Posts

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From the Bahamas

Back from a 5 day cruise from the Bahamas, stopping in Half Moon Cay and Nassau. There were some beautiful places there, but more importantly it was utterly relaxing. The inevitable explosion of memories from BSM was also delayed a little as I was constantly distracted with other fun stuff.

Now back to some regular postings,

  1. I posted my review for the BSM algebra exam in the hopes that it would help people. It is available here or under the “About Me” page.
  2. I really want to do a Clash of Clans math review sometimes this winter break…
  3. An investigation into the irrationality of trig functions from a lattice point of view? We’ll see if I have the time.

 

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Lost to History

As my time at Budapest comes to a close, I can’t help but be reminded of the times during honor band in high school.

For three days, sixty other musicians and you gel together and make beautiful music for the sake of music. Friendships are made, and is inevitably short-lived with the nature of gathering students from all over the state. During the last rehearsal of one such honor band, the conductor said something quite profound to me. He told me to look around and know that this is the last time this group of people will be assembled. Consequently, that was also the last time that particular sound associated with the ensemble was made in history.

After the concert, the sound of the ensemble is forever lost to history.

I guess BSM, or any other camp for that matter,  is something like that. That group of people will never be together again, and that synergy of relationships will be gone after the program. But as the saying goes, it is better to have loved than not loved at all.

And so, another happy chapter comes to a close in my life.

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Is Music Inevitable

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?

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The Best Layover

Ha, what kind of layover is even good?

My itinerary for going back to the US:

  • Flight from Budapest at 6pm on the 22nd, ~3 hours.
  • Flight from London at 9am on the 23rd, ~10 hours.
  • Flight from Miami at 5pm on the 23rd, ~1 hour.

I’ll be in London for a random 12 hours. UGH.

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Long-Form and Attention Span

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.

 

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Sushin-sen

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 cracks—only perfectly shaped rice, grown in North Korea, was approved. […] All were impressed when Fujimoto served the freshest meal of all: still-living fish he’d fillet alive by cutting around the organs—a 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.”

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The Question of Why

Philippe Petit Walks Over Jerusalem

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.