Felt like recording this song, for no terribly convincing reason. Again, used my Yamaha digital piano as a MIDI controller into Apple GarageBand on my MacBook Pro. Wish GB’s instruments were as good as the ones on the Yamaha (ca. 1996).
Or download speak-softly.mp3 (possibly by right-clicking). It’s just over 2 minutes and 2 megabytes.
ASCAP wants $288 annually for a ‘new media/internet’ license, even if I broadcast just one piece and have zero income from it. Screw that. Maybe I’ll get away with it — I hit enough wrong notes that it ought to qualify as a new composition.
Common Craft has a fun and engaging style for presenting “Web 2.0” technologies with paper and white-boards. Found at Presentation Zen, but I chose a different video than the two that appear there. Enjoy “Wikis in Plain English”…
Here’s my synthesized rendition (recorded using my Yamaha digital piano as a MIDI controller into Apple GarageBand on my MacBook Pro) of the first movement of Vivaldi’s concerto grosso in D minor (opus 3, number 11).
Or download vivaldi-cto-11-1.mp3 (possibly by right-clicking). It’s just under 5 minutes and 5 megabytes.
On most days, I am an extreme rationalist and philosophical materialist, but I have one major weakness. Any ‘delusion’ that inspired (for example) J.S. Bach to compose the Mass in B minor is definitely worth maintaining.
I recognize the fallacy. In Bach’s culture, credo in unum deum was the only game in town. Apologists may claim that without it, the Bachs could have been a family of bakers. And perhaps their panem diem would have been divine too, but centuries later we could not partake.
At counterpoint is the old sentiment that an ordinary person must be thoroughly trained to excel, but we’d have to train a prodigy not to. Who is to say what Bach could have composed if he grasped our deep and ancient connection to all life on earth, or perceived the majesty of the cosmos as we understand it today?
Still, what a tragedy it would be not to have the Mass in B minor. Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. Dona nobis pacem.
Grammar maven Patricia T. O’Conner responded via email to my query about suffix orthogonality. I don’t think she will mind my reprinting it here.
Hi, Chris,
You’ve done a lot more thinking about this suffix business than I have. Most of the shades of difference with adjectives ending in “-ic” and “-ical” seem to have developed idiomatically and there are no general rules governing them.
Suffixes in general can be quite mysterious. For example, two opposite suffixes (”-less” and “-ful”) give similar meanings the case of “shameless” and “shameful.” But I may be able to come up with some rough guidelines for certain kinds of suffixes.
In the case of agent nouns formed by adding “-er” and “-or,” there’s a generality to be made. Often the “-er” ones come from Old English (like “singer,” with roots in ancient Germanic), while the “-or” ones are derived from Latin (like “editor,” from the Latin edere*, “edit”). Even here, though, there are exceptions. When an English word has both endings (like “adviser”/”advisor”), the “-er” ending is often the older one. In the case of some legal terms, it appears that lawyers historically have been fonder of more pompous-looking Latinate endings than of simple Germanic ones. (Historically, English academics, jurists, and churchmen always respected Latin more than Old English, which explains much of the confusion about English grammar.)
Then there’s the “-ible”-vs.”-able” ending. If there’s a generality to be made, it’s this: Often a word derived from Old English or another Germanic source (like Old Dutch, Old Icelandic, Old Norse and so on) will end in “able” (“forgivable,” “lovable,” “readable”). But a word derived directly from Latin will end in “ible” (“terrible,” “audible,” “legible”). Again, this is only a rough generality, since there are exceptions. And oddities too: “eatable” is from the Old English etan (”eat”) while “edible” is from the Latin edere* (”eat”).
I can understand how a mathematician might be frustrated by all these generalities. As the grammarian Otto Jespersen once said, this isn’t Euclidean geometry.
Pat O’Conner
*The Latin edere can mean to eat, to publish, to edit, to give forth.
In English, the suffixes ‘-ic’ and ‘-ical’ both form adjectives from nouns. An object exhibiting symmetry is ‘symmetric’, and the aims of a devil are ‘diabolical’.
My question is about how we use each suffix. For some roots, they seem interchangeable (diabolic vs. diabolical). For others they produce distinct shades of meaning (mythic vs. mythical). In some cases, one conceivable variant is absent from the dictionary and never used (chaotic vs. *chaotical, or *chemic vs. chemical). And in other cases, one variant seems to be preferred but the other can be found in the dictionary and is often heard (cyclic vs. cyclical).
To me personally, words like ‘cyclical’, ‘symmetrical’, and ‘fantastical’ clearly have redundant suffixes, because ‘cyclic’, ‘symmetric’, and ‘fantastic’ are already perfectly good adjectives. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to apply my own rule consistently, because I would use ‘parenthetical’ over ‘parenthetic’.
Nouns ending in ‘-ic’ confuse things too: ‘magic’ is both a noun and an adjective, but we also have ‘magical’ to make slight semantic distinctions. A “magic journey” is supernatural (perhaps enabled by a magic carpet or enchanted broomstick), whereas a “magical journey” is merely extraordinary.
