Two Dishes But To One Table

Scottish Translator

I was trying to make a computer program to insert creative spelling into a document.  I wrote it in PERL on my laptop while riding the train to work. 

I named it Ben Johnson in honor of the famousist diary writer ever.   But instead of creative spelling, my program seems to give a strong Scottish bias to the speech -- sort of a Trainspotting Translator.

What follows are two sample translations my program made of, respectively, Dirty Harry, and President Obama.  After that I have attached the actual Perl script if you are curious.
-------------------------------
"I knoo ohaht yoo'rae dinkin, ponk, did I virae six shots or only vifae? oaell, in ahll dae aexcitaemaent I kind ov vorgot mysaelv - so yoo'rae goin to hahfae to ahsk yoorsaelv ah qoaestion: 'Do I veael locky?  oaell, do yoo ponk?' "
-------------------------
"On onae aend ov dae spaectrom, oae'fae heahrd dae implicahtion daht my cahndidahcy is somaehoo ahn aexaercisae in ahvvirmahtifae ahction; daht it's bahsaed solaely on dae daesirae ov oidae-aeyaed libaerahls to porchahsae rahciahl raeconciliahtion on dae cheahp. On dae odaer aend, oae'fae heahrd my vormaer pahstor, Raefaeraend Jaeraemiahh oright, osae incaendiahry lahngoahgae to aexpraess fieos daht hahfae dae potaentiahl not only to oidaen dae rahciahl difidae, bot fieos daht daenigrahtae bod dae greahtnaess ahnd dae goodnaess ov oor nahtion; daht rightly ovvaend ohitae ahnd blahck ahlikae. "
--------------------------------
PERL SCRIPT (The following lines mostly just tell the program to look for certain letters and swap them out for other letters. For example, "Turn F's into V's and vice versa."):

open RH, shift(@ARGV) || die "Did you enter two file args? $! \n";
open OH, ">>", shift(@ARGV) || die "Did you enter two file args? $! \n";
for(<RH>){

    my $line = $_;
    chomp($line);
    $line=~y/fv/vf/;
    $line=~s/w/o/ig;
    $line=~s/ph/f/ig;
    $line=~s/ing/in/ig;
    $line=~s/a([^aeiou])/ah$1/ig;
    $line=~s/e([^aeiou])/ae$1/ig;
    $line=~s/u/o/ig;
    $line=~s/th/d/ig;
    print OH "$line \n";
}
print "\n\n";

Art Review -- from Flatbush, Brooklyn

I had no camera that morning and it rained in the afternoon, so you'll just have to trust me:

Display Location: a sidewalk on Argyle Street near Cortelyou Rd, outdoor
Media:  Chalk, sidewalk.
Dimensions: 90cm x 900cm
Date: June 7, 2009
Artist: (unsigned work)

Working in mostly yellows and whites, the artist has made a very large outdoor drawing which is indistinguishable from a hopscotch board except greatly exaggerated.  This outsider art shows an almost childlike desire for the game to go on forever, implying both haste and crudity in a board which, rather than terminating at "10" as most hopscotch boards,  goes all the way to "220". 

Assuming that the hopscotch player must hop to the terminal and then return to the origin, a single turn at this hopscotch board would take an estimated 3.5 minutes. Such extended focus from a 9 year old might serve as an alternative to Ritalin.  Hair would have time to grow, coffee could go cold, and the ice cream truck could serve your entire block.  One imagines an entire Gnarles Barkley song playing in the space of one player having a go, taking a single trip up and back on this hopscotch figure.

The Farther You Stray From Humanities, the Cheaper the Education

Once again, I find an entire, state-of-the-art computer training manual online and indexed.   This postgrSQL book sells for $35 right now at Barnes and Noble.   (SQL is a database system and a computer language.  It exists inside many of the web pages you have probably visited.)  Here is the book:
http://www.commandprompt.com/ppbook/x17149  

Erased deKooning -- er, Caesar

When you vote out the old leader sometimes the new leader feels the need to erase memory of the previous leader.   The Roman senate was so glad to get rid of Domitian that after they assassinated him, an official act of damnatio memoriae was passed.  Not only were his images decapitated, but written references  on public buildings were erased.  From the stone.   Here my sister examines a plaque at UPenn Museum of Archaeology. 

