Internet, as well as the volume of data that goes out to and comes in from the Internet.

Voice and Text

In addition to phone calls, most phones today which have text capability, so that they can send text messages.  Today’s smart phones can do all three: voice, text message, or e-mail.
For various reasons, cell phones needed to have a record of the exact time at the location of the phone, so of course they display this time, so that increasingly cell phones are used as a clock.

Last but not least, Music

I phones have a fair amount of storage space, which most people, quite reasonably, use to store music files.  All you need is a nice pair of headphones, and you can listen to the music while on a bus or plane, or at a boring meeting, or in a classroom where you really don’t want to be.  (Wait ... did I say that?)  Getting the music into your phone is done through a service such as Itunes, which is an annoying product dreamed up for morons by Apple, or through something like Windows MediaPlayer, or various Google-family Apps that are slightly less annoying, or even Amazon Cloud Player, which is a peculiar animal that has its pros and cons.  But see below, under BlueTooth for using your music machine with a recent-model BlueTooth-enabled car.

BlueTooth-enabled cars.  Well, guess what.  My wife finally decided to trade in her old gas-guzzler for a lease on a new car, and she decided to lease a hybrid.  (These are cars with an amazingly powerful battery which can actually power the car at low speeds and accelerations.  The engine and the battery trade energy, so that very little is lost when braking.  Braking an automobile--when coming to a stop, or descending a steep hill-- destroys all the energy the car has, and converts it into useless heat.  Instead, hybrids save most of this normally wasted energy by converting into power, and sending it to the battery, and use it to accelerate the car back up to speed.)  Most new cars, we have learned, are able to connect to your smart phone via BlueTooth (see below), so that you can answer the phone while your hands remain on the wheel.  This is an enormous safety feature.  The call comes over the car stereo system, which thoughtfully interrupts the music you might have been listening to.  In addition, some cars and some phones team together to pipe the navigation voice --e.g. “In .5 miles, turn left.  In .5 miles, turn left”-- to the car speakers!  Cool, huh!  In our case, the car salesman helped my wife pair the Bluetooth phone to the car before he even handed her the keys.

In addition, once a car is paired with your phone, it can usually play music from your phone right over the car speakers!  This is great, especially if you listen to classical music, because there are fewer Classical radio stations these days, under the Austerity imposed by our Conservative Congress (which wants to blow our tax dollars in various conservative ways), and our Liberal President (who prefers to blow our tax dollars in health care and social safety-net-type things which penurious Seniors want to retain, but foolhardy younger folks are willing to dispense with).  We have not quite figured out how to play particular pieces, but I’m told it is possible!  We just play through the whole collection every time.

Tablet Computers

As I said in the earlier post, Tablet computers have been around for years.  The entire display surface is touch-sensitive, and it usually has no moving parts at all: no fan, no conventional disk drive. These little computers do have large capacity flash memory (the sort that is found in thumb drives), and most of them have back-lit displays (unlike some E-readers; see below).  In other words, they may as well be enormous cell-phones!  Note: at time of writing (May 2013) there are two types of Tablet computers: Wireless Only (which link to the internet), and 4G which also link to your phone service.  The former kind, since it only uses wireless Internet, which you have already paid for separately, is less expensive to buy, and less expensive to pay for as you go along.  The latter kind has to be paid for as a phone, and costs the usual $50 or so per month that a phone costs these days.

When any Tablet first powers up (or a smart phone, for that matter), the touch screen shows an array of about twenty icons that you can touch with your finger, like clicking with a mouse.  Each one triggers a program, such as the Internet browser, or your e-mail, or the music player, or a word-processor, or your photo album, or the settings manager (a little like Control Panel, in Windows), or almost anything you want to load on.  On most tablets, you can go to a second “page” of icons by swiping from right to left, like turning a page.  All your programs and most important files are represented by icons.

Once you ‘click’ on an icon, that program will usually fill up the whole screen, and you get to navigate through that program with a line of icons, either at the bottom, or across the top, just like the menu or toolbars of a conventional program.  If text input is required, as you would in a word-processing program, a keyboard pops up at the bottom.  There are ‘shift’ buttons, which switch the keyboard from lower-case to upper-case, or to symbols and numbers.  There is usually a button that removes (“dismisses”) the keyboard, and you’re back to using your finger like a mouse.

Around the edge of the pad there are sockets for various things: the power cord for charging it, a socket for earphones, a socket for a flash-card, possibly an HDMI connector for output to a TV, and so on.  The fact that there are no moving parts means that the devices can run with very little power.  On the other hand, they can’t supply power to a peripheral device, like a CD burner, or anything that draws power as much as a USB connector.  (In the future, peripherals might draw a lot less power than they do now, in which case Tablets could connect to that new generation of peripherals.)

A well-known drawback of the Ipad family of tablets is that they don’t handle Flash Video very well, or hardly at all.  Certain sorts of video can be played on a tablet PC, but for some reason flash video does not, on some tablets.  (Flash video is the sort you get on YouTube.)  The Ipad interface is very similar to that of the Iphone, and the operating systems of the two are essentially the same.  It is possible, as mentioned earlier, to get an Ipad with phone capability, so that you can connect to the Internet even when you’re nowhere near a wireless hot-spot, using cell service.

A competing family of tablets is powered by the Android operating system.  Among these are Xoom, by Motorola, Nexus, by Samsung, Kindle Fire, by Amazon, and Nook HD, by Barnes and Noble.  The last two are tied to Amazon and Barnes and Noble respectively for new software (the much talked-about “Apps”), which the owners must buy through the two online stores.  In contrast, most other Android tablets can get their apps from an online Android App store, which sells the apps for very little cost, and sometimes gives them away for free.  Free apps have advertising built into them, and that’s the source of revenue for the App manufacturer.

Note: Any tablet can be used as an E-reader, almost more easily than for any other purpose.  See under E-readers below.

Since the last post, we actually went out and bought two tablets for ourselves.  The tablet my wife had been using thus far was an original Ipad, first released in 2010, which was not so long ago.  But my wife was frustrated with the limitations of her little gadget (though later generations were much faster and better), and decided to buy an Android tablet.  Many of the frustrations she experienced, as I said were due to the outmoded hardware, but she was also attracted by the opportunity of tasting a different interface, namely the Android operating system.  She decided to buy the latest Samsung Nexus, a large 10" device, while I chose the smaller 7" Nexus.

