Mozart: Clever Dick

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

.

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?

.
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!!

.

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

.

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

.

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

.

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

.

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!

Arch

Shale Gas: Pennsylvania's House Drops the Ball

.

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.]

Arch

Orphan Works: The Views of an Ignoramus

.

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.

Arch