Brews you can use

Somewhat apropos of the previous rant, from Karl Deutsch, via Mark A. R. Kleiman’s memory:

Since power means being able to conform the world to your ideas, while learning consists of conforming your ideas to the world, power is the ability not to learn from your mistakes.

Words to live by, or at least not-go-crazy by. It can help explain why the people who “call the shots” can behave as if they were from a different planet sometimes. If they’re not learners (philosopher kings?), then they are from another planet as far as they’re concerned.

The good news, this isn’t a sustainable situation over the long term. The bad news is, real world observations put the upper bound of “long term” in the multi-millenia range.

I’m watching a TiVO’d recording of the Science Channel’s re-broadcast/re-master of Carl Sagan’s old COSMOS series. He’s talking about the human brain, and tossed out an estimate of the amount of information the brain can store as “perhaps a hundred trillion bits.”

With the stereotypical “BILLIONS and BILLIONS” accent, of course; I’m most of the way through the series, and I still can’t get past that…

He proceeded to describe the vastness of such an amount of information in terms of a library of printed books. What an old metaphor. Now, 100 trillion bits is a little over 10 Terabytes, which is … actually not too much these days. Twenty large IDE drives. Google manages hundreds of times more information on commodity hardware. We’ve installed over three times as much at work.

Kind of takes away the sense of wonder, doesn’t it. Maybe when the science channel re-did the special effects, they should have added a few more zeros to the numbers.

During my trip through the musical looking-glass the other day, I took a quick detour into historical musical instrument, and found that my main instrument (the Tuba/Sousaphone) had some rather interesting roots.

(more…)

A tangent-laden conversation at work the other day led to a discussion of musical pitch, tuning, and temperament (in the sense of “well-tempered clavier”). As a result, I think I’ve added music theory to the list of subjects I wish I could learn in reverse order. There appears to be some interesting stuff going on at the advanced level, but only after the boring or unrewardingly difficult fundamentals that any course or book will cover first. In short I’d like to know it without actually learning it, just jump in at the deep end of and learn the basics as needed, rather than the way things are usually taught.
(more…)

… is Of Montreal’s Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games)”. Not a bad song, actually, just addictive with a rather poppy beat, and the absurd catchy refrain

Let’s pretend we don’t exist /
Let’s pretend we’re in Antarctica

I did get a brief break from the tune while reading “Green Eggs and Ham”. The cumulative rhyme knocked anything else remotely musical out of my head, a handy trick I will have to remember for later. After the rhyming wore off, a couple Seussian thoughts kept the song at bay for a bit.

Seussian thought #1: I remember a high school speech class assignment involved reading a children’s book to the rest of the class. One rule was “no Seuss, unless you can read without rhyming.” A friend of mine was the only person to attempt it that semester, and pulled it off perfectly. She de-rhymed well enough that the teacher played a tape of the reading for the other sections of the class. That feat seems even more amazing now.

Seussian thought #2: Somewhere, I have a DVD of “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T” laying around. We also have a new DVD player. Hmmm…