The original plaque said:

"to the imperator caesar
son of the deified vespasian,
domitian augustus
victor in germany, pontifex maximus
holding the power of tribune for the fifteenth year, imperator for the twenty second time
consul for the seventeenth time, perpetual censor, father of the country
the flavian augustan colony
of puteoli
by thee indulgence of the great
and divine princeps
having been moved closer to his city"

I didn't take a close up to show how the plaque looks "post-damnation" but it resembles the cream cheese plate after a brunch: just grooved, dragged furrows where the sentences were.  I was a little stingy with the camera that day so you'll have to use your imagination.  In fact, the picture above was taken with the built-in web cam on my little Asus Eee Netbook.

Respect for the Lightest Metal. And Best Battery.

If Wikipedia is trustable on lithium batteries I learned three things today:
1 - They mostly degrade just from shelf life, no matter what you do to them: up to 20% loss per year at room temperature, much more if hotter.
2 -  Letting them go below their lower limit voltage is bad.  Overcharging probably not dangerous, not even possible anymore with internal safeguards.  The voltage monitoring circuitry is right inside the battery pack, not in the computer.  So almost a bigger hazard is putting them away on the shelf long enough for them to dip below that 8 v threshold or whatever.  I let that happen to laptop #1.  (I'm on #3 now, just bought a netbook last week).
3 - M.I.T. demonstrated a full sized battery with smaller internal atomic structure thanks to -- how cool is this, virus-grown fiber structure inside.  They engineered the viral DNA to contain/attract iron, and so have achieved the smallest iron phosphate wires ever (iron phosphate is one option for the cathode material and the smaller the better)

Which President Did Jiu-Jitsu on the South Lawn?

Theodore Roosevelt.  And 1906 was probably before Asian martial arts were 'cool'.
Article here.   And the graphic that the article doesn't include online (do they ever?) is below (click larger).
    

For some reason the Wall Street Journal has been kind to the president so far.  The way I see it, this article, running in the sports section, answers the tacit question "Is the Prez someone you'd like to have a beer with?" with a firm "Yes.".  Even the WSJ editorial page uses respectful language about him.  

Throwing Rupert Murdoch into the mix may have confused the Journal's Conservative zeal.  Murdoch is dating some sort of young liberal last time I heard.

My First Enjoyable Tax Reckoning in Years

There are three things I wish I'd known about sooner:  Electric Tootbrushes ($100 is not a lot to spend if it prevents 3 root canals), The Birthday Party (this 80's Australian rock band is the blueprint for The Jesus Lizard and several entire punk rock record labels), and finally, tax preparation software.

I must be the last guy on earth to discover this way to make tax time easy.  Tuesday I spent from 3 to 5 pm in the friendly, capable hands of a tax robot, who, for a mere $13 asked me numerous probing and helpful questions.  Why leave home!  Many are the years when I had incompletely filled out tax forms or lacked correct paperwork.  This year I had zero stress and learned a lot from the robot.   And buying Turbo Tax must cost more than $13, yes?From now on, doing tax paperwork is the one thing I won't try to learn about at the library.

What part of a movie hits you the second time

Seeing The Big Lebowski for the second time was worth it.  There's a 'mad caper' theme to the movie, which means lots of excuses for Jeff Bridges' character, 'The Dude', to get hit over the head and enter dreamland. All of those dream sequences, off-putting and disorienting the first time around, are now the highlight of the movie for me.  Viva la Coen Brothers.

The Dude on a sort of 50's diner stairway to Valhalla.

The Dude in an anxiety nightmare that he is trapped in the finger holes and taking a roll down the lane from the ball's perspective.

Unsubscribe x 5

Like a ponderous Leviathan encrusted with barnacles my inbox is stuffed with the junk of countless lists.