‘Logic’ is strictly a noun (we need -al to form the adjective), but mysteriously, both ‘gynecologic’ and ‘gynecological’ are listed in my dictionary as adjectives. Similarly, ‘graphic’ and ‘graphical’ are both adjectives, as is ‘cryptographic’, but not *‘cryptographical’. In the former case, there might again be different shades of meaning: is a graphic depiction the same as a graphical depiction?
Is there any pattern or method to this madness? As a borderline mathematician, I would prefer orthogonal grammatical characteristics (orthogonalistical grammatic characterisms); as a language user, perhaps I must submit to its haphazardly evolved nature.
Ever since I was eight years old, a succession of piano teachers have told me I have ‘perfect pitch’. Such pronouncements invariably followed a brief, poorly-controlled test wherein I turned my back to the piano and guessed whether the teacher had played C, F♯, G, B♭, or whatever. I could do this semi-reliably, though not very quickly. As a parlor trick, it would do. Much later, I heard of people that could instantly name all the harmonics in the screech of a car’s tires. My ability was never to that level, but still I assumed that what I could do qualified as perfect, or ‘absolute’ pitch.
So when I heard that there was a pitch study at UCSF with an online test, I jumped at the opportunity to try it out. And I failed miserably:
If I interpret the scores correctly, it basically means my pitch recognition was useless — bottom quintile or so. Half the tests were with pure tones (sine waves), while the other half were piano tones. I did significantly better with the piano, but still pretty miserable.
So what’s going on here? Maybe what I have is just relative pitch (recognition of intervals, not absolute pitches), combined with a fairly reliable memory of what ‘middle C’ sounds like on a piano. And in my defense, I hadn’t even touched a piano for a few weeks before taking this test.
But still I think it’s more than that. I can hardly play my digital piano when it is set to transpose everything even a half step up or down. Unless I concentrate very hard on watching my fingers on the keyboard, I make many mistakes because the pitches arriving in my ears do not match the keys that I know I just played. One would think that difficulty playing on a transposed keyboard is a hallmark of absolute pitch.
Luckily, I found a more friendly and configurable pitch tester hosted in Japan. You can specify how many octaves and which keys to test. I can do pretty well if you stick to 1.5 octaves of white keys:
This month, I became a published photographer. Some time ago, Mark Zachry happened across my Australia photos and contacted me about the possibility of using one of them for the cover of an academic book he was co-editing. Mark is a professor of technical communication at the University of Washington, and the book is Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions: Cultural Perspectives on the Regulation of Discourse and Organizations [Amazon] [B&N] [Baywood]. I received a gratis copy of the book at my office address today.
My original photograph.
This is not the first time my photographic work has been used by others; I’m aware of various event tickets, business cards, and presentations. But this is (as far as I know) the first time one of my photographs has been displayed on Amazon and B&N. If you do “search inside” at Amazon and click one page past the cover, you’ll find my photo credit at the bottom of the page. That’s somewhat exciting.
Incidentally, commercial use such as this is not permitted by the default license, so don’t start treating my site as istockphoto! To reproduce my photographic work commercially, you must seek specific permission (as Mark did). If the thrill of having my amateur work appear on Amazon wears off, I may start raising the fee.
Somehow we got hooked on the Discovery Channel show Man vs. Wild, where former UK special forces soldier Bear Grylls parachutes into some god-forsaken landscape with just a knife and a windbreaker, and demonstrates how to survive for several days and find civilization again. Along the way, he ingests unspeakable things and gets himself in more trouble than needed — knowingly jumping breast-deep into quick sand, for example — ostensibly to instruct us on how to get out.
It’s a little hard to explain my fascination. I can tell just from the adverts that I’m not the expected target audience. But I think it stimulates some deep-seated survival instinct that we all must have. (And if this effete urbanite has any interest in survival under such conditions, then it must be innate.)
I sense a certain connection to another of my unlikely interests: dystopian literature and film. I am fascinated by the various ways healthy societies collapse, and what it takes to navigate the new world order. Bear’s adventures end the moment he finds a paved road, but I’m much more interested in what would happen when there’s no reasonable civilization to return to. If you can never again be certain of getting your next meal from a supermarket or restaurant, what then? How to organize a new society, and possibly a resistance, whilst surviving in the jungle?
Perhaps these questions are beyond the scope of the show, and the only question needed to explain our fascination is this: When will the Etonian hottie take off his shirt?
There’s also a sense in which I’m waiting for him to fail. Just once, one of his ballsy maneuvers should land him in enough trouble that he needs an airlift. For the sake of realism, of course, not Schadenfreude…
I’m a latecomer to this fad, but here’s my entry into the transparent screen phenomenon that was all the rage. It’s far from perfect. But it’s true that the final image is not a composite; photoshop trickery is needed only to create the desktop background image. And even that was fairly simple-minded in my case, because I don’t know how to use any of the perspective tools in Gimp.
