I Could be TOTALLY Wrong, but ...

Who are the people in your Neighborhood?

2012-03-10T11:01:00.000-05:00

When the USA entered World War 2 (encouraged by Pearl Harbor), it was the end of US isolationism. (You can read all about the philosophical bases of this particular attitude towards foreign policy: look under the Monroe Doctrine.) But the American involvement in World War 2 had its social implications too; after the War, Europe was no longer a mysterious place where only the elite dared to go.

It seems to me that it was very much as though The United States of America grew up, and went to College. We met different people, and we were no longer dominated by the world view of our Parents. Blacks and Native Americans, Hispanics and other non-white minorities looked more like human beings, just as if we had met and gotten to know them in College. It seemed possible to get some wisdom from those who did not wear the traditional face of wisdom, namely white Europeans.

Interestingly enough, Sesame Street went on the air, and within a decade or so, our kids were listening to a song: Who are the people in your neighborhood? It's the people that you meet, when you walk along the street! The conservatives of today would view that song as subversive in the extreme. It encouraged little kids to regard people who appeared to be aliens as actually their neighbors. A neighbor is someone with whom you share a vested interest: an interest in your neighborhood.

Hillary Clinton boldly declared this vision: there are certain things that must be approached communally. The list was far larger than any fiscal conservative could tolerate: Education, Housing, Health, Aging, Transportation. No, no; just Defense and Highways, people; everything else has to be privatized! Are you crazy?

This is probably still the battlefront between the haves, and the have-nots, including all liberals of any level of income: our neighborhood is much larger. We're not really happy with the gun-owning, bible-thumping, gas-guzzling guys in the big house up the street, but he's in our neighborhood too. He thinks he's a one-man neighborhood all by himself, but if tuition costs go up much higher, he's going to have to beg to get into our neighborhood, and of course we're going to let him in.

The amazing thing is that a good many economic elitists out there heard this very song in their young days. But it is much harder for people who either have large incomes, or dream of them every night, to enter the mindset of our Neighborhood than it is for a Camel to go through the eye of the proverbial Needle.

Arch

College Students Critique Lectures

2012-03-06T14:29:00.004-05:00

College is not for everybody. Some colleges aren't any good for anybody. No college is good for everybody. When lots of kids are railroaded to college, this is what happens. Kids end up wanting to be entertained in college. They think their professors should be Jerry Seinfeld, or whatever funny guy or gal the kids watch these days.

I was incited to write this post by this article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which referred to a video on YouTube.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum and Mit Romney ridicule President Obama for suggesting that most students should go into higher education (even if not traditional college). Their point was that we must dignify all occupations, so that students who take on jobs that are currently considered undesirable will not feel looked down upon. It seems to me that this would only happen if all jobs provide the same pay. Conservatives, of course, are the last ones to look favorably on such a situation.

Nor would a conservative be happy paying big money to people such as, to take a random example, a store clerk, who has little higher education. (These days many store clerks would have at least a bachelor's degree.) Why? because that would result in higher prices for consumer goods.

[It is right that society rediscovers the dignity of labor. But it seems unfair to doom some citizens to low-income or low-satisfaction jobs based on their limited education. This condemns both the worker and the job, because the job comes to be associated with people of low intelligence or low scholastic achievement, at the very least. It seems more reasonable to me that people be given incentives to take on (presently) unpopular jobs on a part-time basis, or during a period of community service. No job should be so terrible that it cannot be done for a brief stint.]

But what about this business about college professors not being sufficiently entertaining?

There seem to be two schools of thinking about this.

The Archimedes school of thinking goes as follows. You're in college to educate yourself. College is a place in which you can learn things, but no one is going to stuff your head with education while you relax and are entertained. You've got to stuff your own head with the information. What is the professor paid to do? She is there to arrange for you to know what information is out there, to help connect the information and the reasoning together. But not to do it for you. So why should you pay big money for someone who is not going to do the learning for you? I don't have an answer. Society wants you to be educated, and so society should pay for it. I don't think education is a consumer item.

The other school of thought is that it is indeed the professor's job to make the subject interesting. If the professor can't do that, he should give up the profession, and allow someone more entertaining to take his or her place. Unfortunately, the expectation of students tends to escalate, and there's no satisfying a student who has had a sequence of entertaining professors in the past. You've gotta come on like Crazy Eddie, or junior is going to be bored. I, even I have been accused of being too entertaining. But I draw the line at a certain level of entertainment. I make a joke or two, intersperse a set of difficult example with a little levity, but we grind on. I get the students to go to the blackboard to work out examples, so that the class doesn't go to sleep. I do make everyone move to the front of the class (so that all the empty seats are at the rear). But that's about all I do. I seldom or never use PowerPoint, unless there's an image or a diagram that I want the class to see.

Having said that ...
I have to confess that really terrible instructors --who are more likely to be teaching in institutions that have great difficulty in finding staff-- can use PowerPoint presentations as a crutch.

Even given the fact that faculty by and large reject the notion that it is their responsibility that the students should learn the material, faculty do feel that it is their duty to their subject to persuade the interested student of the value and the fascination of the topic that is being presented. A professor of literature is either in that occupation because he or she loves literature, or because they're unable to find anything better to do. It is an unfortunate school indeed that is the home for the latter. But it is just a little unrealistic to expect that, if you put a mass of text on a slide and put it up on the screen, that the material will speak for itself. Occasionally, it will. Usually, it will not.

Often a professor will merely show a famous person explaining a topic on YouTube. It seems somewhat crass, however, to expect that your entire series of lectures should be a sequence of YouTube clips. The temptation in the social sciences is great, to outsource your entire course to YouTube, or a series of video clips from any source. Many institutions, such as MIT, have put entire lecture series on the Web, and it is possible for the interested student to learn from these videos. But then, what you have is distance learning. The jury on distance-learning for undergraduates is still out. However, some experts advocate using what is called blended learning, which is a combination of web-based or video-based learning, with face-to-face teaching.

A colleague of mine uses PowerPoint heavily. But his slides have many blanks, which the students must fill in. He hands out his slides, with the blanks, and as they go through the lesson, the students fill them in. This keeps them minimally engaged, and provides opportunities for questions. Questions form a great nucleus for real learning.

However, PowerPoint is most useful for pictorial or graphical information. If your point requires a pictorial reinforcement, it is criminal not to present it! So there are things that you should not do in PowerPoint (or equivalent presentation software, such as OpenOffice), and there are things that make great sense to do in that way.

So, I guess I'm saying that entertainment in class is not an entitlement. Professors are allowed to be boring to anyone who has no business being in their class. Sometimes a topic is just over your head, and you won't find the topic fascinating. If you're held in thrall despite your unpreparedness, it is only delaying the inevitable moment when you should depart. Sometimes a topic is too simple for a student, and boredom is unavoidable. I don't know how to deal with that situation; evidently someone has decided you have to be bored in that class, and there's no help for it.

But some people are bored no matter where they go. As a society, we should give these people an income, and keep them out of our hair. Or there's always the Army, though they probably don't like wet blankets there, either!

Arch

Gawrsh!

2012-03-06T12:24:00.000-05:00

11180 people have looked at this blog. I don't know that many people!!! I'd better be careful ...

"College At Risk", says Andrew Delbanco

2012-02-27T22:01:00.002-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education is one of the most widely-read journals for college professors. Recently Andrew Delbanco (a professor at Columbia, according to the Chronicle,) wrote an articulate and insightful article, in which he describes many of the issues facing American citizens and the American education system.

First of all (he points out), both President Bush and President Obama have said that education is an important aspect of getting the country ready to compete in the future. The products and inventions and new industries of the future will be in countries with the best education. Delbanco quotes Obama as having said in 2009: "Countries that outteach us today will outcompete us tomorrow."

In what follows I will describe some of the points that caught my attention, but you should read the article for yourself.

Education has various functions. Elementary education provides one with the skills absolutely necessary for day to day existence. Secondary education provides a basis for the skills required by someone who works in a clerical occupation, anything that requires moderate mathematical and literary skills: a mechanic, a grocery store clerk, a low-level worker in an office. In the past, a secondary education was enough to teach, be a nurse, do all sorts of things that today requires a college education. More young people complete high school today, but not all of them have learned as much as high school graduates in the early 20th century. Education has declined simply because today, more than in the past, people of more varied skill levels remain in school, and today's teachers must cope with far less motivated and capable kids. But we want all these kids to learn a great deal, because life today is more complicated than it was 80 years ago. To a minor extent, we succeed in educating all our kids.

In ancient Europe, where higher education was first provided to the elite, it was intended to promote the kind of thinking and reflection that is very far from the utilitarian product obtained in most American colleges. Delbanco reports that the President of a well-known for-profit college said: "I'm happy that there are places in the world where people sit down and think. We need that. But that's very expensive. And not everybody can do that." This encapsulates perfectly the attitude that just thinking is a waste of time; what most students (and their parents) want is for the students to be efficiently filled with information and skills that will enable them to get a job.

It is hard to convince someone who has never been blessed with a liberal education of the value of one. (Even those who have had a liberal education are not convinced about its value; a large proportion of those who have been through even a good college, leave their alma mater baffled by the whole experience. College should never have been inflicted on them. But of course telling them so is hardly a kindness.)

The increasing cost of college education results in increasing class sizes, and students in such environments are less likely to get the benefit of the carefully orchestrated discussions, and the one-to-one interaction with adults with various intellectual gifts and specializations, and the experience with teaching young people. The young people hardly have the opportunity to get to know their classmates, and, as the author explains, these lateral interactions are at least as important as the interaction between the instructor and the pupil.

The author proceeds to describe how new technology might help to give means of salvaging some of the benefits of college given the problems of the present time. But I'm more fascinated with the description of the problem: the author is eloquent in describing the benefits of higher education, and just as insightful in seeing how these benefits cannot be understood by present-day students and their parents. Modern society makes it impossible to obtain a good education, and even if one is put through the education machine, to appreciate what one has experienced, and to capitalize on it.

What follows are my own thoughts.

What is frustrating about the life we lead today is the boredom we feel all the time, on the one hand, and the lack of time for doing anything interesting on the other.

How can this be? Doesn't boredom imply that we have time on our hands? If we don't have time to do anything interesting, how can we be bored? But ask any kid, and they will tell you that they are both exhausted and bored.

One of our primary challenges in this millennium, is to plan for ourselves, and for our society, how to increase the amount of leisure each citizen enjoys, and to provide each member of society as far as possible the wherewithal to use that leisure time wisely. If great things are to come from anyone in the next several centuries, I predict it will come from our leisure time, and not from work. We must separate the drudgery that pays the bills from the work that we do that creates new and useful and wonderful things. Education must equip us for this leisure time activity.

More importantly, I think education in the new century must be a leisure time activity. I don't think it is practical to force all our education into a few desperate years in which we have to learn it all, and then expect us to lead forty years of pure work. Our learning will be just as useless as the years of education were desperate, and our years of labor will be hardly worth living; we may as well kill ourselves, and get it over with. We must find ways of making the years of our maturity satisfying and productive, and that means less work, and more play.

Arch

The Musical Motifs of Wagner's Ring Cycle

2012-02-27T12:17:00.002-05:00

In the post about Star Wars, I referred in passing to Wagner's great Ring cycle, and have blogged about it before: Der Ring des Nibelungen. The most detailed —and accessible, I must add— analysis of the musical themes of the opera cycle is by Deryck Cooke, who has not only written a respected book on the subject, but made a double-CD set containing all the musical examples. I recommend Sir Georg Solti's complete opera sets for the operas, and the companion Deryck Cooke analysis. (Do please first try to get your small hometown bookstore to order the items for you, before you add your mite to Amazon's profits!! Amazon will doubtless agree with my plea.)

I have just discovered, a few seconds ago, that Cooke had begun a book on the subject, but died before it was completed: I Saw the World End. More appropriately, it should have been called "I heard the world end!"

Arch

The Musical Themes of Star Wars

2012-02-25T17:45:00.008-05:00

When John Williams —already a greatly admired composer— was asked to write the music for Star Wars (subsequently called Star Wars Episode 1: A New Hope), and, by implication, for the sequels and the prequels, he approached the job seriously.

His great model for this undertaking was Richard Wagner, who had conceived and created a great cycle of 4 three-hour operas, a total of 12 hours of almost continuous music, and had thought long and hard about the compositional problem it presented. The bottom line —for any extended piece of music, really— is that you just can't throw new tunes at the listener all the time. Later in the musical work, you have to repeat musical material you've used earlier in the piece, if not as is, at least in a modified form.

In addition, a composer for a dramatic work (which Wagner was) had to use the music to underscore the plot. One way, of course, was to have the Hero's Theme every time the hero rode in, such as one did in the Lone Ranger movies. But a more subtle technique was possible: you could remind the audience of broken promises, or past events that foreshadowed what was going on on stage, or earlier events that caused what was transpiring on stage, or characters offstage whose existence was critical to the dynamics of what was happening.

So Wagner invented the idea of the Leitmotif, or leading motif, which was essentially a melodic fragment, terse and memorable, that the listener would quickly catch at its first introduction, and associate with something to do with that occasion. Subsequently, when the leitmotif was reintroduced, the listener could not help but recall the earlier occasion when that very tunelet was heard. You could slightly alter the melodic fragment, to represent distortions of ideas. You could re-orchestrate it, to reflect the same idea being carried by a different character, for instance.

In the original album sleeve of the Star Wars movie (1977) soundtrack album, John Williams explained in detail what each track represented. For various reasons (that might be obvious to other people, but not to me at this moment), each track really consisted of a continuous piece of music that used multiple motifs, but generally just a few.

In addition, it did not make sense to place individual motifs in a soundtrack album. Each track had to be a complete piece of music, while a motif was a mere musical idea, a tune fragment. The tunes John Williams used as themes were extended, memorable pieces of music, out of which he could extract a unique phrase which he could use as a motif. Many of these tunes are well known to us.

First of all, of course, there is the Star Wars Theme itself, usually called the Main Title theme:

Note: after the main tune ends, there is some busy music that has to do with mood music and the Rebel ship that is conveying Princess Leia. It is running the blockade of some planet, possibly Tatooine, and we hear the little fanfare that is really a second theme, the Rebel's Blockade Running Theme.

The Rebel's Blockade Running Theme is a jaunty tune which you invariably hear when the Rebel Alliance (or one of its ships) is trying to outrun the evil Empire ships, as happens repeatedly in Empire Strikes Back (Episode V, 1981). It is a true motif, because it so short, not an extended piece of music. (You can easily see how hard it was to make an extended track of this little tune.) It comes in at around 0:09 in the clip below. After its initial announcement, it is repeated with different instrumentation, interspersed with busy "Let's go!" type music.

One of the most important themes is The Force theme. It starts out rather a nostalgic tune, recalling past things almost with regret, but it gathers itself after a few bars, and sounds determined and hopeful:

Every movie must have a love theme, of course. A more unlikely pair of lovers was never seen than Han Solo and Leia Organa. Their Han and Leia Love Theme, though is utterly romantic:

Those are the themes that approach the importance of motifs. There are lots of other pieces used in the movie that perform important functions, such as the music in the Mos Eisley bar, for instance, and the closing scene, which has a great march, which John Williams admitted was inspired by Elgar's Pomp and Circumstances march (or perhaps Walton's Crown Imperial; I forget!)

There is a theme for Princess Leia:

(It is awfully difficult to keep a straight face listening to this theme! It must have been written long before John Williams got to see Princess Leia, because the theme is soft and wistful, whereas a badder heroine that Leia was hard to imagine. She was irascible, impatient and demanding, but of course we Star Wars fans see her through rose-tinted contacts, and we imagine her to be the very personification of femininity. Well, a model of The New Woman, at the very least.) But because of the wistful mood of the theme, you could not imagine it sounding in the background when Leia was out gunning down an adversary, or chasing someone on a "speeder", as they called the motor-bike - like personal vehicles that figured prominently in all the movies, most notably in The Return of the Jedi (Episode 6). So this is not a very important theme in the development (John Williams did not use very sophisticated development most of the time.)

When Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back was released in ... wait a minute; let me look it up ... 1980, there were at least two really important new themes that hit the audiences: the first of these was the fabulous Darth Vader theme / Imperial March. This is interesting; in Star Wars 4 (New Hope, 1977), Darth Vader was essentially the face of the Empire, a minor character. In the next episode, we are given an inkling that he will emerge as an important protagonist, when he claims that Luke is his son.

The second of these is Yoda's Theme:

I must confess that I never associated this theme specifically with Yoda, but with Luke's successes in training, especially the jaunty high phrase in the winds, harmonized in sixths, with pizzicato strings and harp. This kind of instrumentation is conventionally associated with fairy folk and magic, a sort of instrumental "Bippity boppity boo!" Perhaps it was intended to remind us of the playful aspects of the force.

By the way, "OST" is evidently an abbreviation for 'original sound track.' Young people who contribute videoclips to YouTube are far too busy to spell things out, and rely on acronyms for a quarter of all that they write. TIA, ttyl.

[To be continued.]

Note: See here for an article comparing Star Wars and Wagner's Ring cycle.

Sitting, apparently, is killing you.

2012-02-24T08:35:00.006-05:00

I don't have direct evidence for this, but I'm fairly certain that interrupting your sitting time with 2-minute spells of walking around should make significant reductions in the detrimental effects. (The observation about cessation of electrical activity in the legs is very plausible, and worrisome.)

Arch

Ice Cream!

2012-02-22T20:02:00.005-05:00

I recently decided to make what we called a fruit salad ice cream in our house when we were growing up. It’s really simple; here’s the recipe:

•    ripe mangoes (1 or 2). Remove the skin with an apple-peeler (or a paring knife). Slice off the two cheeks, then down the two remaining sides, and cube the pieces into half-inch cubes and set aside.
•    a ripe papaya. Half a big papaya will do. Cut in half, remove the seeds (it’s not easy, but keep at it, even if you feel sorry to see the guts of the fruit get removed), scoop out the flesh carefully, and cube into half-inch pieces;
•    a barely ripe tomato. Cube into pieces of about the same size as the other fruits.
•    a handful of seedless grapes. Cut each grape in half.
•    5 strawberries, just ripe. Cut lengthwise into quarters, removing the green stem and end.
•    a ripe kiwi or two. Clean off the hard stem and core, and slice.
•    A pint of softened vanilla ice cream.

A fruit salad salsa, similar in inspiration to mine.

Mix it all together just before serving. You can vary the amount of ice cream; a little is good, but too much ice cream obscures the fruit flavor.

I’m embarrassed to admit that if the ice cream has just a tiny bit of salt in it, it will taste more buttery and creamy. If you add your own salt, you’ll probably add too much. If the ice cream is too sweet, it ruins the taste.

As you can see, just the perfect ice cream is important to have for this recipe. First of all, it mustn't be too sweet. Most people I know don't like ice cream that is too sweet, though they like ice cream too much to not eat it just because of excessive sweetness.

Secondly, the ice cream must have just the right degree of salt, to make it taste right. Many recipes have too much salt, and that's not good. Some folks just leave out the salt as a matter of principle either for reasons of health, or because they don't like the salt. I don't want to get into a huge controversy about the matter; I figure if a tiny bit of salt improves the taste, that overrides the health consideration.

I have to avoid sugar for health reasons, so for my own recipe, I'm going to use an artificial sweetener. Many purists would rather die than do this, and all I can say is, do what you think is best for you.

Well, I've been going through recipes for ice cream on the Internet, and I've been appalled. I figured that home-made ice cream should be healthier and tastier than store-bought ice cream. The best-tasting commercial ice cream I have eaten so far is Wegman's Vanilla Ice Cream. Less sugar per serving [7 grams, I believe] ---actually 16 grams (corrected 2012/2/23) than another brand we often buy, but a little more fat. But to my horror, I'm reading recipes that call for pudding mix and other means of making the mix creamier.

Commercial ice creams contain a certain amount of thickener, that is gelatine-like additives made of sea-weed and plant matter called cellulose gum and so on. I recently read on the Internet some indignant questions about why the FDA allows these derivatives of cellulose (which is often derived from wood, actually) in common foods.

The traditional recipes for ice cream often contain things like egg yolks and so on, which, though perfectly natural, have been known to raise cholesterol levels. I suppose it is a matter of personal taste, but I like to eat my eggs face to face, and not hidden away in ice cream, for heaven's sake. I mean, how would you feel if processed bacon bits was a part of your ice cream recipe, say? What a terrible waste of some perfectly good bacon, right? So, in a nutshell, if cellulose gum makes my ice cream creamy and less full of cholesterol, I'm all for it. Yes, you heard right. Now where can I find some cellulose gum?

I have also recently discovered lactose-free milk. The first time I had some lactose-free milk with my morning coffee, I though I remembered that it didn't taste right. But I like it so much now that I don't think I'll go back to regular milk. So I'm wondering: can I find an ice-cream recipe that uses lactose-free milk?

So don't fear; if like me, you too crave vanilla ice cream that's not too sweet, has no pudding in the mix, no eggs, but does have lactose-free milk and cellulose thickeners in it, and a tiny bit of salt, I'm on the job. I shall find a recipe.

Arch

Kathleen Ferrier

2012-02-20T12:41:00.001-05:00

In October 2008 I blogged about the late Kathleen Ferrier, the wonderful British contralto, who died in 1952 of throat cancer. I posted a few cuts from her albums on YouTube (in violation of their policies, no doubt), and I occasionally get notified about comments to those posts, almost invariably happy to have found the link, and lamenting the death of Ms Ferrier. She was universally loved in her time, by all accounts.

In addition to the clips I provide in that post (linked above), here are some more video clips of Kathleen Ferrier on YouTube that I like:

"Father of Heaven" from Judas Maccabaeus
"Erbarme dich" from the Matthew Passion
Blow the wind Southerly (unaccompanied)
"O Thou that Tellest good tiding to Zion (Handel), possibly one of the most joyful arias ever written:
"Nun will die Sonn", from Mahler's Kindertotenlieder; dirges for a dead child.
"Silent Night", the arrangement I hear in my dreams! (Francis (Franz) Grueber):
"Agnus Dei" from the St John Passion (J. S. Bach):
Qui Sedes ad dextram patris, uploaded by me
"Du bist die Ruh", Franz Schubert
"An die Musik", Franz Schubert

"Deconstructing Academe": Do we need an entire FIELD for this?

2012-02-20T09:52:00.008-05:00

Well.

I think this will be the last post I make on this topic.

Read the article. Lots of people have been worried about higher education, evidently starting in the 1990's (though you have to realize that people have been worrying about this as long as there has been higher education, and people to worry about it). Let me make a list of things that worry me, personally, about this whole business.

I too worry about labor conditions in universities.
The main question is: does a university education truly work?
A related question is: does a freshman know what he is going to get in a university?
Academics are famously jealous of academic freedom. This principle attempts to ensure that a professor is able to express views that differ from those of the home institution, without risking his employment. But doesn't the institution have a right to control the curriculum? Doesn't the instructor have a responsibility to coordinate his teaching with his colleagues, in such a way that it makes sense in a holistic point of view? Is it right that the professor be the sole arbiter of the extent to which this obligation violates academic freedom?
In practice, (or so at least many professors will claim,) professors work harmoniously with their colleagues so that students do receive a beautifully coordinated education, from the academic point of view. However, in hard times, schools compete with each other to offer sexier programs that appeal to students and their gullible parents, such as Web Design, and Video Game Programming, and High Fashion Marketing, in other words, occupations related to the myriad ways in which students have wasted their time in high school. (One can imagine a college major in Vampire Fiction for Teen Audiences, With A View to Getting A Movie Deal.) Doesn't the interest of the institution in attracting students with such programs war with the interest of the faculty in providing a well-rounded education, and the interests of the government in supporting higher education that will create an educated and employable workforce and a knowledgeable citizenry? (Conservatives have an easy answer to this: lower taxes, so that those who can afford it can get any education they damn well want, and just stop worrying about the citizenry, ok? We're going to take our business overseas, anyway, and we're more worried that kids overseas have the education we need for our labor force.)
Universities need young faculty, who can be underpaid and overworked. Other universities are perfectly happy to provide these, but these people need PhD's. But it is difficult to provide on-demand PhD's, because they have got to do what is called research. Yet other universities are perfectly happy to provide graduates who have already done research in college. This often means Googling a lot of stuff, and then verifying via library books a certain proportion of the information you have Googled. For a PhD, however, every discipline makes its own rules; Googling is completely out (except for some young fields, where Googling is totally in, and which shall remain nameless). All your research has to be original. This means books are not much use, either, but research journals are ok. But the best idea is to create a whole new field, such as Criticism of Higher Education. A lot of these modern fields would seem to fulfill the need for providing a topic that someone can earn a PhD in, so that some school has one more young PhD that they can chain to the oars for a few years.

To summarize, I do believe that it is good to study education; there are huge problems with it. Though it is possible that universities know the problems with higher education, but it is also possible that they are powerless to change matters from within the system.

University accrediting agencies are in somewhat a better position for steering the entire education industry (even though these agencies consist of members of universities). At the moment they are more concerned with being a sort of Better Business Bureau for colleges and universities, which is certainly one important service they can provide the education consumer. This document outlines their concerns for the last few years. It does reveal some preoccupation with the minutiae of college governance, and less concern with some of the bigger questions that they presumably feel inadequate to address, or consider to be outside their mandate.

Kids have to learn some basic things that will enable them to function beyond the kid level: write grammatically, obtain information efficiently, understand people outside their immediate experience: foreigners, historical figures, people of different political views than themselves, people of different religions and philosophies, members of the opposite sex and/or differing sexual orientation, war veterans. Kids need to practice complex reasoning, so that they can understand sophisticated arguments, and see through a certain amount of bullshit. (Kids who can see through all bullshit might actually be dangerous.) Kids need to know a little science, because they have to make up their minds about climate change, environmental pollution, and things that threaten the safety of their families and their community and themselves. They need to appreciate art and music at a deeper level, because it helps preserve sanity, and binds one to one's fellow man (if you think that is a good thing). But how to do this efficiently? How can we organize education in such a way that it doesn't take up all our resources? But do we need a new field to tell us what is wrong with what we have?

Arch

Star Wars: A Weird Feeling of Regression II

2012-02-14T15:01:00.008-05:00

Now that you know the story (see previous post), a few remarks about the movies.

The first episode that was released (Episode IV: A New Hope) was a ground-breaking piece of cinema. The concept of the movie cycle, conceived in multiple parts, was somewhat new for science-fiction-fantasy; the special-effects which, though they depended on miniature models and careful photography, were an enormous improvements over the techniques used in earlier movies (e.g. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey) and Star Trek. The ever-present pair of robots were a whole new generation of successors to robots that had appeared in earlier films. The Storm Troopers, the infantry of the Empire, were an anonymous pack of entities whose only sign of humanity were their voices. But already, their very uniformity paved the way for things to come, such as the clone warriors of Episode II.

[Added later: How did they show what the Millennium falcon saw through its screens as it whizzed past an enormous Star Destroyer? A camera was conducted past the suspended model of the star destroyer. But the camera was suspended in such a way that its motion was controlled by a computer, which jinked and banked as the Millennium Falcon was supposed to be doing. This was a new innovation; in the past, cameras could only be simply dollied past the stationary miniature model. ]

But, beyond special effects, we must talk about style. The Empire fleet vessels and personnel were sleek and antiseptic in appearance, subtly signifying robotic entities, entirely under the control of the Emperor and Darth Vader. In contrast, the Rebel fighters appeared derived from terrestrial models, essentially updated versions of Allied troops from WWII.

In Episodes V and VI, the special-effects gradually improve, still making use of miniatures (and stop-action animation using poseable figures). One of the biggest tools in their chest, of course, was the ability to blend the special-effects animation with the live action using computer smoothing. By the time Episode VI rolled round, more and more was being done on the computers.

All of us fans waited impatiently for the prequels, Episodes I, II and III. By the time Episode I was released, the computer animation game had progressed far beyond the imagination of anyone in 1977. The improvements all had to do with computer animation.

In traditional animation, e.g. early Mickey Mouse, the lead artist would rough out a sequence of figures that represented the stages in an action sequence. They would correspond to points of rest, actually; e.g., a running figure would be represented as each foot hit the ground. These were called the key frames. All the slides that were required to depict the figure in between the key frames were assigned to a second animator. The process of creating these "in-between" slides was called "tweening".

Now, if desired, the chief animator could tweak the "tween" transparencies to make the action jerk in a special way, or just leave the tweening as it is. Next come special artists, who clean up the artwork, and other artists who ink in the outlines and fill in the colors, etc.