Unlike a whale, I invented a barnacle-removal routine.  My online housekeeping project for this month goes like this: every time I sit down to do some work on the computer I take out five coins. I unsubscribe to a mailing list and then put a coin back in my pocket, similar to how I keep track of reps when I exercise. It's to make sure I don't get lost in a neverending sea -- I just want to spend a few minutes a day until my inbox gets under control.

Today I deleted my name from the email lists of:

• Google Alerts (Taiwan, Chemistry Teacher, Sarajevo, Joel Klein)

• Oxfam (sorry!)
• Friendster (remember them? Today's email subject line was "Now in Tagalog"!)
• Spirit Airlines Richard Foreman's Hysterical Ontological Theater

Remembering Especially __________ , Our President

Here is an obscure souvenir: humble but singular evidence of Inaugaration 2009. A hand corrected note for the weekly form prayer from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer:

I took this scribble-amended prayer script from the podium after the service.  This hasty footnote will be my scrapbook keepsake for the changing of the guard last month.

Show Review: The Bad Plus played Tuesday at the Bowery Ballroom

Very amazing seeing tB+ record release party on Tuesday.

Main thought prior to the show was: will it suck, adding a vocalist?

All around relief from us in the audience as the band went for an initial 50 minute stretch, playing as God-made-em:  (not nude, silly) an accomplished, telepathic instrumental trio.

Still, a persistent worrying thought was: how can they allow a girl into the clubhouse?   Will this upset the testosterone-apple-cart?

All concerns vanished at 10:09 pm when a deferential but assertive Wendy Lewis popped up in the band's midst, managing to take a Kurt Cobain vocal "Lithium" and make it her own.

I don't have enough reference points to make a closer triangulation but I would describe the vocal style as Patty Smiths range but with post-Boomer sense of irony.  Closer to PJ Harvey than to Kim Deal, though less grand and scarey than PJ Harvey, more approachable and healthy.  I'd like to see her sit in on vocals for either The Descendents or Deerhoof. 

I'm sure we all appreciated the added visual appeal of having a girl crash the male clubhouse. 
The crowd was wildly endorsing of her presence and wouldn't stop clapping.    I'm not sure if the band can go backwards again after this to an instrumental format.   It's like the vibrating bed at a motel:  initially you didn't see a need for it but when the last quarter runs out, you miss the vibrating presence.  

The boys may have a hard time putting this genie back in the bottle.

Conclusion: TBP with WL are a worthwhile further iteration on the Nouvelle Vague concept, with both vocalist and band being superior in every way to NV.

The new Bad Plus album includes many covers from the show:  Pink Floyd's 'Comfortably Numb', Yes' 'Long Distance Runaround', and Nirvana's 'Lithium' all worked great live.  Some enjoyable tension occurred when lyrics written for a 4/4 time were played in the odd time-signatures of the Bad Plus.

Follow Up: Do The Math makes numerous interesting observations in their blog  account of what the band did the following day:  live accompaniment to the New York Fashion Week tent show of Isaac Mizharhai in Bryant Park .

Caught Between Being not-Dylan and (I think) Suing Don McLean

Poor Phil Ochs.
For starters, consider that my entire generation from the 70's, even avid students like me of the Rolling Stone Record Guide (et al, et al) has no idea who he was.  I only learned about him in 2001, from Stephen King's novel Hearts in Atlantis, where Ochs is repeatedly namechecked as a humble but broadly important figure of the counterculture.  The proto-protesters of King's 60's aren't listening to Dylan's "Masters of War" but rather Ochs' "Fogey From Muskogee".

