Take 4 at a stable blog
My general rants and speeches
No, not the jeans.
I did a round of Power 90, not P90X, yesterday evening. And goodness was it tough. This is what I get for not working out for a whole semester.
Same thing is happening for my clarinet skills too. It’s just so rusty.
It’s too bad I can’t do the stuff I used to be able to do in high school right now. đ
Many discoveries in physics and mathematics seemed to occur concurrently, with a few people uncovering (or almost finding) the important concept. The standard example is how Gauss and Newton simultaneously developed calculus, albeit in a different notation. I have also read that if Einstein never existed, contemporaries of him would have found the same relationships in physic, albeit a few years later.
So does this apply to music? Is Beethoven’s 5th inevitable in a sense? Is the development of Romantic music automatic? What about contemporary music?
In a sense, yes. There are a finite number of melodies to be played. That finite number is quite large though. One can argue eventually a composer, let’s call him Waspthoven, would stumble upon the sequence of intervals and rhythms which is the melody, but that is not all of a symphony. Chords and “transitions” play an equally important role in any form of music. Waspthoven would then have to piece together the correct sequence of silence and sound, dissonance and consonance.
But then, would the period be ripe for the publication? Would the public have accepted Waspthoven’s composition? After all, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was met with such horror that riots broke out. Besides the public opinion, the matter of logistics also plagues our hypothetical composer. Will there be enough high-quality instruments to play what Waspthoven wanted? Would there be a concert hall to play it in?
Certainly some music are highly period dependent. Bach’s come to mind, when writing for religious purposes is the sole motive; a symphony as abrasive as the 5th would have never been performed then. That means if a genius like Stravinsky was born in the wrong time period, his or her work would be forever lost. It’s kind of poetic to think of unappreciated genius, but also sombering to think of where we could be now culturally, and scientifically.
I guess a correct way to phrase what I’m asking is that is music primarily driven by “Great Man” or is development primarily from the social period? Maybe some other theory of history?
Ha, what kind of layover is even good?
My itinerary for going back to the US:
I’ll be in London for a random 12 hours. UGH.
I’ve been getting into long-form journalism recently, and trying to read more in-depth materials rather than have superfluous posts from reddit. It’s quite weird that I can work on Putnam problems for hours on end, yet struggle through reading a 2000 word article. Maybe it’s just my motivation level?
I find also that my attention span has been getting shorter, and I am a more impatient person than in the past; this is especially true when I’m doing homeworks in pure-math classes. There are times when I just want a solution now, and not work at a problem for a bit. It seems to be a by-product of switching over to more computational stuff, where results can be obtained instantly and results can be almost “generated.”
Hopefully reading more will slow me down, because sometimes the mundane parts of life are worth slowing down for.
I’m sure everyone has a fascination with the conundrum that is North Korea…
Some surreal quotes from this long, but extremely worthwhile, article detailing a chef’s adventures in North Korea:
Its staff of 200 approved every element of Kim’s diet. Each grain of Kim’s rice was hand-inspected for chips and cracksâonly perfectly shaped rice, grown in North Korea, was approved. […]Â All were impressed when Fujimoto served the freshest meal of all: still-living fish he’d fillet alive by cutting around the organsâa skill he’d learned while working at Japan’s Tsukiji fish market.
As a wedding prank, Kim Jong-il had the unconscious Fujimoto’s pubic hair shaved off.
A month after the wedding, Fujimoto and Jong-yo snuck off to meet her family. Her relative success as a singer had not bettered their circumstances. Fujimoto discovered her family of six living in a single room. Four of them would later die of asphyxiation when, on a cold night without heat, they brought a bucket of hot coals into their room for warmth.
 And every time he asked me to kiss his face, he always said to me, If you betray me, you will… Then he would go silent and make a gesture of a knife going into my stomach.”
He remained on Kim’s good side, with the occasional lapse. He once failed to clean his room at a guesthouse, and Kim decided to make an example of him by taking away his kitchen. For six months, Fujimoto was forced to prepare sushi in a gymnasium.
As the famine became devastating, Kim Jong-il had the former agricultural minister’s body exhumed from the Patriots’ Cemetery and subjected to a posthumous execution by firing squad.
I said, “But they were sent to the coal mine, your wife and children, to be re-educated.”
Fujimoto seemed untroubled by this. He said he’d done all that he could. Right away, he started writing letters of apology to Kim Jong-il.
“And it worked,” he said. “After six years, they were freed.”
NPR’s TED Radio Hour latest podcast was titled “To The Edge” where adventurers discussed, amongst other topics, why they did what they did. One wanted to escape the mundane life of a management consultant. Philippe Petit wanted it for the beauty. The most famous answer is the quintessential “because it is there.”
