The WH is now lobbying not only for the Nobel Peace prize but also the one for economics for teaching the world trade economics. The 'shooting the messenger' to deal with job numbers should bolster that claim even more.
But why rely on those commie Swedes (and worse: Norwegians) for prizes? The US should come up with their(!) own presti(di)gous awards that a POTUS approved committee could award to the worthy (in particular POTUS). https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/white-house-lobbying-nobel-prize-trump-takes-farcical-turn-rcna222492
The BLS has been struggling a lot as of late, most all of it caused by staffing shortages. They've stopped collecting inflation data in a number of places as well and are imputing (modeling) a lot of the data for those measures. This from June, but getting more play at the WSJ in the last few weeks: https://www.npr.org/2025/06/05/nx-s1-5424367/inflation-data-cpi-government-job-shortages
The vandalism of the federal government continues apace. It's not being shrunk and drowned, it's being given the Khashoggi treatment and leaving one bag at a time.
As long as I can remember, when bad jobs numbers come out, the President reacts by talking about how he will act, or how he wants Congress to act, to get the economy back on track. Today, when a bad job reports came out, the Presidential response was to fire the (non-partisan) head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Shoot the Messenger at its finest.
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done. http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done. http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
So...a professional MIDIator?
I asked for that, didn't I? But yes, although when he was working on it was a few years before MIDI happened. Poking at Google, I see that people are still working to get woodwind attack transients right, now looking at the problem that what the player does with shaping their mouth and throat matters.
My only important personal experience with attack transients was when I was in junior high. The band director convinced me to switch from clarinet to oboe. Too late I learned that the reason he wanted an oboist was so he could include a "Themes From the Nutcracker Suite" piece in the Christmas concert, which had a little four- or eight-bar oboe-all-alone intro to one bit. There are so many things that can go wrong when you attack that first note on an oboe.
I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.
So...a professional MIDIator?
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
When I worked at Bell Labs, the Labs was in the midst of a large hiring surge bringing in lots of people in their mid-20s with shiny new degrees. There was a Bell Labs Club blanket organization whose job was, to be blunt about it, to provide activities that kept those mid-20s people out of trouble. Lots of sub-clubs. Eg, go to a movie sponsored by the Cinema Club in the very nice company auditorium Friday evening rather than going to a local bar and getting into trouble with the equivalent of "townies".
The jazz band was actually multiple bands because of demand. The folk music club was enormous. (Also strange in the sense of a group of people who wrote a set of lyrics, and performed them publicly, with excellent harmonies, set to the tune of Alice's Restaurant and running almost as long, on being hired as a systems engineer at Bell Labs, playing on all of the internal prejudices.)
I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
In my freshman year music tutorial at St. John's College (Santa Fé) we did a lab where we tuned two strings in unison and then changed the speaking length of one of them, listening for the places where they sounded consonant or dissonant and calculating the ratios where those things occurred. Then change the speaking lengths of both and tuned to unison again and repeat the process. Fun lab.
We ended up getting into a discussion about what, exactly, consonance and dissonance sound like, because a few people were taking consonance as meaning "pleasing to my aesthetic taste" and they had a taste for clashing waveforms. Once we all agreed with the literal sense of the words - together-sounding and apart-sounding - the conversation moved on smoothly.
I'm currently reading "Harmonic Experience" by W.A. Mathieu, in which he explores the mathematical nature and structure of musical harmony. Very briefly, he looks at explaining the human experience and phenomenon of tonal music (very broadly construed) in terms of the mathematical relationships between pitches, as manifested in the overtone series.
The exploration is not just theoretical or cerebral, there is a singing and listening practice that goes along with it all, the goal of that being to learn to feel the relationships in your body as physical phenomena. But it's an interesting read even without that.
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms. Mostly ratios between different elements in the work, I think.
Humans are pattern-seeking critters.
Here's one that will pull together two of the recent discussions here: metal, and math.
Tool - Lateralus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7JG63IuaWs
Tool was playing with the Fibonacci Sequence all through the song. The opening riff after the acoustic intro is measures of 9, 8, and 7 for the 16th step in the sequence (987). The lyrics also play with steps in the sequence:
Black [1]
Then [1]
White are [2]
All I See [3]
In My Infancy [5]
Red and yellow then came to be [8]
Reaching out to me [5]
Lets me see [3]
As below so above and beyond, I imagine [13]
Drawn beyond the lines of reason [8]
Push the envelope, [5]
Watch it bend [3]
Etc.
Not everything is done in sequence in the song, but there's enough to geek out over, and the rest is thematically related to the search for patterns and exploration.
And the outro lyrics: "Spiral out, keep going."