Today, it can be done automatically. We could even do it in PowerPoint, given infinite patience and time. For instance, we can create a stick figure, and move the control points slightly, to move the figure, or even change its shape: see at right.

The same technology that is available to PowerPoint is used in animation software. There, in addition to helping us create the individual figures, the software automatically interpolates the tweening. A mathematical formula is used to move each part of a figure from one position to the next, along a straight line, if desired, or along any curve. (This can actually be done in PowerPoint as well! You can have any slide element move along any desired path--within limits.)

All this innovation meant that, by the time Episode I was ready to hit the screen, they had used pure animation to create the scores of robots who appeared in that movie. (Decrepit remnants of these military robots (Battle Droids) appeared in Episodes IV, V and VI as cantankerous "civilian" robots, venting their spleen on defenseless fellow-robots. Their synthesized voices are unmistakable! Added later: I must confess I can't find a single reference to vintage battle droids being used in Episodes IV, V and VI, though there are interesting-looking vintage droids in many scenes, e.g. inside the Jawas' mobile warehouse, and inside the bunker of Jabba the Hut. By the way, robots are called "droids" throughout the cycle.)

More interestingly, the overall effect of the Prequels is smoother, more stylish, more polished. The old-style robots couldn't talk as fine as C3PO (built by Darth Vader in his earlier existence, don't forget), but they looked far more modern than did either C3PO or R2D2. The latter two robots, who were present in every episode, look like model T Fords, compared to the battle robots of Episode I, which look like a Prius, although heavily armored.

But more importantly, Lucas (George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars) seemed to deliberately view the Old Republic as a beautiful civilization in its full flowering, a renaissance time, a cultural zenith. To help in this effort, he actually used some beautiful buildings in Spain as locations for the Prequels. An example is the use of the Plaza de España in Seville:

Next we see a depiction of the Mos Eisley town on Tatooine, where a lot of the action of Episodes I and IV and VI takes place:

As we consider the series of movies from Episode I to Episode VI, the incidence of scenes of grandeur such as the Palace of the Naboo become less frequent, and desert outposts such as Mos Eisley, and the Moon of Endor become more common.

To summarize, the style of the Prequels reeks of Baroque beauty, while the style of Episodes IV, V and VI is all military might and resistance fighters and desert camps, and ancient spaceships. (It is a pretty good trick to make a space-ship look ancient, admittedly.) The point is that the Star Wars cycle starts off in beauty and ends in ruins, even though, plot-wise, we have a hopeful new beginning.

Afterword
George Lucas opened up the development of the post Episode VI Star Wars "universe" to fan writers, i.e. writers who wanted to independently continue to develop the story beyond the end of the movie saga. I regret to report that though, in essence, it involves the new government led by Leia and Luke and Han Solo, at last look the galaxy is as dangerous a place as it used to be, though the central government is now in friendly hands.

Arch

Star Wars: A Weird Feeling of Regression . . .

2012-02-14T09:30:00.004-05:00

I was recently watching the Star Wars cycle with my wife, starting with the oldest movie (Episode IV), through Episodes V and VI, wrapping round to Episode I, in the order in which the movies were made and released. First, I will summarize the story, for the benefit of anyone who might have not figured it out. Bear in mind that the setting is a multi-planet civilization, and we should think of the planets as if they were far-flung countries in the world in which we live.

I
The story opens in the Capital Planet of Coruscant, in a hoary civilization that is so ancient that the planet has evolved into a single enormous city. (This is amplified in the printed novels that have been released to accompany the movies.) Coruscant is supposed to be a beautiful city/planet, just beginning to fall into decline. We see the Senator for Naboo, a minor planet, discussing the fact that his planet is being blockaded by a business conglomerate called The Federation. It is difficult to notice, but the Senator seems only mildly concerned about the blockade. Two Jedi Knights eventually set out for Tatooine, to help force an agreement between the Federation and the planetary government.

We see the bridge of the main ship of the blockade, with the Federation bosses talking to the Planetary ruler, young Queen Amidala. She is angry, because evidently food is in short supply. Soon afterwards, we see these same Federation bosses talking to someone (long-distance) on the Capital planet, Coruscant. It is a long while before we learn that the shadowy figure, promising support for the Federation bosses, and issuing orders, is in fact the Senator for the very planet that is being blockaded, Senator Palpatine.

The Jedi arrive, and are captured. Senator Palpatine (via long-distance hologram) tells the Federation bosses that the Jedi should be no problem. Eventually, as the Jedi become difficult to control, he asks that they should be killed. Meanwhile, he is also assuring the Queen that she should make a settlement with the Federation, since Coruscant is too far away to send help from.

To cut a long story short, the Jedi Knights escape, steal a spacecraft, and land on the planet. They make their way to the planet city of the Naboo, home to the Queen, just as the Federation decides to land and attack the planet. The Jedi rescue the young Queen and a few members of her entourage, and escape in their small craft. Among the Queen's ladies-in-waiting is young Padme.

In the uproar surrounding the escape from Naboo, the little spacecraft needs to go to ground, and the Jedi choose the very minor desert planet Tatooine, supposedly in the middle of nowhere. There they discover that a main component of the engines of the little spacecraft need to be replaced. They get help from a little slave boy, Anakin, and his mother. The little boy appears to have a physiological peculiarity that the Jedi look for in youngsters who should be trained as Jedi. The kid wins a major race, and with the winnings, the Jedi secure the part they need, and the freedom of the little kid. The mother has to remain behind. In the course of the action, Padme, a girl of about 15, and the little boy (about 7) become close.

With the repaired ship, our small band goes to Coruscant for help. There they find that the Senate is in a stalemate. Palpatine takes them under his wing, oozing charm and assurances, and maneuvers the Queen into calling for a vote of no confidence in the Supreme Chancellor of the Senate. Amazingly, Palpatine himself is elected Supreme Chancellor a few days later. He is disappointed when the young Queen decides to depart, in disgust. Meanwhile, the Jedi organization has met and examined Anakin, and reluctantly decide to train him, even though he is deemed too old.

Responding to desperate pleas from Naboo, the little group leaves for Naboo, and somehow destroy the invaders. Palpatine arrives afterwards, and congratulates them on overthrowing the invaders. But the Jedi who led the revolt is killed, and his apprentice, Ben Kenobi, takes Anakin under his wing, to train him. Surprisingly, "Padme", the young handmaid of the Queen, is revealed to be the Queen, and another young woman has been masquerading as the Queen (at the behest of the Queen).

II, III
In the next two episodes, the friendship between little Anakin Skywalker and Queen Amidala (Padme) ripens into love, as Anakin comes into manhood. However, as a Jedi, Anakin suffers setbacks and frustrations, since he has an impatient temperament. All his weaknesses are blamed on Ben Kenobi's ineffective training, supervised by none other than Master Yoda, the diminutive ancient being. Senator Palpatine has Anakin's mother murdered, deliberately to embitter young Anakin. Several Jedi defeats at the hand of the Sith, a rival group that gets its strength from the so-called Dark Side, frustrate Anakin further. Anakin marries the Queen. But as Anakin's frustrations grow to insurmountable proportions, Palpatine succeeds in persuading him to come over to the winning side: the Sith. He names himself Darth Vader, and gives up all connections to his former self, including his dead wife.

Palpatine declares himself Emperor, and dissolves the Senate. With Anakin at his side, he embarks on a rule of repression and terror. Before Queen Amidala died, she had given birth to twins. The Emperor sets Anakin to hunt down these infants, but Ben Kenobi has separated them, and hidden them away.

IV
One of Anakin Skywalker and Queen Amidala'sdeath star inside a little robot, R2-D2. R2-D2, and C3-PO, a robot that Anakin Skywalker had built, and which had come into the possession of Leia, are placed in an escape pod, and fired off to Tatooine. The Princess is taken on the ship to be interrogated by Darth Vader. (At this stage, since this is the first of the episodes released, we are unaware that Darth Vader is Leia's father. Neither of them are aware of it, either.)

The robots land on the planet Tatooine surface. It is many years after we see the place, and the main city has grown. It is mainly controlled by the gangsters called Huts, and there is little law and order. In a remote farm, a young boy called Luke Skywalker lives with his uncle and aunt. He accidentally comes into possession of the robots, and sees a brief clip from a holographic video the Leia has made, asking for help from one Obi Wan Kenobi. The only Kenobi Luke knows is Ben Kenobi, who lives some distance away. Ben manages to get the robot to release the entire message, and Luke is drawn to the holographic image of the Princess. Returning home, Luke finds his home destroyed. He decides to go with Ben to rescue the princess.

The Princess is rescued, with the help of a smuggler called Han Solo, who is being sought by the Hutts for being late with a fee. The plans are delivered to the Rebels, and the death star is destroyed. But Ben Kenobi is killed in a duel with Darth Vader.

V
Luke narrowly escapes a battle on an icy planet in the Hoth system, and hears Ben Kenobi's voice encouraging him to travel to the swamp planet of Dagobah, where Jedi Master Yoda has retired. Luke trains with Yoda. Meanwhile, Leia and Han seek shelter with Lando Kalrissian on a certain gas planet. When they arrive, they find that Darth Vader has set a trap for them there. Han is frozen in a block of Carbonite, and shipped off to Tatooine, where his debtors want him.

Luke has a feeling that Leia is in trouble and goes to find them. He encounters Darth Vader, who has recognized him as his son. Together, Darth Vader says, we can rule the galaxy.

Lando and Leia evade Darth Vader, rescue Luke, and rejoin the Rebels.

VII
The Empire has built a second death star, near the moon of the planet Endor, home to the Ewoks. Han, Leia, R2D2 and C3PO end up on the moon, meet the Ewoks, and get ready to attack the power station on the moon which generates the shield that protects the death star, which is in stationary orbit around the moon. The Rebellion has planned an attack on the death star, and the little advance group has undertaken to disable the shield in time for the attack.

Luke gives himself up, insisting that he can enlist the aid of Darth Vader to neutralize the death star. But the Emperor, Palpatine, has arrived, and is eager to turn Luke to the Dark Side. As the Emperor's needling of Luke turns vicious, Darth Vader snaps, and hurls the Emperor into the power shaft of the death star, a sort of well that leads to the central power source of the structure. The Rebellion, which had emerged from light speed into the space around the death star too early, had been taking a beating. But the advanced group, belatedly, disable the shield with the aid of the Ewoks, and the death star is destroyed. Luke escapes just in time, with Darth Vader's body.

There is much rejoicing.

The Future of Education in America

2012-02-09T15:26:00.003-05:00

As we have been discussing over the last several years, what I am seeing in American education is troubling in many ways. As with any observation about the USA, it is almost impossible to generalize broadly (except for the general statement that generalization is impossible). A number of connected facts are unarguably true:

Students are not graduating from either high school or college with as much academic capability as their predecessors from about 20 years ago.

Of course, what makes sense for a young person to know today is a lot different from what made sense 20 years ago. But today's graduate arguably knows a smaller percentage of what we would expect them to know than the graduate of the nineties knew compared to what we expected back then.

Students are far more selective about what they engage with in the classroom than in earlier years. They are more likely to shrug off the fact that they are clearly bored in class.

Students have always been complacent about being bored in class. Read a book or two in the popular literature, and one gets the impression that the best one can say about a classroom is that people are bored. This is accepted without remark because it is such a common expectation.

There is a tendency to blame teachers and professors for the fact that students are uninterested in class work. There is also a related tendency to glorify websites and videos that feature people teaching material that students would normally expect to see in a classroom.

It is the same --putatively boring-- material, but some little factor, perhaps the voice of the presenter, or the pace of presentation, or the colors being used in the diagrams, or the time of day at which the video is being watched makes the video far more effective than a live presentation.

What does this mean? Students are less tolerant of factors that were considered minor in the past: what the instructor was wearing, what colors the instructor uses on the chalkboard, what time of the day it is ... Students are getting very picky.

I had a friend who was criticized by his students for wearing a green sport coat. I suppose a green sport coat is not the ideal choice of jacket for an instructor, but to remark on it as a formal criticism of the class goes too far. I myself have had teachers with annoying adenoidal voices, who dressed like slobs, who taught at that horrible hour right after lunch. But we compensated in other ways; we studied together, to offset the fact that we couldn't all pay attention every minute during the hour.

Many students consider themselves "visual learners". But this characteristic evidently does not extend to being able to make sense of text. You can write a sentence on the chalkboard and outline it in red, but there are often a few students who miss a significant syntactical or semantic element in the text.

Students cannot grab the sense of something they see, either in a book or on the screen, unless perhaps the subject is something entirely un-academic, such as a piece of gossip, or something of personal interest. The ability to get something subtle from text is gradually being lost.

It is pointless to blame high-school teachers; they can't fix up a student over a single year. Reading is truly at least 50% the responsibility of the family. If the family does not read, it is unlikely that the child will be a wonderful, mature reader. (What do I mean? I mean if you take 100 kids whose families do not read, less than 25 of them will end up reading at the inferential level. There will be a few who transcend the limitations of their backgrounds, to be sure.) Kids must be convinced of the value of reading (and of books) over the six or seven summers between Kindergarten and 9th grade when they are not totally too busy to read.

Have you ever got one of those jokes on e-mail? Have you got one which screams that it is the FUNNIEST THING THE SENDER EVER SAW! PASS IT ON TO EVERYONE IN THE UNIVERSE? I mean, it's a bunch of jokes, so if they're funny, you'd probably pass them on, right?

But the sender has no confidence in your ability to see the humor in it, so it has to be pointed out in the hugest font the e-mail system will allow. Does this tell us anything? Will Mathematics texts have to be printed this way, say, so that kids will actually notice the stuff?

Arch

Frida!

2012-01-31T09:33:00.002-05:00

Left: Frida Kahlo; Right: Salma Hayek as Frida

My daughter gifted my wife and me with a big 32" TV, and we have been watching a lot of movies. We tend to fight about what movies to watch; I tend to watch movies without a lot of violence, whereas she watches movies that are widely considered to be of high quality, even if the movie contains parts that are frightening or disgusting. What does that tell you?

Anyway, I happened to pick up a recent DVD of the Frida movie of 2002, starring Salma Hayek and Afred Molina, arguably two of the most talented actors of the times. (I'm not giving you a link; you can buy the movie, rent it at Netflix or Amazon, or go to a theater to see it if it is shown near you.)

This (perhaps surprisingly) is the first movie that I have seen with Salma Hayek in it, and I was amazed. In my estimation, she was Frida; either their personalities matched well, or ... what can I say. When I see Charlton Heston as Michaelangelo, I am totally persuaded. Perhaps Salma Hayek was convincing because she is Mexican--indeed Frida Kahlo was half Hungarian Jewish by birth, which could explain some of the wonderful passion and creativity that flowed from her (children of mixed ethnicity are often very creative, for cultural or genetic reasons; who can tell?).

To know the historical person Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, one has to have met her, or at least, read her writings, and contemporary accounts of her friends and acquaintances. In the movie, we see her through the eyes of the director, primarily (Julie Taymor), and Salma Hayek herself. Having only seen the movie, my remarks are about the character portrayed there.

Frida Kahlo (the name Kahlo is possibly a Mexicanization of a German-Jewish name such as Kähler) in the movie comes across as a person suffering chronic pain, but whose warmth and vitality is largely irrepressible. Through careful choice of material, Julie Taymor and her writing team (see the credits on the IMDB website) have tried to depict the major forces that shaped the personality and the motivations of this remarkable woman. But more amazingly wonderfully, the design of the movie steals from the work of both Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; the choice of colors, the rich clay-reds, the vibrant blues, the dull browns, greens and greys that work so beautifully in the backgrounds of murals are used skillfully, to immerse one in a sort of Frida-Diego-ness that is satisfying. One is transported to that time and place (Mexico in the early years of the 2oth century), and this sort of experience always leaves its mark on me.

Frida was an important figure in Western Culture of the 20th century. She was, naturally, interested in gender issues, even if gender issues were not her central preoccupation. The women's movement of the last quarter of the 20th century fastened on figures such as Frida, as an example of (possibly unintentional) victimization. However, feminism and women's homosexuality were inextricably related in the 90's, and feminists whose concerns did not extend to gay rights were embarrassed by Frida's ambiguous sexual orientation. At the time the movie was made, most people were far less threatened by bisexuality in general. We had successfully disconnected pedophilia from homosexuality, and in the light of the 21st century, some of Frida's escapades seem far less weird. The problem, indeed, is to reconstruct their weirdness in context.

The person who emerges is warm, ultimately patient, loyal, motherly, affectionate, and surprisingly outward-focused, for one who suffered lifelong pain. Salma Hayek could not help but portray Frida as an essentially lovable person, even if when the subject was alive, she may have been more palatable at a distance than up close in person.

[Added later: the movie I saw was in English, and in the present-day idiom. Not knowing what is come down to us of Frida's style of speech, I cannot comment on how apt the choice of voice for Frida is, in the movie. But she speaks a fluent "Hey guys," sort of idiom, which seems appropriate for a person who frequented bars and hung out with the boys, and the bohemians of the time. Is it more important that we should be true to the facts, or that we should be given a representation of a person that we can understand? Perhaps the memory of an historical person who was difficult to understand is not well served by a biographical film that makes that person accessible--and I can imagine even that observation being far from axiomatic. But in the case of Frida, I doubt that she was difficult to understand. Perhaps it was some of the ways in which she was transparent that were difficult to tolerate by her contemporaries, but there is little doubt that she was greatly loved in her lifetime.]

In addition to the brilliant performances of Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina, we have a host of the best and brightest in the acting world contributing beautifully understated performances to support them: I recognize Geoffrey Rush, Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, Valeria Golino, Lila Downs, Mia Maestro, and even Didi Conn. (Please forgive me if I fail to identify some names with which I'm not personally familiar.)

In keeping with the art world of Frida Kahlo, the movie has surreal elements that underscore the artistic settings. The stinging analyses of contemporary socialists and Marxists are nevertheless affectionate and plausible. (It is startling to realize how modern American intellectualism has most of the Marxism purged from it; how is this possible? Philosophy has taken on some of the dogmatic aspects of Theology, I'm afraid.) Again and again one is startled into remarking how various sights and visions Frida sees and has find their way into her paintings. The movie may fall short for those who knew Frida personally, but to me, it is a work of art.

Arch

The State of The Union

2012-01-26T11:17:00.006-05:00

I'm writing on Thursday; last Tuesday was the State of the Union address by Barack Obama.

Anyone elected president of any nation, including this one, could do many things. (I use the masculine personal pronoun, though obviously the president in question may be either gender.)

01. He could set a high moral tone, as an example to his people.
02. He could initiate legislation for the good of all.
03. He could set in place regulations that favor those in a narrow sector of the population in which he has support.
04. He could conduct foreign policy that serves the narrow interests of his own nation, or a sector within his nation.
05. He could conduct foreign policy to maximize the chances of peace among nations, and minimize the likelihood of war.
06. He could indulge in belligerent and bellicose rhetoric, to inflame the hotheads among his constituents.
07. He could indulge in aggressive campaigns to redistribute wealth among his people.
08. He could encourage structures and regulations that give the illusion of superior education of the nation's youth, while creating scapegoats of teachers who have incurred the dissatisfaction of their students, deservingly or undeservingly.
09. He could ensure that the members of the privileged classes continue to enjoy the privileges they have.
10. He could ensure that those in greatest need have the aid they require to offset the disadvantages of their circumstances.
11. He could discourage the poor and indigent from bettering their conditions by giving them handouts.
12. He could write off the poor and indigent if they make clear that they have no intention of meeting society halfway, and helping to help themselves.
13. He can cooperate with his political opponents to the extent that they are willing, to solve problems in which they have a common interest.
14. He can depict his political opponents in the worst possible light, as being uninterested in compromise for the greater good.
These last two are the most difficult:
15. Given the fact that many societies do not have the machinery to provide employment to all their citizens as a matter of course (“Full Employment”), a president can work within the structures he inherits to prevent massive loss of employment due to economic catastrophes.
16. He could seek ways of avoiding economic catastrophes in the future, by regulating the mechanisms of business investment.

I list these here, without any judgment as to whether Barack Obama has or has not done any of these things. And we must weigh which of these actions we would support, and which of the Republican Candidates are likely to do them; and similarly with actions we would oppose.

Watching and listening to President Obama addressing the Joint Chambers of Congress in the State of the Union address, (affectionately called the SOTU,) it was hard to avoid noticing that the tone of the speech was infinitely more gracious and “presidential” than any of the Republican candidates could equal. Reagan, in 1980, was the last great Republican who was concerned with setting a positive tone, and who looked “Presidential”, and more importantly, used a rhetoric that we would not be ashamed of.

Furthermore, (speaking of the SOTU,) I was struck with the fact that, while the Republican candidates, in their several debates, treated their audience as if they were ignorant hicks, incapable of verifying facts and understanding sophisticated reasoning, President Obama may have been challenging, even aggressive, but did not speak down to his audience. If I were a Republican, I might have resented the reproachful tone of some of his remarks. But I would not have felt patronized.

The Republican rhetoric that has begun to fly about appears to be aimed at ignorant, bigoted high-school dropouts. It is all jingoism, racism and chauvinism; mere posturing to attract an audience that has been encouraged to feel threatened by society and the economy. The Republicans are addressing themselves to a constituency that is on the defensive, their backs to the wall. And why? Because they have been persuaded that the various forces that have caused them trouble (the economy, the housing bust, the unemployment, the expensive wars being fought, the decline in the quality of goods) were not caused by the very folk who steer the Republican Machine, but by some bogeymen who are Democrats in disguise. In fact, they have been persuaded to view things that will help them as things that will hurt them.

The Republican leadership has managed to persuade some of the poorest white Americans that Food Stamps helps mostly African Americans, despite the incontrovertible fact that many white folks enjoy the benefit of food stamps. I myself, in my poorer days, was glad to avail my family of the few food stamps for which we were eligible, by virtue of qualifying for the WIC program, which is intended to assist young children and pregnant women to head off possible medical problems that could arise later, due to poor nutrition. The WIC program deserves the highest possible praise for its effectiveness and its fiscal efficiency in terms of bang for buck.

In the first few years of the life of our little baby, we took her to the Well-Baby Clinic, which ensured that she received inoculations on time, and which monitored her health in various ways. There was a good balance of racial and ethnic types at the clinic, and one could not accuse any minority of taking a disproportionate amount of services from that clinic. And the constant chant of fiscal conservatives is that we cannot afford to continue to provide these services. They insist that it is more important to allow the top-earning 1% of the population to pay less than 15% in Federal Taxes than to provide these sorts of services. (See the interview of Elizabeth Warren by Jon Stewart for more information about these sorts of issues.)

Gingrich interviewed by a Cuban TV host.

In addition, some candidates have been heard pandering to right-wing extremists who wish to escalate aggression towards communist states such as Cuba.

In short, the Republican candidates speak as though they seek the votes of ultra-conservative, ultra-warlike, independently wealthy people who are indignant about the high taxes that they pay, but are upset about the unemployment situation. Why would independently wealthy people be upset about unemployment? Perhaps they deplore unemployment from a purely altruistic point of view. Quite cynically, is this possible? Independently wealthy folk are more likely to be employers than employed. The worse the unemployment, the cheaper is the cost of labor. Wealthy business owners ought to love that!

No; the fact of the matter is that somehow the GOP has persuaded folks who are poor and only marginally employed that it is a good thing for millionaires to pay low taxes. They think this will translate into low taxes for everybody.

Finally, it is becoming clear that the power of lobbyists is out of control, and the lobbying reform has not changed matters at all. Banks and Insurance companies can afford powerful lobbyists (some of whom are actually former members of Congress). And the caliber of people we elect to Congress is such that they cannot resist the force of the lobbyists. In many cases, it is well known, lobbyists actually write the legislation.

In an atmosphere of extremism and manic hostility, Barack Obama projected a refreshingly calm, confident, reasonable image. One is amazed that the chosen ones of the GOP have forgotten how to do this. What has happened? Obama has taken ownership of the centrist position that the more enlightened conservatives were accustomed to adopting, leaving them with nothing to distinguish themselves from him. As a result, they have assumed ultra-conservative postures that are steadily alienating moderate Republicans and Independents. Liberals (and ultra-Liberals) within the Democratic Party must weigh the relative value of keeping to their Republican hostile rhetoric, versus making the centrist positions of Obama a comfortable home for disenchanted Republicans. However, we must bear in mind that centrist Republicans are the first to bail out when a Democrat president inches even slightly to the left, or even the perceived left, such as proposing Health Care Reform. Read Glenn Greenwald's post about this peculiar development for a better explanation.

It is so difficult to deal with an electorate that absorbs hype more readily than logic! But this is the brave new world we live in.

Arch

A Name-That-Tune website! / Holiday Music

2011-12-24T14:27:00.001-05:00

I had just got this brilliant idea for a website that would do online what the fabulous book by Barlow and Morgenstern (now selling on Amazon for $185) did for music lovers: enable you to look up the composer and name of a tune that you can write out using the names of the piano keys, e.g. CDE-EGF- and so on. I was just about to contact all my computer geek buddies to see if we could put such a site together.

Unfortunately, I have just this minute discovered that the concept has already been implemented on the Web. The site is called Musipedia, a very simple and effective tool to identify classical music themes. Here's how you use it.

At the website (and why am I wasting your time and mine describing all this? You could easily discover the routine by going to the site) they give you a choice of methods of putting in the tune. There is a Flash-based keyboard that you can "play" with a mouse, which transcribes the tune (not too accurately, since the rhythm you enter is at the mercy of how good you are with a mouse), and then, when you click the Search button, the site looks up the closest match to your tune in its database, and gives you the half-dozen top matches.

I tried to match a certain tune that my mother used to sing around the house, but the words to which I could not remember. (My mother used to sing lots of goofy songs from the thirties and forties, when she was growing up.) Here's the tune, if you're interested:

The software suggested a string quartet by Mozart, and a variety of other losing matches. I wonder whether there is a way of adding entries to their database once you discover the name of the tune and its composer. . . I suppose there must be; there is a disclaimer that suggests that they really can't take responsibility for contributed information, just like Wikipedia.

An interesting problem that crops up is the following: if there is no exact match (and there generally will not be one), how does it measure how close an approximate match is? In other words, every tune --at least conceptually-- can be imagined as being surrounded by other tunes that are close to it. This is the idea of Topology: in a collection of objects, what objects are a given object close to? In fact, topology addresses the idea of what points are next to each other. For instance, if you take a rectangle, and consider the points at the left edge to be right next to the points are the right edge, you turn the rectangle into a cylinder, because you have glued the left edge to the right edge topologically.

By changing the gluing procedure slightly, you can make a Möbius strip. Just consider the points at the left edge near the top be "next to" the points at the right edge near the bottom, and vice versa. This way, it is as if you have glued the two edges after twisting them. (If you give the paper two twists, it may as well be a cylinder, mathematically, which you can appreciate by thinking about who is "next to" whom!)

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

One thing I'm pretty vague about is non-sacred music for the Holidays. At one time I scorned the usual "secular" Christmas tunes, because basically I knew so many carols that I just didn't have time for Jingle Bells, and that ilk. But, over the years, there were a goodly number of holiday favorites that I missed if I didn't hear them once the weather got cold.

The rather small list of songs that I grudgingly got to like are, in addition to Jingle Bells: Winter Wonderland (ugh), Let It Snow, The Christmas Song ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..."), Need a little Christmas, Sleigh Ride by Leroy Anderson, Silver Bells, Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and a few others that elude me at the moment. Oh; John Lennon's Merry Christmas, War is Over; and So this is Christmas. (The Beatles, evidently, enjoyed Christmas hugely, judging from the many gems they dreamed up for the members of their Fan Club. In their Messages, of course, they affected a Tired Of It All attitude, but you can see through it.)

I would like to get myself a CD that has most of the better-known (non-sacred) Christmas and Holiday songs and tunes, but I don't know which one to get. It is actually possible to sing these songs badly; I really prefer not to get get Perry Como singing them all, or even Julie Andrews, though the latter comes closest to the artist who can sing almost anything beautifully. Deck the Halls, We Wish you a Merry Christmas, and a few other songs are really secular carols, even if they are placed in a Christian context. So this is an invitation for anyone reading this to send in their nominations for best Christmas CD (non-sacred)!

Is Bill Maher Predicting The End Of The World?

2011-12-04T09:38:00.001-05:00

Bill Maher, the comedian and abrasive political satirist, wrote a book earlier this year: New New Rules (How everybody but me has their head up their ass). The link takes you to a Amazon Kindle application that lets you read the foreword. This post is more about the review of the book by one Herbert Calhoun.