Note: Most computer users have two sorts of activities in mind.  The more common type is content consumption, which is a fancy word for browsing.  You want to surf the Web, watch a video on YouTube, check up on Facebook, read your mail, shop online, or even read an e-book.  The other type of activity is content production: you want to write a term paper or a blog, write a lengthy e-mail, make a CD or DVD, create a video to upload to YouTube, photoshop a picture, or, in my case, input a piece of music into an editor, and fool around with the playback of it, and so on.

For the former activity, browsing, little power is needed, but portability is at a premium.  You want to be able to use the gadget while waiting to have your teeth extracted at the Dentist’s office, or while in a plane.  For the latter activity, production, you need a lot more powerful resources, but you’re usually resigned to doing it at home, or at the office.

I use my desktop or my laptop computer for accessing my productivity tools, e.g. Microsoft Office, or Adobe Creative Suite, or any number of a host of other software, while my wife would settle down on the futon when she got home, and play the odd game, or get on FaceBook, or read her E-mail, which usually had links to various fascinating websites.  I anticipated needing my tablet when away from home, while she hadn’t thought about the matter that far, and anyway was accustomed to the large Ipad she was getting rid of.  Hence the choice of gadgets.  (Her large tablet cost around $500, while mine cost around $200.)

Blue Tooth

Both Tablets and Phones connect to each other and to printers and keyboards and mice and so on using a certain short-range variety of wireless called BlueTooth.  BlueTooth is a special kind of wireless that needs two devices to be “paired together”; each device must identify the other positively, after which they merrily continue to be linked through a little private wireless connection provided they’re close to each other, within a few dozen feet.  This is an easy way for a tablet or a phone to connect to a printer, for instance, and wires are not needed.

The pairing process is sort of interesting.  Each device has to be set to ‘find’ the other.  Any Bluetooth device in the vicinity could be paired with any other, so there has to be some method for one of them to establish the identity of the desired partner.  (More about BlueTooth in the earlier post.)

E-readers such as Nook and Kindle are special-purpose tablets, with a tablet display especially designed for ease of reading text, called E-Ink, which uses very little power.  Some of them have buttons for turning pages and selecting the book, others use a touch-sensitive screen.  There is flash memory built in that holds the book displaying program, as well as the books, usually a few Gigabytes.  A single book is usually less than half a megabyte, so a single Gigabyte can hold 2000 books of that size.  (Books with illustrations will be much bigger.)  Some e-readers are black-and-white, others are full color; some need light to be read from, others have internal illumination, such as the Nook Glow.

Keep an eye on Public Domain literature, which is now being investigated --most infamously by Google, but also by the Gutenberg Project, and other non-profit organizations.  The most common format for free online books was initially plain text, which was very economical for storage, shortly followed by HTML, which was almost as cheap, storage-wise.  The latter enabled such things as italics and boldface, and also permitted a Table of Contents from which you could hyperlink to a particular chapter.  A few years ago, a standard for E-books was developed that went a step further, called the epub format, shortly followed by numerous proprietary formats from Amazon and Barnes and Noble and other E-book manufacturers, regrettably, addressing various real and imagined weaknesses in the Epub standard.  Anyway, now many free offerings in the Gutenberg project are available in Epub format, which can be loaded into your E-reader in addition to the E-books you actually buy.  Some manufacturers make this process easier, others make it difficult.  The Nook allows it fairly readily.  Tablets can easily used as E-readers; there are dozens of E-reader apps, many of them for free, which work both on smart phones and on tablets.

Ipods and MP3 players are little devices on which you can store music files.  They have a socket for headphones, and a little screen with a menu, and a couple of buttons with which you scroll around to find the tune you want.  You get to play a single song, a playlist of songs, a whole album, or go through your entire collection in any desired order, or randomly.  You can either connect them to your computer with a USB link, or using Bluetooth, or by inserting a flash card into it.  If you connect it to your computer, software on the computer can be used to organize the music files in folders, make a database of them, locate information on them from the Internet, and even buy new music from various provided, e.g. Amazon, Google, or Itunes.  My entire collection can probably be saved in 64Gb of storage on a MP3 player.  (Each piece is around 1 Megabyte, or 3 Mb for large-scale classical works.)

Any smart phone or tablet has music capability, so everything said above for MP3-players applies to your smart phone or tablet.  Interestingly enough, if you connect your smart phone or tablet to your computer, the computer discovers it shortly after, and considers it to  be a media device, which is a combination of a mp3-player, and either a camera or a camera flash card.  If you’ve ever connected one of these to your computer, you’ve seen the DCIM folder, which has your photos in it.  The smart phone or tablet has such a folder as well, and it, too, contains any photos you might have taken with the smart phone or tablet.  (In my experience, phones appear to have better built-in cameras than tablets.)

Software

Because of the close similarity between the Ios used on Ipads and Iphones on one hand, and Android used on Droids and Android tablets such as Xoom and Kindle and Nook E-readers on the other, using a Droid feels very much like using any Android tablet, with certain minor differences.  It is no surprise that the programs that run on phones and tablets are similar.  In fact, when my wife got her Iphone, she was surprised to find that all her purchases of music and games and software from Itunes (which is an online store for all sorts of things that run on Iphones and even on PC computers) would be automatically loaded onto her Iphone as soon as she logged in, without further intervention.  Apple products are all designed that way: the gadget starts working without the user having to wait to find out how to use it properly.  In contrast, for Android, there is a brief but significant wait time until you figure it out.  Similarly, as soon as I had identified myself to my new Nexus tablet, it ran out to the Internet, and fetched most of the software (apps, short of applications) I had loaded on my Droid.

Furthermore, some of the Iphone/Ipad appd my wife had bought from Itunes (the Apple online mobile device store) were available for use on her Nexus tablet as well!  O brave new world.

GPS and Navigation

In addition, the phone can triangulate its location, and send exact geographical information to the phone company, which can be used for GPS-like services, and driving directions, etc.  The only additional piece of information they need are road maps, which the phone can carry on board, or retrieve from the Internet for a small additional fee.  Recently, this service is provided at very little or no cost.

