It's the First Day of Spring, the Equinox, and BACH's BIRTHDAY!

A hearty good afternoon to all you readers!

In previous years, I usually inserted a lengthy explanation about the actual date of Bach's birth, the problems about the adoption of the (Roman Catholic) Gregorian Calendar by the protestants of Saxony, and so on.  But today, following our illustrated leader, president T, let's ignore the science and the mathematics.  (I might just Tweet this post if I get the urge; it'll probably take about 5 tweets!  Don't forget; we're not doing serious mathematics today!)

To celebrate the day, Google (which also considers March 21^st Bach's birthday like me {just let it go; it doesn't matter}) has put up a Doodle on their main search engine page, which is ingenious.  When you click on it, it takes you to another page, where (after a short break, while they load up some coding) they tell you to type in a short tune.  Their interface does not allow anything too fancy, but still, there's a degree of flexibility.  They then harmonize your tune automatically, using a database that has distilled some 300 Bach tunes.  The result is quite nice, though a tiny bit goofy!

They give you an example, which they then proceed to harmonize, and Hoo Hah!  It comes out perfectly harmonized in the style of Bach!

Now, it turns out, their example is an actual hymn-tune that Bach harmonized, called Ach, wie fluchtig, ach wie nichtig!  No need to look up the translation; it means something like, "Oh, how fleeting."  (All flesh is as grass, etc, etc.)

(You realize that you can play their Doodle yourselves, so what I'm about to do is redundant: I'm going to insert a little video clip of their example tunelet right here.)

How close is their Artificial Intelligence harmonization to Bach's own?  Hang on; I have to go look this up . . .Well, it's (very) close, but not identical.  (At least, they're not cheating!)  Here they are, one below the other:

As you can see, they are very close!  This doesn't prove anything, really; the algorithm that harmonizes your tune is very clever, but the more 'Bachian' your tune is, the better it is likely to do.  If you want to push the program to its limits, give it a tune that is wildly un-Bach-like, and you might be amused with what you get!

This might interest you: as my own tune, I gave it the second half of the line from the hymn they used as an example.  And, predictably, it supplied the harmony from the Bach chorale.  (The tune I thought I knew is just slightly different.)

An interesting treat
Bach, as you know, made numerous cantatas---around 200 of them---to be sung in Church, about half of which were based on, or were enormous elaborations of, existing, famous (at that time) hymn-tunes.  Cantata number 26 is based on precisely this tune: Ach wie fluchtig.  Its opening chorus (full choir and orchestra, and probably the organ as well), is one of the most awesome choruses Bach wrote, and here it is.  The hymn melody comes in a few seconds after that really fast orchestral introduction.

Here's a completely instrumental version, arranged by the late Sir William Walton, as a scene for a ballet:

Arch

The Whole 'Tax Versus No Tax' Thing

In this day and age, very few people want no taxes at all.  I mean, there probably are some, but they're not serious.  (Without taxes what are we going to do: get around on Imperial Walkers?  Not that roads are the only thing the Feds do for us.)

The simplest thing I can suggest to Tax Agnostics is this: take something that we take for granted at present: like, say, the FDA (the food and drug administration).  Yes, I know: most conservatives hate this office.  What do they do?  Spend huge amounts of tax money to figure out, infinitesimally slowly, whether new drugs are dangerous, or whether they're effective.

The GOP is probably fine with having some private company do that for us.  Of course, the patients can pay for the service, right?  Think about that.  It would be easy for the drug companies to give these testing labs a lot of money, and just make them feel the obligation to go easy on the biggest contributors.  (That has happened, but the memory is so painful, we try to forget that it happened.  Officials of the FDA had been bribed, if I'm not mistaken.  They were fired.)

Environment, Inequity, Justice, Action, and the Future

As many of us know, we live in puzzling and worrying times, where lots of things around us are inter-connected, and deciding what we ought to do is too complicated for most of us to really figure out.  For years, the Idea Environment that surrounds us has tried to simplify things for us; somehow we've been fed a lot of pre-chewed information, and we're just not accustomed to dealing with unfiltered reality.  Now, suddenly, we have to worry about everything from tiny little organisms going extinct, to cruelty to whales and elephants, to unemployed coal miners, to ignorant politicians who bend the truth and condemn the Press. Nobody is giving us the version for busy executives.  (If this sounds like I'm being condescending, I'm not; I'm almost as confused as you are.)