Mr Calhoun appears to take the view that Bill Maher is a prophet foretelling the doom of America as we know it.

Trying to describe America, in my very humble opinion, is like the proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant. I have been for thirty years decrying the fact that there is no national health care system, but for thirty years my friends have told me that it would never work. Why? After all, they have it in Britain, and in Asian countries, and it works, despite the rampant corruption in those countries. Because America, they say, is too big.

Well, America is hardly bigger than India, with close to half a trillion souls (half of them as sick as dogs). But, as far as I can tell, in India there is still a sense of national identity. (Those of us who live outside India can't really analyze that phenomenon, but I suspect that it is waning, and only survives in part because of the presence of America on the one hand, and Pakistan and China on the other.) In the USA, national identity is entirely different, and corruption is also entirely different than it is elsewhere in the world. This is an important point, which many Americans will grant right away, without quite understanding the actual differences. Our national identity is bigger and better than any other national identity, we will say, thinking that we have fought harder for it, and we have forged it in the face of massive waves of immigration for several centuries. Well, at least two. (Our corruption, we will be thinking, is also bigger and better than you'll find anywhere else.)

Many liberals --among them Bill Maher-- as well as many conservatives are gazing on current events with horror. If you read Maher's book (which I haven't) you will probably see the reasons why both sides of the political divide are horrified. It appears that many American institutions are being subverted. It used to be that you could depend on real estate investments. No longer. It used to be that a new President could solve at least some of the problems identified by one party or the other. No longer. It used to be that new technologies would reliably result in jobs in America. No longer. It used to be that if you were educated enough, you could always find a job. No longer. It used to be that in both parties, at least one of the candidates was someone whose ideals you could identify with. It used to be that every spring you could depend on a flood of young people flooding the employment market with high idealism. We could depend on Europe as a market for our high-tech exports. We could depend on snow every winter. We could safely take a vacation in Mexico. We could board a plane flight in 2 hours.

Some of us have obviously been taken by surprise. We are better than this, they cry, thinking of the conditions that have changed due to shenanigans on Wall Street and in Washington. It has been a long process, but some of us are just beginning to realize that the murder and mayhem in Mexico is driven by the huge drug profits in America. But wait; can a few little black kids skulking in parking lots account for all that drug money? No; it's wealthy folks whose drug habits are never in the news. Rich Americans are spending more money on drugs than ever before. They're just a lot better at not getting caught.

Lots of things are alarmingly different. Health care is gradually getting worse in the USA. For the very rich, it is true that more diseases can be cured today that in earlier decades. But it is useless for us middle class folks, because inexplicably our deductibles are going up, and our treatment limits are going down. Education is worse, because teachers increasingly have to cope with students who don't really do any work at home, so that the few who do their homework feel that they may as well stop doing it. It's a vicious spiral based on a weird understanding of "fairness". Teacher, be fair: kids who don't do their homework are people too. Dean, be fair: kids who don't study deserved to pass, too. They did pay their fees, after all. We didn't pay $200K to your school just to flunk out, you know.

But it is not the end of the world; things will keep spiraling towards chaos, but we will keep inventing ways of avoiding total disaster. But we're going to see a sequence of disasters that are just a little this side of total.

Is it fair that a few of us should keep our fingers in the dikes, while the rest of us just use our indignation to march around doing nothing? Well, it's always been that way. The average citizen has always been noisy about his or her rights, but not about his or her responsibilities. A few have always gone about cleaning up everybody else's hamburger wrappers and cigarette butts. A few of us have always organized those study groups at the end of the semester, and helped our dysfunctional buddies to learn their periodic freaking tables. Is it fair? It's just what makes us us.

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Poverty in the USA

2011-10-25T11:08:00.001-04:00

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Before I go into this subject, I want to make it clear that I would much rather live in the USA than in any other country in the world. To be honest, when I visit the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Hem-hem) I do feel ---briefly--- that I would really love to move there; and I would probably feel the same if were to visit, say, Germany or Holland (though who knows how much they welcome foreign folks over there?) but I would sooner or later feel the urge to return to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Bananas.

I keep meeting wonderful people here. So there's no shortage of them. A person I never knew turns out to be someone wonderful, and we sit together and deplore the state of things. Lovely women mourn the difficulty of finding men with a liberal attitude; all the guys seem to be conservative-leaning. (On the surface the guys are quite reasonable and well-balanced, but there does seem to be dissatisfaction with social welfare programs, spending on education and the arts, impatience with environmental initiatives, and hostility towards women, immigrants and ethnic minorities. All the liberal guys seem to be married. What does that tell you?)

This was brought home to me strongly just this morning when I read about a little 2-year-old Chinese girl being knocked down by two vans in heavy traffic, and lying there bleeding, ignored by all the bystanders. It appears that Good Samaritans have, in the past, found themselves liable after interfering in similar cases. Such things do not happen here in the US very often, but I cannot say whether people are just that much nicer, or whether the laws are that much more strict about hit-and-run accidents. In addition, the enormous population of China has a negative effect on the social responsibility of average citizens, it appears to us from here. The phrase "Life is cheap" seems to take on a whole different meaning ...

However, if you read the websites of organizations that study such things, we learn that poverty in the US is on the rise. Bread.org, for instance, gives a quite dispassionate but depressing account of the picture of hunger in the US.

The causes of hunger, says Bread.org, is economic. Their lead article describes various technical states in which a household can find itself, one of which is food insecurity, which describes a household that struggles to put food on the table at least once a year. There is no shortage of food; only a shortage of money to buy it.

Poor, uneducated families tend to spend their money on food that does them little good in the long term; very poor folks are often overweight. The effects of low incomes are complex and varied, and in the US, in particular, families seem not to have the cultural resources to cope with poverty. Because of the American lifestyle which focuses on nuclear families, and which minimizes interference from older (and very occasionally, wiser) relatives, poor families have few or no ideas about how to ride out a hard patch. The Village does not help. The Church does not help much, since the intellectual liabilities of belonging to a church are so vast, that most people who might be able to cope with the church's incessant demands for money (by just saying no, for instance) tend to keep away from it. Increasingly, too, the churches have no use for people who are too poor to tithe to them.

Preparing for Affluence

Ok. We're really far down this particular post, and not at a very good point at which to start a completely new idea, but that's exactly what I want to do.

I suspect that most of the affluent "fiscal conservatives" come from families of so-called "self-made" men. These are working-class men who have worked very, very hard, and made their money. They pay their taxes very resentfully, and the money they make is earmarked for their spouses and their (often quite undeserving) offspring; after all, blood is thicker than water (whatever that means), and why should the Government distribute their hard-earned wealth among the undeserving poor?

In my last post, I addressed the issue of what Education is for; here I'm musing about what Money is for. The Ignorant are convinced that money redistributed by the Government is ill-spent. My money, they say, is for my kids, and my grandchildren, to splurge on whatever they want. I shall give some of my money to my church (which will bankroll missions in Darkest Africa, ostensibly, but which really goes to support the church bureaucracy), and some money to my golf club, and that's all I'm going to do.

But can we really live well while our fellow-citizens, some of them very probably thoroughly lazy people, are on the brink of hunger, our schools are sorely short on equipment, school canteens are serving junk food, the orchestras and bands are going bankrupt, the libraries are shortening their hours, the police force is laying off officers, the city cannot afford to replace burnt-out light fixtures on the streets, and public TV and radio has to beg for funds to keep operating? We are rapidly becoming a nation of newly-rich surrounded by newly-poor. Neither component of the population knows how to deal with its new circumstances.

Part of what we must learn is how our spending impacts our life in ways that are not obvious. It is difficult to persuade children that the welfare of others is important, that it is satisfying to see our neighbors healthy and comfortable. I really don't know how to do this; it must come from constant exposure to the idea. Public-spiritedness is very rare; and we must study it when we see it: where does it come from?

Arguably, the children of today know neither how to deal with affluence nor with poverty. Our community organizations are inept both with addressing needs here in the US as well as with needs in the world abroad; it is a miracle that anything gets done anywhere.

On July Fourth, 1890, one Albert Pillsbury gave a speech in Boston. Evidently 120 years ago, he felt that public spirit was in the decline, and he deplored it eloquently. A search on Public Spirit brought up a link to his speech, and I give it here: Public Spirit.

Comrade Pillsbury pursues his theme at length. But he says:

If public spirit is declining, the decline must be stayed; if it sleeps, it must be awakened. We need not lose confidence; we must not omit caution, nor forget the maxim, which contains the essence of all political wisdom as applied to popular government, that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. We have fairly entered upon a period which, to the republics of ancient times, has proved to be the period of decline, — a period in which new sources of mischief are opened, different from those to which we have hitherto been exposed, — the period of wealth and luxury, in which the people are liable to be seduced from proper attention to their public interests by the pursuit and enjoyment of riches. It has been said by a political philosopher that while danger to a small republic comes from without, to a great republic it proceeds from within. We have nothing to fear from foreign power; we must turn the eye of vigilance upon ourselves. It was long ago foreseen that one result of the unexampled opportunity for the acquisition of wealth, afforded by our resources and our laws, would be to divert the attention and the energies of the people from public affairs to the pursuit of private gain. We are beginning to realize this result. It is not a source of danger if it is met with a quickened sense of public duty on the part of the whole people. We cannot expect to enjoy the fruits of the prosperity which has made the United States the first nation in the world in aggregate wealth, and in the annual production of wealth, without the difficulties which seem inseparable from such a situation. We are reaping its benefits in every avenue of enterprise and philanthropy; in the march of industrial development, moving at a pace and upon a scale of which history affords no example, and in the boundless liberality of private munificence, manifested in the endowment of schools, libraries, museums, hospitals, and in every form which can increase the comfort and promote the progress of society. These are all proofs of public spirit, but to be effective for the security of popular government public spirit must be carried into the actual work of government by the whole body of the people.

What Education is For

2011-10-17T19:58:00.001-04:00

A few months ago, I wrote about what use Education was.
By now most of us must be tuned in to the fact that, though, on the face of it, getting an education is --at least mostly-- still a voluntary thing, people are out there furiously getting an education. (At least, when they do expend the least bit of effort getting their education, they certainly let everybody know about it.)
I had been firmly of the opinion that, among other things, an Education was all about what to do with oneself when one was home from work; in other words, it is all about one's leisure time. In the light of the terrible unemployment picture that obtains presently, this attitude is laughable: how in the heck is one supposed to enjoy one's leisure when one hasn't got a job in the first place?
This brings out an enormous contradiction in our society. The vast majority of people are in occupations that merely give them a living: sales, services, management, whatever: be it an office job or a floor job or a job in the outdoors, most employed people keep their jobs just to bring home a paycheck. This means that they use, possibly, a very small proportion of their education in their actual workplaces: a little arithmetic, a little language capability, a little knowledge of law and accounting principles, and that's all; all the rest they pick up on the job, so it's a common complaint that the education they received was "useless".
My claim was that the education was for when you really began to live each day, when you came home. Surrounded by your family, you can focus on the things you choose to do, rather than the things you have to do to earn your bread.
I completely recognize that most people are exhausted by the time they come inside the house and slam the door shut. You know, this wasn't always the case: half a century ago, a middle-class citizen spent a moderate amount of energy at work, and came home with a certain amount of energy left to talk to the kids and the spouse, cast an intelligent eye on the newspaper (if it hadn't been read at breakfast already), and possibly had a friend or two pop over in the evening, to play a hand of cards, or go out for a night of bowling, or whatever. If you look around you, those who have the energy to do any of that are rare, except for those who have some fun on the weekends. The Great American Business Boss has gotten much better at sucking every last calorie of energy out of you before you head home.
Given that this is the case, it is perfectly true that one's education is useless. It is preparation for your leisure time which you simply do not have the energy or even the time to enjoy anymore.
It is our leisure time that makes us human, and civilized. When our ancestors were out hunting and gathering, they had to be on the alert every moment, to keep from becoming food for some wild animal. Once we settled down in villages and in farms, it was the leisure we found that enabled art, and music, and literature. The whole point of education was that every new generation did not have to start from scratch.
But I'm seeing a different side to the story. Everything I teach seems immediately forgotten by each class. Every semester, I have to start from scratch. Starting from scratch has become a way of life for everyone, even young people who haven't started working yet. Somewhere they have got the idea that it is better to learn the same little thing in their ten mathematics classes than to learn ten different things.
My students, are, by and large, a lazy bunch. A few of them forget themselves and find themselves actually learning something in a class, to their extreme embarrassment. They recover quickly, and manage to forget the material quickly in time for the appropriate ignorance they have to display the next day.
At one time, this country truly was civilized; it is difficult to put one's finger precisely on the era in which this was true. There was a recognition of the higher things, the greater good, the dignity of labor, the equality of Man, and the things held in high esteem by the Founding Fathers were in fact truly admired by all educated citizens. But in the course of time, people found themselves professing these high ideals, while not actually understanding them, or even understanding the vocabulary that was required to explain the ideals. Today, it is very likely, even if the great Preamble to the Declaration of Independence were to be translated into the modern idiom, that a large proportion of the population would not have the background for understanding what it is saying. Isn't it obvious that everyone should be able to understand at least that? After all, it encapsulates almost everything that Americans hold dear. But I doubt that, in fact, it is any longer the body of axioms that holds this nation together.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting that it is the enormous influx of immigrants into the country that has diluted this knowledge. It is simply the fact that the vast majority of people have been trapped into working so hard that they have no leisure to think about anything but work. They cannot convey their ideals to their children because they simply have no time. They could not learn the ideals of their parents, because their parents had no time for passing it on.
From being the Land of Plenty, the USA has become the Land of Plenty of Work for those who have jobs, and Plenty of Worry for those who don't. We are working in the Mines all over again.
Those in upper management work a lot less, it is true. All their time is spent appearing to be a lot busier than they are. In principle, they should be perfectly able to interact with their families in culturally meaningful ways: convey family values, engage in cultural pursuits, interact with their friends in civilized ways. But I suspect that mostly what gets done is a lot of drinking, smoking, and boasting about fictitious achievements. Things are set up in this society in such a way that most people get to be wealthy because their parents worked extra hard, which means that those parents had even less time to engage with them in ways that allowed family values to be meaningfully transmitted. So once junior gets to be a big shot on the shoulders of Papa's labor, junior has hardly any family values to speak of.
Perhaps the complaints about the irrelevance of education are true. A typical American liberal education is perfectly suited for a society in which obtaining a job is not a desperate thing. The fact that the American economy is uncontrolled to the point where every young person cannot be guaranteed some sort of a job, is deplorable. In this situation, where the economy is based on public mood rather than rational decisions, it is obvious that young people will insist that their education should guarantee them a job. In other words, most students will migrate towards narrow, technical educations, leaving only upper-crust kids --who typically do not worry about obtaining employment once they graduate-- to seek a liberal education: i.e., an education focused on understanding civilization. This is a situation that will lead to an even greater stratification than we have now. No doubt there are those who think this is a good thing. I think it is a very bad thing, because the most affluent students are by no means the ones who are most capable of understanding civilization. We shall be throwing our civilization before swine.

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Modern Orchestral Suites

2011-10-15T12:09:00.005-04:00

Suites, as a genre, seemed to have emerged in the late Renaissance and the early Baroque. I'm just guessing here, but I can imagine some feudal lord listening with satisfaction to a bunch of dances performed by a roving band of musicians, and calling one of them over. "So what was that you fellows were playing?" The leader, half in fear of being decapitated, would have looked over to the drummer, who was a little braver than the others, and the drummer strolls over. "Hi, Lord! Hi, Toots; what's up?" You can imagine Toots glaring at the impertinent young drummer, shooting an embarrassed smile at the nobleman, and mumbling to his colleague that they were being asked what the music was called.

The dances were probably called things like Kick the widow while she's down, and Jumping on the chickens, and so on, so of course the last thing Toots wants is to disclose the names of the dances. Upon reflection, it was a bad idea to get the drummer over.
"They're just some dances we play, you know, when folks want to dance, you know, like ..."
"Yeah, like on May Day, and stuff," adds the drummer.
"Yeah, that's it, your lordship," adds Toots.
"But it's got to have a name," insists the lord, or maybe the laird, and so they decide to call it The Mudheap Dances, since it was the Lord of Mudheap that was insisting on a name for the dances. He insists that the next time they come through, he wants to hear the same set of dances, and they had better remember the name of the set.

A suite is basically just a collection, such as a suite of furniture, or a suite of rooms, but most definitely a musical suite is a collection of movements that are intended to be performed together, and, moreover, performed in a designated order.

By the end of the Baroque, when Telemann, Handel and Bach were doing their stuff, they took as their models the suites being performed at Versailles, with Lully and other court composers playing grand-sounding music for the entrance of the King (the Overture), followed by a set of about five dances in contrasting meters, for actual dancing, or for eating to the sound of.

In the time of Mozart, of course, there were the Divertimentos (more properly divertimenti) and Serenades that he wrote for the amusement of the aristocracy of Vienna, and all of Europe, really, since he was invited to Czechoslovakia and France, being a celebrity in a small way. Nobody really wanted to hear his symphonies and concertos; they preferred the Serenades by far. These were lighthearted pieces, intended to be enjoyed with half an ear (in contrast to symphonies and concertos, to which the audience was expected to give their undivided attention).

By the time Beethoven came along, the Suite made a comeback. Composers were writing Operas like fury, since they were all the rage. (Just as musical theater is more popular than classical music today, so it was then.) Once the opera had finished its run, composers discovered that they could write several movements from the music of the opera, and call it a suite. Hence the Egmont suite by Beethoven. [I have just learned that the Egmont suite is not an instrumental work, so it perhaps does not quite belong in this discussion.] I'm not certain that Mozart did not do something of the same sort, but some of the most popular of suites written in the 19th century have been derived from operas and ballets. (I must mention here that Purcell, in 17th century England did the same; his suites written for various plays of his time are still frequently performed today, and are among the most accessible music Purcell ever wrote.)

Let me place here a reference to Suites that I found on the Web, the only really useful one: Suites, on Wikipedia. The need to be precise, and the requirement of satisfying Wikipedia's self-imposed, and rather defensive, standards of documentation make filling out a Wikipedia article an exercise in frustration, I imagine, and so all we can find is this compendium of links to existing articles in Wikipedia.

Mendelssohn wrote at least one orchestral suite that I am aware of, namely one inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare. Schubert also wrote at least one suite, whose name eludes me. Schumann wrote collections of pieces, not intended to be performed all together, and so do not really qualify for the name of "suite", e.g. Kinderscenen. Weber wrote the Oberon overture, but possibly not a suite to go with it.

Before I forget, let me mention the major suites that inspired this entire post:
The Mother Goose Suite, by Modest Mussorgsky, originally for piano, but subsequently orchestrated both by the composer, and by Maurice Ravel;
I could not get a decent clip of this one; sorry! I'll keep trying...

Pictures at an Exhibition, also by Mussorgsky (also orchestrated by Ravel, among others);
This is a grand and brilliant work that is very accessible and entertaining.

Le Tombeau de Couperin, by Ravel;

A favorite work of mine!

Pines of Rome, Ancient Airs and Dances, Roman Festivals, and a few other suites by Ottorino Respighi;
Ancient airs is lovely. Festivals is noisy and brassy, evidently very influential; you can hear echoes of this style in film scores.

The Enigma Suite of Variations, by Edward Elgar;
Nimrod is by far the most popular variation.

The Wise Virgins ballet suite by William Walton, based on chorales by J. S. Bach;
The clip contains movements 1-4; the first is from Bach's harmonization of "What God hath done is rightly done."

Numerous ballet suites by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, including Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, as well as a Serenade for strings, which is a suite pure and simple;
The clip is of the second movement of the Serenade: a waltz.

The Rite of Spring, and Firebird, both ballet suites by Igor Stravinsky;

Porgy and Bess, by George Gershwin;

Karelia, by Jean Sibelius;

Smetana's The Bartered Bride, and Ma Vlast;
The clip is the dance of the clowns.--Pardon me: the Dance of the Comedians. I realize that the two categories are not the same, and not knowing Czech I cannot tell which word is appropriate, and must defer to the documentation on the clip.

Peer Gynt, by Edvard Grieg.
The clip is of the movement Morning, also known as Morning Mood.

To be accurate, suites of variations are a slightly different animal from orchestral suites generally. The fact that the variations are linked by being variations of a common theme is an additional structure that is absent in a typical suite. Because suites are such loosely-linked collections of movements, there is usually --but this is by no means a rule-- a non-musical, or more correctly, an extra-musical idea that holds the movements of a suite together. In Bach's time, for instance, the movements of an orchestral suite needed have nothing in common except key. (The only reason the tune of movement 4 pops into my head at the end of movement 3 is because I have heard the entire suite so many, many times before.)

OK, girls and boys, I'm getting a little hungry, and I'm going to postpone adding some YouTube links for a later date. I can't think of pictures that go along with this post, so if I do add images later, they will be completely gratuitous.

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Sobriety Tests

2011-10-07T08:43:00.001-04:00

Falling in Love with Dead Authors: Louisa May Alcott

2011-10-04T11:20:00.004-04:00

Louisa May Alcott

I was given a copy of Little Men by Louisa M. Alcott when I was about 10 or 11. I can't remember the occasion; perhaps it was a birthday. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but I took it as a "school story", and could not quite understand the central position Jo Bhaer occupied in the story, because in all the school stories I had read, it was the kids who were central to the story and never the adults. Still, I began to understand Jo's affection for all the children in her school, gradually working my way past the slight sentimentality that occasionally got in the way.

A few months later --or perhaps years-- we were taken to see the movie of Little Women, the version starring June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor. I was instantly in love with all the girls, but most especially Jo. I was furious at Rossano Brazzi, who played Professor Bhaer, but I was by then accustomed to falling in love with older women, only to have them snapped up by older guys, some of them with outrageous sideburns. Anyway, of course I had to go home and read the book. (At this time Dad was away at Yale, and did not have the money to come visiting during the breaks. Everybody was glad that I was reading Alcott, and not James Bond, etc ...)

Reading Civil War era novels is heavy going. But through it all, Louisa May Alcott's storytelling shines through. My mother observed my progress through the book (I think I had gotten sick with something serious, but I kept reading), and explained how autobiographical the book was. Looking back, I think I was impressed at how open-hearted Jo March was, a very likely genuine portrayal of the character of the author, Louisa Alcott herself. It was certainly in the spirit of the times for women to be overly sentimental about children and poverty, but there was just enough of a touch of restraint to give Alcott's characters the weight of authenticity.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

At times, the author makes her characters just a little too perfect. When they have faults, even the faults are perfect, and there is a veiled glamor over even the humblest of personalities in Alcott's account. After a while, you forget the sentimentality. Unfortunately, some of those tricks of writing have attached themselves to me, and the observant reader will know just how much I have been influenced by L. M. Alcott.

It is interesting to read just how engaged the middle-class was in national affairs, to the extent that they were able to obtain news of current events. The Alcotts in Boston were far better informed of the events of the war than folks further west must have been. I'm still trying to get a clear idea of what gave solidity to Alcott's boundless enthusiasm. Even in the Little Women, Little Men series, she is already half in jest about her enthusiasm, but she is beginning to see her attitudes about education and the new society she was envisaging, and presumably the vision of whoever inspired the character of Friedrich Bhaer, taking shape. All the way up unto that time, the idealists who were the successors to the founding fathers of America were keeping alive the idealism of those founders, even if some of that manic idealism must have been fueled by the cheap labor provided by slaves and former slaves, and the leisure it brought the propertied classes. Labor was no longer cheap, but the open Western frontier was enough to keep driving the vision of a good society that lay just beyond the horizon. This is the most attractive thing about Louisa M. Alcott: her belief in the boundless potential of young people. This is attractive to me in anybody.

Charles Dickens

The almost contemporary books of Laura Ingalls Wilder are set just after the War, and refer to it rather distantly if at all. Wilder is more concerned with the details of life in the West than with the personalities of those beyond her immediate family. Gifted with equal charm, Laura Ingalls makes her very restraint lend her the glamor that Louisa Alcott must craft with Dickensian deliberation. (I don't know that Dickens was all that deliberate about anything; I only mean that Alcott admired Dickens greatly, and seems to have set out to emulate him in depth of feeling. And she certainly succeeded.)

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Quartets and Quintets in the Classical Era

2011-10-03T21:34:00.008-04:00

There is something delicious about how music sounds with just sufficient instruments to fill out the harmony!

Back in Bach's day, I think it is fair to say that rhythm and syncopation were really the driving engines of the musical scene. Though some of Bach's melodies are among the most lovely ever written, the vast majority of his orchestral works appeal to us ---to me, at least--- because of the rhythm. The harmony does certainly play a major role; in fact, the harmony actually plays a rhythmic role, which is a phenomenon that is just a bit too subtle for me to describe.

Alongside the rhythms and the harmony, is the texture created by the interweaving melodies of the parts, or the voices. This texture is characteristic of the contrapuntal era, beginning before Palestrina, and culminating probably with Mozart. Some, of course, insist that Bach was the crowning glory of Counterpoint, and how are we to argue? Chacun á son gout, as they say.

Let's leave that aside for the moment.

Imagine a lovely composition for just three voices! Many composers have contemplated this very ideal, but Bach went further: what if the three voices were perfectly matched? One of the ideals of chamber music is to have a small ensemble of perfectly matched voices.

Homogeneous Ensembles

At the end of the Renaissance, and up to the beginning of the Baroque, there was a genre of composition for a small set of matched instruments called a consort. Two major consort types have come down to us: the Consort of Viols, and the School of Recorders (or consort of recorders). Noble houses commissioned skilled instrument-makers to create a set of matched instruments of sizes ranging from a high treble size (or even a tiny descant), down to a large bass size (or larger contrabass size). Then, the patron hoped, the jaded court composer would be spurred on to write new and better music for this matched set of instruments.

Among the consort pieces I enjoy the most are those of William Byrd and John Downland. Here is an In Nomine by Byrd:

(The performer appears to have played all the parts himself.)

The homogeneity of the tone-color of the instruments --in this case, the single instrument-- enhances the contrapuntal texture, or the weaving in and out of the parts. Syncopation, especially --where different voices sound at different times, on the beat and off-- is particularly effective.

Bach wrote a number of Trios for the organ, where the two hands and the pedals played a single voice each, constituting a trio. The important thing in Bach's Trio Sonatas was the delicacy of the texture and the lively rhythms, and not the weight of the sonority. The Trio Sonatas are almost invariably performed with very light registration (very few stops), most performers understanding the esthetics of the Sonatas perfectly. Here is the Trio Sonata in E Flat major played on an organ. Here it is, played by a modern string ensemble. It is just as charming, but the neutral organ tones lend themselves more towards enjoying the music independently of the performance (though an organist would be indignant at taking second place to the music itself, perhaps).

The famous Loeki Stardust recorder ensemble from Amsterdam is one of the few recorder ensembles that I am familiar with, and the following is this group playing the famous (incomplete) last fugue from The Art of Fugue of J. S. Bach.

Joseph Haydn, you may know, developed the musical structure called Sonata Form. This was a plan for writing the large-scale first movement of a symphony. (Subsequent movements contrasted both in mood and complexity with the First movement, so their forms were correspondingly simpler, usually, though often the last movement, too, was in a variant of Sonata Form.) Another genre Haydn brought to full development was the String Quartet. In some ways, the String Quartet, both the ensemble consisting of two violins, a viola and a 'cello, and the String Quartet form, consisting of a first movement in Sonata Form, followed by up to three more movements, was a successor to the Viol Consort, and the multi-movement pieces written for them. The instruments were perfectly matched, and the music written for the ensemble exploited to the fullest the homogeneity of tone of the instruments. (It must be noted that the three sorts of instruments do actually have a degree of distinctiveness in their tones, even if they sound very similar indeed. Some composers exploit this slight variety in their sonorities, especially modern composers.)

Here is a string quintet movement by Mozart (not a quartet, as I had originally written!).

Heifetz, Primrose and Piatigorsky were famous performers of their time, and we can tolerate the poor recording quality to hear these folks play!

Heterogeneous Ensembles

In contrast to string quartets and viol consorts, a different sort of ensemble became popular in Mozart's day, namely the Woodwind Quintet. The woodwind quintet consists of a flute, a clarinet, an oboe, a bassoon, and, of all things, a French Horn. On one hand, these are five very distinctive voices, but on the other hand, they are similar enough to be able to blend together to a certain extent. Quite honestly, I know little about this particular sort of ensemble, and the genre of music written for it (except that I have been scoring a movement that I wrote for various groups of instruments, including a wind quartet). Let's look for examples of Quintets from about Mozart's time.