Browsing, and E-mail

On Ios, the preferred, pre-packaged browser is usually Safari, but you can download any browser you want.  The pages you see are scaled-down versions of the page you would get on a computer, unless it is a page that has a special “App”, which is essentially a web-page written specifically to look good on a phone or a tablet, using an interface that has a family resemblance to all the other Iphone Apps, or Droid Apps.  The Facebook page, for instance, is missing the side columns with the advertisements; instead, the advertisements are at the foot of the page, or interspersed right between the posts of your friends.

A lot of us have personal e-mail accounts on a website.  On the phones and the tablets, the e-mail is a separate app, designed specifically for a phone or a tablet, with all the other paraphernalia removed, or put in a hierarchy of menus that only expand on demand, because the usual nonsense takes up too much space, and space is at a premium.

The browser always remembers where you were when you opened it up last, and that’s what it opens up, rather than a home screen.  (You can set up the browser on your desktop or laptop to behave the same way.)

On Android, the Search engine is Google, by default, and is a separate App entirely, tailored for phone / tablet use.  In fact, you can talk at the screen, and it figures what you’re searching for by voice interpretation.

Common Websites

Popular Web destinations, such as Imdb, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, CNN, and so on, all have dedicated icons, and you go directly to them without going through the Browser.

Other Apps

There are some interesting application that Junior discovered:

Shazam: this one identifies tunes that are playing near you.  You activate the program, and hold it up to the source of the music, and after a few seconds it displays the title and the performer, and offers to sell it to you.  (You don’t have to buy it.)

E-book readers

An obvious idea is to load any e-book you happen to be reading onto your mobile device: phone or tablet.  There are a number of third-party apps that read most books that you’ve obtained without a DRM (digital rights management, the tool that proprietary e-book sellers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble use to control use of their e-books).  Note: you can make your own E-books, or get them in E-book (.epub) format from Gutenberg, or other free online book source.

Nook: this is a proprietary E-book reader app belonging to Barnes & Noble, and if you have a Nook account with Barnes and Nobles, it has your library ready to go.  You can either read them off the Cloud (in this case, the server at Barnes and Noble), or download the books to storage on your phone or tablet.

Kindle: similar to the above, owned by Amazon.

Sudoku:  There are several alternative implementations of this game, that provides random puzzles for you to solve.

Camera:  Most phones come with a camera, with both forward-facing and backward-facing lenses.  There is a button icon which you press, and you get a photo, or even a video.  You can choose to keep or discard.

Note Everything:  A multi-purpose recording program that records video, sound, doodles, or typed-in text.

Amazon MP3:  Plays MP3’s you’ve bought from Amazon, or browses for new purchases.

Contacts:  Manages your contact list that you maintain on Gmail.  This is a centralized location for e-mail, snail-mail addresses, and phone numbers, which you can update from either your desktop or your phone, and synchronize on demand.

Calendar:  A calendar program.  You get to set alarms to remind you of events you program into the calendar.

Created by the Fractal app

Calculator:  Most phones have a basic calculator.  Optionally you can download a free App that emulates a graphing calculator, that will draw curves and surfaces.

Gallery:  A gallery of photos you’ve taken, or downloaded.

Fractals:  A number of programs that will generate fractals for you, most commonly of the Mandelbrot Set, a furiously complicated set of points on the XY plane, discovered by the late Benoit Mandelbrot.

Quick Office:  Basic implementations of the most common Microsoft Office Suite programs, e.g. PowerPoint, Word, Excel.  Make a slide presentation from your photos, text, and material from the Internet, in fact, practically anything within reach of your phone.

Skype:  The popular Video chat program, now implemented for hand-held phones and Tablets.  You can make space-age video calls to your friends, provided they have Skype installed.

The Cloud

This is simply a word for storage that people are given either because they use a particular program, or use a certain service, or buy a certain amount of storage to use as a sort of disk-drive on the Web.
When you have mail, of course, you realize that it lives somewhere.  If you don’t delete it, it is there, to be retrieved anytime you like.  Well, Google decided to give those who have mail accounts with it the ability to keep documents on their server (a large internet-accessible computer, essentially).  Presently this public-access storage is called Google Drive.

Getting space on Google Drive is as simple as signing up for a Gmail account.  Once you set up the E-mail account (or if you already have one), you can download a program which sets up a folder on your computer.  (It works best if you set it up with a traditional computer, a laptops or a desktop.)  Then you can drag any files or folders you like into this folder on your computer.  It is no longer a traditional folder, but rather a cloud folder.  It is a folder on your computer which is paired with a folder on Google’s computer, which I’m going to call the Internet Mirror.  Anything you put in your computer folder is quietly uploaded to the Internet mirror folder.

Now suppose you want to get at the file in the Google drive folder on your home desktop from your office.  You download and install the Google Drive program onto your office computer.  Once it is satisfied about who you are, exactly, it informs you that it has some of your folders, and offers to create a copy of them on your office computer.  And there they are, all the files and folders you moved into Google Drive on your home desktop!

Google Drive can be gotten as an App on your smart phone and your tablet.  Once you log in to gmail on your Android device (phone or tablet) or log in to your Ipad, Google is satisfied about your identity, and your Google Drive is available.

On a small device such as a phone, downloading a file can eat up a lot of your space, so the app allows you to look at the file while it remains in the cloud (on the Internet mirror).  This is fine, as long as you don’t want to modify the file.

About 5 Gb of storage is free.  To get more, you have to pay about $2.50 a month in rent.

Itunes and Amazon Cloud are both services that keep your music and other media purchases on the cloud, and give you access through an app on your mobile device.  Nook does the same for books only, though they plan to expand their service to movies.  Netflix have an app for Android which allow you to watch movies on your mobile device (phone or tablet).

Marriage

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I never thought to write on this topic, because I have been divorced, and I had got into the habit of thinking that I had lost any right to comment knowledgeably on the subject.  But the divorce from my former wife was an amicable one, and I figure that one thing anyone getting married has to do is, if they ever get a divorce, do it amicably.  If you’re planning to marry, and you think that any possible divorce is going to be a contentious one, think hard.

Some people, I know, put so much trust in their partner that a divorce leaves them totally destroyed.  Should they not have put their total trust in their partner?  Some people seem to simply need that total trust, and divorcing from them is going to be  horrible.  Should you get married then, in the first place?  (I should be organizing this post a little better, with subheadings, but the whole subject is just too nerve-wracking.)  This is a subtle question, and I don’t have a good answer.  As far as marriage, and similar significant relationships are concerned, everyone is an exception.