Tom Lehrer was wonderful. And even fans can find some new songs (see below) - for various reasons I recently mentioned "Wernher von Braun" to a friend who I knew liked him, and she had never heard it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&list=RDQEJ9HrZq7Ro&start_radio=1
And of course, his reply to the question of why he was no longer doing satire is a classic: that satire was obsolete after Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize.
Also, his relinquishing of all his rights to his compositions was a rather heroic act. And the website publicising this reveals an amazing number of songs, many of which I had never heard of, and although presumably not all of them are classics I still intend to browse around them... https://tomlehrersongs.com/
The inimitable Tom Lehrer died at 97 a couple of days ago. It's some small comfort to learn that the good don't always die young.
People surely exist who enjoy both Tom Lehrer and Ozzy Osbourne in equal measure; alas, I am not among them.
Which is too bad, because my 21yo nephew is a dedicated heavy metal rocker. He is the lead guitarist and main songwriter of DefCon:Dead, a widely-unknown college band. I have gone so far as to attend a couple of their gigs, and survived. I can even say I genuinely like a couple of their songs, in the privacy of my house where I get to operate the volume control. But I still can't quite "get into" heavy metal.
It was my nephew who texted me the news of Tom Lehrer's death yesterday, because he has been a fan from a young age (my doing, of course). His reaction to Ozzy's death was: "He was a hero to my heroes." The kid knows his heavy metal genealogy, it seems.
Anyway, I mention all this to say that my nephew is one of those who are so made as to enjoy both Tom Lehrer and heavy metal, and I kind of envy him for that.
--TP
Metal is a vast country and it is easy to get lost or to only encounter things that clash with your own preferences. I was a marginal metalhead for years before finding a bunch of bands that hit the sweet spot for me.
Learning the geography helps a lot with avoiding the things that annoy you and finding more that delight you.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “An open thread”
Care to elaborate on that, Charles?
Most likely something to do with the Chomsky-Westheimer theorem, but you know Charles....such a joker.
"
Care to elaborate on that, Charles?
"
The development of language likely had a significant sexual selection influence.
"
Open thread, so I found this (about and with an extract from Max Bennett's A Brief History of Intelligence) on the origins of human language, its relation to AI and other aspects, interesting. Also, it sent me down a rabbit hole about Kanzi, whom I had completely forgotten:
https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/the-one-weird-trick-that-gave-humans?utm_source=substack&publication_id=54748&post_id=169644176&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false&r=w2vx&triedRedirect=true
"
The WH is now lobbying not only for the Nobel Peace prize but also the one for economics for teaching the world trade economics. The 'shooting the messenger' to deal with job numbers should bolster that claim even more.
But why rely on those commie Swedes (and worse: Norwegians) for prizes? The US should come up with their(!) own presti(di)gous awards that a POTUS approved committee could award to the worthy (in particular POTUS).
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/white-house-lobbying-nobel-prize-trump-takes-farcical-turn-rcna222492
"
The BLS has been struggling a lot as of late, most all of it caused by staffing shortages. They've stopped collecting inflation data in a number of places as well and are imputing (modeling) a lot of the data for those measures. This from June, but getting more play at the WSJ in the last few weeks:
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/05/nx-s1-5424367/inflation-data-cpi-government-job-shortages
The vandalism of the federal government continues apace. It's not being shrunk and drowned, it's being given the Khashoggi treatment and leaving one bag at a time.
"
The movie Idiocracy's premise is becoming all to real.
"
Also, ensures that in the future, reliable statistics and actual facts are harder, or impossible, to come by.
"
As long as I can remember, when bad jobs numbers come out, the President reacts by talking about how he will act, or how he wants Congress to act, to get the economy back on track. Today, when a bad job reports came out, the Presidential response was to fire the (non-partisan) head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Shoot the Messenger at its finest.
"
LOvely, Micheal. A gift I am sure she will appreciate when she is older.
"
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done.
http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
"
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done.
http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
This made me smile:
https://x.com/forresterbird/status/1950592868160090387
https://www.householddivision.org.uk/musicians-coldstream
"
So...a professional MIDIator?
I asked for that, didn't I? But yes, although when he was working on it was a few years before MIDI happened. Poking at Google, I see that people are still working to get woodwind attack transients right, now looking at the problem that what the player does with shaping their mouth and throat matters.
My only important personal experience with attack transients was when I was in junior high. The band director convinced me to switch from clarinet to oboe. Too late I learned that the reason he wanted an oboist was so he could include a "Themes From the Nutcracker Suite" piece in the Christmas concert, which had a little four- or eight-bar oboe-all-alone intro to one bit. There are so many things that can go wrong when you attack that first note on an oboe.
"
I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.
So...a professional MIDIator?