Well, I couldn't find any! What a shame. But here is a quintet anyway. They're playing a movement from one of my very favorite modern suites: Le Tombeau de Couperin, by Maurice Ravel. (It was originally written for piano solo, and subsequently orchestrated for orchestra. Ravel was a genius at orchestration):

This is a piece by Anton Reicha:

And my Serenade. This is scored for Flute, Clarinet, English Horn (Cor Anglais) and Bassoon.

As I was fooling around with this piece, I was fascinated with the dual problems of scoring it (that is, assigning instrumentation to it) on the one hand, to make the strands of the harmony blend, and on the other, to make the strands of the harmony not blend too much. For instance, if I had one instrument looping upwards past other melody lines, I didn't want the motion to be obscured by those other melodies. This sort of thing happens beginning at 2:24, where the flute spirals past the rather laconic melody in the clarinet.

I also realized something directly that I had only read about up until last winter: the Clarinet has two entirely different "voices" in different parts of its range. (Yes, I know everybody knew this but me, but ... never mind.) In the higher register, which is beautiful in its limpid simplicity (or jaunty and perky, when playing popular or jazz music), the tone is actually uninteresting and sort of characterless. In the lower register (more reminiscent of the ancestor instrument from which the Clarinet was developed: the chalumeau, the clarinet has a unique reediness different from the oboe and the bassoon. In other words, the flute, clarinet, oboe, French horn and bassoon are really six quite different instruments, which can be made to blend together beautifully, but also keep their individuality.

Beginning in the time of Mozart, music that was essentially classical (using the word "classical" to distinguish from popular dance music) was being played by commoners: ordinary folks, tailors, cobblers, carpenters, farmers, etc. Music, until this time, was played for the nobility by professional musicians, or played for dancing by musicians while they were off-duty, or by completely different musicians, who played for contributions from the dancers, e.g. street musicians. But now, groups of serious musicians had obtained instruments for themselves, such as clarinets and bassoons and such, and played serious music on the street; or at least semi-serious music. They formed themselves into clubs and Harmonies, and Mozart wrote some of his most brilliant music for them. Some of Mozart's serenades are for these sorts of groups, including this one, K 375 in E flat:

This movement is incorrigibly jolly --it is the Finale-- but you can hear clarinets high up, bassoons earnestly keeping the bass going, and horns occasionally splashing chords in the middle. (Flutes seem to have been used rarely, since it was probably too difficult to play flutes while marching along.)

The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet in rehearsal.

[More later.]

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This Kitchen is Only for Those who can Stand the Heat

2011-09-29T16:18:00.001-04:00

Oh sinful generation ...

It appears that there is no place for caution in today's world. In a world that is ruled by economics (and not very rational economics, at that), the moment that growth stops, or even slows, everyone begins to panic.

It is reasonable and proper that those who are without work should panic. But the approach furiously advocated by Big Business and its friends: unloose the fetters on Big Business!!! --and reduce government spending-- simply makes every little locality desperate to grab at any economic opportunity it sees.

In our little town, for instance, since we're close to the center of all this --highly destructive-- shale gas exploration, there is a great deal of bustling around, meetings everywhere, promotions, interviews, big shots from Texas coming in to gloat, big shots from Washington and Harrisburg hovering anxiously. There is a scarcity of hotel space; not a single room is available some weeks. Four new hotels have been put up recently, now competing with the grand old hotels of yesteryear. The new hotels, of course, are essentially all plasterboard and steel girders; that's why they can be put up so fast. Everyone in the hospitality industry is crazy about build, build build.

But all this frantic busy activity will peter out within a couple of years. Once the gas companies bludgeon the local authorities into coming to terms with the pollution that simply cannot be alleviated, and once the local authorities begin to come under pressure from locals who benefit (alas, only temporarily) by the boom, the necessity for bigwigs from anywhere coming to our little town will cease, and the hotels will lie empty once again.

It would seem that all the gas will be extracted within five years. At that point, even the low-level gas-rig jockeys will leave town, and only the blighted gas fields will be left. But, on the bright side, there will be a lot of really cheap rooms for Little League families. I suspect that the hotels will be very poorly maintained, since there will be no money in it.

Nobody wants to listen to any voice that suggests that furious building will be wasteful. The voices of the nay-sayers are ignored, or worse, the pessimists are shunned. Nobody can stand anyone who "isn't part of the solution," because, of course, they're part of the problem.

The Better Mousetrap, and Other Myths we may Need to Jettison.

2011-09-20T12:58:00.008-04:00

When America first hit the stands as the biggest thing since paved roads, it was Henry Ford's assembly line that headlined the news. The better mousetrap became essentially sidelined, and the fabulous economies of scale took over the thinking of economists and businessmen.

Industries had been around for a long time; craftsmen were, for instance, making dresses for wealthy customers back in the time of King Arthur and Queen Betty Lou. The sweat shop that makes dresses so inexpensive that even I can afford one were a recent invention. Horse carriages, likewise, were being turned out in factories all over Britain and the USA. The assembly lines of Detroit made them a lot cheaper.

Books were hard to find in the Middle Ages. Gutenberg's invention made them affordable to everyone (and ultimately created the new occupation of the Bible-thumper, surely a good thing, eh?). So we're all hung up on mass-producing things for good reason. Small farms are disappearing, and instead we have these giant businesses which, if they produce anything, will only produce a million of them.

We in America, in particular, have a tendency to equate progress with growth. A new breed of "geniuses" has come into existence: the kind that will take a good idea to make something useful, and increase your profits by (1) marketing them to people you never thought could use the bloody things, and (2) help you make far more of the things than you can easily sell. At this point (3) you need them to find new and better ways of making money out of the things, e.g. use them as toys for pit-bulls, for instance. Infuse them with bone essence, and here you go: a toy for Rover. (Never mind that it was supposed to be a nail-clipper.)

Our brave new world is now filled with a number of millionaires (apparently most Congressmen are), but also trillions of flavor-infused nail-clippers that nobody wants. So, in my humble opinion, this breed of genius must die. Actually, we have choices: we can fill the planet with surplus products, or we can change the advice these geniuses give the idiot entrepreneurs. It's time we pursued a more imaginative way of being productive than that of simply mass-producing everything, and persuading those who aren't interested in a product that they should purchase one anyway, and give it a temporary home on the way to the landfill, ---that is to say, the Planet--- which will be its final resting-place.

But for many reasons, we're going to have to abandon this view of the world. There is not scope for endlessly expanding everything, just as everyone cannot be above average, and just as the population cannot expand without limit. Today, landfills are wild places in which nobody, supposedly, wants to live. Tomorrow, these will be the places where the poor will have to build their homes. The more landfills expand, the greater the proportion of real-estate that will be "converted" blighted land.

In the future, not everything that expands is bad: information and technology will continue to improve and spread wider. Living conditions should improve. An increasingly larger proportion of the population should have access to medical resources. But once education was identified as something that was suitable for economies of scale, we lost a great deal. Certainly, education is important for the citizen to fit him- or herself into society in the most effective way. But we cannot make education into an assembly-line process, though it is very tempting to do so.

When the armies of production-line jockeys entered the planning of academia, we outsourced the business of publicity, admissions, raising money, etc, to a large number of well-meaning folks (a.k.a. "production-line jockeys") with wives, and children with teeth that needed straightening, and jets that needed fuel, and weekend getaways in the flood plains ... you get the idea. Soon, students were paying for a lot more than instruction. (They had to bankroll the very means whereby they were being exploited. I say this even though some of my best buddies are recruitment specialists.) College was costing more, the Government had to subsidize it, and now Congressmen could get up on their hind-legs and demand that colleges prove that they were effective.

On the one hand, it is as well that teachers at all levels keep an eye on just how well they're doing. But there has to be a fine balance between using Assessment as a useful feedback device, and pushing this fad of assessment as a way some idiot politicians can convince his electorate that once they get to Washington, your kids are going to do better in school, taxes are going to get lower, jobs are going to be more plentiful, and America is going to whip the pants off those pesky Asian teenagers at math and science. I doubt that teachers at any level respond well to the whip. Teaching is not something that can be delivered to order. If you turn the screws on teachers, you will get kids who are screwed up in complicated and invisible ways, which will only emerge down the road. It's a little like waterboarding.

The time may have come for us to go back to being a bunch of impecunious gurus holed out in a commune somewhere, where students can come to learn whatever we're interested in teaching. No accreditation, no student loans, no federal aid. We may have to scale down our lifestyles, but those of us who think we need 5-figure salaries (in constant 2011 dollars) are probably not happy teaching, anyway. All this preoccupation about whether students are actually learning what we're certifying them to have learned is due to the fact that it costs so damn much. The phrase "economies of scale" only means that there's a lot of cash for expenses that have to do with education and learning only very tangentially, such as football. Sure, some kids won't come to a school that doesn't have football. So much the better.

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Testing and Assessment: What is Happening in Education?

2011-09-15T14:58:00.002-04:00

When the results of the "Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)" came out, US politicians and bureaucrats were appalled at the implied inferiority of US students, and by further implication, the inferiority of US teachers, and US Education generally. (This is typical of the culture: the well-known fact that American kids were coming out of school not knowing very much did not alarm people until it was demonstrated that Japanese kids were showing our kids up in international tests.)

In the early years of this century, following some excitement in the nineties, politicians began clamoring for the hides of school teachers. A heap of tests of students at various grade levels was mandated by the States and by the Federal Government. Obviously, these tests were indirectly tests of the teachers.

This same culture of trying to get data of education outcomes has been gaining ground in colleges as well. Are students really learning what the colleges claim they're learning? So now in colleges, too, we have furious testing going on, with a view to estimating the efficiency of professors (and, to be honest, the overall curriculum, and how it is connected together).

Honestly, it is a sort of Consumer's Reports approach to education that was inevitable; it was bound to happen. The Government will now step in and say that unless colleges can prove that they're successful at teaching students what they need to know, they will have to re-think student financial aid, the non-profit status of colleges, and soon we will be hounding college professors as much as we hound schoolteachers.

In my (oft-repeated) humble opinion, hounding teachers does not have a good result. Teachers will tend to teach less and less, and teach it more carefully. Students will start doing better and better in a narrower set of skills (e.g. "I can really do addition and multiplication and spelling good, but grammar and subtraction I can't do at all.")

On one hand, it seems unreasonable to give teachers carte blanche on what and how to teach. On the other hand, interfering with the teaching process does lead to contradictions that are impossible to resolve.

Let's agree on one thing: teachers always do brilliantly with highly motivated, intelligent students. As long as we stay with students who are interested in a particular subject, teachers and students make progress like a couple of houses on fire. But when universal education enters the picture, the trouble starts. The Public want teachers to teach all students a little of everything, despite the fact that the vast majority of teachers are reluctant to teach a large class of reluctant students. Make no mistake: I am not in favor of reserving the highest wisdom for the deserving few. There is a subtle difference between elitism, and recognition that without motivation, learning and teaching is impossibly difficult. Today teachers are required to motivate the unmotivatable student, which even the gods cannot do with 100% success.

So we have a problem. The public feels that it has a right to information about how successful a teacher (or a school, or a program) is, but the very act of obtaining that information interferes with the very thing it is measuring. There is a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle operating here.

Note:
A consumer approach to education is what resulted in all these Online Courses and For Profit Universities all over the country, with designer majors. The majors advertized were on the lines of Engineering of Video Games, Fashion Swimsuit Design, etc. Unfortunately, many of these schools have found that their graduates do not do well in the employment marketplace, and are unable to pay their student loans.

Why is this? Young people who refuse to entertain the possibility of taking any course unless it is directly required in his or her major are likely to be impatient with a large number of skills and requirements that make them generally useful as employees. In a depressed economy where one might not be able to find a job that fits one's (possibly very narrow) interests, it is necessary that one has a broader training that allows one to keep body and soul together doing something that is remunerative, but possibly not very inspiring.

But these broad skills are provided by traditional Liberal Arts schools. Once these schools are pushed through the wringer of accountability, few of them will survive, and the boutique-major schools will have to take up the slack with education that most students will not be able to use.

But that's free enterprise. Someone will surely provide a good education for reasonable cost, right? Surely it is a niche market that someone could fill? Sure. Just until you assess the crap out of the place.

Tomorrow: Answers! Just kidding; I have no answers.

The Right Attitude for the Times

2011-09-14T09:49:00.000-04:00

For a hundred years, our school has been giving thousands of students a variety of skills and attitudes. Our faculty have been telling them about the wisdom of the ancients, the opinions of sages and cranks (not always making clear which is which), a variety of procedures for doing things, analytical tools, insights, and occasionally, prejudices! When they graduate, students are often grateful to their school, and later in life, respond with generosity.

The generosity of alumni and well-wishers gives our school a slightly greater degree of permanence. The permanence of their alma mater is valuable to alumni, but it is desperately important to those of us who work here. College faculty are understandably preoccupied with generosity for this reason.

Thinking of generosity, one associates it with earlier times: the industrialists of the golden age of America, names associated with steel, coal and oil. But in these difficult times, it seems as if purse-strings are being tightened with great determination; doors are firmly bolted at night, as we peer anxiously through cracks in the shutters at what seems an inhospitable, even a hostile world. But others are hurting far more than we are. Soon it could be time for food banks, for soup kitchens, for free clinics, and homeless shelters. The need for generosity does not wait on convenience.

But generosity is learned, not born with. It is here, in college, that the young people see examples of going the extra mile, staying that extra hour, giving that extra review, and summoning up that one last smile when you would really rather not. Generosity goes hand in hand with education. Education, on the face of it, is enlightened self-interest, spiced with generosity. In reality, it is generosity of spirit, masquerading as self-interest!

How the Government Decides on a Major Expense

2011-09-12T15:56:00.000-04:00

Well, if you thought you were confused about whether you could afford a major purchase, imagine the quandary in which Lawmakers find themselves!

For instance, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives has been asking itself whether it can afford to have various gasoline companies from Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Florida, etc, develop the so-called Marcellus Shale Gas deposits. Can we afford the ruined roads, the polluted rivers, the destroyed property values? Well, sure, provided these companies hire people locally. That would ensure that the grateful newly-employed workers will vote for their representatives who pimped for the gas companies, giving them a free ride without additional taxation or any sort of excise burden. Unfortunately, it is the unemployed workers from Texas and Arkansas, etc, etc, who are getting employed; the local kids just get the least well-paid, most dangerous jobs. On the plus side, bars and brothels are doing a great business, but on the whole, the total infusion into the economy of Pennsylvania is miniscule; the State still hurts for revenue, and education funding has been severely cut.

When the Federal Government decides on a particular project, it is with great difficulty, because the true cost of the project is difficult to estimate. Why is this? Because it is essentially paid for with credit, by floating bond issues, or printing paper money. When the government decides on lowering taxes, again they do not know the exact value of the loss of revenue, because the true value of these taxes (which technically have not even been levied yet) is impossible to estimate. You can state it exactly in dollars and cents, but you're using a unit whose value, in turn, is uncertain.

Many economists will ask me right back: what do you mean by the "true value" of anything? And, quite honestly, I don't know myself! The word "value" has almost no meaning as it is, though the economists will insist that it has exactly as much meaning today as it ever did, namely a subjective quantity that each person must decide for themselves, but about which there can be some consensus by averaging over a large population.

After MortgageGate, however, in the eyes of many observers and mine, the process of arriving at an averaged figure for an aggregate risk for a large collection of risky ventures has tainted the whole idea of aggregation of values.

The ability of an individual to assess whether he or she can afford a purchase is compromised by the constant use of personal credit. Similarly, the Government --though its resources are far greater then those of an individual-- nevertheless finds it difficult, or even impossible, to assess the affordability of such steps as lowering or increasing specific taxes, or providing or ceasing to provide a particular benefit.

Despite all this, however, I presently believe that the Government should spend whatever is necessary to increase employment. This would normally involve creating government jobs, but the current political climate makes expanding the public sector repugnant to the top income portion of the population, those few hundred souls who earn most of the money in the USA. So the administration has to resort to leaving it in the hands of Small Business to hire new workers, and giving the businesses tax incentives for doing so.

But the hiring of a new worker is a huge risk for a small business. Even if it thinks it could use a new worker, the conservative lobby has persuaded it that the hire means huge expenses in Health Insurance and unemployment insurance, and all the sorts of costs the Business Lobby keeps working to eliminate. Business would like the hiring of a worker to be a trivial thing: hire today, fire tomorrow. But society has an interest in making the firing of a worker something that is done with due caution and consideration, and not lightly. So liberal politicians (and liberals, generally) would like there to be a certain amount of inertia in the process of hiring and firing, to reduce uncertainty in employment among the smallest-income sector of society.

So, as President Obama pointed out in his Jobs speech, there is no point in reducing taxes across the board for all businesses, and expect them to go into a hiring frenzy. Instead, it is better to offer tax reductions precisely to those businesses that actually hire unemployed workers. The Republican opposition will certainly find something objectionable in that plan.

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How to decide on a major purchase

2011-09-09T14:02:00.000-04:00

Oh what a terrible world we live in!

I have blogged before on this issue: how can we make decisions on the quality of a product before we buy?

The economists say that the value of a product is how much the public is willing to pay for it. More accurately, the value of a product to a particular person is precisely how much money he or she is willing to part with to procure it. This simple view, initially perpetrated on us by some economic fathead in the late eighteenth century no doubt, is beginning to lose any residual validity it might have had.

Firstly, the money anyone is willing to pay for anything depends entirely on his or her credit situation. We pay for silly things that are really not worth very much simply because we're not thinking very hard, and we pay with a credit-card. Impulse purchases dilute the strength of the "value-willingness to pay" paradigm because it would suggest that very similar people with different credit situations will respond differently to the same product---indeed, the same person would respond differently--- other things being equal. So the value of a product becomes entirely a matter of psychology and financial liquidity. Economics is based on this value paradigm, and their insistence that the value of a class of things averages out over the market into something that is objective is hard to accept in a post-October-2009 world (or whenever the hell the economy of the USA went south, and stayed south, and don't give me any crap about how great it is today).

Secondly, Manufacturers have stumbled onto the trick of making every product a new product. Even an automobile model that was assessed as being a great value in July could be altered in December, to use inferior parts, assemble it in a less reliable location with poorly paid workers, so that the half-year model is significantly different from the model you thought you had inspected carefully, and about whose worth you were satisfied in the Summer. Shoes, cameras, computers, printers, paper, everything is an untried and untested product. Bait-and-switch is built-in into the system. Services. TV sets. Music Records; DVDs. Two identically labeled items might be quite different when you open up the packages.

In short, we really have no objective basis on which to base our assessment of value.

The manufacturer might be reputable. But over the years there have been numerous instances of reputable manufacturers who have compromised quality at some point, leaving a vast number of consumers owning a worthless product for which they had high hopes. Toyota. Drug companies. Credit card companies. Mortgages. Phones.

Consumer's Union tests products, and their members read the reports to decide which products to buy. But manufacturers discontinue the products the minute they get a bad rating, and market the identical product under either a different product label, or a different model number. "Model x15 was discontinued; there were some design errors. Model y53 is completely different! Try it! It has fabric softner, and makes you smell nice, too! And it comes in this handy toxic bottle!"

The same kind of thing, of course, happens with service companies. Vice President X comes up with a fabulous plan for earning the company millions of dollars at the expense of the customers. (The upper management pretends to be completely ignorant of what X is doing.) As soon as customers stumble onto the deception, X is fired with much noise (though, of course, his contract gives him a fabulous golden parachute), and a new face, Y, is hired to replace him. The kindly face of the company president assures the public that the company is now completely worthy of trust, and will uphold its high standards once more.

But my original topic was: how to decide on a major purchase. Do I have a method I can recommend?

Well, nothing really novel. You have to research the product twice as hard as you would have some years ago. You must learn where the product is actually manufactured; for instance, a Toyota might actually be manufactured by Ford, or an Oster product actually manufactured by Black & Decker. You must read all the consumer information (including Consumer Reports, or similarly reliable publication, as well as reviews on Amazon, and on the Internet generally, bearing in mind that Internet reviews are often planted by the manufacturers themselves, and cannot always be trusted). You must ask around your friends and colleagues, but be careful to measure their recommendations against what you know of their reliability and good judgment as well as how different their use patterns might be from yours. For instance, a backyard chef might label product A as poor, while an occasional barbecuer might consider product A quite reasonable. Your mileage, clearly, will vary.

Don't be shy about asking a question on FaceBook, or on your personal network. (On the down side, Facebook will inundate you with advertisements for the product in question.) Finally, ask the salesman candidly, when his or her supervisor isn't watching, and study their expression carefully.

Getting Sick and Tired of Government?

2011-09-05T13:59:00.001-04:00

It appears that there are only cynics and megalomaniacs running for office throughout the world. Let's face it: Barack Obama seemed just the ticket four years ago; why can't he keep up? Answer: Government is just too big for anyone to steer.

We used to think that the bureaucracy was too big, and Reagan began the first wave of outsourcing back in the eighties (or 80s, if you prefer, or even 80's). This is basically what privatizing government services is: you outsource it to private companies.

What does this entail? You send home (i.e. fire) a whole enormous office of inefficient pencil-pushers who are paid by the taxpayer, and over whom you have some slight control. Instead, you employ a private company, which then hires a whole heap of employees ---over whom you have absolutely no control, and about whom you frankly do not care---and they, in turn, hire smaller private companies to do menial work (like make the coffee, fill the water coolers, replace the toilet paper, send out the mail, etc, etc), and each of these companies are, in turn farming out the work to several other smaller companies.

All this provides a lot of very low level employment for a lot of disgruntled people. But you have no control over the way the job is done, just over the final product.

What control do you have?

If you don't like what they come back with, you can fire them. It is not easy to fire government employees, but you can fire outsourced work.

So far, there is a lot of dissatisfaction about outsourced government work. Work for the Armed Services outsourced to private companies have been unpopular (the private workers have been poorly behaved, and supplied some poor quality services ---I can't remember the exact complaints--- and have been a public relations problem for the Services specifically, and for the country as a whole). Security work ---for instance at air terminals etc--- have come under fire for various reasons (dissatisfaction with the public relations of the security agents, i.e. rude security people; allowing countries other than the US to handle American security, e.g. companies based in the Gulf, which happen to have shares in American airport terminals, etc. NASA, for instance, has outsourced its services to other companies for decades; the shuttles, for instance, were built by private companies.

Does outsourcing reduce the size of government? Yes, and no.

Don't forget the large proportion of services that are the responsibility of the individual states. The States administer a large proportion ---if not all--- of the welfare services, the housing, medical insurance control, education. Additional opportunities for adding bureaucrats arise when each department of each State has to interface with the corresponding department of the Federal Government. Remember the Baby Bells? That was initially a Good Thing. Then Washington decided (under the supervision of a Democrat president, I do think I remember) to allow the Baby Bells to offer services across the nation, and now we have Verizon and AT&T (the largest Baby, and Ma Bell) set to become so big that they can legally proceed to fix prices, once they become effectively a Monopoly. However, when government services are outsourced, it seems to me that they become still harder to keep track of; like herding cats.

We (my wife and I) were just talking over the seven large Government agencies that between them provide all the services: HUD, HEW, Justice, State, and so on. How many of the Secretaries of these do we know by name? Hilary Clinton is one of the few that springs to mind; many of the others are anonymous figures about whom we know very little. President Obama, of course, must know them all, and consult with them regularly. These agencies are staffed, by and large, with people who are in the Government game for the long run, and are expected to take responsibility for the success and or failure of each aspect of their charges.

The legislative branch, meanwhile, seems to bumble along, with most congressmen more anxious to be noticed than to support good legislation. Why is this? They get re-elected for those things that they claimed to have done than for the things they actually achieved. This great democratic nation has a bunch of voters who don't really know what actually took place on Capitol Hill, but rather what their favorite news sources say took place on Capitol Hill.
Congressman: Vote for me! Any questions? Yes, from that intelligent-looking gent over there ... ?
Voter 1: Hey, man, you guys did not pass a decent Health Care Reform bill. You suck.
Favorite News Source: No, actually, the Congressman saved you from a bill that would have cost millionaires a lot of money. And everybody would have been forced to get insurance.
Voter 1: Well, I have insurance.
Favorite News Source: Sure, as long as you have a job. What happens when you get laid off?
Voter 2: I got laid off!!! I would have to get insurance?
Favorite News Source: Sure would. These Health Reform bills are bad for poor people and for millionaires.
Voter 3: Is that really true?
Congressman: Yes! It was terrible! I didn't vote for it very much at all, really! I was totally thinking of my electorate.
Voters: I guess you don't suck.

Great. All's well that ends well. The poor congressman doesn't really see any of the money that the Party bigwigs get from the Insurance Industry lobbyists. But Congressmen are not elected for their intelligence anyway.

"Improving" education

2011-08-29T10:00:00.001-04:00

One approach to improving the achievement of the United States of America in the Olympics has been to introduce American sports into it, sports that are not widely played outside the USA. (This would certainly improve the profits of the TV channels that carry the Olympics.)

And now for something completely different.

A recent article in the NY Times by two quite respectable mathematicians and educators suggest some changes to the mathematics curriculum in American schools.

For instance, [the authors ask,] how often do most adults encounter a situation in which they need to solve a quadratic equation? Do they need to know what constitutes a 'group of transformations' or a 'complex number'? Of course professional mathematicians, physicists and engineers need to know all this, but most citizens would be better served by studying how mortgages are priced, how computers are programmed and how the statistical results of a medical trial are to be understood.

The broad thrust of the article can be reduced to the following assumptions:

Every child doesn't need to be taught the same (science/engineering - type advanced) mathematics.
Concrete applications are more useful to students than abstract mathematics.
The useful mathematics (listed in the article) is not being taught now.

All this, of course, is being driven by poor results of American student samples on standard international tests.

The fact of the matter is that ALL THREE ASSUMPTIONS ARE WRONG.

Certainly, all children do not need to know the same mathematics (or the same social studies, or the same history, for that matter). But there is no harm in teaching all students the same principles, while you allow for expected variations in interest. It would be a big mistake to try to predict the precise sliver of mathematics a child is likely to need and teach him or her only that. First of all, we can't predict needs that accurately, and people change careers so often that the prediction simply cannot be correct. Finally, with the insistence that Education should cost society the very minimum it possibly can, (and that the majority of education dollars should be spent on building-beautification and athletics) we cannot afford to give a highly individualized education at lower levels. But teachers can, and do know how to, adjust for individual interests in students, and the better teachers supplement their basic classwork with enrichment activities focused on student interest. But, of course, that instruction cannot be easily tested in standardized tests.

Secondly, the concrete vs. abstract debate is so out of place here. It is human to abstract; that is, to generalize. Two chickens and two chickens is the same number of chickens--four--as two cows and two cows are the number of cows: four. No one can possibly protest the most common abstraction of all, namely number. Our parents tolerated quite well a large degree of abstraction (though, of course, it was a small elite that went on to college in their day). In these times, we all recognize, we want the students to learn considerably more. Why? Because a lot of what our parents considered to be advanced knowledge has now been demoted to material that is accessible to kids, and which they must know. A "complex number" might be regarded by Professor Sol Garfunkel as something mystical and specialized (though I know for certain that he is no stranger to them), but it is an easy enough concept for the typical student, and moreover, an easy way of teaching various topics in calculus. [Easy for the teacher, but also easy for the student.] Geometry is these days taught via the idea of transformation, where transformations was a topic reserved for mathematical black belts in the earlier part of the 20th century. Abstraction is another way of killing several birds with the same stone, and hardly something to be deplored.

Finally, useful mathematics is being taught now. As early as grade four, with the recommendations of the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) that were announced by a taskforce as early as 1980, and adopted by the full NCTM shortly thereafter, and widely adopted in schools across the country, basic descriptive statistics was to be taught to children of about the age of ten or eleven, and in classrooms across America you can find displays of various pieces of data in bar charts and pie charts. These fellows should get out more.

The fact of the matter is that if we were to change the curriculum to be exactly what Garfunkel and Mumford recommend, the chances are that within a few years, this curriculum would be --in its essentials-- adopted by all foreign countries, or even taught in addition to their own, and foreign kids will be trouncing American kids once again.

Why is this?

In an insightful comment (Mike O'Shea?) says that a possible reason why academics in the US are weak for the majority of students is that excellence in academic subjects is valued less than excellence in athletics and sports. He concludes with: "And if our teenagers aren't practicing sports, they're working at part-time jobs after school for pocket money for themselves. Competing against sports and money, academic subjects don't have a chance."