Should you read this post?  I hope you do, especially if you have a strong stomach, have patience with science, and have the intellectual stamina to read through it.  It is a difficult undertaking, and I just don't have the training to set it out in psychologically the best way, so that the greatest number of people will get just the right benefit from it, for all our sakes!  No; it's not the end of the world, but, you know?  Repent and—maybe—be saved, in some sense, is the message.  If you're likely to misunderstand what you read, especially when we get into science and social science, maybe you should not read this.  There are far too many people out there who're going off half-cocked, having only understood a small fraction of what they're being told.  (On re-reading this, I have made dozens of mistakes, and left many long sentences incomplete, and I'm trying to fix them.)

There are a number of very smart people writing on the Web, who have excellent mental pictures for us, so that we can imagine the problems in a graphical way.  So human intelligence is doing its best to make all of us understand, but the habits of a lifetime get in the way.  Especially habits of  choosing Convenience really get in the way.  A lot of the actions we can take oblige us to take a whole lot of little steps, each of which is going to be inconvenient, so if you're a single parent, for instance, struggling to get your two kids off to school every day, before you rush to work in your truck: well, you can be excused for ignoring this!  The rest of us just have to do better, to compensate!

Also, I'm old and feeble, and I might want to take a nap halfway through this post, and I might never have the energy to do it right when I continue.

Planetary Warming
We have been told, for a number of years (actually more than 30 years) that the planet is warming up, and by now all of us believe it.  Big Oil and Big Business have firmly said: No, it isn't warming, or sometimes, No, it isn't warming as fast as you think!  Or sometimes, Well, OK, it is warming, but It Isn't Our Fault!  But we know, temperatures are rising.  It may not be rising where you live, but fairly reliable calculations based on sampling the temperatures all around the globe, including in the seas, and in the air, and including looking at infra-red images from satellites, over more than two decades, shows that temperatures are rising, and accelerating.

Why are we concerned?  Because the Oceans are getting warmer, and dirtier.  All the food we eat, and a huge number of creatures: fish, whales, birds, are at risk.  As the temperatures pass beyond a certain point, one species will stop existing; past another point, and another species goes extinct, and so forth.  When these species die off, it won't be like some curious little critter in the Amazon jungle dying out; it could be a huge gap in our diet, e.g. having to give up Tuna and Salmon.

The Oceans, according to some writers, is the beginning of all the food lines.  I think that is an over-generalization, but it has an element of truth.

Why is the planet warming up, and can we slow it down?
There are two answers (as to why warming takes place), a local one, and a global one.
The local one is that, for instance, we warm our homes and businesses, and the heat leaks out, because we don't insulate our homes very well.  In the warm season, we use electricity to cool our homes, which pumps the heat out of our homes—more heat than we pump out of our homes, because the motors of the AC generates its own heat.  And the Electric Companies also generate a lot of heat.  Every factory generates heat.  It can't be helped; this has been going on from the beginning of factories!  Forest fires, arson, people burning tires, and crazy stuff like that goes on all the time, and generates more heat; so do war zones, nuclear tests, etc.

The global cause is tricky to explain.  The Greenhouse Effect is something non-science people love to disbelieve, because it is sort of invisible.  When there is a lot of Carbon Dioxide in the air (atmosphere), it reflects heat radiation back down to the earth.  How is this?  Heat Radiation is a kind of wave, like light rays; in fact it is Infra-Red rays.  When the Infra-Red rays reach the Carbon Dioxide layer high in the atmosphere, The Carbon Dioxide molecules soak it up, and it gets them vibrating.  When they stop vibrating, they release the energy in all directions.  But obviously, half the directions are downwards, and half the directions (thankfully) are upwards.  So, according to my understanding, the Carbon Dioxide effectively sends back half the heat that the earth is trying to get rid of.  The Carbon Dioxide is like a blanket that frustrates and interferes with this cooling process.*

Anti-science citizens will often reject the Greenhouse Effect right here, simply because Business Interests put out  propaganda to suggest that this explanation is too hypothetical; "It is just the sort of high-concept mumbo-jumbo that scientists spew through the Fake News Media!"  Business interests of all kinds do not like the idea of Warming for reasons I'll tell you presently.

If, in defiance of all the Anti Science propaganda, we do concede that the Greenhouse Effect must be recognized, what are the consequences?