"
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
When I worked at Bell Labs, the Labs was in the midst of a large hiring surge bringing in lots of people in their mid-20s with shiny new degrees. There was a Bell Labs Club blanket organization whose job was, to be blunt about it, to provide activities that kept those mid-20s people out of trouble. Lots of sub-clubs. Eg, go to a movie sponsored by the Cinema Club in the very nice company auditorium Friday evening rather than going to a local bar and getting into trouble with the equivalent of "townies".
The jazz band was actually multiple bands because of demand. The folk music club was enormous. (Also strange in the sense of a group of people who wrote a set of lyrics, and performed them publicly, with excellent harmonies, set to the tune of Alice's Restaurant and running almost as long, on being hired as a systems engineer at Bell Labs, playing on all of the internal prejudices.)
I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.
"
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
In my freshman year music tutorial at St. John's College (Santa Fé) we did a lab where we tuned two strings in unison and then changed the speaking length of one of them, listening for the places where they sounded consonant or dissonant and calculating the ratios where those things occurred. Then change the speaking lengths of both and tuned to unison again and repeat the process. Fun lab.
We ended up getting into a discussion about what, exactly, consonance and dissonance sound like, because a few people were taking consonance as meaning "pleasing to my aesthetic taste" and they had a taste for clashing waveforms. Once we all agreed with the literal sense of the words - together-sounding and apart-sounding - the conversation moved on smoothly.
"
I'm currently reading "Harmonic Experience" by W.A. Mathieu, in which he explores the mathematical nature and structure of musical harmony. Very briefly, he looks at explaining the human experience and phenomenon of tonal music (very broadly construed) in terms of the mathematical relationships between pitches, as manifested in the overtone series.
The exploration is not just theoretical or cerebral, there is a singing and listening practice that goes along with it all, the goal of that being to learn to feel the relationships in your body as physical phenomena. But it's an interesting read even without that.
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms. Mostly ratios between different elements in the work, I think.
Humans are pattern-seeking critters.
"
Here's one that will pull together two of the recent discussions here: metal, and math.
Analysis of Fibonacci Sequence and Golden Ratio in Musical Compositions
"
Well played, Priest!
"
A friend suggested Ozzy and Tom from a duet, the first song would be “I Am Irony Man.” I’ll just see myself out…
"
Here's one that will pull together two of the recent discussions here: metal, and math.
Tool - Lateralus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7JG63IuaWs
Tool was playing with the Fibonacci Sequence all through the song. The opening riff after the acoustic intro is measures of 9, 8, and 7 for the 16th step in the sequence (987). The lyrics also play with steps in the sequence:
Black [1]
Then [1]
White are [2]
All I See [3]
In My Infancy [5]
Red and yellow then came to be [8]
Reaching out to me [5]
Lets me see [3]
As below so above and beyond, I imagine [13]
Drawn beyond the lines of reason [8]
Push the envelope, [5]
Watch it bend [3]
Etc.
Not everything is done in sequence in the song, but there's enough to geek out over, and the rest is thematically related to the search for patterns and exploration.
And the outro lyrics: "Spiral out, keep going."
"
Tom Lehrer was wonderful. And even fans can find some new songs (see below) - for various reasons I recently mentioned "Wernher von Braun" to a friend who I knew liked him, and she had never heard it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&list=RDQEJ9HrZq7Ro&start_radio=1
And of course, his reply to the question of why he was no longer doing satire is a classic: that satire was obsolete after Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize.
Also, his relinquishing of all his rights to his compositions was a rather heroic act. And the website publicising this reveals an amazing number of songs, many of which I had never heard of, and although presumably not all of them are classics I still intend to browse around them...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/
"
The inimitable Tom Lehrer died at 97 a couple of days ago. It's some small comfort to learn that the good don't always die young.
People surely exist who enjoy both Tom Lehrer and Ozzy Osbourne in equal measure; alas, I am not among them.
Which is too bad, because my 21yo nephew is a dedicated heavy metal rocker. He is the lead guitarist and main songwriter of DefCon:Dead, a widely-unknown college band. I have gone so far as to attend a couple of their gigs, and survived. I can even say I genuinely like a couple of their songs, in the privacy of my house where I get to operate the volume control. But I still can't quite "get into" heavy metal.
It was my nephew who texted me the news of Tom Lehrer's death yesterday, because he has been a fan from a young age (my doing, of course). His reaction to Ozzy's death was: "He was a hero to my heroes." The kid knows his heavy metal genealogy, it seems.
Anyway, I mention all this to say that my nephew is one of those who are so made as to enjoy both Tom Lehrer and heavy metal, and I kind of envy him for that.
--TP
"
Metal is a vast country and it is easy to get lost or to only encounter things that clash with your own preferences. I was a marginal metalhead for years before finding a bunch of bands that hit the sweet spot for me.
Learning the geography helps a lot with avoiding the things that annoy you and finding more that delight you.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.