Ochs seems to have been slighted from multiple potential fan bases. Consider:
1) Dylan, a peer, abandoned sincerity for crazy imagery, facile chameleonism, and cynicism to, finally, great aclaim.  Ochs, appearing to be a step behind, evolved with less sureity and mixed reviews, slipping in stature.
2) In a Robert Bork/ Michael Phelps moment, Ochs had what could have been a pretty cool, rambling epic radio hit, "Tape From California" become censored because one character in it, a burned out Nam vet is described as "passing his pipe" to the song's narrator, Ochs.   It's funny to think of the hypocrisy of bands in the 60s not being allowed to admit that they got high.
3) Ochs had a lesser-known rival zoom past him, aping his style a bit, I think.  Sitting here today in a coffee shop on 34th Street, I heard "American Pie" for the millionth royalty-generating time in my life and realized that Don McLean's voice (his voice itself!) and song both derive from Ochs just as much as, say, Sum 41 derives from Green Day nowadays. To me, "American Pie" seems all-Ochs, both the rambling narrative and lingering pre-occupation with pre-Boomer culture (i.e. fifties rock and roll-- see Ochs gold-lame-suit appearance in his late 60s "Gunfight at Carnegie Hall").

    ---------------------------------------

In 1976, after Ochs hanged himself at his sisters home in Rockaway, Queens, Bella Abzug had the following entered into the Congressional record:
Mr. Speaker, a few weeks ago, a young folksinger whose music personified the protest mood of the 1960s took his own life. Phil Ochs — whose original compositions were compelling moral statements against war in Southeast Asia — apparently felt that he had run out of words.

While his tragic action was undoubtedly motivated by terrible personal despair, his death is a political as well as an artistic tragedy. I believe it is indicative of the despair many of the activists of the 1960s are experiencing as they perceive a government which continues the distortion of national priorities that is exemplified in the military budget we have before us.

Might Have Counted As School Lunch Vegetable

Words to live by:
    "There is no season for Jell-O; Jell-O is always in season."
        --my mom, sagely reflecting on the popularity last week of a crushed pretzel Jell-O mold she brought to the office potluck at her school.

Like Putting Your Eyeballs into Warm Honey

Two things about Magic Eye Pictures:
1) About 70% of my friends say they hate them.
2) Magic Eye images strongly and surprisingly relax me more than a dog that's getting scratched between the ears -- not sure why. My bro-in-law gave me a calendar of them and on the back page it has actual testimonial from optometrists confirming this beneficial eye effect.
3) I figured out how to make an ultra low-grade, barely passable flat Magic Eye, by telling my UNIX terminal window to fill up with zeros.   I'll admit this particular Magic Eye is, oxymoronically 2-D but the font on terminals has a little dot in the center of the zero, so I feel some kind of Tibetan transcendence, staring at the screen.

Real Magic Eye images here.
Real mean Magic Eye image here.
Let me know if you end up building your own stereogram here.

I Still Think 1988 Is Pretty Likely

I would like to propose a law.  Every time someone wishes to publicly declare that they are making public policy or Mideast wars based on THEIR interpretation of a religious prophecy, they must append  a list of apocalyptic disclaimers.  Just as cigarette packs, beer cans, and pharmacological ads are required to give caveats, so too must the Branch Davideans, Hal Lindsey's, and the entire Left Behind crew. 

At the very least, the American Fundamentalists would be required to state
"1.  We are following Hal Lindsay ("The Late Great Planet Earth").  2. He said it would come in 1988" 3.  It didn't.  4.  We would still  like America to spend taxes and lives in the belief that Hal Lindsay is still correct."

This would include people from Ronald Reagan's cabinet.

Chris Nelson writes "James Watt, Secretary of the Interior under the Reagan administration, felt that there was no need to protect the environment because the end was coming SOON! In 1981, he told a Congressional committee, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns."

Some info on the Christian-Zionist voting block at Wikipedia and Jack Chick Tracts

No Need to Reinvent the (flashcard) Wheel

Sometimes the web works the way you want it.  For instance, today I found flashcards galore. Flashcard Exchange is an extremely "Web 2.0" site that has scads of student-authored mnemonic aids for students of -- anything.  Maybe you'd like to memorize:

Perl programming syntax
Klingon Language
military protocol
organic chemistry
math
William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying & The Sound and the Fury
as well as, of course, tons of medical school, anatomy, architect license, New York State Bar exam, and almost any professional exam you can think of.