When we burn anything (except Hydrogen, I suppose; burning Hydrogen simply gives us heat, and water), usually Carbon-based material: Wood, Coal, Gasoline, Peat, Natural Gas, Propane, Paper, Cardboard; Carbon Dioxide is released, together with smoke and soot and other crap.  That directly contributes heat, and also contributes to the Greenhouse Effect, because of the release of more Carbon Dioxide.  So, as somebody described it, the most powerful thing that could counteract this steady, brutal process of Carbon Dioxide release is: Carbon Trapping.  We want to capture the carbon dioxide, and keep it imprisoned harmlessly.  What does trapped carbon look like?  Wood, petroleum, plastic, natural gas.  It is inactive, not reflecting heat back into the earth.  But when this stuff is dug up and burned, we do two things: we release the heat, and we increase the efficiency of the Carbon Dioxide greenhouse, which keeps the heat here, instead of allowing it to radiate out into space.  To summarize, we need to trap the Carbon Dioxide, and prevent it from getting into the atmosphere.

Okay, Major Omission Alert.  I forgot to mention that of course The Sun blasts us with heat all the time.  We're in a sort of rotisserie that gently roasts us just enough (normally) so that life on earth has a decent temperature.  But an equal amount of heat has to be radiated out, otherwise the earth will obviously warm up.  The Greenhouse Effect is preventing this equilibrium from taking place.

Our biggest friends in our desire to trap carbon, is Trees.  For millennia, these fellows have been gobbling down Carbon Dioxide, and releasing Oxygen, with which we're totally fine.  Seaweed, plain ol' weeds, grass, geraniums, maples, oaks, firs, pines, these guys are peacefully absorbing Carbon Dioxide, trapping the carbon in their trunks and leaves where they aren't contributing to planetary warming.  But of course, burning, shredding, contribute to Carbon Dioxide outflow.

Don't forget that vehicles burning carbon fuel--that is, every single vehicle, unless it is an electric car powered by an electric power station that does not burn some carbon-based fuel---is also creating Carbon Dioxide.  And just looking out your window on a weekday morning probably makes you despair, at all that Carbon Dioxide hitting the skies.

Business Interests
Why do businesses hate anyone addressing Global Warming?  Successful business folk tend to focus only on things that affect their businesses, and ignore everything else (including inconvenient laws!  Yeah, I hate business.  Business insists that it, exclusively, brings prosperity.  To a limited extent, this is true; but they're crude and destructive, and egocentric, and left to itself, will destroy everything in its path.)

Now, Businesses depend on transport.  Crucially.  When they hear: Global Warming, they think: These fellows are trying to raise the price of gasoline.  Well, it's true; raising the price of gas was the go-to method for discouraging the use of gasoline.  If you study the statistics, you can see a strong correlation between times when gasoline was cheap and plentiful, and business was good.  Politically, it is a bad move to raise the price of gas, because employees need to have gas, to get to work; trucks need to have gas to bring goods and supplies, and everybody needs to have gas, so that they can drive to places to have Fun, and blow their savings.  That's good for business.  So when they think about the environment, they think about gas prices and they think: RESIST.  This is why Trump got elected, because the business world recognized someone who would not be swayed by environmental considerations, and keep the gas supply flowing by hook or by crook.  As you can see, from the point of view of Business, dealing with Planetary Warming is pure poison.  Business, therefore, blasts us with a relentless stream of propaganda that insists that Warming is a fairy tale, for the simple reason that freely-flowing gasoline supplies is logically good for Business, and have historically been correlated with good times for Business.

Is it still possible to reverse Planetary Warming?
Probably not.  With 21^st-Century Science, and with mass psychology so heavily influenced by business interests, it is hopeless.  The younger generation, which has lived with environmental prophets since their birth, has a sense for the urgency of the problem, and the Trump Administration's unbelievably clumsy attempts to discredit the Press and the Media, (despite the Media's equally unbelievably clumsy attempts to fight back!).  But despite the feeling of urgency the Millennials have, for trying to fix Warming, there's too much resistance from Business.  The minute a leader emerges, such as Bernie Sanders, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Business deploys its armies of Orcs, to discredit them, and grind them into the dust.  Additionally, the folk who just love to drive around in enormous vehicles for fun, equate Warming with party-pooping.  To get going on slowing down Warming, we will have to take austerity measures.  Conservatives have presented austerity as something The Poor have to do: give up food, give up shelter, give up Medicare, etc.  But, pound for pound, The Rich contribute more heavily to Warming than the poor.  Public Transport will have to replace personal transport, something we spoiled Americans hate with a passion.  Unless all of us can persuade our rich friends and neighbors that bus and train travel is fun, public sentiment will be against any steps toward minimizing austerity measures directed at slowing down Warming.  As you can see, reversing warming is very unlikely to happen.