There are actually thousands of adventurers among us who make that aphorism their motto. They eat, drink, sleep at places we think cannot be the mark of a swashbuckler though, and scale great obstacles we cannot see. Those people are the researchers who teeter at the edge of human knowledge.
To do research is to literally step off the edge of what humanity knows, and try to expand that swath just a tiny bit so that someone can stand on where there use to be nothing. For most of them in science, they might see their work used by a doctor at some point, or become an intricate cog in the unifying proof of everything. Their goals might be similar to my own, in bettering the world to a visible extent.
On the other hand, those who toil in philosophy, history or language, I never can fully understand why do they do it? Maybe they do it simply for the beauty (though as a mathematician, I’m biased that mathematics is the most beautiful). The best reason reason that I have construed is simply “because it is there”; that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is innately useful.
And I find that beautiful too.
I agree the world is shitty right now. There are civil strifes in Syria, ISIS in Iraq and Putin is flexing the unused Russian muscles. It is not the end times though.
It seems ridiculous that more than almost HALF of Americans said that recent natural disasters are the results of the apocalypse rather than climate change according to a study by PRRI. Thankfully, a good 60
This doesn’t seem to be a fluke either. I took a look at their methodology, and it seems to be fine from a cursoury glance. They sampled some 3000 people via a phone survey with a seemingly good distribution of people. The Jewish people are overrepresented slightly, but that’s a small perturbation.
What this means is that science holds such little sway in the American public that explanations from Revelations outweighs what scientists has to say. The thousands of years of technological advances means almost nothing to half of the public, even as their lives are better than ever. This is absolutely terrifying to me.
You know what else is terrifying? Applying to graduate school and hoping I get in somewhere.
It’s been quite awhile since I posted. Laziness and business both contributed to my dearth of content. On the other hand, there’s still a lot of stuff I want to get off my chest at times, so here’s one of them.
So how intercountry (intra?) trains work in Europe is that you can reserve a seat, and you have the right to eject the person who’s sitting on your seat by the time you get on. At Prague, I got on the train and went to my compartment. Turns out some lady was sitting in my seat (you probably know where this is going…). I didn’t want to be a dick and so I sat in a non-reserved seat of the compartment.
As the train went on, she started to pull out random books, read a while, then proceeded to write in a Moleskin notebook. Around an hour plus before I reached Budapest, I asked whether she was a writer. This led to us conversing for the rest of the way about stuff from politics, math, League of Legends, education, sociology, Kant, feminism and so much more. Turns out she’s a German, senior in college, going to Budapest for 2 weeks to volunteer at a conference….
But guess what. The one thing I didn’t ask for was her name nor email.
I wasn’t even interested in romance, I just felt a potential great friend is gone. A lot of the people I meet while travelling are quite interesting, and I would love to be friends with all of them. But the thing is, neither Christine from Philly or Bridget from Portland elicited a better conversation than this mystery woman.
Well, if you’re reading this and know a German brunette who goes to uni in Luneburg majoring in cultural studies, and is doing work in Budapest, email me.
I left Tallahassee at 11am on Friday.
I got to Budapest at 12am on Sunday.
Somehow, I managed to spend $60 in London within a span of 4 hours.
Virgin Mobile worked well enough for me to Skype Alex in Miami.
Okay, so here’s what happened. My flight in Miami had a 8 hours layover, and a overnighter to Heathrow followed. As soon as that happened, I wanted to spend some of the 10 hours layover in London. When I finally landed in Budapest, it was 11:30PM local time. I didn’t get to my apartment till 2AM on Sunday. Still, nothing terrible happened and quite successful.
Budapest comes from a distinctively communist root. The street which my apartment is on just seems so… bland and dangerous at the same time. If one was to plop it down in Soviet Russia 40 years ago, it’ll fit right in.
The insides is great though, with a fantastic, guitar-playing landlord. Did I mention that everything is so cheap here? The prices are just ridiculously in favor of United States citizens.
Water and restrooms are not as popular as in the States. Water fountains are a foreign concept and bottled water is the way to go. Furthermore, public restrooms are almost invisible or guarded by an attendedant who expects a tip.
They’re going fine. I’m just really rusty with pure math though…
Let me tell you a story of a woman in Washington DC.
This woman is a well-respected citizen within the community, volunteering at many PTO events during the weekdays. She probably also has a few kids and grandkids, but I never did ask. On weekends, she goes and plays tennis to keep up her ever-aging body in shape.
On this particular day, her husband surprised her with tickets to the last day of the Citi Open! Excited as she was, the thought of spending some 4 hours in the sun bothered her so she brought her favorite wide-rimmed hat; a wise idea by all standards.
What she should’ve bought was a helmet though. Because this lady got nailed in the face by a ball thrown by a spectator which bounced in all the correct manners into her face.
The audience got a good laugh.