A movie that I watched recently with my wife was, on the face of it, just a chick flick (a type that I really don’t mind), but seemed to have some really good insights: it was “He’s just not that into you,” which is a clumsy (but eye-catching) title for a quite sensitive movie.  The movie is all about girls making up rules of thumb to classify their relationships with romantic prospects (are they really interested vs. only slightly really interested, etc), and rules of thumbs as to how to signal your feelings to them, and how to signal the feelings you want to signal versus your true feelings, etc.  The subject was too complex for them (the movie-makers) to address with complete success (especially given their intended audience), but they did a surprisingly good job at delivering a useful message.

The girls from "He’s just not that into you."

The useful message that I got was this: everyone is different.  One character in the movie says that xyz is true for the vast majority of people, but of course you could be the exception.  (But chances are, he implied, you’re not.)  But, says the movie, in the end, you probably are.  Why is this?

Well, let’s look at it another way.  Suppose you’re considering how important it is to make a general rule about short, blond, blue-eyed, abusive men.  (There goes my short, blond, blue-eyed abusive audience, right there; but I guess I knew it was just a matter of time before it happened anyway! jk)  How important is it, considering that the proportion of short, B, B-E, A men compared to all men is probably very small? Probably not important.  But, it might be terribly important to anyone who tended to be attracted to short, B, B-E, A men.  So, while a certain circumstance might be rare among general relationships, it might be quite the opposite for a particular person.

[My dog Fuzzy just walked up and asked me to pet her!  It’s awesome that a dog can simply ask for a pat on the head, while people just don’t have the chutzpah to do it.  And, let’s admit it: I enjoyed doing it as much as she enjoyed getting it.  But it was a very short pet, so she grumbled before she walked off and lay down.]

Rules of thumb other people make up are likely to be useless in the world of romance.  But let me try and figure out what marriage can mean in this brave new world in which we’re deconstructing everything.

As far as I can tell, given that the word marriage means different things to different people, it is the following.  It is a partnership between two people (or more; who knows?) that involves a great deal of trust, and intimacy.

Because of the trust, the law permits a married couple to hold property in common, and have certain legal privileges, such as being parents, or having rights when one partner dies, e.g. to retirement or pension accounts, bank accounts, safety deposit boxes, and things of that nature.  And of course there are the hospital visiting rights, which were central to the whole argument for the meaning of marriage to be expanded in law.  All of this flows from the trust that each partner acknowledges in the other.  And from the rights and the trust, there also flows a great deal of responsibility for each other, and each other’s affairs.

Because of the intimacy, which is usually both emotional and physical (but need not be both), the law assumes that if the couple produce children, that both ‘parents’ have equal rights over, and responsibilities towards, the offspring.

So there it is.  A partnership that presumes some trust, and some intimacy, usually a lot of trust, and a lot of intimacy.  And it logically follows that there are rights, and responsibilities.  There are many sorts of legal partnerships that establish various sorts of rights and privileges and duties and responsibilities, but marriage is the one that assumes that there will be intimacy.

Just the other day, a close friend of ours was married for the first time.  We thought, my wife and I, that he embarked on the road to marriage with a good deal of trepidation, which oscillated between well-disguised peaks on some occasions, to other times at which he seemed almost maniacally delighted at the prospect.  On the whole, the couple seemed pleased to have successfully survived the nuptials, which too, on the whole, were conducted with legendary panache (except for the religious part, which seemed almost mythically awful).

I was seated at the reception with a young couple (friends of the bride and groom), the male member of which started off the meal tight-lipped, and evidently anticipating having to fraternize with someone with whom he expected to violently disagree.  But gradually I was able to draw him out, and it turned out that it was the second marriage for him, and he was somewhat embarrassed at the failure of his first.

Well, there were at least three failed first marriages at that table, and it seems to me that being embarrassed about failed first marriages was, all things considered, a total waste of time.

Should people marry young, since we’re all aware that marriages between very young people are often doomed to failure?  Well, if I had to do it over again, I absolutely would.  There is simply nothing compared to the mad love of a young couple, completely lost in each other.  I think the biggest problem that they face is the religious establishment that insists on their being married until death do them part.  A young couple is likely to swear to anything, in the heat of their passion.  Isn’t it a crime to make them swear to something that they are more than half likely to fail at?

On the other hand, it does seem silly to have a couple swear to love and cherish each other for at least 15 years, or whatever.  Maybe The Lord will stand by them, and help them stay faithful, but it seems to me that The Lord has more important things to do, and His time is probably better spent making sure that, while the couple is together, as long as they have young children in their care, that those children are raised carefully and considerately, and that the parents set good examples to them.  But, on reflection, a 15 year contract makes more sense every time I think about it.   We’re not forcing the couple apart after 15 years; no, we hope they will live together forever.  But to make them swear to something that will possibly make liars of them is silly, and weakens all vows they may take in anything.

It is usually religious extremists who insist of people taking oaths and making vows.  President John Quincy Adams, I recently learned, refused to take his oath of office on a bible.  I think it is an exemplary precedent, and I wish that more Presidents could choose different books on which to make the promise to serve the people with integrity.  (If the President were to consider becoming a traitor for some reason, the additional fear of becoming an oath-breaker is hardly going to dissuade him from such a course of action.)

I can recommend marriage to almost anybody.  The knowledge that there is a beloved friend at your back is amazingly liberating.  I told you about our friend who recently married.  Well, a little after he was engaged to his lady friend, the couple began to regularly visit both families together, and it was wonderful to see how much more relaxed they were than they had been, especially the half of the partnership that I had the opportunity of observing before.  I can absolutely believe that, in general, married couples live longer than singles.  I haven’t seen reliable statistics on the subject, but that’s what I would expect.

The couple need not share everything.  My wife knows most of what there is to know about me, and I know most of what there is to know about her, but part of the limit of the sharing is not knowing the extent of the not sharing.  But that’s how trust works: you don’t know everything, but you know enough to trust the other partner.  Some couples have a lot of intimacy outside of their marriage, most do not.  For a while, in the sixties and the seventies, there was a lot of experimenting with and about the institution of marriage.  But once it was established that people could live together long term without marrying right away, the mystique of "open marriages", or at least, their attractiveness to most people, seems to have declined.  But without the trust, the intimacy, and the partnership, there isn’t anything left.