The huge ice caps at the poles--which were a lot huger not long ago--have started melting, and it will not be easy to reverse that.  (What are we going to do: install enormous refrigerators at the poles, and use lasers to beam all the waste heat out into space?)  Sea levels are rising, and when the rich owners of coastal real estate finally decide it is time to drop the pretense of Climate Change Denial, which they think of as political Rhetoric, it will be no longer possible to actually reverse planetary warming.  By then, it will probably be impossible to even Slow Down planetary warming.  But at the moment, I still believe that it is possible to slow it down.

Why can't we say, firmly one way or the other, whether Planetary Warming can be reversed?
Because it depends on science of the future; on scientific breakthroughs that have not yet taken place.  Thermodynamic (heat-related) breakthroughs are the least probable sorts of breakthroughs we can expect.  We might be able to find a really efficient battery that can be used by cars, which alone will help slow down the rate of warming.  We might stumble on an energy source that is carbon-neutral, which means we can give up fossil fuels (gasoline, gas, wood, coal) completely, and have lots of energy without a lot of heat by-products.  But every engine---car engines, air conditioners, planes, excavators, lifts---produces waste heat.  There will never be a heat-free engine.

Slowing Down the Rate of Planetary Warming
Except for the reluctance of Business Interests to support anti-warming actions, we could easily begin to slow the rate at which planetary warming takes place.  This will help the poorest among us, who are least able to handle the problems with warming.  Consider floods, which affect poor people most, and which are made worse by planetary warming.  (The oceans heat up, and give rise to hurricanes and typhoons, which then drift towards the land, and hit the areas near the coasts in which poor folks have settled, disproportionately.)

Timbering
The timber lobby is greedy for cutting down trees.  A lot of pressure there; trees provide paper for business (marketing, packaging, etc), construction (housing, furniture, cabinets, etc), the printing industry (direct mail advertising, newspapers, toilet paper) and so on.  Never mind that a tree has been trapping carbon for a century.  Some of these 800-year-old trees have been doing this for that long, and have gotten very good at it!  (Just kidding!)  But the thing is to keep that carbon trapped.  Once the tree is timbered, almost any use it is put to will release some of that carbon.

I can't see, with my limited knowledge, any downside to planting trees in every convenient place.  Our family has a tiny lot; I believe a quarter of an acre, and all the trees we had had been attacked by pests, and the branches were falling, and the leaves were refusing to fall, which is apparently a sign of a tree that is dying.  So they were all cut down, and we have just one maple in our yard.  If we plant too many trees, we won't get any sun in our back yard at all.  (We don't have a front yard.)

This is the problem of most city dwellers: they don't have too many options when it comes to planting trees in their property.  But farms, businesses, schools, universities, parks, recreation areas, all can increase the planting of trees.  Yes, they're inconvenient if they're deciduous, but they directly trap atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.

Family Traditions of Heat Efficiency
In each family, we develop family traditions that influence whether, when our children become adults and set up their own homes, they adopt a needlessly heat-using lifestyle: cooking for every meal, discarding unused food, using the most heat-intensive cooking methods, using dryers needlessly, keeping the thermostats turned up very high, even in the spring; keeping the car cabin temperature levels high, and the worst: keeping the heater on in one room, and the cooling on in the next room!

Our family has slowly begun using clothes-racks to dry our clothes in the warm, dry weather.  One of our cars is a hybrid, which gave us 40 miles a gallon, and is the quietest of our cars.  (The other is an SUV, and a small truck!

We still use the dryer all the time, but now it is time to bring out the racks, and put the wet clothes out on the back porch.

[Note: Now, don't get too excited, but I wonder whether anyone has thought about one way of offsetting the Greenhouse Effect, that is: placing a thinly distributed layer of highly-reflective crystals or dust in the air, to reflect the Sun's heat away from the earth. If the amount of radiation coming in is reduced, the heat should not build up.  I think the problem with this approach is that it could get out of control, and actually prevent trees from photosynthesis, and result in a catastrophe.  (Photosynthesis, of course, is desirable; in fact, it is essential.)  This is a dangerous game to play.]

Arch

*Normally, when we put a hot object on a table, it cools through three processes: Conduction, through the table surface; Convection, by heating up the air, which then flows away; and Radiation, which is Infra-Red rays that go out in straight lines to hit the walls and ceiling, and whatever else is in their way.  In the case of the earth, the heat goes out mostly by Radiation, which means that  the heat goes up as Infra-Red rays, and hits the Carbon Dioxide in the upper atmosphere, and is re-radiated back, as described above.  I apologize in advance if I have misunderstood the mechanism, and misinformed my readers!
Arch