This reminds me: I can’t stand when someone observes an act of amateur creativity and says “he has too much time on his hands.” I guess it reflects the Protestant work ethic: idle hands are the devil’s tools and all that. But in my estimation, it tends to be said by people who spend much of their leisure time parked in front of the boob tube. Who are you to judge that reruns of Friends are more worthwhile than making an Earth sandwich? Personally, I want to live in a world where everyone has the time and inclination to pursue whatever creative outlets strike their fancy.
For some reason, we went to see ‘300’ this weekend. Spartan values don’t need such glorification — particularly in this age, which doesn’t exactly seem to be a new Enlightenment. The Village Voice had it about right: “Spartan hotties trounce Persian trannies.” I heard someone behind me shout “Take that, faggot!” when Leonidas reached Xerxes with his spear. (I’d like to hear that repeated directly to Xerxes, who — despite some eye liner, facial hardware, and gold body paint — was portrayed as about 3m tall.)
Shallow parallels to today’s geopolitics abound, but I wonder how ‘pro-life’ warmongers interpreted the portrayal of Spartans chucking less-than-perfect newborns off the cliff.
To its credit, there was some truly spectacular imagery. And I enjoyed lines that revealed (in my view) that the film wasn’t taking itself too seriously:
King Leonidas: “Dilios, I trust that scratch hasn’t made you useless.” Dilios, bandaging half his head: “Hardly, my lord. It’s just an eye. The gods saw fit to grace me with a spare.”
Follow-up about BitTorrent: at some point, I read the FAQ and found that for BT to work correctly, one needs to forward ports to overcome the Network Address Translation done by the router. (Would have been easy except that I forgot my router config password and had to reset it.) But after doing that, the number of peers increased significantly, and with it both upload and download rates. That’s more like it!
In my email the other day, I received a message with an image claiming that:
Wow, sounds great, I thought. Where was this when I was doing my thesis research? So is it based on the lambda calculus? I read on:
Ah, that kind of ‘type system’. Come to think of it, the message was from myfonts.com…
I missed a big chunk of yesterday’s Simpsons because it was delayed by some silly game and the DVR is not smart enough to compensate.
But in what I saw, the Aquarium by Camille Saint-Saëns (from Le Carnaval des Animaux — that link is to the iTunes Music Store) played a significant role. It was the soundtrack during the home movie. (I wish I could say I identified the piece on my own, but the closed-captions gave it away. In fact, they’re often helpful for decoding cultural references in the Simpsons, e.g.: [March theme from The Great Escape (1963) playing.])
It occurred to me that I don’t have much Saint-Saëns in my collection. Now, I’m not typically an enormous fan of French impressionists — in music or painting — and I guess I sometimes lump Camille in with Debussy and Ravel. Maybe not an entirely accurate classification, but I’m not a musicologist. Anyway, I certainly enjoy the Saint-Saëns Organ Concerto. In fact, I thought I had a copy, but if so, it never made its way onto my hard disks. (My grandmother was a big fan of that piece, having encountered it in the France part of Epcot… I believe it’s the soundtrack during the simulated lift up La Tour Eiffel. Took us several visits to identify it when I was a kid.)
No, it turns out the only Saint-Saëns in my collection is The Swan from Carnaval — probably the most famous piece therein, and part of some other compilation — and a Havanaise for violin and orchestra. Will have to remedy that.
This TV show advert — plastered all around New York lately — is making me angry. Why?
That curly thing is not an apostrophe! And you don’t have to be a font freak or typography wonk to know the difference. In grade school — before I could distinguish Garamond from Gill Sans, before Adobe Systems was founded — I knew that an apostrophe curved down and to the left.
So how did this happen? Considering that computer keyboards have no ‘left curly single quote’ key — and that probably 98% of all computer users wouldn’t know how to type that character if their lives depended on it — how could this gaffe occur when the apostrophe key is right there on your keyboard?
Yes, you know where I’m going with this: SmartQuotes.™
This is the feature on many word processors and desktop publishers that automatically converts typewriter-style straight quotes into curly ones. Unfortunately, it does a poor job of it, and that’s often worse than not doing the job at all.
Now, I’m not one to ridicule or be offended by home-made garage sale fliers and grocery store signage with their superfluous quotation marks. Er, well, I don’t extensively ridicule them.
But here is a case of a major broadcasting firm with professional graphic artists plastering their large full-color ads across a major city in which you can’t swing a cat without hitting a designer. There’s just no excuse.
P.S., it’s even wrong in the HTML on the web site:
By the way, the iPod-in-car setup is working out great for the commute. I love having what is essentially a portable TiVo for public radio.
Of all the shows I’m listening to lately, the highlight has definitely been Radio Lab. It appears to have been a limited run series, with just two seasons of a half dozen shows each. But it’s really brilliant. Dear Jad, make more!
I’m afraid if I were to try to describe it, I’d have a hard time distinguishing it from This American Life (“each week we have a theme…”). TAL is usually pretty good too, but Radio Lab is something altogether different. The image of a goat perched on top of a cow on the side of a California highway is still with me. [Detective Stories, aired 14 April 2006]
Another honorable mention is BBC’s Digital Planet, which is just technology news (and not particularly technical) but Gareth Mitchell is fun and easy on the ears.
Say No to Extra credit
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