Mavis Tavis says, looking at the whole article:

Ah, yes, just what we need: a math for the masses and a math for their masters. This argument presupposes that the common people don't get it, don't need it, and don't want it. It echoes the argument that has gone on in the humanities and foreign languages for a generation now: why teach complex subjects and abstractions to the herd who don't need such instruction? Teach them what they need to know to become, at best, good Wal-Mart managers.

A time there was when math assumed not only a utilitarian function but also a theoretical function, teaching children not just what they need to know to get by, but also how to think logically--to make them better workers, neighbors, voters, parents, and citizens of a increasingly complex world.

Garfunkel and Mumfords's assertion suggests an unhealthy elitism. Worse, it smacks of classism.

Perhaps Garfunkel and Mumford were careless in their writing, and laid themselves open to severe criticism because of a number of poorly-reasoned, or poorly thought-out remarks. It is true that weaker students destined to be highway-repair laborers or construction workers will probably not get motivated to study mathematics that are in the least abstract, even at the level of, say, elementary geometry. But they are butting their heads against cultural principles that dictate that every child must be considered to be potentially a professional or an artisan of some sort. To relegate a child to an easy curriculum based on an assessment of his or her ability may make life easier for him or her, and for his or her teacher, but it is a choice that we cannot ethically afford. We cannot both take the high road about the Equality of Man, and take the easy way to education, and get high scores for our kids in standardized tests. I'm not saying our curriculum (and we do not have a national standard curriculum, but rather a core curriculum that is a sort of "back-to-basics" nucleus that, as G & M claim, has been adopted by at least 40 states) is perfect; it has to be adjusted from time to time. But good teachers can do a better job within this curriculum, and they are doing so. But statistically, they are a minority.

The vast majority of teachers are poorly-paid and poorly prepared underachievers. You cannot improve the quality of teachers in the USA by picking on the weaker members of that profession and making life miserable for them. I suspect that the better ones among our young people do not go into the teaching profession precisely because it is a scapegoat for all that is bad in society. Let's stop bullying our teachers, and concentrate on rewarding the best of them, and appreciating all of them.

Arch

The Greatest Country In The World!

2011-08-26T18:06:00.001-04:00

I just sat through what we call Freshman Convocation here, in my school; it is where we welcome the new students, and pump them up for the rest of the semester. Our featured speaker was an alumnus who recently won a seat in Congress. He described how he regularly meets people from other schools, and travels around the world (for the business of various committees he's on), and he attested to the fact that ours was just as good a school as any Ivy League school (which I'm willing to believe), and that The US is the greatest country in the world.

In some ways I have to agree to the latter sentiment as well. I have met people in the US who are among the most broadminded, the best informed, the most flexible, the most willing to consider new ideas, the most culturally aware, the most generous, and most loyal. Sometimes I'm tempted to believe that these people are just attracted to me because I am, of course, the greatest guy who ever lived. But I quickly come back to earth; I realize that these people live here in the US either because they were born here, or came here because this country provided the greatest opportunities for the sorts of things they wanted to do. An outstanding teacher can find a place to teach here; an outstanding athlete can pursue his craft; an outstanding artist can find a patron here. Let's face it; there are a lot of people with a lot of money, who want to encourage a lot of the right things.

To an American who has emerged from a blue-collar background to become a US Attorney, and then win a seat in Congress, obviously there is no place like home. But let's look at why this is ---or has been, until recently--- such an amazing place.

There are tremendous natural resources.

There has been great wealth, which meant that at one time anyone could get a sponsor or a financier to build a better mousetrap. Today, there is greater wealth in the hands of some than there has ever been, and a few individuals have the ability to fund all sorts of creative schemes. However, keeping possession of a large fortune is clearly becoming very difficult. There are no books about How To Keep On Being A Billionaire Once You Become One. There are Bernie Madoffs behind every shrub. Your very assistants are probably waiting to bilk you out of your filthy lucre. The only recognizable hostile party is the Federal Government in the shape of the IRS, which wants you to pay more tax than any of your friends seem to be paying. (Your immediate family probably has an insatiable appetite for expensive necessities, and they probably find it very easy to confirm your suspicion about the evil intentions of the IRS.)

The wealthy class, however, is hard to herd. It is amazing that the Republicans have succeeded in regimenting them so effectively for so long; at the present, they seem to be eying each other with deep suspicion. As I have written before, the Tea Party and the mainstream old guard Republicans find it hard to agree on almost anything. When the Republican majority meets on Capitol Hill, all they can agree upon are: NO TAXES, and AMERICA IS THE GREATEST NATION IN THE WORLD. They cannot agree, I am sure, that it is precisely the taxes that make this country great.

What has also made this country great is the incredibly hard work of a few very unpopular people: FDR, who managed to establish common-sense social programs that were the envy of the rest of the world (until a whole pile of other countries found how to do the same job a lot better), Ralph Nader, who alerted a generation to the need for health and safety controls in a number of areas; Martin Luther King, who (reluctantly, we now know,) took up the fight against racial discrimination, so that black folk could have a stake in the society in which they lived, but is secretly despised today by many conservative bigots and not a few black racial extremists; Bill Clinton, who worked for and signed the Family Medical Leave Act; the much-hated State House of California that led the way to pollution control across the country. I'm sure you can think of a half-dozen more individuals whom your friends love to hate, who made this a better society for all of us.

Those who fought for a better America are cheerfully reviled by the people at large. So how can we claim that this is such a wonderful place to live, if the cost of improving things for your fellow-countrymen is to be cursed for years? Each of us thinks of those who (privately, I suppose,) express disgust at the names of some of these patriots, as misguided. So if this country is the greatest in the world, it is populated by a majority of misguided citizens. It is great despite the majority of Americans, and not because of them.

What I did over The Summer

2011-08-21T09:49:00.006-04:00

I can now reveal ---albeit in a limited way--- what has kept me from posting up a storm over the last several weeks.

Firstly, of course, in the political arena, nothing really interesting and substantial has been happening. The White House has been curiously inactive, but it is a tricky endgame leading up to the elections and the sort of gambling that takes place at this time is difficult to second-guess, especially since the various assumptions they might be working on are a sort of discontinuous set, possibly wildly differing from each other and from our own guesses.

Secondly, I haven't been listening to music very much. And why is this?

Because I have been busy. I was seeing a lady friend, and the sight was getting more intense as the weeks went by. We decided to marry around midsummer ---which was a lot of excitement, but not of the sort you might expect; it was a quiet ceremony at a country Magistrate's office, in between petitions for zoning variances and evictions, etc, the actual "swearing in" attended only by the two of us and the Judge--- after which we planned to have a nice big party for a few of our friends.

The Party was planned over a couple of months.

We first rented a room. It was a small ballroom at the school where I teach, the perfect size for a party of forty people. The most exciting piece of the arrangements was that we had to obtain an event insurance policy for a million dollars! It only cost us $50, but we walked around for a couple of weeks, pale beneath our tans, pondering the enormity of the undertaking. We were also forbidden the use of alcohol, and we knew many of our friends would have trouble loosening up without alcoholic inspiration. But I figured that if alcohol had been found on the premises after a major fire had broken out, I would be in roughly a million dollars' worth of trouble. But we held firm, and decided to have a certain modest amount of liquid entertainment at our home ---a mere 100 yards from the party--- for Afters.

Next, we got some music together. Since we couldn't afford a disc jockey or a professional master of ceremonies (or even an amateur one), we decided to compile a collection of pieces we both liked, jointly and severally. She liked most of my choices, but she wanted additional tunes that I did not have. So the compilation was partly complete some weeks before.

We then compiled the list of invitees, a most amazingly wonderful collection of people in our separate estimates. I had met a half-dozen of her friends who lived close by, and a couple who lived in New York, and liked them right away. She had met my daughter, and the two of them had struck up a roaring friendship. Junior was having her own romantic adventures (which I am not at liberty to report on), but managed to organize a frighteningly complicated itinerary for her 10-day visit from distant parts.

As my readers might know, Junior is an amateur musician of sorts, and it turns out, so are the daughters of my new wife, Katie. Of course, therefore, we must have the girls sing! The kids had never met, but began a tentative correspondence via the evil FaceBook. My girl, being older, was much more relaxed about the whole thing. The other girls were much younger, and therefore more uneasy about matters. Still, they responded, and I really cannot tell you much about what they discussed.

Meanwhile, down at the farm, friends were e-mailing me, asking what they were to wear. We were determined not to have a formal event, so we had to first decide what we would wear. I finally settled on a sort of Hawaiian shirt, and a nice pair of pants---until I saw the most brilliant T-Shirt, with a fake Tuxedo printed on it! So, of course, that's what I decided to wear.

We forbade any presents, mostly because we live in a small house, and there just isn't enough room for any more Stuff. (Thankfully, all but five families abided by our request.)

Finally, Junior arrived, and we picked her up in Baltimore. The next day, she spoke directly to Katie's youngest daughter on the phone, and they began a brain's trust about what to sing together. They simply could not agree on anything, but with some nudging, I made Junior suggest a song by The Seekers: I'll Never Find Another You. Now she had to teach that to Katie's youngest daughter, who was going to arrive a couple of hours before the party.

Everything went smoothly. My Canadian friends, father and daughter, had arrived the previous day, and very ingeniously kept us distracted, and helped get the house ready for the after-party party! On the day of the party, it began to rain, but the tribes gathered notwithstanding, and before we knew it, it was under way. The food was wonderful, the music was apparently satisfactory to all---Junior had helped supplement my folder of music with Katie's more rhythmic, bluesy selections from the fifties and sixties.

When everyone had eaten, Junior and Katie's youngest daughter went over to the microphone, and sang. That broke the ice, and then Katie's oldest sang one of her own compositions, followed by Junior, who writes her own songs too, and Katie's youngest, who first sang a song of her own, and then, to my astonishment, gave a fabulous rendering of Me and Bobby McGee, in Janis Joplin style.

Shortly afterwards we brought the party to a close, and everyone headed either to their homes, or to our small home, especially those who could stay overnight. After the rest of us had beer or wine, respectively, Katie's oldest and her young man sang a lovely duet, and the young lady sang alone, followed by Junior with one of her own, and then we all began to sing songs from the sixties: notably Mrs Robinson [Simon and Garfunkel], If I had a hammer [Pete Seeger], and Blowing in the Wind [Bob Dylan]! (If photos become available, I'll post them.)

Hopefully, my regular rants will resume in the Fall, though Katie keeps me steadily distracted. [Added later: a few photos of all of us, including some taken later in the week, when we visited some relatives in New York and New England.]

Arch

Music Lists

2011-08-20T09:54:00.002-04:00

What is a discussion list?
A "discussion list" is a loose organization of people who like to discuss topics on a particular subject. It was one of the oldest recreational uses of the Internet, powered by e-mail.

A piece of software called a Listserv resides on a central computer somewhere, and when you join the list, it adds your e-mail address to its internal list. You make a post to the list (by simply sending email to a special address), and the e-mail is copied by the software to everyone on the list. You reply to a post, if you wish, and the reply is sent out to everyone on the list. The nice feature is that you do not have to go out on a browser to a website; the stuff arrives in your mailbox. You can make a complete fool of yourself on the list, knowing that only your discussion-list friends can see it!

I belong to several mailing lists, and here they are:

The Bach List. This one is hardly active at all, especially since the lady who was in charge of it seems to have fallen ill. To join, go to this website and follow instructions: The Bach List. Once you join, you post to the list by simply sending mail to bach-list.
The Classical Music List, classm-l.
This list was my earliest education on the Internet, and e-mail, generally speaking. It has been around since the late 80's, and though it takes as its domain all of classical music, the members have been a close-knit group of friends that enjoy talking about matters that are very much on the periphery of the subject. A great list to start with. Go to CLASSM-L
The Bach Recordings List, BachRecordings.
This list is the most active of the lists mentioned above (though that could change at any moment, depending on response to a particular post). It is one of three sister groups, and can be joined at this location. Though, on the face of it, their subject is recordings of Bach works, it is in effect a list on which you can discuss most topics related to Bach, except for the Cantatas, which have their own list.

The proliferation of mailing lists is, on one hand, regrettable, especially in times when the discussion in all of them is inactive. When the posts are flying fast and furious, we are thankful that everyone is not posting to the same list, since we can choose which particular flavor of topic and discussion we would like to join.

A Closer Look at Distrust of Government

2011-08-09T13:53:00.001-04:00

I was puzzling over the failure of the Democratic Congress of 2008 and President Obama to pass Healthcare Reform Legislation. Why, I asked myself, is there such suspicion of government sponsored healthcare?

The upper-middle-class really has a reason to view healthcare reform with dislike: it would seem to be accompanied by higher taxes. The reform was presented as being tax-neutral, but over the years, as the country got a taste for the service, one could imagine Government Health Service expanding, with an ever-increasing load on taxpayers. Healthy taxpayers would hate it, but the average taxpayer would benefit, since most basic services would be performed for free: your annual or half-yearly checkup: free; basic emergency room visits for simple surgery: free; family planning, neonatal care, elective and compulsory inoculations: free; preventive medicine related to diet, exercise, lowering health risks such as cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugar: free. Most Americans pay for all this anyway.

But ordinary middle class, and working class folks are against health reform!! These people's share of the tax burden for health care will be negligible, but they are deathly afraid of it. In heaven's name, why?

The suspicion must come from Government Services that are presently provided, but, at least in the view of common people, badly carried out. The example that pops into mind is: Education. Is it possible that the Face of Government for many folks ---and most certainly, the Face of Authority--- is the schoolteacher. Even though it is the local government that ultimately controls the schools, it could well be that in the minds of many, Washington looks like the school: a place from where you get your education, a place which dominates your spare time with homework and other tedious responsibilities, and over which you have very little control.

I looked up on the Internet for a ranking of student achievement averages by State, and found only one site that was willing to provide the figures for 2003 for free, but wanted me to take a subscription in order to be given more recent data. I just went with the data for 2003.

The table is at right, in the form of an image. Here is a link to the actual page for the first table.

Let's look at the achievement in Elementary School, i.e., the Grade Four reading and mathematics scores. The last several states are Hawaii, Mississippi, Alabama, and New Mexico, with Louisiana and California not doing much better. A little higher up come Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Tennessee, and Arkansas. These are the states whose students fared worst in these tests.

Is it possible that the residents of these states would expect that Government Health Care will stink as badly as Government Education?

The top achievers are Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont. I don't know about NH; perhaps their State Health Care motto is Private Health Care Or Die, but Massachusetts is certainly for Healthcare Reform, despite all the energetic efforts of the Tea Party to confuse Massachusetts residents.

When it comes to Middle School achievement, the top scorers are again Massachusetts, New Hampshire, with Minnesota and North Dakota. The low scorers are, again,MS, AL and NM, joined by Hawaii.

It's difficult to tell what drives these variations in state achievement. States with many families living below or close to the poverty line can be expected to have low average achievement: a child needs family support, a home environment conducive to grappling with ideas introduced in school even briefly each day, nutrition, rest, security, all of which impinge school performance, and all of which are threatened by poverty.

A large proportion of ethnic minorities might seem to influence achievement, but belonging to a minority alone should not influence school achievement, except via the poverty factor.

Latitude does seem to have a mysterious effect on achievement; it remains to be shown whether it has a corresponding effect on suspicion of government!

Arch

Honeybee

2011-08-04T18:50:00.007-04:00

This post is completely devoted to my dog-in-law, Honeybee. Honeybee is a mixed-breed (a.k.a. a mutt), with a lot of character. To illustrate I would have to post a million anecdotes of goofy things that she does, but that would bore you.

Honeybee is a silly dog, but has a lot of dignity. She tends to look at you through the corner of her eye, just as in the photo above. It is as though she is thinking deep and beautiful thoughts, but wants to keep an eye on you all the same just in case you're going to do something amusing. This glance looks flirtatious sometimes, but I haven't succeeded in capturing it perfectly on camera.

Honeybee loves to go on walks, and gets quite excited when she sees her owner put on her sneakers. She wears a huge grin while she gallops along on the trails we take when walking her. She likes to visit her doggie friends next door (this is in the country, so the doggies next door live a quarter-mile away). They are kept in a cage (a nice roomy one, so it's not a hardship). Honeybee goes and barks at them furiously, her tail wagging, and then comes home smiling. I suspect that she knows that if the neighbor dogs were out of the cage, she would be nursing some painful bites. She's 11, but they're much younger. In this next one Honeybee is pretending to be mad and snarling. You can tell from her eyes that she's a terrible actress.

[2011/8/8]

Well, here's a new story that emerged over the weekend.

Honeybee is left home by herself, now since the family is growing up and leaving home. She does have her pet cat, Bigfoot, but he isn't much company for an intelligent dog, really. Honeybee is left to gobbling up any food Bigfoot happens to knock off the kitchen table, and that's the extent of their voluntary interaction.

One morning, the gentleman who, apart from Honeybee and Bigfoot is the sole occupant of the house, decided to lock up the house when he left for work. Now it came to pass that, later that day, the young lady, his sister, who had just moved out into her own apartment, came home to ferry out a few additional items that she needed, and found the place all locked up. She had, much to her frustration, to gain entrance via the kitchen window. However, she caught the leg of her pants on the toaster oven, and fell unceremoniously to the floor.

As was her custom, on occasions when she was precipitated onto the floor unexpectedly, she cursed all of nature and mankind at length, before she noticed Honeybee. "I swear," she recounted to us, "that dog was laughing at me!"

I have to agree; I have never seen a dog with a broader grin than this particular one, and it is with deep regret that I find myself without a single photo of her laughing. The minute you take out a camera it seems that the dog composes herself into a semblance of great seriousness. I declare she knows that a photo is being taken, and that it behooves her to look as solemn as a deaconess.

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Only The Rich Have Political Power in America Today

2011-07-26T16:16:00.000-04:00

Jeffrey Sachs, whom Mano Singham describes as an "establishment liberal," has come out of a long silence to write for the Huffington Post. His article tries to put a high-tech economics analysis on the present situation. He deplores the fact that "in America today, only the rich have political power," something that Robert Reich says in less than two minutes and fifteen seconds. It didn't use to be this way; until Ronald Reagan straightened things out for the affluent minority, it used to be one citizen, one vote, rather than one dollar, one vote.

I took a Facebook Quiz this afternoon. I had to decide whether I agreed with a statement to the effect that The Wealthy are inclined to think that they made it on their own, whereas in actual fact, Society helps them a great deal to amass their fortunes. In fact, the Government helps them a great deal, by providing roads and education and the infrastructure that they use far more than the average dude, and for which they are not willing to pay proportionally more in taxes. Lobbyists, Jeffrey says, have far too much influence in Washington. Everyone knows this, but no one can stop it. In fact, it appears that the Constitution itself facilitates the means whereby powerful interests can heap support on Congressmen (and Congresswomen) in exchange for political patronage and favors that do not benefit the ordinary citizen.

I'm probably preaching to the choir, but let's not lose sight of the problem. (Jeffrey Sachs suggests that a third party may help solve the problem. At least it might make things a little complicated for lobbyists. But it will probably complicate the lives of the ordinary citizen just as much.)

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Deficit Ceiling Kabuki Theater

2011-07-17T10:05:00.002-04:00

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Mano Singham, in his blog, clarifies some of the strangeness around the whole debt ceiling debate, and what is really going on. He points out that though the matter is presented sometimes as "Obama vs. Congress", or "Democrats vs. Republicans", etc, etc, it is really Big Business vs. Everybody Else.

Mano quotes several authors.

The first of these is Ralph Nader. Nader has some hard remarks to make about taxes and corporations. The most surprising thing he says is that big corporations are sitting on about 2 Trillion in profits that they are not sharing with shareholders. If they did, the economy would absorb it gratefully, and it would alleviate some of the hardship we see around us.

The next is Matt Taibbi [Rolling Stone], who discusses the style of the Obama presidency, and reports on the opinions of many economic experts who say that the President, wanting not to appear to be an "angry black man," has taken the advice of too many clever white guys (I paraphrase), who do not want to alienate Wall Street. Obama, Mano Singham has always written, is too concerned with not burning his bridges with Big Business. One would not think this, given the rhetoric of the Republicans.

Mano then links to Paul Krugman [New York Times], whose brief post I am not smart enough to understand, but suffice it to say that it is critical of Obama. This is not the time, he says, for Government to tighten its belt, just because the rest of the country is suffering, something I completely agree with. Tragically for liberals, President Obama seems intent on establishing his credentials as one who stands up to the Democratic Party, in order to gain the support of the so-called independents in the coming election, which is what Glenn Greenwald says, in addition to agreeing with Mr Krugman on most points.

Here is my take on this.

Nobody wants enormous deficits. But ...

Until the debt is reduced ---in a responsible, considered way--- the country must continue to stand by its debt, especially since the automatic steps that follow on refusal to raise the debt ceiling are very serious and repugnant. The analogous situation for private individuals is like keeping onto your debt and continuing to make payments, or going into bankruptcy. For individuals, though bankruptcy practically destroys your credit rating, it can be an opportunity for restructuring your finances under the supervision of the courts. For a country, there is no higher power to which it can appeal for guidance and supervision. (In any case, the USA will reject any attempts at benign supervision, and resort to drastic and puerile acts that will make matters worse.)

Everybody, therefore, needs to have Congress raise the debt ceiling. But it suits the Republicans to pretend that they are doing it for the President, and to levy favors in exchange for cooperation. One need hardly mention that these favors are all intended to help Big Business and big businessmen: lower taxes, smaller Government spending on the poor. (Wars are OK, because they help arms manufacturers, who are a stealth component of Big Business.)

It appears that either the President is unable to see through this pretense, or continues to play along with this fairy-tale for his own purposes.

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Gun Control Yet Again: How could we miss?

2011-07-11T03:28:00.001-04:00

It turns out that I have been a little naive about gun control.

A hostile comment on Comedy Central points out that fully automatic assault weapons have been outlawed since 1934, and Wikipedia corroborates this. It appears that to follow the progress and the failures of gun control one has to be an expert on guns.

In 1994, a ban on a certain category of assault weapon was enacted and passed under the presidency of Bill Clinton, but the law had a 10-year sunset provision, and thus expired (presumably in 2004). Evidently weapon manufacturers were able to circumvent the law by making very minor alterations in the features of their weapons, this making them fall technically under the category of allowed weapons. It was argued that weapons manufacturers could not reasonably be held to a standard higher than the law itself.

So, to be effective, a law has to anticipate all measures that gun manufacturers might take to circumvent its application. This is like having to spell out what it means to kill somebody. Reading the gun laws in Wikipedia (look under Federal Assault Weapons Ban, Gun Laws, and Gun Politics) was a painfully difficult undertaking, since the amount of technical detail was oppressive, especially to one who is uninterested in guns except to get rid of the bloody things.

As is typical with Wikipedia articles on contentious subjects, the articles mentioned above have been written by multiple authors with evidently conflicting viewpoints, and, in many cases, limited language skills, resulting in convoluted grammar that is often difficult to follow, and occasionally positively misleading. One thing is clear: writing skill and interest in firearms do not go together. A clear, uncluttered article on the present state of gun control from the National perspective, with a clear definition of gun categories, would be very useful. It is useless to include the interested parties, since pro-gun groups have proliferated over the years (the NRA, the GOA, the Pink Pistols), and some have supported some measures, and opposed others, and become merely an additional layer of confusion on top of everything else. The delight that gun fanciers have in talking about stocks and spent cartridges and tumbling projectiles would be amusing, if the issues were not so horrific. It is a dirty business, jealously protected by many dangerous people, but sane people must get into it, or gun violence will continue to escalate.

Arch

Once Again: Gun Control

2011-07-05T19:46:00.000-04:00

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The issue of gun control has polarized the nation ---and the world--- so much that each side has largely given up trying to engage the other in any sort of meaningful dialog, which makes it difficult for politicians running for office.

The data and statistics of the issue have been studied at length, and there is little argument that guns are dangerous, etc, etc. Let's look at the issue from a slightly different angle. I'm sure that this approach must have been tried before, but ignorance gives me courage. What is the psychology of the whole business?

The other day I saw (a video of) the fabled Charleton Heston speaking on the subject, and he was calmly deploring the fact that the anti-gun lobby (as the NRA characterizes it) tries to demonize gun ownership, and cast doubts on the morals and the civic-mindedness of gun owners. I thought hard about the matter, and tried to put myself in the position of a gun-owner, brought up in a gun culture, whose parents and uncles and aunts have all owned guns, the proud descendents of pioneers, who "tamed the West" by the use of guns.

Some of these folks simply consider guns to be tools. It is something you use to defend yourself, and when necessary, your neighbors, some of which are idiots who refuse to take up arms themselves, and always call on their (more responsible, gun-owning, courageous) neighbors to protect them. Owning the guns is, in the mind of gun owners, a cherished privilege, but also a duty; sometimes a burdensome one.

Other gun owners think of them as a precious piece of equipment for hunting. If all else fails, and prices of groceries rise out of control (which will happen, they think, if the price of oil continues to rise!) they can at least feed their families with game. When the time comes, they feel, they can force the states to give up this foolishness of setting limits on hunting seasons.

Yet other gun owners probably don't think about their guns very clearly at all, but nurse deep suspicions about the constitution of the society in which they find themselves: in contrast to the simple world of Ozzie and Harriet and the TV series of the fifties, society is full of immigrants and riff-raff, people of dubious motives and doubtful values. Subconsciously ---or quite consciously--- these people probably feel that it is the gun in the gun closet in the hall that keeps the creeps from invading the sanctity of their homes, and making outrageous demands on them (such as a cup of sugar, for instance).

The question is not whether these people would be willing to compromise on their ownership of guns, but how they would feel if gun ownership were to be curtailed in any way. A whole generation of men has grown up not needing to have very hairy chests simply because owning a gun is sufficient evidence of their testosterone levels. Unfortunately, I truly can identify with gun owners, and I can easily imagine how threatened they would feel if gun ownership were to be circumscribed.

Another sort of objection comes from a still more reasonable source, namely logic. To see this, we have to see parallels between the sort of disasters that flow from unrestricted gun ownership, and the sorts of disasters that arise from reckless driving.

We are all familiar with the stories of the drunken revels that take place during hunting season, occasionally resulting in one of the members of the hunting party being ---sometimes fatally--- shot. I know for a fact that these incidents fill responsible hunters with fury, and rightly so. Many gun-owning families are scrupulously careful about gun education and training. When a gun accident occasionally takes place in such a family, they are utterly humiliated, and no doubt shunned by their fellow gun-owners.

The same happens when a member of a responsible family of car-owners happens to be drunk while driving, and accidentally kills somebody.

Meanwhile, of course, all sorts of people are manufacturing slogans to defend one law or another: Guns Don't Kill People; People Do.

It might be a bit unfair to suggest an analogous slogan: Cars don't kill people, People Do.

But one can easily imagine how that slogan would be quickly altered to read: Cars Don't Kill People; Alcohol Does. It's hard to avoid the observation that the auto manufacturing industry is larger than the alcohol manufacturing industry and the beer brewing industry combined. Still, the link with alcohol does muddy the water in the case of driving under the influence, and vehicular homicide. We can't ban the sale of cars just because a small minority of car owners choose to drink and drive.

In that case, the Gun Lobby can argue, is it reasonable to restrict gun sales just because a small ... well, anyway, a large minority of gun owners choose to shoot people dead, for whatever reason?

This is all very well, but no objections by the Gun Lobby can excuse their opposition to a ban on assault weapons. Clearly a responsible citizen anxious to protect his wife and his neighbors is not about to buy an assault weapon for his gun cabinet. Clearly a hunter eager to bring home an eight-point buck is not going to hunt him with an assault rifle. An assault rifle is bought solely for the purpose of violent crime, or possibly, defense against violent crime.

Is the line between an assault weapon and a traditional firearm so vague that gun owners fear some sort of "ban creep" that would gradually ban all guns? The opinion of this non-expert is that this is most certainly not the case; assault weapons are a clear category whose strict control makes perfect sense to me. Such guns are only useful to gangsters and militia.

Finally, just from personal observation, I seem to notice that even simply arguing against gun control seems to give some individuals a certain amount of sexual satisfaction! Even men who do not now, and have never in the past, owned guns become flushed and excited when they defend the right of their more heavily armed buddies to own their guns. Guns are sexy even at a distance.

So, to sum up, taking these dangerous toys away is too hard, since they are so tightly bound with American concepts of manhood and virility, and even their defense is a matter of pride for a certain sector of the population. Even female lawyers, politicians and gun-owners get excited over the issue of gun control, which seems to suggest that testosterone is not something that inspires the male sex exclusively.

I hope none of my readers were hoping to find a solution here; I'm merely saying that the problem is complex, and is complicated by motives that are some of them very emotional, some very cynical, and some very mercenary.