If you were to agree with me that a marriage between, to begin with, two human beings, is simply a partnership based on trust and intimacy (which, as I tried to persuade you, leads to various rights and responsibilities towards each other, especially regarding children and property), it’s interesting to look at the entire marriage debate from this de-mythologized perspective.  Why not permit two men or two women to marry?  It is simply a matter of us getting used to the idea of two women looking at each other with love in their eyes, or two guys walking into a restaurant with a couple of kids in tow; you have to learn to imagine it with some degree of calmness.  Unfortunately because of the way our society has evolved, I find that I can imagine a couple of women more easily and with more comfort than a couple of men, but I recognize that it is more to do with me than to do with them.  Not all the decent couples in the world consist of one woman, and one man.

I think we should wait to expand the idea further, to permit an entire football team to get married to each other, for instance.  At this point, I would suspect larger groups insisting on marriage to have ulterior motives (such as to sabotage the rights of gays and lesbians to marry), but I don’t think it makes sense for us to categorically refuse to consider other sorts of groups being allowed to marry, provided the basic principle of trust and intimacy is present.  (I somehow can’t see how the word "intimacy" can be stretched to include very large groups, but I would shy away from being given a practical demonstration.)

A last tip for those thinking of getting married:  get married privately, by a judge somewhere, and make sure the judge leaves out religious references completely, but don’t freak out if they creep in; life’s too short for freaking out about everything.  Then, once you’re married, you can have a party, and don’t forget to encourage your friends to get to know each other, and don’t forget that your friends might not introduce themselves to everyone automatically.  It just might be the last time you have everyone together.  (Don’t try to get everyone together periodically; it’s going to be a logistical nightmare.)

It is interesting that being a couple does make it easier to relate to people!  You can just watch your partner doing his or her stuff, or you can jump in and make a complete fool out of yourself with relative impunity.  It is obviously up to the couple to make their own rules about how much to socialize, but I don’t think anyone should consider socializing as an obligation.  If you have kids, I suppose, it does make sense to allow the child or children to mediate a certain degree of fraternization with people you would otherwise leave alone; this is part of the magic of having kids.  If I have learned nothing else, one thing I have learned is that it is important to try to relate to and appreciate diverse people in your neighborhood, short of feeling obliged to do so.  Some people know everything about everyone in their neighborhood, others leave their neighbors strictly alone.  How your partner deals with neighbors is always a fascinating study, especially if you’re newly married, or if you’ve just moved in with a new partner.  (In my own case, for instance, it very much appeared as though my wife was the "I mind my business, and I’ll let them mind theirs," sort of person.  But pretty soon it emerged that she had chatted up the neighbors, and did know a lot more about them than I had ever dreamed of knowing.  So ... what can I say?  Either what she considered zero fraternizing with the neighbors was a lot higher than my own zero, or just being married made her a little more sociable.  She probably hates my discussing her like this...)

I’ll stop here for the time being.  I would like to add that we still look at each other sometimes, disbelieving that we could have fallen in together so perfectly.  I suppose I could have been very happy with someone that was a lot more of a closed book to me than my wife is, but it would not have been so much fun.  I hate the thought that she could have just as much fun with some other guy as she has with me, but I know it is probably true.  Age does teach one that one is not the only hope for all the women---or men--- in the world.  So my parting advice is: go forth, and get married, already!

Arch

Foreign Policy and Domestic Emotions

Just yesterday there was another bomb blast in Afghanistan, and I heard some general come on NPR to talk about what the implications were for troop withdrawals from the Afghanistan theater.  The President had withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq as a basic promise for after he won the White House, but of course he has found that disengagement with the Taliban is not as easy as he thought it would be.

Every time there is a new piece of guerrilla violence in any country we’ve invaded, it becomes that much harder for the Pentagon to make withdrawal palatable to the public.  We have to withdraw after the enemy has been ‘quiet for a while,’ which could be presented to the public as having won a peace of some sort.

But remember whom we are facing over there: the Taliban.  The Taliban is not a bunch of very bright people; they’re very motivated, cunning people, as military folk tend to be, but not bright.  But they’re also from a society in which machismo plays a big role; a man must show that he’s a man, or he’s nothing.  So the last thing they want is for the Americans to withdraw after they can claim a victory.  So they have to keep hounding our troops with bomb blasts, so that we leave after what is clearly an American defeat.

Well, we don’t want that.  So we have to stay.  We can’t nuke the country; that ship has sailed, hasn’t it?  We bombed Japan, and in the last analysis, that did not work out very well for us.  We did win the war, but our European friends, god love them, looked sorrowfully at us, as if they could not believe we would take such a crude and extreme step.  And we took it for them!  And don’t tell us the Germans wouldn’t have nuked us if they had the capability, right?  And so on, and so on.

Hey, but we have machismo, too.  It’s more subtle machismo, but it’s still the same ... thing.  We just can’t withdraw right after there’s been a bomb blast; that’s too much damn bile to have to swallow.  The last place we got hounded out of was Vietnam, and we swore we’d never do that again.

So the machismo of the American electorate and the machismo of the Taliban will conspire to keep the US in Afghanistan indefinitely, unless we get really clever with our machismo.

Arch.
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Early Childhood Training Without Sunday School

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The old ball and chain made the following remark one day, making me stop and think.  I had just said that there seemed to be some evidence for the belief that the decreasing religious belief in people generally did result in declining moral values.
“Well, sure,” she said at once.  “We got that thumped into impressed on us week in, week out.  Now, without the preacher to do it, someone else has gotta do it.  It’s common sense.”  [She was pained by the implied violence in the phrase "thumping in", which was not the one she remembered using, and I had paraphrased freely.]

I had, of course, gone on the assumption that moral values were intrinsic, and people don’t need to be told them.  Kids, in particular, I assumed, would know right from wrong instinctively.  But on further reflection, I have to change my mind.

Moral values, and certainly those that can almost be derived from ethical principles, are buried in our minds somewhere, and can be dug up on deep reflection.  I feel that kids do truly know some basic principles instinctively.  But I think a certain sort of social logic supersedes their instincts, and they begin to act cynically, unless what we adults consider right conduct is constantly presented to them.  Furthermore ---and I suppose child psychologists know all this sort of stuff from their textbooks, or maybe they know the exact opposite--- the sort of things that we can present to a kid as making sense will vary with their age.

