State of the Discussion

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

Well, the Nazis were extremly advanced in their electioneering pre-1933. At least in Germany they were the first to employ modern marketing techniques in politics. They also had an eye on information flow or absence thereof, allowing them to campaign very differently in different parts of the country. An extreme case is that their campaigns in Eastern Prussia were in Polish because even many Germans there used it as their primary language while in Western Germany instigating anti-Polish hatred was a prime theme (In the Ruhr area there were many Polish guest workers - often there for decades already) with the same lies as the US Right uses against Latinos: They steal your bread (= your work), they speak a foreign un-German language, breed like rabbits etc.
They knew that there was minimal info flow between those reagions, so the local voters would not notice.
Hitler used a plane (sponsored by friendly industrialists) and thus could have several campaign events per day in different cities (while other politicians used the railway). And Hitler's campaign events were highly choreographed (and film clips of those were used in places where he did not show up in person).
Of course an essential part was the focus on the person of Hitler. He and Goebbels knew that one does not win votes with detailed party programs (although they pretended to have one) but with simple slogans repeated ad nauseam and appealing to the id.
Far ahead of its time, and quite a lot looks still quite familiar almost a century later.
Btw, I think His Orangeness and most extreme right politicians in the US today would be utter failures, were the somehow transported back to that time and place. They are phonies and cowards at heart while the original Nazis were literal killers who'd rather lead the violent mob from the front than having useful idiots doing it for them and afterwards denying any responsibility. Hitler personally kicked some SA goons from the party because they beat up some lefty opponents out of uniform. He approved of the violence but not the anonymity.

Then there’s prog metal, so, yeah…
I get annoyed with the metal technocrats. I can listen to clinical demonstrations of technical proficiency for a bit, but I can listen to 70s/Bon Scott AC/DC for who-knows-how-long. It’s not a contest. Make me feel something. (There’s also a happy medium, but the extremes are good for illustration.)

...legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security.
I expect there will be a lot of countries that boycott the LA Games, rather than send their athletes into reach of ICE's by-then very large corps. If they risk it, I can easily imagine almost open insurrection between ICE on one side and California/LA on the other. Or between the California/LA law enforcement and the rest of the state/local government if the local police decide to side with ICE.

I've never been into Metal, but Ozzy was a beautiful, loving soul. RIP.
If you want a taste of Ozzy and Black Sabbath that wanders far afield of their usual heavy metal aesthetic, you should give Spiral Architect a try:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQi7HP9Bjs
Of all the things I value most of all
I look upon my Earth
And feel the warmth
And know that it is good
The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it's built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early '70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement - wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
Ozzy's voice is not beautiful or versatile, but it is expressive and affective, and he uses it to great effect here.
Worth a listen, and it might make you appreciate Sabbath's musicianship and range a bit more. It's the song I keep coming back to since Ozzy's passing.
I was never a huge fan of Ozzy or Sabbath, but the metal bands I do love would never have been what they are without Sabbath's influence. Their music built a genre every bit as vast and varied as jazz. Their influence is staggering.

Speaking of heroes, I note that the 2028 Olympics are currently scheduled for Los Angeles. Two problems there:
1) Getting international tourists, or even just Olympic athletes, into and safely back out of the country. I belong to an organization which holds international conferences. It is sufficiently difficult for would-be attendees to get visas that attendance plummets when we hold one in the US. Which will doubtless hold down Olympic tourism. Not to mention the increasing fondness of the current administration for arbitrarily holding up travelers, even those with impeccable paperwork.
2) Trump would doubtless find it impossible to resist (not that he'd try) showing up and making the whole thing all about him -- see "hero in his own mind". To see how this might go, consider the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
I'm already seeing calls here for Los Angeles to bail on the whole thing. Those tend, so far, to focus both on those issues, as well as the legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security. Currently Federal law enforcement agencies are, thanks to ICE, not in good oder in LA (or California generally).
Plus, staging the Olympics is expensive. Local government budgets are already strained, and nobody can see Trump kicking in financial support. If anything, he might decide to bill LA for the security costs.

Michael, this is just way cool!
When you feel like the software is mostly together, is it something you would be willing to share? Sell? (I hesitate to suggest beta test. ;-)

Perhaps the greatest calculator ... was Kepler
Perhaps. But the ladies who did all the calculations for the Mercury and Apollo Projects were no slouches either. Men's lives hung on their work. As the story goes, John Glenn asked explicitly for Katherine Johnson to do the calculations for his flight. He wouldn't trust anyone else with his safety.

I love maps. All kinds: altases, road maps, city maps, world maps. Give me a map to use, read, ponder, and I can be absorbed in it for hours.
I remember, when I was in Athens (Greece, not Georgia), getting my hands on a fold-out street map, assuming I'd be able to make some sense out of it based on knowing the general names of streets, and where things like markets and bridges were. And I remember the delightful/terrifying feeling of not, in fact, being able to do that even a little bit. Thanks to the different alphabet, I was unable to tease out any meaning at all. Terrifying for obvious reasons, but delightful because it was rather fun to see one of my most-cherished objects - a map! - manifest as incomprehensible.
Michael - The issue of records being kept, preserved, and accessible for more than one generation is one I think about a LOT. Just seeing how quickly electronic media become obsolete makes me shake my head in bleak wonder.
We can read the direct writing of people from thousands of years ago - multiple thousands of years - right up to, what, a couple generations ago? When did people stop writing letters or keeping written journals?
It just seems like humanity, or at least the industrialized portions, is engaged in a headlong rush to erase itself from the record. (Which, considering where we are right now as a species, is kind of understandable, though no less alarming.)

Why spent minutes (at minimum) on the screen when a sketch on paper takes seconds?
Tablets are getting better at imitating what paper and pencil do. But it's still a pale imitation. And, from what I've seen, the rate of progress towards duplicating it as slowed markedly.

There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory
The more ways you can engage with a body of material, the more it will stick with you.
The greater the degree of attention required of you as part of that engagement, even more so.
Humans should think, machines should work, as the saying goes. That said, thinking *is* work, and attempts to find short cuts around that just make us stupid.

...why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age.
There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory, and taking notes longhand reinforces more than typing on a keyboard. That's the pseudo-academic in me speaking, of course.
For the last twelve years or so I've been using a little note-taking application that I wrote myself. There were just too many cases where pasting in an image, or having a live URL, or even just searching for a keyword seemed to justify it. Recently I've been considering going back to paper and pen.
I thought about using an Ipad with an Apple Pencil, which has gotten very much like paper and pen (so long as you don't use the eraser much*). Unfortunately, Apple has seen fit to put handwriting recognition into the OS, and insists on putting a little line under anything you write/draw that it thinks might be a date or time. I've seen many complaints about it, and people asking why Apple can't make it optional.
* One of the reasons I always took notes in ink while I was doing research work was because sometimes I wrote down something that I thought was right, and two days later discovered I was mistaken. With ink, you have to grab a different color pen and put in a dated bit with the correction.