Arch

Star Wars: A Landmark in Popular Cinema

2011-05-26T00:36:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I was watching Star Wars (subtitled "A New Hope", a subtitle nobody actually uses) with my nephew. I have to say that the visual effects were almost as fresh today as they were in 1978 --except for a few sad moments, such as when Darth Vader's spaceship goes out of control when hit by a shot from Han Solo who joins the fight unexpectedly. It was indicated by the hackneyed method of spinning the camera (sad, sad, sad). The music was just as glorious as the music for any movie; John Williams had succeeded brilliantly in using a simplified version of the Leitmotiv idea introduced by Richard Wagner. For those who are interested: there are several themes:

The famous main theme of Star Wars);
The Rebel Attack theme (I could only get a synthesized representation of this one);
The Force theme;
The Princess Leia theme;
The Imperial March / Darth Vader theme.

Unlike Wagner, whose themes were far more terse, and as such, more conducive to actually weaving into the orchestral texture in subtle ways, John Williams makes sure that when he inserts one of his themes into the action, it is easily heard, and its point easily understood. (My friend Gary was of the opinion that the themes were more skillfully used in The Empire Strikes Back.)

Unlike the visuals and the music, the dialog of Star Wars (Episode 4) was very simple; simple to the point of banality. Lucas (and / or whoever wrote the final screenplay) was not aiming for literary excellence at all, but to connect with the vast teenage audience out there, which is never impressed by literary excellence. Arguably, some of the seventies teen movies had more literary scripts than did Star Wars. It seems that even dialog dripping with bad grammar, colloquialisms and inarticulate grunts can have different levels of literary merit; something that boggles the mind. The Harry Potter movies, for instance, in which the adults, for the most part, speak careful English, while the kids (for the most part) do not, have a certain literary quality to them, whereas in Star Wars the dialog is minimal, and the only characters who seem to say anything worth listening to are Darth Vader, Obi Wan Kenobi, and Yoda.

Columbus, Riemann, Bach and Wagner: what do they have in common?

2011-05-16T16:33:00.004-04:00

I have an indifferent voice, at best, but just this evening I was visiting my brother, and got drawn into singing in the choir for a wedding! This is a thrill, since we atheists rarely get invited to sing in church choirs. Luckily for me, this was an amateur choral society, and they were short of male voices.

Everyone has their own way of getting their head in the choir game. Some folks need to learn the melodies. Some can simply read off from the notes. Some have to hear their place in the rest of the choir sound. Some have to understand the chord for each note they sing. Me, I have to understand the geography of the piece.

Back in the old days of plainchant, the tune stuck to just a few notes, and once you knew the Home Note (the so-called tonal center, or Tonic), you learned all your notes relative to that one. They could have called the Home Note 1, and then numbered the remaining notes 2, 3, 4 and so on, and of course note 8 was (essentially) the same as note 1, but an octave higher, so you could call it 1', and the next note 2', and so on. (You have a problem going downwards. You could call the note below 1 by 7*, the next lower one 6*, all the way down to 1*, etc, etc.)

As many of us know, the notes were actually called "doh, re, me, fa, soh, la, ti, doh," etc, as charmingly described by Maria in The Sound of Music. This system is called Tonic Sol-Fa. Here is an account in Wikipedia. (Actually, there seems to have been a medieval verse of music of eight lines, the first line starting on the home note, and each successive line starting on the next higher note. The lines are said to have started with the syllables Ut, re, mi, fa, so, ... , but someone replaced Ut with Do. Probably got canonized for this innovation. If anyone can give me a reference to a performance of this verse, I shall be eternally grateful.)

[Added later: Here is a depiction of the original latin hymn to which I referred, and an explanation by Mr Neil Hawes:

]
Centuries passed, and by the time Palestrina was composing (Giovanni da Palestrina -- probably not his real name, but I could be wrong) harmony had been discovered, and people were singing many melodies simultaneously, creating a tapestry of sounds at a single instant. This meant that a given note could be harmonized in many ways.

As a side-effect, it became possible --and desirable!-- to change the home note temporarily, to create tension, and the feeling of travel. Many tunes depart from their home note by the second sentence, to coin a phrase. By the time Bach came around, the skill of changing home notes was not just one of many procedural techniques for composers, but almost their most important stock in trade.

How was music notated, once the home note was changed? The new Doh could be the old Soh, or practically any note! To be honest, I don't know how this situation was dealt with in the world of Tonic Sol-Fa, as the Do-re-mi system is called. But Bach, and even many composers before him had begun to use an absolute notation system that simply showed the notes, and new notes that were required because of moving away from the Home Note were indicated with symbols (so-called accidentals: sharps and flats that were inserted right in front of the note).

So when we're singing along, and a whole lot of accidentals suddenly crop up, of course we know that we're traveling, and incidentally, what note to sing, as well. But for those of us who are hard to please, we need to know where we are relative to the original key; hence my remark about the geography of the music.

Several months ago, I described a system used by Stephen Malinowski which illustrated relationships between notes. He actually used several methods, I'm referring to one of them: The Interval Lattice. Here it is:

Here, the Home Note is represented by 1. You could think of it as C major, if you like. Surrounding it are six other notes: counting counter-clockwise from the note immediately to the "east" is 5, or G major; 3, or E major/minor; 6, or A major/minor; 4, or F major; 5#, or 6Flat, G Sharp or A Flat; and finally 3Flat, or E Flat major.

Of course, some folks consider every note to be related to every other note. This particular scheme gives priority to these 6 notes, but if you take their immediate neighbors, you get all the possible notes included, at (at most) a distance of one (additional) note away.

To help out novices, I should say that some of these 6 notes are closer than others; actually G major, F major, and A minor are the most closely related. These are most often the first destination when Bach, for instance, leaves home. Next favorites are D minor and E minor, closely followed by G minor, and C minor. (By this time, you're seeing that this lattice is not that helpful, really! Maybe some 3-dimensional lattice might be of help...) So when I say that I want to know where I am, I don't mean simply which new Home Note; I want to trace the sequence of Home Notes that got me where I am.

Where do Riemann, Columbus and those people come in?

It has to do with maps. A map, of course, is an abstract representation of a geographic area. (We've obviously gotten away from thinking of a map as a representation of The World --here be dragons, etc, etc. Maps of The World are, at best, laughable approximations, because adjacent points are often at opposite ends of the map.) If we think about it, our system of scales is a map from a set of sounds into the numbers 1, 2, 3, ... , 7. Mathematicians and geographers soon cottoned onto the fact that any shape other than a plane, such as the Earth, cannot be represented by a single map.

One of the big things-to-do in mathematics is to calculate gradients, such as the pressure gradient, or the temperature gradient, and so on. A lot of physics is all about gradients, but we math folks own the idea of gradients. It so happened that everyone knew how to do gradients when using a single map. Riemann's brilliant contribution to mathematics was to show how to do gradients while using a patchwork of maps! By and by, Einstein came along, and said that all maps were equally good for physics (though of course some maps were a little more equal than others).

[Added later: As to the mathematics-- A surface such as a cylinder or sphere (or Möbius Strip, for that matter) cannot be represented by a single map. So you need several maps to represent the whole thing, and these maps must overlap, and there has to be a minimal degree of smoothness in the equations that connect the two maps in the overlap. These sorts of surfaces, together with all their maps, are called Manifolds, for the simple reason that multiple maps are necessary. So, all manifolds are locally Cartesian; in other words, a small neighborhood of every point is one at least one of the maps. Compare this with the remark that Wagner's music is locally diatonic in the following paragraphs. Later composers have written music that is totally atonal, that is, there is no tonal center at any moment. In fact, they go out of their way to destroy any feeling of tonality --any feeling that there exists a Home Note, even a temporary one-- in the entire piece. I must confess that atonal music is not satisfying to me personally, but I might have enjoyed a few seconds of it while my defenses were down.]

Then along came a fellow called Richard Wagner. I doubt whether he knew anything about Riemann or Einstein, but he was writing music that seemed to completely disregard the home note. At any given instant in time, one can hear an implied home note. But unlike Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven, all of whom traveled widely in respect to their home notes, but who always took the time to travel back to the home note, Wagner sometimes set out from the home note, never to go back again in the same piece. Like Riemann, though, who insisted that every point should be on some regular map that looked more or less like the X-Y grid, Wagner's music is, in a small neighborhood of any moment in the music, like the music of Bach, which is to say, locally diatonic. This makes Wagner's music easy to apprehend, so long as you did not have a driving urge to "go back home" to the initial Home Note. [Wagner changed home notes --modulated, which is the technical term for it-- based on the imperatives of the melody he was building.]

Many Wagner tunes are perfectly diatonic. Some of them, however, are not. So Wagner is, for music, something like what Riemann (or Einstein) was to mathematics (and Physics).

So, you see, geography is not too far removed from music, conceptually. To conclude, Merv Griffin's tune used in Final Jeopardy (named by Griffin Think) is an instance of a tune that leaves home in one direction, and arrives home from the opposite direction, having gone completely around the world!

Arch

AN EXTENDED FAREWELL TO OUR GRADUATES!

2011-05-08T18:31:00.003-04:00

Every year I feel ever more impatient to give our departing graduates a jolly good word or two of advice, but I never get the chance, what with Finals, and grading, and all the parties, ahem. This time I’m really going to do it.
Most students –and their parents—see a college education as a gateway to better employment: a nice, easy, well-paying job. (Actually, jobs for college graduates are not going to be easy, except for the exceptional graduate. They usually involve less heavy lifting; that much can be said.)
And now you’re expecting me to give you the usual drivel concerning what a college education is all about. But you will be disappointed; I’m going to give you that drivel at the end.
The Elephant in the Room, of course, is the fact that you’re going to be looking for jobs, so let’s get that out of the way, before your attention starts to wander.
Some of you are thinking: well, I like to … watch TV, hang out with my friends, party on the weekends, play video games, and listen to loud music. These are personality traits that have to be carefully concealed from your prospective employer, you’re thinking, so the entire job-seeking process becomes very tense and uncomfortable.
Nobody wants to hire a tense and uncomfortable job applicant. This is no way to go about presenting yourself.
But, imagine what you could be thinking instead.
You’re a person who wants people to get a fair deal. You want to work reasonable hours for reasonable pay. You feel you can do as good a job on any task as anyone else they can hire, and dammit, people like you. But, seriously, you’re more interested in making a good match between what your employer has to offer and what his customers need, than in making a shady buck for your employer at the cost of an unhappy customer. You want to become a good parent to your kids, and a good spouse, and a good alum of your school. This means, you have to take on responsibility, and discharge it reliably, and be in a position to hire more alums some day!
If they hire you, good for them. If they don’t, they will learn their mistake, and begin to realize what an opportunity they let slip through their fingers. (So leave your e-mail addie with them, in case they need you desperately someday.)
As some of you know —or suspect—I teach mathematics. When I say this, I can just imagine what goes through people’s minds. Actually, it could be a number of different things, depending.
“Mathematics! Fractions! Eugh!”
“Mathematics! Pi! Wow, you must be a god!”
“Mathematics! I guess that would be, like, Accounting … You must be good at doing your taxes.”
“Mathematics! Like, Statistics?”
(Actually, most people think of mathematics as multiplication. They wouldn’t come out and actually say this, but that’s what they’re thinking.)
Most of you are not as afraid of math now as you might have been at one time. There comes a point when you look around, and see how much more afraid of math everybody else is than you are. This is usually a turning point.
There is a sort of conceptual fence you jump over; one day you’re accustomed to thinking of yourself as a math-phobe, and the next, you’re thinking: well, yeah; it certainly is unpleasant, but not fearful, no. And your entire attitude towards it changes. As you go higher up in math, it happens at different levels: Calculus, Trigonometry … all things that people start out hating, and the lucky ones cross the fence, and laugh at themselves for having feared it.
There are these fences you have to cross: from being single to being married; from being a student to being a teacher; from being a youth, to being a parent!
You’re probably thinking: this guy is a total math maniac. Yes, I’m kind of a math geek; and I wear it proudly! (I’m other sorts of geek, too; but I’m not quite ready to be outed at this point.) But all the people who sit on the platform at graduation, certainly at my institution, are absolutely convinced about the value and the fascination of their chosen field, and, very probably, of those of a number of other fields as well.
To be this way, to be so insanely enthusiastic about a discipline, is to be totally persuaded about civilization, about human achievement, about the good parts of human history. And the fact that we chose to teach tells you that we believe in the future. We wanted to infect you with this disease, and this is why you should be an asset to any employer who cares about his community. It is never a good time to hire an employee who looks at civilization with doubt and despair. We want you to cross the fence from the side of the people who just don’t get civilization, to the side of people who may not understand it, but who are in awe of its amazing achievements.
You can also write. You can do math. You can appreciate art, music, and dance. You can read and understand books. You can surf the net on your employer’s behalf! You are an amazing value to your prospective employer.
We sincerely enjoyed having you with us for this long. Honestly, we probably enjoyed having you here more than your parents enjoyed having you at home; why else would they send you off to a residential college? We love to have you come back! Of course we sometimes tend to hide when you descend on the school en masse, but that’s different! We have seen you at your best so far, and your worst, and we still like you, but the best is yet to come.
Good luck!

Sprung ...

2011-05-05T19:33:00.001-04:00

Spring has, finally! At least here, in Pennsylvania.

I remember bringing my aunt up here one time. She had lived in Arizona for years and years, and only visited other places by plane. We brought her up from Philadelphia by car, and she stared at the scenery.
"Well, what do you think?"
"It's so ... so green. It's too green!"

That's how it strikes people who live in the Southwest; it's too darn green up here.

This is the time of year when Dogwoods in bloom stand out in delightful contrast to the surrounding greenery, with their distinctive light-colored flowers. Willows are among the first to get their leaves, an interesting yellow, until a little later in the season. Now the evergreens are surrounded by leafing deciduous trees. Here is a photo from my friend's driveway; it's two photos pieced together, to show a variety of trees.

All the way at the left, close to the house is what we believe is a Pennsylvania Hemlock, the official State Tree. A little to the right, you can see the white flowers of the Dogwoods, at the edge of the lawn. The tall woody trees near the center are Black Walnuts, that haven't actually started leafing yet. (I'm told that they're usually the last to get their leaves.)

Right behind my friend and her dog is a Lilac bush, with flowers a deeper shade of purple than the traditional lavender blooms. Finally, the salmon-colored flowers are on a Japanese Quince bush. (If I could have got in some Forsythia, we would have the entire spectrum of colors represented in this single view, without the painful contrasts one sees in Conservatories!)

That outdoor grill is making me hungry. Gotta go.

Arch

Mozart: Clever Dick

2011-04-27T00:37:00.011-04:00

I often say that Mozart is one of my favorite composers, but I also confess regularly that I don't listen to Mozart as often as I used to do. When I was a kid, I hardly ever listened to Mozart; I got hooked on Wagner, then Beethoven, then Mendelssohn, then I finally rediscovered Mozart.

"You've never heard of Eine Kleine Nachtmusic?" my aunt asked one day in disbelief. Actually, I had heard it --often-- but I had never learned its name. My dad's taste in music was remarkably similar to my own (probably unsurprising), but he hated to pronounce foreign words. (I still remember him blushing furiously when he happened to say hors de combat one day, in passing, and was caught saying it. We didn't make a fuss, but he was embarrassed all the same!) So dad often played it at night, as we kids were about to fall asleep, but we never knew what the piece was called.

Mozart is commonly believed to have been very intelligent. I stumbled onto this idea late in life --around the time people started playing Mozart to their babies-- and I thought it was a little precious. I knew he was eccentric, all right; that was common knowledge. But how could people deduce that he was a genius? The evidence is still not clear. But as far as I'm concerned, Mozart's genius is very much like pornography: I can't define it, but I know it because I can hear it.

Unfortunately, Mozart muddies the evidence just by trying to be clever. Most of what I know about the times Mozart lived in is from Mozart's own letters, and he makes perfectly clear that he just knew himself to be several cuts above the rest, at least as far as musicianship was concerned. Musicianship in the late 1700s was all about economy; killing several birds with one economical stone, but letting brilliance flower. If you stopped too soon, you had no genius. If you went on too long, you became boring. Mozart played this game of one-upmanship all the time, and when I read his letters as a teenager, I was appalled at the conceit of the man, and of course I completely missed many of his allusions, simply because I did not know the people involved. But that he should stoop to criticize people of lesser talent than himself I could not understand! You could not score points by being vicious. I knew all about scoring points as a teenager; that's what my teen years were all about. (The first thing you thought as you woke up in the morning was how to avoid becoming the fulcrum of someone else's point-scoring.)

Mozart was not only brilliant, he was utterly innocent. On one hand, he could put himself inside someone else's head to a certain degree, but unfortunately --I believe-- he misunderstood their motives in rather amusing ways. (I wish I could give you specific examples, but my speculations are actually going in a different direction.) But his genius lay in how he was able to get everyone else, at least partially, into his own head.

The question arises: do we want to get inside Mozart's head? And my opinion is: definitely yes.

First of all, I have to make it clear that Mozart wrote a certain amount of stuff that does not make sense to me --at this time. But so does Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, and most other composers. One must assume that it may have made sense on some occasion, or they may just have been having a bad day. But don't write them off permanently; sometimes I've accidentally listened to a piece I had written off as useless, and it suddenly sounds perfectly plausible and meaningful. But with the proviso that not everything Mozart wrote is immediately certifiable as brilliant, I encourage you to give his work --at least the best known works-- a try.

Just the other day, I was showing my Mini-Disk player to a friend, and put on a disk I had recorded. (MiniDisks are tiny two-inch disks that you record yourself. They come in a protective shell, so that they just can't get scratched. Each one can hold 75 minutes of music, and most MiniDisk recorders permit you very sophisticated editing capability. Of course, sound editing software is available on the Internet for free, for recording your own CDs and so forth, but the MiniDisk systems really made it very easy, and you did not have to link them up to your computer; you could do it all on your stereo system.) Anyway, to get back to Mozart: it happened to be a compilation of "slow movements" from Mozart. (Symphonies, concertos, sonatas, all have these lovely jewels, an Andante, or Adagio 2^nd movement, and it is the easiest thing in the world to compile them into a 75 minute collection.) The first one on the disc was the Andante Cantabile called the Minuet in D. This particular piece --just a movement from some serenade-- has no function except to be delightful. Knowing Mozart, he was probably trying to be clever when he wrote it, but as always, the cleverness is not intrusive. He might go back and refer to the piece in a letter, indicating that the whole thing was sheer artifice, and all the feeling in the thing was completely fake. But one listens to it, and one weeps, because there is no artifice to be found in it at all!

I have written often about the wonderful Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, and the Clarinet Concerto, and the Concerto for Flute and Harp, but I would like to write about something else. One of the earliest major works by Mozart that I learned to enjoy is the Symphony No. 40 in G minor. It is just a jewel, all four movements of it. (Apparently there are two versions: one with clarinets, and one without; I haven't really studied the matter.) Oh, where to begin?

The structure of the opening movement of a Symphony is complicated, but it's worth learning. It is based on two themes, which are simply tune-fragments. (In Mozart's time, they were quite recognizable melodies, but by the time Beethoven got his hands on the idea, they were brief, terse melodic atoms, allowing a great deal of twisting and bending without breaking, if you know what I mean.) The first theme --let's call it A, is introduced first. Then the music moves into a related key. In the G minor symphony, it moves into B Flat. There, the second theme is stated; call it B. (If they're playing the symphony as it is supposed to be, this entire section would be repeated, but in these busy times, the repeats are often skipped to make room for commercials.) Now comes a section called the development, where there are really no rules, but that the two themes are developed and combined in various ways, and the composer gets to be very clever and painfully musical in the process. There is a noticeable increase in tension, the listeners wondering what the heck is going on, and the composer sweating, wondering what to write next. At any rate, the music gradually approaches a big pause, and we get ready to hear the two themes once again.

To this point, the music has been A, B, C, where C is of course the development section. Now we hear A again; this is the recapitulation. But, in an interesting twist, the theme B is heard not in the related key in which it was originally heard, but in the same key as A. In major-key works, this doesn't make a huge difference; it is only the bridge between the two themes that betrays the fact that the second theme is in the theme of the first: you can hear this in the first movement of the Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. But in the present case, in the recapitulation, theme B --originally heard in B Flat major, is now in G minor, which makes an enormous difference; it makes this recapitulation all the more heartbreaking. The emotion is not worn on the sleeve; to me it seems as if the work sets out to express grief, but changes its mind and decides to be graciously cheerful. But every once in a while, the gracious facade crumbles, and we see the tears beneath. So, the structure is A, B, C, A, B*, where B* stands for the slightly modified second theme.

All first movements of symphonies of this era have this structure, including many written by Beethoven, who first began to tinker with the form. It had worked for several decades for good reason; it gives the composer great expressive freedom within the form, and the fact that later composers felt the need to discard it simply tells you that Beethoven had done so much with it, that it was too much to live up to. (The same thing is going to happen to SUV's; they're all the same shape at the moment, and someone has to come up with a startlingly different shape to seduce new generations of idiots. Maybe something that looks like an enormous hybrid, but with the letters SUV emblazoned on the windscreen, just to make sure there's no confusion.)

And now this: I wish they would invent a new video format for cartoons!

The well-known "jpeg" file format for photographs is designed to represent photographs as efficiently as possible. The changes from pixel to pixel in an ordinary photo are generally smooth; jpeg is most efficient at representing smoothly varying data in an image with the smallest possible file. They do less well with sharply defined images, such as, for instance, a page of print.

The same situations arise in video. When you film scenes from life, the colors vary smoothly from point to point, unless you're filming a stick man, for instance. Unfortunately, though, the generally available video formats are all intended for video from cameras, which vary smoothly from moment to moment, and pixel to pixel.

In contrast, cartoons are sharply-defined images that are made to move. So the motion has to be smooth, but the image has to be sharp. This means that a file type is required with minimal smoothing, to help smooth motion (such as "anti-aliasing", which is a simple averaging method for neighboring pixels), combined with some sort of palette-based image representation. Well, here's to anyone who invents such a thing!

Arch

Trust: A Recently Recognized Scarcity

2011-04-19T12:14:00.003-04:00

Why do I always stumble on these insights just a little too late?

I have been noticing for decades the waning of trust in different areas, but it is just now coming together in my mind: trust is hard to find in modern society.

The most noticeable realm in which trust is lacking is in government. Our representatives have latched onto the fact that you do not really have to do what you promised at election time. Heaven knows there are (1) enough people to blame if you abandon your agenda, and (2) your constituents are a lot less smart about really understanding what you did, so you can kind of snow them a little. In any case, getting re-elected more than once is almost impossible, so get rich quick while you can, and walk away with that fabulous health insurance that all one-time congressmen are reputed to get to keep at government expense. Is this true?

Trust is lacking in employment. An employer is more likely to hire somebody in the family, or a kid of a trusted old buddy, than someone who walks in with a certificate, no matter how impressive. They don't trust the certificates, and they don't trust the kids, who have become ever more adept at lying, and representing themselves as more efficient than they really are. [Added later: another problem, I think, is that people are not confident in their own ability to assess how trustworthy someone is with any sophistication. People who can judge character quickly and reliably tend to rise to the top; but sometimes that's the only think these people are good for. But then, they have to surround themselves with --trusted-- people who can do the work, and as a result what used to be a one-man job is now a team job, and much more expensive. This might not be the whole story with rising costs, but it is surely one piece of the puzzle.]

You can't trust your bank to keep your interests in mind. You can't trust the manufacturers whose goods you've faithfully bought forever. (You loved those solid items of hardware, but it seems they're making them out of plastic now, imported from China.) You can't trust the labels on your food. You can't trust the News, the papers, what you read on the Internet (though most of us are most gullible when getting information from the Internet).

Students in college are learning that a good hearty handshake, some snazzy threads, and Dad's support is more useful than really earning a strong degree. A lot of self-made businessmen are suspicious of college fellows, anyway, because they've learned to be prejudiced against intellectuals. They don't realize that there is absolutely no fear of getting an intellectual applying for a job with them. All three intellectuals who graduated last year are now disgruntled postal workers. (And these days, disgruntled postal workers are not a patch on the old ones.)

Some of my students are more focused on persuading me that their gaffes are excusable than on making sure they never make them again.

They also spend time cultivating their professors. A good letter of recommendation is worth several poor letter grades. It's not what you know, it's who will write a lying letter for you! It's getting to be quite an art to communicate that a student is unreliable (in a letter of recommendation) without alarming the student. The more honest thing to do is to tell him or her out front that you cannot bring yourself to write a letter on their behalf that is silent about their shortcomings.

In our personal lives, too, trust is hard to give and receive. Most people look with great consternation at their prospective life partners, and simply cannot figure out whether he or she can be trusted. Hell, they figure, I'll just give it a try. They're thinking that if things go wrong, it isn't that hard to end it. Many younger people have friends they have not figured out completely, and they're totally stunned by the things their good friends do. The fact of the matter is that they never knew them. "I don't think I ever knew you, man." The suggestion is that it is the friend's fault, not their own. This sort of trust is very shallow. It is mere acceptance, with very little evidence.

One of the most charming things I found about adults whom I knew was how willing they were to trust you based on very brief acquaintanceship. Foreigners do not do this; you just know that you're on trial for a couple of years. It isn't just suspicion, it's common sense. Trust easily given isn't really worth very much, is it?

But the speed of life today requires quick judgements about whom you can trust. Many managers and businessmen give trust quickly, and come down on their employees like a ton of bricks if their trust is betrayed. This is a policy of massive retaliation. Some parents follow the same policy with their children. The Trust, but Verify policy is given lip-service, but not often followed carefully.

As a result, many people are in responsible positions not because they have the necessary skills for the position, but because they can project trustworthiness effectively. Not surprisingly, young people cultivate projecting trustworthiness effectively rather than personal integrity. Communication skills (or rather acting skills) are more important today than having something useful --and sincere-- to say.

If anyone has ideas as to how to deal with this crisis in trust, let us know! Important questions are: how do you approach the matter of trust personally, assuming you deal with it at a conscious level? How do you approach coaching your children (and nephews, grandchildren, students, whatever) in how to place their trust advisedly? People have rules of thumb; e.g. "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!" which is really an aphorism about trust.

Colleges: Does a Market-Driven Approach Work?

2011-04-19T10:16:00.003-04:00

.
The Background
Back in the seventies, when everybody discovered graduate business schools and MBA's (the graduates of which probably brought us to our present pass), you had to be pretty clever to succeed in a graduate school of business. Most of those who were accepted were not business major graduates, but engineers. Through the next several decades, graduate business schools were not so much working on improving their product, but in increasing capacity and flow; in other words, they succumbed to their own propaganda, and began pandering to rich graduates who wanted to buy qualifications in order to legitimize their ambitions to get into the upper echelons of business and industry, even if they were light on quantitative skills, and heavy in personality and ... what can I call it? --Bullshit.

From basic bullshit, they progressed to intermediate- and eventually advanced bullshit. They began to take courses in Political Science and Economics, learning both the benefits of rhetoric and corruption, and the bullshit substitutes for substance and quantitative analysis.

It was inevitable that, over the years, Business Academicians gradually lost their quantitative analytical skills, while their bullshit skills were strong. While they puzzled over the curriculum they inherited from their more quantitatively skilled predecessors, seeking how to support a migration towards a more bullshit-based curriculum (and how to sell it to the curriculum overseers with more bullshit), they noticed a surprising (to them) trend with incoming freshmen: they couldn't do math.

"The poor darlings can't do math!" they howled. "How will it help our school if this disgustingly quantitative curriculum forces them to flunk out?" Administrators paid attention, their ears flapping. They, too, were a little stronger in bullshit than in numbers, and depended on the Business schools to explain numbers to them, little knowing that number-explaining was the least of the skills of their business colleagues.

What happened next
As graduate business schools upped their production capacity, they spewed out graduates, some of whom found their way into schools of Education Administration. After all, who needs money more desperately than colleges? (Why else would colleges hire presidents at ever greater salaries?)

Inevitably, the focus changed from "What would we like to teach our little students?" to "What would our incoming freshmen like to see in our major descriptions? What would impress their rich little parents?"

It turns out that what impresses the parents brings the kids in, but what the kids like keeps them in. It is possible to attract a few bright, poor students with scholarships, so that the student profile isn't completely dismal.