Bear in mind that the thumping reminding has to take place frequently, and regularly.  I know.  Tough order.

Suppose we go on the assumption that “Jesus won’t like that” is a definite loser as a basic axiom of conduct.  What can we tell a kid to support what we think a kid should do?

An eye for an eye, the Golden Rule, retaliation, and all that jazz

Do As You Would ...

An interesting book written by a 19^th century clergyman Charles Kingsley is Water Babies.  This book has two fairies, or supernatural figures, anyway, visiting the subject of the book, a little boy.  One of them is BeDoneByAsYouDid, and the other is DoAsYouWouldBeDoneBy.  Unfortunately, I was given this book to read as a child of eleven or twelve, and I did not see the difference between the two principles (which the two characters kept enforcing, or teaching).  If you know all about this, just skip the next few paragraphs.

‘Be done by as you did’ is the Mosaic Law: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, intended to forestall escalatory retaliation.  In terms of secular military and political principles, it was the general practice to extract a bigger penalty than the original offense warranted: you slap me, I slap you twice.  You’d better watch it.  Present-day punitive action is almost exactly the same; Al Qaeda kills 3,000 odd random New Yorkers, we take out more than ten times that number, on various pretexts.  The Mosaic Law expressly forbids this, and it must stand as a shining example of philosophical advancement of its time.  Obviously, if the Biblical accounts of the Exodus have even an iota of truth to them, it would have made sense to put a stop to a vicious cycle of retaliation, which would have decimated the number of the Israelites who survived the migration eastward.

Presenting this minimal standard of behavior is not difficult.  “I don’t want you fighting for any reason,” you could say, “but don’t ever let me hear that you hurt the other kid worse than he (or she) hurt you.  That is not civilized.”  Look: if you need to invoke an authority, invoke Moses.  He was a great leader, you can say (which he certainly was), and this was his rule.  No hurting the other person more than you got hurt by him or her.  This is the Iron Rule.

My wife was also insistent that more basic rationales have to be presented.  “Sesame Street did this very effectively,” she said.  “The basis for civilization is Cooperation.  It isn’t difficult to persuade a child that cooperation is good.”  She’s absolutely right.  Ethical theorists have chased down this idea of Cooperation as a basis for society and labeled it Enlightened Self Interest, putting a beautifully cynical face on a very commonsense idea.  It is better to work together, than to work against each other, a basic lesson that was learned about the time nomadic patterns of existence gave way to farming as a way of life, where family teamwork was imperative for success, which spread to social living at many levels.  Society and cooperation are inextricably bound together, which is something our gun-loving, individualist GOP cowboys haven’t quite picked up on.

(Anyway, why is it called the Iron Rule?  Well, once upon a time, there was a guy called Iron Man ...)

The Golden Rule, to which the Water Baby graduates after having mastered ‘Be done by as you did,’ was the ‘Do as you would be done by’ rule, which is more pro-active.  Do good to others, so that they will, one hopes, do good to you in turn.  This is (as far as I can tell) not something to bring up in times of active conflict, but at a time when a friendly overture might be appropriate.  The Golden Rule is about pre-emptively making a friendly gesture, rather than forestalling an inappropriately harsh retaliation.  Any kid will buy into this idea; in fact, it is precisely this sort of idea that a kid is more likely to buy into than an adult.  You don’t have to bring Jesus into it at all; you only have to prepare the kid for possible minor disappointment.  If a kid makes a friendly advance and is rebuffed, with minor attitude adjustment, it can hurt a lot less than other sorts of disappointment, especially if you make the suggestion simply from the point of view of suggesting that junior puts him- or herself in the other’s place, rather than if you lead junior to expect a reward from the overture.  These are kindnesses that one can sow, the fruits of which can come much, much later.  And no supernatural agency need be invoked at all.

Again, Sesame Street beautifully presents this idea under the general heading of Cooperation, and I remember my own family advocating the principle of cooperation whenever I came home to complain about some sort of conflict in school, or among my friends.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I’m making this up as I go along, and if you think this is all crazy, you’re probably right.  But my wife and I have raised four wonderful children, and at least some of them were not raised in a religious environment at all, so some of the claims I make, even indirectly, are not entirely without justification.

The most demanding teaching of Jesus is encapsulated in the following verses from Matthew:

You have heard that it has been said, you shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

This is a teaching seldom or never actually practiced by The Faithful, though they are ever eager to pay lip service to the ideal.  Eastern religions have parallel teachings; the basic idea is that one must have pity on one’s enemies (or those who set themselves up to be one’s enemy), since evil has a way of turning back on its agent.   Despite the disparity between the number of those who are aware of the teaching, and the number of those who follow it, the principle is well understood, and it seems to me, actually believed.  Why do I say this?  Because the principle of boomerang evil is widely found in literature, from ancient Greek drama to modern Theatre, to Science Fiction.  The agency has drifted from The Gods to Fate, or Karma, some mysterious force in the universe that keeps account of actions and motives.

The idea behind the teaching is great wisdom, that is, assimilated study of human nature, and experience.  When you take up the "sword", you usually die by the sword, but kindness "begets" kindness, in experience as well as in our hopes.  So how can you tell a mere kid to turn the other cheek?

You really can’t.  This is behavior that has to be backed up with example, and unless we're prepared to show how it works, we can’t be teaching it.  The basic symmetrical principles will have to work, except for special occasions where an example is possible. Turning the other cheek is very advanced stuff, and not for kids.

Arch‘’“”

Follow on, on the last post

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On second thoughts, the video clip of the gentleman I featured on Friday is not what I would have wanted to say exactly, because it had some flaws.  It probably resonated better with students and their parents than the stuff I usually lay on you, but I was intrigued by some of his opening remarks, namely that students have absolutely no idea that getting a job means working almost every single day for the rest of your life, except for weekends and perhaps two weeks a year, and a third week in the winter if you’re very, very lucky.

A minor point in his talk, a point he made in passing, was that we are soon tempted to think of everything from our point of view, and forget that everyone else is having as bad a day as we are.  This is the whole point of maturity.  Some people can only see the world through their own eyes.  This is the big problem with the present membership of the GOP.  They’re the only ones who pay taxes.  They’re the only ones who are concerned about government overspending.  They’re the only ones who are worried about their student loans.  They’re so worried about their fershlugginer student loans that they forget the enormous student loans that every single kid is taking on, just so that some banks can make a decent profit.  (And they’re the only ones who are concerned about the poor little banks.  Oh, please.)  Well, honestly, once we liberal bleeding hearts get going on our little hobby-horses, I suppose we do tend to forget about the National Ever-Loving Debt.

But putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes is the adult thing to do.  In a crowded world, that empathy is very, very important, and it is wrong to leave that part of a child’s education up to the schools, be it elementary school, high school or college.  At the individual level, a teacher or a professor can teach subtle lessons about empathy, and trying to see the other man's point of view, but they have to be subtle, and they cannot be part of the curriculum.  That lesson must really be taught at home.  We must do it; parents must do it, and by example.  This is why I keep saying that the number one job of any human being, whether or not he or she has children, is to be a sort of a parent.  Not so much to be the pater familias to everybody in your vicinity, but to be aware that there is a lot of parenting deficit in our environment, and we might have to take up some of the slack.  Some of the most admirable childless couples I have seen instinctively do this.  All good teachers instinctively do this: it’s called setting an example.  But of course anyone who tries to labor that point in a graduation speech is asking for trouble.

The second point, and quite an independent point actually, is that avoiding a mind-numbing boredom is a major part of what a working adult has to do.  The culture we live in has empowered employers to lay almost intolerable burdens on employees, to the end of making profits.  Everyone’s objective is to become an employer, so that they can destroy their employees’ lives, rather than be destroyed themselves.  It is a terrible world, and some employers don’t see themselves as destroyers of lives; they see themselves as providing a living wage to some undeserving rascals, who quite incidentally enable you to make a small profit, but force you to play unemployment insurance and provide health insurance, and all sorts of stupid insurance, all put in place by idiotic liberal governments.  (That’s right; it is liberals who put in place this whole curse of employer-provided health insurance, but it was because no one would have tolerated government health care in the first place.)  But part of a good education is to give everyone the means for making creative use of their leisure.

A businessman would probably rather not be reminded that his employees even have leisure time, and most college kids thinks that their destiny is to become a businessman, and work to deny his workers any leisure time at all.  (This will be easier if overtime pay becomes a thing of the past.  A new bill in Congress will take away mandatory overtime pay, all in the name of making things easier for small businesses.  Pretty soon there will be legislation to make all businesses small businesses.  Mark my words.)

That point was also downplayed (on Friday’s featured video).  Again, parents hardly want to hear in a graduation address that their kids have been trained to make their leisure time more rewarding, because that would indeed sound as if college was preparing them for endless unemployment, though that is the last thing on anyone’s mind!  Still, training a student to be a productive worker is most definitely less than half of what a college should be doing.  The skills a typical worker needs should have been learned in high school: reading, writing, arithmetic, basic account-keeping, basic law, basic social contract.  If the kid is to become an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or ... , well, there’s stuff that college has to teach you.  The rest of what a kid picks up is to understand what someone else is saying, which is not easy, and a lot of subtle things that makes it possible for an employer to send an employee out as a representative of the business with some confidence, knowing that he or she has a certain je ne sais quoi that will only come to a mere high school graduate after much experience.

Well, we know what college should be doing; whether a college or university today actually manages to do it is open to question.  Whether a college can deliver all this via MOOCs is very doubtful indeed.  The reason everyone is thinking seriously about online education is because colleges have started focusing on marketing themselves, rather than delivering education.  But that’s what we see all around us: businesses spend a lot more on advertising and a lot less on improving their product than they did fifty years ago.  As goes the world of business, so goes the world of education, to the deep regret of society watchers everywhere.  And the same goes with hospitals; they spend far too much on big billboards advertising themselves, and beautifying their campuses, than in improving health care.  And all the cost is piled onto the back of the consumer.

There are no big moves that we can make to reverse these trends, at least none that I can see.  All we can do is to influence those around us, especially the younger folks, to appreciate the better, more important things in life, and view the rest with a healthy degree of suspicion!  And there you have it.

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I wish I had said this first!

Just ignore the cheesy background music!

The video is aimed at younger people, who need to figure out their relationship to the universe right away, before they begin to think about their relationship to society!  Living in a rural area as I do, I tend to forget a lot of what is happening to people in urban or suburban areas.  Honestly, it seems very much as though the typical working day is designed to prevent anyone from thinking clearly about anything.

It is amazing that there are so many liberals in urban areas at all; the daily grind should make Rush Limbaughs of all of us.  But somehow it doesn't.

In related news, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh is losing popularity in certain sectors of the population; or more precisely, activist liberals have succeeded in getting advertisers to boycott Limbaugh to the point where the company that markets his talk show, Clear Channel Communications, is losing money.  I might not be stating the situation accurately; follow the link to get the Huffington Post report on it.

Those of us who try to avoid knowing anything about Rush Limbaugh have no idea of some of the more corrosive things he says.  One of my closest friends listens to Limbaugh Radio all the time; it is more than I can understand how we manage to be civil to each other!

To get back to graduation addresses, here's what I would have liked to say to our own graduates:

It is a pleasure and a privilege to be allowed to speak to you graduates and your families on graduation day, or Commencement, as it is sometimes called.  While you’re thinking: “I can hardly wait to get out of here; I’m so done with this place!” the rest of us are thinking: we are not done with you, not by a long shot.

An actual proposed campus somewhere

Once you have finished paying off your loans, guess what?  You get elected to the Board of Trustees of some school, most likely this one.  Then you get to have a say about what this campus will look like in twenty or thirty years.  This is a scary thought, considering what so many modern school campuses look like: total wastelands of  blocks of once gracious and charming homes razed to the ground, and replaced by generic-looking concrete buildings, or worse, acres and acres of parking lots, to satisfy the insatiable need for rich undergraduates to bring more and bigger personal transportation to school.  All the beautiful neighborhoods that give this place its unique character will gradually be replaced by bigger, less efficient buildings that, frankly, this school does not need.