Meanwhile, of course, some of these MBAs found themselves working for --you guessed it: Colleges. Actually, they might not work for colleges, but the big universities that educate college presidents (people who earn degrees such as Doctor of Education) began to educate their students --who would go on to steer colleges across the nation-- how to keep a weather eye on the almighty dollar. Over the years, they began to encourage keeping not just a weather eye, but both eyes on the financial foundation of a college's operation. Traditionally, of course, college presidents have always been involved with raising money; it is almost the only thing they do. But increasingly, the following question has become more important: what can we do to make our school more attractive to major philanthropists?

As it happens, major philanthropists are eager to give their 'hard-earned' money to schools that have a good financial foundation in the first place. This means that they can attract paying students (in contrast to bright students) with their interesting curriculum, and good graduation rates.

Some schools improve graduation rates by making their faculty work harder. Some schools improve graduation rates by encouraging less draconian standards. Some schools increase graduation rates by providing lots of free private tutoring for students. Other methods are:
Very careful monitoring of student progress, and timely intervention.
Very careful admission standards, so that students are prepared for success.
Careful control of student course schedules, to make sure students never bite off more than they can chew.
Careful control of curriculum development, so that harder courses are phased out, and easier courses created and put in place.

These steps have some indirect and unintentional consequences.

1. Students, over the years, take less responsibility for their own success.
2. Students begin to believe that they have the right to be entertained and kept engaged by the professor.
3. Students do not take charge of studying, but expect that the instructor will provide study materials, and create course summaries for their students. A student who creates his or her own summary learns an enormous amount more than one who simply get a present of a course summary. But schools and instructors dare not take the risk that a class will not study for the test all.
4. Standards are creeping lower.

The fact of the matter is that it is a great mistake to consider incoming freshmen and the current students as the primary customers of the market model. In the market approach to any business, you must know who you want to impress: the prospective buyer. But in a school, the ones you want to impress are, guess what: the alumni.

Over the years, some alumni are more likely to contribute to the college far more than they ever contributed in fees. Alumni are also in a position to hire new graduates. They are also in a position to impress folks with the quality of their alma mater. So a school has a choice of going two ways: to pander to full-fee-paying, affluent students, who do not need to depend on scholarships and financial aid, but who are probably academically weak, and to accommodate whom the school has to lower standards, OR to focus on stronger students, who may be less financially able, but who have the potential to graduate well, and go on to earn positions in which they can support their former school, and hire its graduates.

Schools, in fact, mostly have a strategy somewhere in the middle. But the younger administrators in any school are increasingly uncomfortable pursuing a strategy in which the payoff comes in the --to them-- distant future. The Almni themselves, who often constitute a large component of the Board of Trustees and its financial branch, often encourage the school to pursue a "financially sane" admissions policy, thinking to themselves that it is more important to have any younger alum colleagues at all, rather than a few bright, capable alum colleagues. So all the instincts of everyone involved are poisoned by the new Business sensibilities. But the damage is done; building an academically strong school takes a back burner to dealing with the perceived permanent state of financial crisis.

Arch

Pasta Salad!!

2011-04-15T20:37:00.002-04:00

Whoa!

My friend Katie and I put together the most amazing pasta salad just a few minutes ago. We already had a pound or so of Rotini in the house, and a bottle of pitted olives, some Pepper Jack cheese, some Grated Parmesan, and lots of other odds and ends we could throw into a pasta salad, but Katie wanted also Pepperoni, and I wanted some Yellow zucchini squash. We were improvising from the outset, but I had made lots of pasta salad over the years, and so had she, but we had never put one together together, if you know what I mean.

1. The first thing I did, as always, was to take the nine slices of pepperoni (roughly 1½ ounces of 1" pepperoni slices), quarter them, peel them apart, lay them on paper towels, and microwave them for about 9 seconds. Some of the fat sort of melts out and soaks into the paper towels.

2. The yellow squash was going to be sliced and thrown in, but I decided to slice it, quarter the slices (actually, we quartered the squash lengthwise first: a foot-long baby yellow squash), and soak them for a couple of minutes in vinegar and salt. Just a cup of vinegar with a teaspoon of salt. Katie tasted a slice after the minute, and liked it. She said we could soak them longer, but I insisted that this was enough, for no good reason. (It's good to do this sort of enigmatic thing every once in a while; it reinforces your reputation as a culinary genius.)

3. It was multi-flavored rotini from the health-food store: there was tomato flavored rotini, and other flavors; anyway, there was yellow, green, red and white rotini. This is usually a good choice, even if health-food-store rotini is ridiculously expensive. You boil the stuff the usual way, making sure it isn't too soft when you're finished.

4. We sliced the pitted olives (about 15 stuffed, pitted olives), and cubed the pepper-jack cheese (about a ½ inch slab from a 1-pound block) into ¼ " cubes.

5. Katie wanted hard-boiled eggs. (We used 3.) This seemed a little different; I mean, who puts hard-boiled eggs in pasta salad? Evidently the Katie Culinary School believes in this. So the eggs were actually boiling alongside the pasta, and then cooled, shelled, and sort of cubed.

6. This next ingredient made a huge difference: sun-dried tomatoes. Katie insisted on getting the dry stuff, in plastic bags, and not the stuff soaked in oil, in jars. They're sort of pruney-looking strips of tomato, like tomato jerky. She chopped them into smallish strips.

7. We rinsed the pasta in cold water, put it in a big mixing bowl, and added everything except the eggs and cheese. We added a little salt, Jane's Crazy Mixed-Up Pepper, and ordinary black pepper to taste, We also added 1 tablespoon of olive oil, that's all, honest. Toss it all together. Each of us added grated Parmesan to taste.

We thought it was totally fabulous, despite the infinitesimal quantities of salt and oil used. The eggs seem sinfully decadent to me, but they really made the dish. There is enough for 4, certainly, and if there isn't, you guys are eating way too much. Manga!

Arch

Chairie's Song on Pee Wee's Playhouse

2011-04-13T11:48:00.003-04:00

I have just recently discovered that a jolly song I liked was sung by a popular artist whom I also admired!

The song is the Pee Wee's Playhouse Theme:

The writer of the lyrics (at least; possibly also the rest of the song, together with Paul Reubens and Mark Mothersbaugh) is identified as George McGrath, and he says that it was performed by Cyndi Lauper! See below for comments presumably from McGrath himself about the writing of the song.

As many of the comments on YouTube point out, it was far from being a little sound clip; it was a 2.5 minute song, and a good one, providing an important part of the atmosphere of the show.

Arch

College Education and the Ordinary Citizen

2011-04-11T12:20:00.004-04:00

Those of us on the Internet, who read blogs and so forth, are conditioned to taking for granted that everybody has gone to college, or is on the way there. There is, however, a significant portion of the country that has not gone to college, does not intend to go, would not send their children to college, and sincerely believes that colleges and universities are cesspools of wrong thinking and serious destruction of young minds.

There are conservatives, of course, who are deeply suspicious of college professors, who are deemed to be invariably ultra-liberal. Anyone who has been to college would normally think that the liberal college professors are nothing we can't handle. There is a small, vicious minority of college professors whose liberalism is determinedly obnoxious, and they do more harm than good for the liberal cause, but by and large these liberal professors will back off if you hold strong conservative views. The worst they will do is talk at you until you're tired.

As far as I'm concerned, the kind of liberalism that I would push (if I were in a discipline in which I could represent my liberal views in college) is in terms of pooling resources. It is much easier to deal with things like child-care, health-care, education, nature conservancy, environmental issues, law and order, etc, if we act together as a society, than to somehow get free enterprise and the open market to take care of it. The very poor are convinced that most of these issues do not concern them, and the very affluent consider most of these issues as not their responsibility. Finally, the very religious are deeply suspicious of typical colleges, regarding them as modern-day analogs of Sodom and Gomorrah, and not fit for their kids to attend.

Recently I visited a young couple, who had moved into their own tiny home, and had set it up as beautifully as they could afford. The gentleman, a young man of about 28, had been raised on a farm, left home as a teenager and kept himself alive doing various jobs, mostly in construction, then reconciled with his family, and started his own little construction company. It is not a very profitable business, but until their expenses go up with bringing up a family, they can keep body and soul barely together. The young lady is finishing her degree at a well-known university. Her area is environmental biology, and though she went into the field with enthusiasm and great idealism, she is becoming dismayed at her job prospects. Even more, she is beginning to see her fellow-students through the eyes of her gentleman friend, and it seems as if most of them are simply wasting their parents money on alcohol and ---let's face it--- loose living. Even worse, some of the faculty set a terrible example for the students. In my experience, great intelligence and creativity do not always go with emotional stability and restrained conduct; unfortunately quite the opposite.

Yet more alarming is the fact that, to the young lady's mind, the facts and opinions she encounters in college seem to her not relevant to the outside world. In fact, some of the opinions are totally in left field; for instance a well-known environmentalist gives a guest presentation to their environmental biology class and states that he doesn't care what happens to anything else, he is determined that a certain insect species should survive.

Of course, biology is all about passion these days. I would be deeply suspicious of a biologist who was a cynic; my mental picture of a biologist (and that of most people I know) is of someone completely filled with respect for life. But of course there have to be some biologists to whom the only good organism is a dead one, and there must be every shade of attitude in-between.

Coming back to our young couple, the young gentleman has even more fundamental problems with college education. If you know how to build a house, how to cook, how to hunt, how to look after yourself in the event of a minor health emergency, why would you need a college education? All colleges do is to cost the state an arm and a leg (certainly in California), and what do they give back? To the working class, it looks very much as if colleges give back a great deal to the upper classes, and the working classes see themselves as bankrolling the entire enterprise.

It is very difficult to defend something from the point of view of supporting it financially. It is the same problem with the National Endowment for the Arts. The same problem with Public Radio, which is on the brink of losing all its federal funding. Why should everybody support a radio station that only eggheads listen to?

There really are no ready answers to these questions; the fact of the matter is that colleges do indeed serve the higher echelons of society, even though they're funded by taxes from everybody. Within a college, we all carry on as if only the middle-class exists as people, and as though the working class (to which many college professors feel little allegiance) is some alien species whose motivations are difficult to understand, and to whom are imputed strange and unworthy motives, which must be endured, but not encouraged.

I still do not think of colleges and universities as hell-holes and sin cities, mostly because I have survived college quite successfully, and gained an immense amount from both college and university. I, too, don't feel any great kinship with the working class, though in actual fact I belong to it; if my employment were to be suddenly cut off, I would be left with absolutely no resources except a few thousand dollars in savings. (When I read about the antics of the governor of Wisconsin, and other union-busters around the country, I am angered and frustrated more as a knee-jerk reaction than as someone who is responding to the removal of a fundamental right. It is the unions who fight for a goodly standard of living for their members, but end up overreaching, and incurring the hostility of the rest of society, who ---occasionally--- feel as if the union members have gotten themselves fabulous deals at the cost of everyone else. In Wisconsin, of course, this is not the case, because the unions appear to be targets in order to pay for tax cuts.)

The whole issue of College Education is complicated. The complex society in which we live does, indeed, require a large minority of people who have extensive post-high-school training: teachers, doctors, engineers, technicians, nurses, veterinarians, lawyers, public servants. But because of the significant attrition in tertiary education (post-high-school education), you have to start with a large pool. But then, there are a lot of people with college degrees who are unemployed, further feeding the resentment against higher education: here I am, with an expensive college degree, and no job.

Where is the truth in all of this?

Arch

Listening to π

2011-04-06T13:59:00.003-04:00

The number π has fascinated laymen (and, to be honest, mathematicians) for millennia. It was observed that when the circumference of a circle was divided by its diameter, the number obtained was always the same for any circle (as long as it was on a plane; if the circle surrounded a hill, for example, what should its diameter be: over the hill, or through the hill?). This fact is difficult to establish rigorously; on one hand, it is an extrapolation of a similar result regarding polygons; for instance a 20-sided polygon is practically a circle, and the perimeters of 20-sided polygons divided by their diameters is always roughly 3.13836 (π is roughly 3.14159). Let's look at a 300-sided polygon; what do you get when you divide the perimeter by its diameter? Roughly 3.14154. Since this phenomenon has nothing to do with measurement, in principle it would be a constant anywhere and in any time. On the other hand, there is no simple equation that one can solve for it; it is what is called a transcendental number. A transcendental universal constant.

One of the interesting things about the actual number π is that when you find it accurately to a million decimal places, the decimal digits continue to be quite random; in other words, it is impossible to find a pattern to the digits (except, of course, the fact that they constitute π when assembled together). Furthermore, any desired string of digits seems present somewhere in π, and there used to be Internet sites that would try to locate any string you wanted to check out, and tell you the position at which it was present. (For instance, if you asked whether the string "159" was present, it would tell you yes, in position 4.) This often strikes laymen as remarkable, but it would be more remarkable if a particular string was absent! So, what with one thing and another, adding in the fact that the relatively esoteric peculiarities of the number π are often misunderstood by laymen to begin with, the mystique of the number has grown to the point where it is practically a religion!

Recently an amateur musician decided to convert the first 32 digits of π into a tune. Usually, when random numbers are assembled into tunes, they are far from aesthetically pleasing. The people in the present instance got around this in a clever way, by repeating the first 8 notes under the random sequence, like a chorus. The result was strangely pleasing: (notes corresponding to) the infinite random sequence of the decimal expansion of π, over the recurring (notes corresponding to the) first eight numbers.

You know, when you think about it, the correspondence could have been anything. These fellows chose to make 0 correspond to C, 1 correspond to D, and so on (it was all white notes, I believe. Or it may as well have been, for all the difference it would have made), which is slightly less arbitrary than it could have been. For instance, they could have made 0 correspond to C, 1 correspond to E, 2 correspond to G, 3 correspond to A, 4 correspond to D an octave higher, 5 correspond to G an octave higher ... why not? And the tune would have been actually pentatonic, and simply beautiful, with or without the Cantus Firmus of the first eight notes! (Or make all the digits correspond to various octaves of the notes C, E, and G, which would result in a gigantic C major chord, or at least an arpeggio.

The other arbitrary thing about this exercise (which I complained about on YouTube) is that laymen tend to think that the decimal system is god-given. Actually, it is quite arbitrary, except for the accident that humans have 10 fingers. You can use any positive integer, for instance 2, which gives you binary numbers. In the binary system, you can represent any desired number using only 1 and 0. For instance
1 [base ten] = 1 [base two]
2 [base ten] = 10 [base two]
3 [base ten] = 11 [base two]
4 [base ten] = 100 [base two]
5 [base ten] = 101 [base two]
6 [base ten] = 110 [base two]
0.5 [base ten] = 0.1 [base two]
0.25 [base ten] = 0.01 [base two]
0.75 [base ten] = 0.11 [base two] (just add the previous two equations)

and so on. The number π in base 2 is just as infinite as it is in base 10, but of course the expansion only has 0 and 1 in it, and the part before the "." is going to be 11[base 2], which is 3. Here is π in base 2 accurate to as many binary digits as shown:

11.00100100001111110110101010001000100001011010001100001000110100110001001100011001100010100010111000000011
[Base 2].

We could make a tune with just two notes for this one! So we can certainly "hear" π if we want, but the tune is most definitely going to depend on what base we pick, and on the notes we pick to represent each digit.

The most reasonable correspondence, really, is to use the so-called 12-tone scale, which is all the numbers on the piano keyboard, counting some fixed note as 0, say C, and then numbering the notes consecutively. (You could re-number the notes any way you like; the melody you get will sound equally "aleatory". (As I have mentioned in earlier posts, the composer Vi Hart specializes in aleatory music, or rather, music generated by binary sequences that come from various sources, not necessarily random, as far as I can see.)

To represent a number in base 4, for instance, we need to use the digits 0, 1, 2 and 3;
to represent a number in base 8, you need to use 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
The number of digits you need is equal to the base. In decimal representation, we use the ten digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
Base twelve requires twelve digits. 0-9 gives us ten, and we need two more; it's traditional to call them a and b. The digit "a" stands for 10, and "b" stands for 11; to get the decimal number 12, we just go 10 [base 12].

In base 12, the number π is 3.184809493b918664573a6211bb151551a05729290a7809a492742140a60a55256a0661a03753a3aa548056468802 [base 12], to the number of places shown, using Mathematica, a computer algebra system. I used the first few digits of this expansion to make a tune, and to give it a little more interest, I had it echoed in another part an octave below, then transposed the whole thing up a few notes, and repeated it. It sounds completely arbitrary, though the accompaniment (which consists of the same melody delayed by a couple of notes) does make it seem "intelligent". Here it is:

Amanda McBroom

2011-04-05T17:49:00.005-04:00

A song I love very much is The Rose, sung by Bette Midler in the movie The Rose. Until a few minutes ago, I was completely ignorant of who had written the song---I tend to forget that this is the electronic age, whatever that may be, and I can Google things.

It wasn't easy, by I hunted the author down; it turns out that the same person had written both the words and the melody: Amanda McBroom. She relates the story of how she came to write this song on her own website, and for anyone who has had a major piece of inspiration, this story will strike a familiar chord.

Honestly, it takes a lot of nerve for an ordinary sensitive person --who is not a Country & Western musician--- to write lyrics that are so emotionally loaded; I can write a story---prose---but never verse like this. But sister Amanda keeps up the onslaught for three stanzas, epic in their power. Arguably, her song carried that movie into the triumph that it was. Not everyone loved it, but it touched a vast number of people.

I suppose it's possible to write emotional lyrics to a song without actually feeling them. In the present case, though, I have to say that the genuineness of Ms McBroom's feelings, the relentless persuasion of her argument, all ring true; it is the lyrics that push the song forward, and the melody is simple, and really takes a back seat. I can imagine the same lyrics set to a more beautiful melody, but I have my doubts whether it would be a more successful song!

In the last several months, I have been surrounded by friends who have found romance late in life. Or rather, the people that I'm usually surrounded with have encountered romance, I suppose! It is a little embarrassing to try to relate to the earnestness of Ms McBroom's lyrics at a personal level; I blush to subscribe to the sentiment that

The night has been too lonely, and the road has been too long,

but I have certainly entertained the belief that "... love was only for the lucky and the strong ..." I think it is this sentence (or clause) that actually hooked me, and I suspect that I'm not alone. All praise and many cheers to Amanda McBroom, and I hope that this brief excerpt falls under the heading of "fair use", since we're not selling anything!

Addendum:
I wrote this post partly as recompense for attributing the song to Bette Midler herself. She was merely the performer (though she was instrumental in cementing the position of the song in the movie, which was inspired by Janis Joplin). But, despite what I have discovered since a few hours ago, it is Bette Midler who is immutably associated in my mind with the song. I suspect that the song has changed Bette Midler's life as well, and possibly not in entirely happy ways. When Bette Midler passes on ---and of course, it is possible that she might never die--- I predict that this song will be her epitaph, and what better epitaph could one hope to have? Bette Midler always blushed when confronted with sentimentality, but looking at her big hits, inside the jovial, brusque facade, there is a sentimental gal!

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Shale Gas: Pennsylvania's House Drops the Ball

2011-04-04T13:55:00.003-04:00

There is a large geological formation that angles up from central Pennsylvania through upstate New York. It is called the Marcellus Shale, and is a layer of shale deep beneath the surface (roughly 100 - 250 feet), from which it is now possible to extract trapped natural gas. Large portions of this shale is under rural farms and homes in Pennsylvania. The gas can be extracted by drilling wells, and forcing steam under high pressure into the drill hole (the well), which releases the trapped gas. There seem to be enormous profits to be made, and the higher the price of oil on the world market, the more eager big oil companies are to come into Pennsylvania, and negotiate the right to drill on the property of the landowners.

If energy is available for so little cost, why not encourage it?

There are many problems with this business.

(1) the process requires large volumes of water, which must be piped in from freshwater sources. Once the water is forced down the wells, dirty water and gas shoots out of the well, and the contaminated water must be stored in surface lakes. Already leaky lakes of contaminated water are suspected of having ruined farms across the country (shale gas is being exploited all over, including in Texas), and there are many horror stories on the Internet.

(2) the influx of heavy equipment into the rural "Shale" areas is ruining highways and infrastructure.

The Pennsylvania house of representatives studied the problem (in a hurry, evidently; John Quigley, the former head of the Pennsylvania Environmental Resources has been reported as saying that they "were not ready" to deal with the problem) and the special legislation that had been proposed to provide some insurance for dealing with environmental and infrastructure problems that might have been caused or aggravated by shale exploitation was not passed. Big Oil was given essentially a free pass to exploit the shale all they wanted.

This leaves the state of PA with the responsibility for cleaning up the polluted water, and repairing the ruined roads, and ---who knows?--- cleaning up the ruined air. None of this is new to the brave House of Representatives. Pennsylvania has successfully avoided cleaning up the the environment behind abandoned coal and iron mines, and is confident that it can turn a deaf ear to ruined farmland and rivers. What the House is concerned with most is how to reduce unemployment.

As small farms continue to fail and produce prices continue to be controlled by Big Agriculture, Pennsylvania has steadily leaked employment at the lower levels. In the wake of Big Oil comes Big Hospitality (hotels, restaurants,) and Big Entertainment (bars, brothels, gambling), all sources for the voters to get jobs. Very few of Pennsylvania's members of the house have any prospect of representing their constituents in the long run; voters want quick fixes for everything, and a career politician must make his money quickly, over a couple of years, and then find something else to do. So being reelected once is a good objective. Keeping the rivers and streams clean is something that they're unlikely to be thanked for in this next election, with the jobs dwindling.

But if Pennsylvania continues to grow anything at all, and a beleaguered Agriculture office approves slightly contaminated corn, for instance, we could all be eating Shale Shit in the near future. The only way to fix the problem is to say: Pennsylvanian Gas, Yes; Pennsylvanian Food, heck no! And be prepared for a gradual migration away from the blighted lands of the Marcellus Shale.

The descendants of Pennsylvanian coal mine workers are, some of them, still left behind in the Coal Region of Northumberland County and surrounding areas. There is great poverty but fierce pride. They enabled many 19th century entrepreneurs make their huge profits by working the mines, but got relatively little for their pains. These days, a large number of workers are not needed to support the Shale operations; most of it is automated. Most of the profits, though, will be sent to other states (e.g. Texas), and the Pennsylvanian contribution to the effort will be minimal. The people who sold the mineral rights to their land will retire in the South [the Sun Belt; but almost everybody does this, right?], leaving Pennsylvania with little to show for the exercise except a temporary spurt of employment.

[Added later: An (unintended?) consequence of exploiting the Shale Gas is that development of low-energy-intensive technology, alternative renewable energy sources, low-energy-consumption skills and habits will be delayed. And delaying energy dieting means escalation of energy demand. At one time, many earnest teachers taught the evils of energy consumption across the US. Many of my friends not only taught energy moderation in their classrooms, but showed their students how one maintains as small an energy footprint as possible. But the incentive to continue to do this is gradually being eroded; except for the isolated spikes in gas prices, fuel remains cheaper than bottled water to the consumer, though a large part of the National Debt has been expended in keeping the energy sources free for our consumption. If that cost were to be passed on to the energy consumer, the economy would take another dive--not because cheap energy is necessary; it certainly is convenient to have cheap energy for marginal business operations to continue to be profitable-- but because the Media will ensure that the economy responds negatively to increased energy prices.]

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Orphan Works: The Views of an Ignoramus

2011-04-04T13:06:00.003-04:00

As many of us know, a lot of the art and literature that has been created in the past, and a lot of the scholarship that is being done at present, is being digitized, that is, scanned or 'ripped' into computers, and often put on the Internet.

It so happens that libraries and museums are interested in exhibiting works whose authors or copyright owners are not known, or cannot be reached. Why are they interested in these works? And why can't these people be found?

Institutions like museums are often eager to exhibit rare or particularly interesting works; authors are eager to reference rare works; libraries are often eager to showcase rare originals, or copies of rare originals. Private individuals are interested in access to works where the copyright owner is unknown or unreachable, simply because the work can be exploited without interference from the copyright owner.

Why are there so many works whose copyright owners cannot be contacted? It used to be the case that a creator of a work had to take aggressive steps to copyright the work, and in the process provide a means of being contacted, so that if someone wanted to duplicate it or exploit it (market something that flows from the work in question) they have a way of negotiating the use of the work with the owner. Since a few years ago (2005?) the law has changed so that (*) works do not need to display a copyright notice, (*) it is not necessary to register a work in order for copyright to belong to the creator of the work. As a result, a large number of works that would have been deemed to be in the public domain are suddenly under copyright, while the owners cannot be found (easily).

New legislation is being proposed to enable libraries, museums and other parties to make use of an "orphan work", that is a work whose copyright owner cannot be found.

I tried reading the proposed legislation, and it has been couched in opaque and technical language that I do not care to wade through, with numerous references to opinions by third parties and law and treaties in and with other countries (notably the Berne Convention), with which the USA was forced to comply in order for various privileges not be withheld from Americans. Here is a summary of the situation presented by a spokesperson for the copyright office. Here is a hostile assessment of the proposed legislation by a copyright lawyer. Here is the position of the Association of Research Libraries.

Owners and Copyright Owners should not be forced to identify themselves. If someone were to write a piece of literature and publish it anonymously, for instance, he or she should be allowed to continue unidentified, despite the frustration of other citizens and entities who desperately desire to exploit the work, or even exhibit it.

Do we need to keep a "hands off" policy on the material forever? Not necessarily, but if the matter cannot be resolved, I suppose a hands off policy must remain, at least for a time. Presently it is "creator's lifetime + 70 years", which is a ridiculously long span of time, lobbied for by representatives for movie companies and creative artists' unions. The earlier "lifetime + 25 years" is far, far more reasonable. Ok, so your kids can only scrounge off the profits for 25 years. But this, in my view, is plenty. In the case of works deemed to be "orphan works", we could simply cut it down to 25 years from the first known instance of anyone seeing the work (and where the date of this first sighting is documentable).

What about fair use? Fair Use is a phrase that describes limited use of copyright material without payment of a fee. This is how in colleges and universities, instructors can share a couple of sentences or a paragraph with students without being sent to jail for copyright violation. The main idea is that no profit is gained from use of the material. So there is no way to commercially exploit a work and call it fair use. This must continue to be the case, even if the copyright owner is hidden. We simply cannot have copyright law trumping privacy considerations.

To summarize, I think everyone must agree that just because the copyright owner of a much desired work cannot be located, there is no excuse for permitting a means for exploiting the work. But, to reduce the waiting time for commercial use of a product, it could be reduced to just 25 years from first sighting.

Here's an alternative that I just thought up. A certain percentage of the net profits from any commercial exploitation of an orphan work could be put in a fund, and maintained on behalf of the missing owner for a period of 25 years. (The growth of the fund would be an incentive for the owner to come forward, but its protected nature might encourage the owner to be complacent about its safety and remain hidden or anonymous.) We could say that half the fund defaults to the US Government after 20 years, the rest after 5 more years, after which the work goes into the public domain. (There is already law that applies to authors who emerge after a work has been exploited for a time; the author simply gets the net profits from the exploiter.)

At any rate, I think even at the cost of keeping prospective exploiters waiting, I don't think it is fair to force authors or copyright holders to come forward or risk losing the rights to their creations. But fair use should be allowed, where fair use should not permit commercial exploitation. Finally, in my view, the term of copyright should not extend to lifetime+70 years in any case. Lifetime seems fair enough (assuming that the potential for exploitation of a work is not so great as to encourage murder), and lifetime+25 years seems ample, to accommodate do-nothing children of aged creators.

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Is it Worth the Effort: Learning About Stuff ---Music, mostly?

2011-03-31T16:29:00.000-04:00

On one hand, we all have stuff we like. On the other hand, wherever we go, there are people trying to turn us on to something different.

For instance, when I was an infant, my father used to play music to us: Bach, Kathleen Ferrier, Carols, Kreisler, Menuhin, Alfred Cortot, Artur Schnabel. I liked all these, and so there was a foundation for learning and liking more classics and light classics. Then my aunt got into the act, and I discovered Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and the Strauss waltzes.

I began to pick up a liking for pop music from my friends, and sixties pop, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits, The Beach Boys, and sundry other groups and individual artists were pretty painlessly incorporated into my list of likes.

Similarly with literature: children's books, then The Saint, James Bond, then Jane Austen, Baroness Orczy (Scarlet Pimpernel!), Dickens, Reader's Digest Condensed Books ... P.G. Wodehouse, C.P. Snow, James Thurber, Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Alexandre Dumas, Robert Stevenson, Walter Scott, etc.

It was during one Summer that I picked up a Terry Pratchett book, and I was hooked. I mean, I do occasionally read books by random authors, but it is very occasionally.

So now, I imagine, if we pick someone at random, they (i) probably already have types of music that they like. (Bear in mind that the Internet, and YouTube, and TV all conspire to keep throwing new songs and music in your face. These are all selected by how much money is being spent on them, rather than how likely the person is to actually take a liking to them. On the other hand, commercial musicians and artists are furiously trying to come up with something that most people will like, to maximize their chances of selling it.) So, if you have an opportunity to check out some new sort of music, is it worth the effort?

The same goes for books. There are books you like, and authors you like. Is it better to re-read one of your favorites, or go to the local library and browse the shelves for something new?

I should have disclosed, right at the outset, that I really have no words of wisdom for this particular puzzle. Music, books, movies, food: the question is, should we try something new?

If you're young, I say, absolutely, you should. You've got to get stocked up with experiences and delights to last you for years, and the same old ones are not likely to satisfy you forever. I still enjoy watching DVDs of movies from when I was young: The Ten Commandments, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, The Court Jester, etc, etc; these are all good fun whenever I watch them (especially with any friends who might have enjoyed the same movies, or who think a movie I like is a good risk!) So the oldies might still be goodies when you get to be a hundred, but ... take risks. An evening wasted is, after all, only an evening.

If you're a hundred already, you know, I'd say: stay with what works. There really is no harm going off to see Avatar with a nephew or a granddaughter, just to see what turns them on, but you should be able to take it or leave it. With music, you might get a bigger kick out of finding less known or rare pieces by your favorite musician or composer, than exploring completely new composers or musicians. If you're one of these high-energy, youthful grandparents, you could keep studying everything new that comes along: it keeps you young, gets you tired, and you get a good night's sleep that way.

If you're in-between, this is a big decision. This is the busiest time of your life; can you afford to be taking time out to scope out a new line of art or entertainment? A new author, a new recipe, a new kind of music, a new movie? Once you get into the swing of this, you can figure out exactly how much time you want to give it. You also become more adept at finding friends who can give you an idea whether the project is worth the effort. (This is where friends are useful.)

If your kids recommend something, I would do it. (Unless the kid is a complete idiot, and has terrible taste, in which case you ought to do it as penance.) Kids are usually sharp about what their parents would like; if they're out in left field on these things, something has to be done. I mean, is it possible to bring up a child, and that child have no clue about the person you are?

To cut a long story short, it's more a matter of what kind of things to pursue than whether to pursue them. Sometimes, if there is a team effort, it is a little more painless; this is especially true of recipes and movies. Even watching a total loser of a movie with a good bunch of friends can be entertaining.

Well, gotta go. Talk to you later,

Arch

What happens after death

2011-03-25T16:30:00.005-04:00

Recently, I learned that my mother requested a hymn based on Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" be sung at her death. I had known of this poem indirectly for some time, but had never really read it in its entirety. Tennyson's poem is a mix of his retrospective view of his life, his hopes that those he left behind would not mourn him, and his yearning for his soul to seek ---and find--- relief and comfort [and understanding] after his death.

When one gets to a certain age, it is perfectly understandable that you should look back on your life, and present it to your friends from your perspective. Its total meaning, it seems obvious, depends on the point of view; what have you learned during the course of it? What do you think of as its successes, and what are your regrets? Your friends can think what they like, but you have the right to present a framework against which you wish you would be judged.

Your hopes for those you leave behind are worthy of putting on record. Once you're gone, it could make a difference to your surviving friends and family to recall these aspirations, and in your absence, they could choose to take guidance, or encouragement, or warning from those thoughts.

As to your yearning for experiencing the infinite, for meeting your Pilot, that's a charming sentiment, but there is no pilot. There is just a Universe that simply exists. If you want to ascribe motives to the Universe, which is a conceit you could certainly indulge in, one imagines it must be on the lines of survival. [There are Conservation Laws: what we observe is that matter conducts itself in such as way as to keep certain things the same: energy, mass, momentum. This property seems to require no intervention; we non-religious types believe that it is automatic; mystics could pretend that God looks after it.] You've done your worst; now the Universe has to try and shepherd the rest of itself along the trajectories established by circumstances beyond everyone's control. A million fools out there are doing their darnedest to destroy the environment, a score [at least] of species have been obliterated, and the Universe stoically does nothing. When I die, across the earth a thousand fellow-human beings die at the same time, and we only leave dust behind, in the material sense.

If something is to survive, it must be your kindness, your wisdom, your works, your memory, and your example. You can't enjoy the survival of these, but you cannot deny their existence.

When I think of immortality, I immediately think of Johann Sebastian Bach. He is alive today in a way in which he was never alive during his lifetime. Thousands of people around the earth remember him with deep love and pleasure. He undoubtedly expected to survive death in some fashion, and be united with that great, all-knowing Cantor in the sky. Instead, he has a million human, mortal lovers, who pass on the love of his music to their children and their students and their friends.

To some, this is a poor substitute for the immortality that Bach craved in his lifetime. But I could ask for no greater destiny than to be remembered with one hundredth the love with which Bach was remembered, for a hundredth of the length of time that he will be remembered, by one millionth of the people who remember Bach!

[Added later:

I had assumed that Tennyson, when he referred to My Pilot, was speaking of god, and inferred that he was a religious man, subscribing to the common Judaeo-Christian beliefs. But why does he remark that he wants to meet the Pilot? Is it (a) curiosity? (b) To express confidence in his ability to pass muster? (c) A desire to ask for an explanation for his experiences? One has to know a lot more than I do about Tennyson to read between the lines here, and decide which of these motives were the source of that line in the poem. To us non-believers, however, all this curiosity is meaningless. There are no hidden motives; we have to perceive the potential of every circumstance in which we find ourselves, and do the best we can; the best we can for ourselves, if we do not feel any external obligation, the best for all around us, if we do.]

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HOW COULD I FORGET????? Bach's Birthday!!

2011-03-23T11:22:00.000-04:00

Oh, I could kick myself: every year I try to celebrate the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach on March 21st, essentially the date of the Spring Equinox. (As discussed in several earlier posts, at the time of his birth, different countries happened to be using different calendars, so his birthday was different in Germany and in Italy, for instance. Still, during his lifetime he would have given his birthdate as March 21, so that's when I celebrate it.)

It so happened that I wrote about Karaoke on that day, which was Monday, which connects nicely with the fact that, once Bach moved to Leipzig, he used to visit the local water-hole, called Zimmermann's Cafe, at which it was customary to have an evening of chamber music. (Many Germans are in the habit of gathering with an ---essentially fixed--- group of friends at a table in the local tavern, every week at the same time, and drinking beer, or coffee, or whatever. In our little American city, a number of people who like to practice talking German do the same on a Friday Night at Froggie's, and I have often gone to watch them. Of course, not knowing too much German, I talk to them in English, which throws them off their stride.)

The Zimmermann's Coffee House weekly events (usually on Tuesdays, I believe) of Bach and his sons and some of his friends, was a relaxed, non-religious gathering, in contrast to the flavor of Bach's official duties as Cantor of St Thomas's School, and three of the churches of Leipzig, for which he provided music. Already, in his days at Cothen and at Weimar, Bach had composed a number of wonderful concertos for various instruments: oboes, flutes, and violins, principally. Bach himself played the violin and the viola, and he has been quoted as saying that he enjoyed playing the viola especially, and being "in the middle of the harmony."

By the time the family moved to Leipzig, where Bach lived for several decades, his oldest boys were becoming adept keyboardists. So Bach re-wrote his violin concertos for keyboards instead, possibly to enable his sons to star in them, possibly because you could get away with a smaller ensemble with keyboard concertos. (In Baroque times, an orchestral ensemble featured a keyboard anyway, most of the time, so using the keyboard as the solo instrument killed two birds with a single keyboard.) In addition, it appears that Zimmermann's occasionally had two harpsichords available, which enabled double-concertos.

As I have said in earlier posts, tragically only these rewritten concertos have survived, in some instances, and musicologists have had to try and reconstruct the original violin concerto from the existing harpsichord "arrangements". The reconstructed works have often become very popular indeed, and few people realize that they are actually conjectural realizations of lost concertos which were known to have existed at one time, but have not come down to us in their original form.

A famous instance is BWV 1064. This one has survived in a 3 harpsichord version, but it was originally (as written in Cothen, we imagine) a concerto for violin, oboe, flute and orchestra. Christopher Hogwood gave himself the challenge of reconstructing the original triple concerto, and I first heard it on WQED in 1980, or thereabouts.

Sadly, it appears that the reconstruction for flute, violin and oboe has lost favor, and is very rare. A reconstruction for three violins is very common, and here is one on YouTube. I'm reluctant to upload one for fear that the performance right holder will insist that it be taken down ...

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Who controls education in the US?

2011-03-22T15:07:00.003-04:00

If you think about it, the utilitarian approach we take in the USA towards education has lots of unintended consequences. On the face of it, local schools are governed by a school board. Who populates these school boards? It is left up to the local residents, but one would expect that, ideally, there would be wide representation from parents, a lawyer or two, some teachers, or at least a couple of members with beyond the average level of education.

Unfortunately, though, in times of economic stress, the knee-jerk reaction of any community seems to be to hand the problems over to whom? Businessmen. Businessmen are supposed to be adept at cutting costs and making any operation efficient. In actual fact, businessmen are trained to encourage others to increase their spending, and meanwhile to cut their own costs.

This general reliance on business to solve all problems does not always work. One consequence of giving a bunch of bottom-liners control over school budgets is that they tend to cut out all programs that they perceive not to have utilitarian value. Businessmen become the ultimate arbiters of which components in the curriculum have value.

In many of the poorer districts, this means cutting out arts, music and drama. (Somehow athletics programs survive, because businessmen are often former meatheads.)

The Government, meanwhile, encourages this bottom-line approach to education. They insist on high performance in measurability-friendly areas such as mathematics and literacy, which local school districts interpret as requiring additional staffing in those areas, and reductions in other areas.

I am not calling for reductions in mathematics and reading budgets, but just balance among all areas. The bloated budgets of football programs could probably do with less; football is notoriously highly expensive, for very little return. I suspect that sports such as tennis and roller-hockey require far less equipment (but I could be wrong).

I strongly believe in the value of a band program. While playing in a band (even if the schmucks consider music boring) might not lead directly to a job, it fosters many skills and attitudes that are often helpful in many jobs and careers, skills that I do not even have names for, in addition to building concentration, a cooperative spirit, maintaining sustained interest in a project, an appreciation of the interrelatedness of things.

Luckily for everyone, in some localities, there are businessmen who have an appreciation of the arts, and who resist those who tend to consider The Arts as discretionary spending. But these are in the minority.

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Karaoke!!

2011-03-21T10:14:00.004-04:00

I recently visited a young family member ---OK, it was my daughter, right? Anyway--- it turns out that she's into Karaoke. It so happened that, midweek, she was joined by a friend of hers, who was touring with an off-Broadway production of the musical Legally Blonde. So all of us: the two girls, my lady friend and myself, were all dragged along to this particular Karaoke bar.

I was warned before we left my daughter's house that it was not just any Karaoke bar, it was a lesbian bar. I wasn't sure whether it was OK for us non-lesbian types to horn in on the action there, but the kid seemed to know what she was doing, so we went.

When we got there, a little after 8:00, a young lady was belting out Oh darling! by the Beatles. Let's face it; that was hard for Paul McCartney to sing, in the first place; this poor girl was trying her best, but the song was getting the best of her. We got ourselves a quiet table (there were only about ten tables, altogether, with a large space in the middle, with the microphone; I suppose there was dancing on certain nights of the week) and sat down. There was an enormous binder on the table, which I discovered contained a huge list of songs.

Soon after we had sat down, junior filled out a tiny paper form with the first song she wanted to sing, hurried around to the woman who was conducting the Karaoke program, Ann, and handed it in, and hurried back, and the two girls began earnestly studying the list.

The young lady finished Oh darling!, and Ann announced the next singer, someone named John. The first song I remember is also from John, a whole round later, when he sang Billy Joel's Moving Out. In the middle of the song, I was informed that John was, in fact, a woman. Man, did she ever do a great job with Moving Out. I could never have known he was a she.

I'm embarrassed to--- oh, wait, it was Long Train Running by the Doobie Brothers! I had almost forgotten the song Junior opened with. Oh man, she totally rocked that room, but let's face it: it's a great song! Generally, there was balance between songs that particular people wanted to sing, and songs they knew the audience would enjoy. One of the best was California Dreaming (Mamas & Papas), sung by a tall, studious-looking girl who was sitting at the bar ---in the next room--- with a gang of friends. With that song, of course, it was more fun to sing backup than the lead, and we had a great old time singing along! Gotta remember that one, in case I ever do it again. Must get someone else to sing it, and sing backup!

Just as I was getting into the groove of the thing, and had suggested to Junior to sing Love Shack (by the B52s), this young lady went up to sing it, joined by a young fellow to sing the rap portion. Of course, we all sang along with the gal. She sang some 5 or 6 songs throughout the evening, and was a fun person to watch and to listen to. We were seated where we could see the words on the monitor ---as my readers must know, Karaoke is a music-minus-one system, combined with a display that shows the words; you sing along to the music, following the bouncing ball, or some equivalent of it--- and I learned the words to some songs for the very first time. Just the titles to some of the songs she sang were hilarious, and she did a fabulous job with every song. (Most of the young ladies present I would not have identified as lesbians; not that it matters whether I could have. The singers interacted with each other in a perfectly relaxed manner, though there were several distinct groups that mostly hung out among themselves, only rarely interacting with the others, except to cheer enthusiastically, or make a --usually positive-- remark about a performance.

Junior and her friend sang Alone by Heart, which was totally awesome. Her friend had a wonderful high soprano, and together they were better than almost anyone who could have sung that song, in my humble opinion, but you realize I have only been to just one of these things, so I was easily impressed. They also sang Shoop (Salt 'n' Pepa), with considerably less success.

Then a young fellow went up to sing a fabulous torch song, which sounded familiar. He couldn't reach some of the notes, and he urged the audience to help him out with gestures, and they responded beautifully. I just remembered the song: it was Unbreak my Heart by Toni Braxton. What a talent Toni Braxton was! A decade ago when we had TV, we watched lots of the Top Ten - type TV shows (Solid Gold, etc), and MTV, and of course Toni Braxton was huge; I haven't been paying attention to the pop music scene enough to know what happened to the gorgeous woman.

When it began to sink in that Ann's success was measured more in terms of how much alcohol was sold at the bar than in how many people got up to sing, I asked for an Irish Coffee, since the following day was St Patrick's Day. It was brought out shortly after midnight, with green sprinkles on, after much complaint that it would take more than an hour to brew the coffee. I wasn't about to be railroaded into drinking beer, because it messes me up, so I waited. Ann herself came by to visit with Junior while someone else was singing (I forgot to say that Ann also sang, about 4 numbers throughout the evening, and was easily the most professional singer in the room), and kept urging the rest of us to sing. Finally, just when she had been back for the third time, I found Can't buy me love (Beatles), and succumbed to temptation.

It was the first time I had ever sung into a microphone, and it was terrible. I mean, I have sung into a little microphone in order to record a song for YouTube, etc. But never to a live audience. Oh, wait ... I have sung into a mike, back when I was, like, 19 or 20 ... I had managed to forget that little factoid ... it was Last night I had the Strangest Dream, after the Simon & Garfunkel performance on Wednesday Morning, 3 AM.

We left soon afterwards. The girls insisted that my rendering of Can't buy me Love was adorable, but I got the impression that it was marginal. (I was accustomed to singing it in A, but I suspect that the Karaoke version might have been in a lower key.)

I'm definitely hooked. At some locations, I'm told, the rivalry between performers is a little oppressive, but Junior seems not to mind. At busier places, however, it is a long wait between chances at the microphone, so the smaller venues are better for those who want to sing often throughout the evening. Everyone cheers everyone ---except for me; only our table cheered, quite understandably--- and people are appreciative of everyone's attempts to sing. A big meal before going in would be conducive to staying sober despite all the imbibing that goes on ... and of course, some of the performers need a drink or two to wet their whistles.

Arch

The Boxer

2011-03-09T16:48:00.001-05:00

This song captures beautifully the woes of someone looking for a job, and the hostility of the big Eastern cities as seen by a vulnerable migrant from the heartland ...

Liberal Arts & The Bad Economy

2011-03-08T11:48:00.009-05:00

I have to admit, this is a tough call. I don't feel qualified to express an opinion on what to do during a contracting economy (or the economy formerly described as contracting) such as we have now, since I really haven't tried to get a job recently. But I have heard experts who are concerned with employment of young graduates speak about what qualifications are most useful when job-seeking, and the following keep cropping up (and I've written about them before, but who knows whether any of it was useful):

The ability to write. This only applies to jobs where you're expected to write on behalf of your employer. In addition, if you have to make a good impression on behalf of your employer, the ability to write good grammatical English becomes important. On the other hand, for an employee of Chemlawn, just the ability to write "Needs cut and watered" is plenty.

The ability to use a computer. Again, if you're just delivering pizza, the ability to use a cellphone is probably sufficient. But think big. You might move on to big Party Pizzas, and then ... the sky's the limit!

The ability to speak clearly. Most important in any job. You'll probably have to stick to jobs with your immediate family if you can't be understood by outsiders. With big companies, the ability to give a good presentation on something you have prepared becomes more important.

Working with people. People at the top don't like to deal with idiots, so the new hires become the front of any business. You get to talk to everyone, and filter through anyone who needs to talk to the higher-ups. This is where a liberal education comes in.

On the one hand, the more complex our society and its business becomes, the more one has to specialize. Unfortunately, this is a two-edged sword: if you're highly specialized within a particular business, (A) it becomes harder for the company to replace you, because they have to train someone to do what you do. On the other hand, (B) it's harder for you to find a job, because you're so accustomed to thinking in the specific ways you have been required to think at your present employment, that it's difficult to start new thought-patterns.

If you're too specialized, to begin with, e.g. graduated with a technical degree, you're already working with a disadvantage. Liberal Arts graduates don't know a great deal about most things, but they do know a little of everything. People like Ken Robinson seem to be saying that new specializations that no one has ever heard of are going to become increasingly important. But when the economy turns sour, the variety of things you have been experiencing and learning suddenly become invaluable. You used to counsel students, but you're suddenly fired, and now you're managing a warehouse. You used to manage a department of a retail store, but suddenly you're selling make-up. You used to sell make-up, but suddenly you're a relief school-bus driver who can't parallel park to save your life. Don't write off any of your skills as unimportant.

A friend of mine who used to have a salaried job with a significant amount of responsibility was out of a job recently. She wonders whether to be choosy about the jobs she takes, or go for anything. This is the sort of choice that is hard to advise about: save yourself for that brilliant job that may come along, or take anything that pays money?

If this slump continues, it seems practical to take any job. You can always keep looking while you're employed, and pretty soon the fact that you are employed, however humbly, may poison your resumé a lot less than having been unemployed for too long.

What about a Liberal Arts education in a good economy?

We were recently discussing the so-called general education requirement at our school. This is the part where they insist that students take courses in a variety of subject areas, and not just in their area of specialization (or "major"). Why is this done? Its origins may, indeed, lie in renaissance times when the idea of formal education was being invented. Education was for the minority back then: initially the younger children of landowners and later, those of artisans and businessmen and tradesmen, who would help their families' ability to diversify; and the advantages of diversification were present back then just as they are today. In the Industrial Age, as Robinson points out, public education was systematized and regularized, but the principle of a liberal ---i.e., a diverse--- education was retained. At the upper level, it was impossible to enforce a common curriculum for everyone, since the natural inclinations of students would eventually lead them to concentrate on subjects that they enjoyed learning (or which their parents insisted they should learn). But insisting on a certain variety in the curriculum had enormous advantages. In addition to the fact that increasing complexity of life required a variety of skills, the liberal education provided a desperately needed social cohesion that offset the fragmentation of society along specialization lines. Thus the businessmen and the engineers and the teachers had a core of experience in common, which enabled them to relate to each other (despite the different mini-cultures that develop within various trades).

Today, more than ever, this social cohesion is important. Society is splintering now, along ideological lines. Declining resources induce splitting in any society; the fragmentation of countries of the Third World in the 20^th Century were caused by increasing populations and decreasing incomes, which turned neighbors against each other, since they were all competing for the same jobs, and their children were competing for the same spots in schools and universities. And we thought it couldn't happen here! Haha. But the situation would be much worse, if not for the fact that there is a certain amount of shared experience, at least within the middle class, and the educated segments of the working class. We've all hated the same adverbial clauses and quadratic equations. [Note: I have observed young people in very economically depressed areas in this country, and as of now I have not noticed any tendency to hostility between youths who are all competing for the same jobs. On the other hand, they tend to gather together and drink, which is hardly a better thing.]

Increasingly important is cohesion within institutions of learning. It used to be that the friends you made in college were your friends for life. But increasingly the libertarians on campus have little to do with the social liberals. If the requirements for a common, diverse curriculum were to be relaxed, it could be the last nail in the coffin of school identity, and more importantly, the demise of the slight social cohesion that college graduates take away with them.

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The Beatles: Let It Be

2011-03-03T17:57:00.003-05:00

My first opportunity to be totally overwhelmed by the Beatles was when our House won 2nd place in an inter-house drama competition, and we were allowed to go see A Hard Day's Night. This was my first experience of not only The Beatles, but seeing this new wave of movies that were a lot darker than what I was used to. A Hard Day's Night, of course, was shot in black-and-white by Richard Lester and co.

It so happened that I was away at boarding school, which explains why I did not have access to Beatles records; in any case, the stereo system we had at home could not possibly compare to the sound of the theater (or cinema). I was simply blown away! The songs that stood out for me were I should have known better, If I fell, And I love her, and I'm happy just to dance with you.

I can't remember the details of my whirlwind progress through the various stages of being a fan, but eventually I found myself in the theater (cinema) again, watching Let It Be with sadness; it was a bitter-sweet documentary of the breakup of the group.

Let It Be was a beautifully shot movie. It is set entirely in the recording studio (which I very recently discovered was an unpleasant, cold room they had leased for Paul McCartney's project to show the group putting an album together. You do see the musicians somewhat more heavily dressed than they would in a warmer room!) The album let it be quite faithfully records the musical aspects of the sessions, and listening to the record brings back the images of the film for me very effectively (despite the improvements made by the infamous Phil Spector, the American record producer who was given the tapes, and asked to assemble them into an album. Some of the production elements are widely considered to be excessive).

The album, if not the movie, opens with the song Two of us, which it turns out was a song written by Lennon and McCartney in their pre-Beatles days, or at least in the early days of the group. (Notice that Paul is playing an acoustic guitar, while George ---the usual lead guitarist--- is playing bass. Also notice Yoko Ono sitting next to John.)

The next song I remember is I dig a pony, which is a whimsical song sung mainly by John Lennon, and seems to epitomize the difference between Beatles songs, and songs the four musicians wrote and sang after they had split up. In this clip, they're singing it on the Rooftop: a performance that famously caused traffic congestion on the street below.

A strange number that found its way into the album is I, me, mine, also sung either by Lennon or Harrison; I really can't tell! (Harrison, now that I think about it). The waltz rhythm is unusual in rock music. It breaks into solid 12/8 for the chorus. We also hear the distinctive sound of the electric organ played by Billy Preston, who had been invited to sit in with the band.

I seemed to have skipped over the magical and atmospheric Across the Universe by Lennon. The version we got on the original album was heavily over-processed by Spector, but is for many the version that they remember the best. "Words are pouring out, like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe ..." In the album Let it be --Naked, this song was presented without the distortion introduced by Spector. However, the choral background is missing.

The title track, Let it Be is an interesting and highly recognizable song by Paul McCartney. In the movie, we see him at the piano, in close up, singing soulfully, gazing at the camera. There is a little organ, a little guitar, and "Oo"s added; otherwise it's just voice and piano and percussion. (It appears that McCartney had been drinking before this track was recorded. These were very difficult days for the group.)

I've got a feeling is another song they dug out of their stock of songs from the old days. This is a duet with John and Paul, and one of the last.

One after 909. Another duet, from the early sixties (or possible even earlier). The Wikipedia article on the album gives detailed information about which tracks from the Rooftop concert were actually used on the album, and which ones were from the studio sessions.

The Long and Winding Road. Note that this clip is essentially the version we see in the film, rather than the the one with orchestrated overdubs added by Phil Spector. That version is familiar since it is the one on the singles (or EPs) of the time, and the one heard most often on the radio.

A lot of McCartney's music is nostalgic, alluding to songs of the 30's and 40's that were heard in the McCartney home in his childhood. The chord he uses are heavy on sevenths and (added) sixths, reminiscent of British music of that era.

For You Blue. Harrison. Lennon plays 'lap steel guitar'.

Part of the exercise of these recording sessions, the way McCartney looked at it, was to get the group playing together and having fun. Their tastes in music had diverged over the years, but he was convinced that they could find something in common if they Got Back to their roots. But you see, in the movie, how Paul McCartney's forceful leadership was irksome to the others, and how documenting it in film was embarrassing to them. It is easy to see how Paul could eventually come to view it as a chronicle of his personal failure as a leader. In retrospect, though, for those of us who were fans, we got a lot of insight into both the kind of music they had made in the early days, but more importantly, how they could not keep making that sort of music for an extended period of time. Not that it was bad music, but that it wasn't grown up enough for all of them.

Several years later, McCartney showed up at George's home with a ukulele, and they reminisced about the good old days, and played music together. Ringo, Paul and George were most satisfied with reaching back for their old music. John Lennon, in his thirties, was impatient with all that. He may have gotten to the point where it appealed to him---he had an impish sense of humor---but he died young, long before we could find out if he could relate to all that nostalgia.

Get Back. This was the last song they performed together, in all our memories; at least the last performance filmed. Notice Billy Preston playing the organ with great glee.

What a sad occasion, but what fantastic music!

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A gripe! (ANOTHER gripe, I should probably say...)

2011-02-25T12:42:00.002-05:00

I'm not the only one who has complained about this:

The WWW enables all sorts of people to have their writing read publicly (I guess published is the word I want), and we're beginning to find out just how terrible the grammar and the spelling of the average person is.

Just in a single user review on Amazon, I got (talking about shoes): "They run true to size, and ... fit my feet perfect!" I would have preferred to see perfectly, but we know what he means.

"... The insole has a blue jell like material under the heal and ball of the foot." The proper word, I think, is heel, speaking of feet. But most times we can tell the difference, and deduce the intended meaning.

"They don't look like the walking shoes you see on the seniors making a trip around the mall, or trying to impress everyone with what you're wearing." The good spelling on this one is wasted on the sentence. The second phrase (or is it a clause?) is obscure; it probably has to do with the writer's observation in the previous sentence that the logo is not too big. Are the seniors walking around the Mall trying to impress everyone with what you're wearing? What they're wearing? What the writer is wearing? Why doesn't he leave the ambiguous seniors out of it?

Anyway, apart from annoying a small minority of people who were taught rules of grammar, syntax, punctuation and spelling, all these linguistically loose cannons are apparently getting their points across. Furthermore, there is deep annoyance at those who use big words (unless they're the latest thing), and painfully correct language, which is described as pedantic. So we're in for years of suffering at the hands of young writers who are less apt to follow rules and good examples than to feel the force, and write in a loosy-goosy style of writing.

[Continued]

I think what is happening is that people neglect writing until they're out of high school, and then they find that their friends can figure out what they mean fairly well, despite the horrible lapses in spelling and grammar. They therefore proceed to write in public forums such as Amazon, Facebook, and sundry blogs as if only their much-forgiving friends were going to read their writing. In addition, the idiot lobby has been very successful in squelching observations about grammar and spelling (orthography) whenever it comes up ---including some members of the English teaching profession, doing the squelching, I mean--- and so it becomes not quite PC to mention spelling or grammar in polite company.

When I was a kid, I was moderately careful not to offend anybody. Then, of course, in the sixties, the fashionable thing was to offend everybody equally, like Professor Higgins, in My Fair Lady, or Pygmalion. In the Eighties, it was a matter of choosing carefully whom you offend. In any case, not offending those who are irritated by poor grammar and spelling is no longer high on anyone's priority list. People like me who are offended by poor grammar and spelling are called curmudgeons (or carmudgeons, and there might be a couple of alternative acceptable spellings) and considered irrelevant. George W. Bush, possibly the least well-spoken President of the USA was more laughed-at than criticized for his poor English. Yale University will never live down my scorn for having graduated such a fool. On the plus side, though, he made several million idiot people out there more confident about their ability to someday make it into the White House. It must have been startling to be set back by Barack Obama, arguably one of the most intelligent occupants of the oval office. History will establish the wisdom of Barack Obama, but his intelligence is beyond dispute.

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