We had four years to give you a certain amount of aesthetic sensibility, to provide you with some perspectives about public art and architecture and beauty, to moderate the total tastelessness of your fellow-Trustees.  Resist the trend towards generic shrubbery, and miles and miles of parkland!  Insist that the undergrads bring bikes to school, instead of bigger cars!  Hold back the trend to buying up neighborhood homes, and razing them to the ground, and replacing them with a lawn!  Prevent your alma mater from transforming itself to a sea of concrete roofs over nothing but endless hallways!  If, in these four years, we were unable to give you this perspective, we have failed, no matter how big a salary you earn.

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And now for something completely different: The body language of dogs

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I bet you weren't expecting that, eh?

Anyway, it's been just about 6 months since my wife's dog Fuzzy (not her real name) came to live with us.  The old Fuzz is probably one of the most beautiful, sweet-natured dogs that ever lived, and what's more, she's fairly good at communicating what she's thinking, or, what's pretty much the same, what she wants.  She usually wants what any dog does: to eat (practically any time), to drink (after any sort of exertion or excitement, like seeing a squirrel), and to go out (when she has a call of nature, or if she hears something outside, or if she's just bored).

As I related to you some posts back, the domestic dog, as a species, owes its success to its adeptness at communicating with humans.  Part of the equation is --and probably the major part-- how much they understand humans, particularly the humans who belong to them.  Each dog seems to take on its own family of humans as a sort of project, and becomes practiced at understanding what each member wants and is thinking, to the point where many people convince themselves that their dog can read their mind!  Most of the time this is because we give off cues that the dog can pick up on, and it sometimes knows what we want before we realize it ourselves.  So by the time we arrive at the realization, and notice the dog, it's as though the dog knew it instantly.  E.g., I'm going to feed you, or I'm thinking of taking you for a walk.  (Walks are pretty high up in a dog's scale of values.)

On the other side of the coin, there's how dogs tell us what's going on in their heads.  It's not that they set out to develop a sort of sign language for humans, or anything of the sort; their human communication is derived from dog-dog communication, which is, to some extent, based on universal mammal-to-mammal communication.  I'm not an expert on the subject in the least; this is pure speculation on my part, and anyone who has studied the subject would be hard put to come up with irrefutable evidence for any theory he might have.  In other words, even experts are probably mostly speculating.  But it makes sense that dogs of today are descended from ancestors who were particularly clever at communicating with their human pets, so it is possible that the language transmitted from dog parent to dog child, or any communication instincts that are handed down genetically, have been selected to be successful at what they do.

I'm just going to collect here a few very basic categories of doggie language, which I am sure have been noticed by practically everybody.

Tail wagging
This is almost the trademark dog behavior, but what does it mean?  Most people mistake it to mean happiness, but it basically means excitement.  A dog will wag his tail even when it sees something in the yard that he can chase, like a fox, or another dog, or a neighbor you can't stand.  It just means: here's something to relieve the boredom!  Of course, when you arrive after being gone for a while, the dog is excited to see you.  In the mind of a dog, I'm guessing, there's isn't much difference between excitement and happiness.  (With cats, too, tail wagging signals excitement, but usually of a threatening kind.  Cats are simple creatures, and are usually not concerned with signalling feelings to their prospective prey!)

Walking in a circle
Fuzzy sometimes walks in a tight circle, and then stands expectantly.  It's clear from her manner that she expects me to understand what that means.  What is it?  It means anything from "Let's go!" to "I want to go out," to "Outside!" in response to a question I might have asked: What do you want, Fuzz?  So it is a multi-purpose unit of meaning that can mean a number of related things, all in the general area of going, and more precisely, going out.

Cocking head to a side
This is a classic part of a trained animal actors' behavior.  It means, essentially: What?  Dogs use this motion to convey puzzlement of any kind, especially if it is something it thinks it was expected to understand.  If an instruction was unclear, the dog cocks its head to a side.  So very intelligent dogs spend a lot of time doing this, simply because they expect that most of what you're doing is giving them instructions.

Prancing
This is what a dog does when it appears to dance, and comes straight down with its two front paws together.  (Horses do it, too.)  This mostly means: let's play, or let's run!  It's a general response to an expected fun activity.  Oddly enough, when Fuzz chases a squirrel up a tree, this is what she does: she prances at the foot of the tree, asking the squirrel to come down and play.  If the squirrel were to actually come down, she probably would bite its head off, but it's all in fun.

Another playful behavior is tossing something, as if the dog is playing fetch.  I've only seen The Fuzz doing this a couple of times, with a rope toy, but they pretend to shake the toy to death and toss it at you, quite a horrible joke, if you were to think of the toy as a small animal.  She can throw the rope quite far, actually.  I have heard of another dog who threw something so hard that it cracked a pane of glass.

More serious behaviors, to coin a phrase, are to roll over on her back: this is a gesture of submission; and of course to stand, with the front legs slightly splayed, and snarl, is an unmistakable gesture of defiance.  Barking, on the other hand, can mean lots of things, from: Is anybody out there? to: You're getting too close, buster.

Smiling
Dogs smile, or rather, they grin.  They have a sense of humor, as I have pointed out before, and they play jokes, usually terrible practical jokes, which gives them no end of amusement.

Pacing
Dogs pace for pretty much the same reasons that we do.  They combine pacing with staring at their human fixedly, and it is pretty unnerving to realize that the dog might be expecting something from you, but is at a loss to explain exactly what.  It would be nice if you had a genius like Lassie who can practically write what she means on paper, but the vocabulary of the average dog is severely limited, and all she can do is tell you that she's impatient.  Finally,

Sitting in the middle of the doorway
You've probably wondered why your dog lies down right in the middle of your path to the door, or to the kitchen, or whatever, and doesn't budge.  This seems to be particularly true of females--don't ask me why.

My theory is that the dog is thinking strategically, and (a) wants to keep an eye on her surroundings, either to be aware of possible threats, or, more likely, (b) not to miss any excitement.  So a dog is likely to place him- or herself on your route out of the house, such as to the garage, or the front door, or the back door, so that --in principle, if not in practice-- he or she can join you on an excursion.  But most animals, at least mammals, will place themselves strategically so that they can keep an eye on everything.  In cold weather, of course, the need to keep warm trumps the need to keep an eye on everything, so you'll find Rover plopping himself down in front of the fireplace.

If you have observed other behaviors that I've missed, let me know!

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