Instructions (for the impatient): At any of the links above, click on "Study" at the upper left.  Once the flashcards appear, mouse or keyboard the (f)orward, (b)ack, (f)lip, (x)got it wrong! links at the left margin. 

The cards can even (allegedly) be printed out.  Okay, gotta go memorize some Elven verb declensions now...

Uneven

My right side is weaker than my left.  I discovered this when I found I could do this morning exercise in one direction better than the other direction. Asymmetry in muscle groups is surprising.

By the way, if you're looking for a bunch of workout recipes, I recommend the book shown above.  It's called Morning Strength Workouts by Annette Lang. It was at Barnes and Noble.

But What's a Henway?

You know, just when I have begun to assume that the standardized state physics tests for New York High Schools are completely devoid of anything artful, crafty, or involving true thinking, comes this charming question, from the January 24, 2008 Regents Physics Exam.

#37   The weight of a chicken egg is most nearly equal to:
(a) 0.001 newton    (b) 0.01 newton    (c) 1 newton    (d) 100 newtons

Hens are funny to me -- almost a sight gag.  But my further, pedagogical appreciation of this question, is that it probes the student's number sense, estimation ability, and back-of-the-envelope thinking, pet topics of mine. More importantly, near and dear to any teacher, it asks the student "Did anything we studied in the last 200 days make enough sense to you that you can connect even the tiniest bit of it to your 'real' life?"

A plain old English analogy of the above question would be: "Does an American quarter weigh 1 ounce, 1 pound, or one ton?". 

Anyway, if you are a nerd, masochist, or just bored, take the test here. Learn more about the titular Henway here.

Quote of the Day: My Sister

"I can't find a Baby Jesus that won't melt."

(The context was an Epiphany inspired  "el pastel de tres reys" baking project...)

Gallup Poll: Partisan Gap on Global Warming Grows

Source: Gallup

I'd Rather Be Hunting Seals

It is probably more fun to paddle a kayak than it is to use Kayak.com but having said that, I am sort of enjoying my first try.  Check out how many sites it can search simultaneously:

Watching this many windows running is a sort of miracle for anyone who remembers crashing a pre-Pentium computer because you tried to, say, check your email on Pine at the same time that you were opening a 256K Jpeg on HotBot.

Alter Mann im Berg und Guilder

The New Hampshire commemorative quarter is a fitting immortalization of the now-gone rock.
I realized the other day, considering that coins easily survive from several millenia ago, as physical objects go, coinage is the gold standard of commemoralization.
So the old man in the mountain will ironically now live forever in its new diminuitive form.    And of course the actual site on the mountain persists, albeit smoother,with, to an art fan, a sort of  "erased de Kooning" significance.

Java Jonesin' in January; I Already Bought the Sam's 24 Hour Textbook.

Forgive me for not trusting that my university is up to date with the times, but I did a quick survey to see whether the real job listings for computer jobs are in synch with the classes that are being taught by professors at Hunter.  So here are the most desirable computer languages which a job seeker in my city should study.

In ascending order, here are how many  job ads on Craig's List mentioned a given computer language.

ERLANG 0 /  1
PERL 5/20
RUBY  6 /15
python  9 /16
c++   12/15 
PHP 14 / 60
JAVA 38/  72
SQL 55 / 117

I looked at the ads posted on NYC.CL between December 9 and December 19, 2008. The pairs of numbers are for "software jobs" / "all jobs".

Is Humility in the Decalogue Anywhere?

I was thinking last month about what one usually declares in public when it is time to "Be Thankful". There are certain cliches: my kids, my job, visits from so and so. But what about something more humble, something that is located within our ego, not without.

I think we should have enough humility to thank God for the things in the core of our ego that we think of as being "us", like let's say "literacy", "magnanimity", "kindness" ... these things that we think of as intrinsically our personal good traits, I think we should not act like we made them through our sweat and will power; they are more appropriately to be thanked for as something bestowed, not something that we deserved or had coming to us.  That would be a more rending, poignant, stirring prayer.

HBO a la Mode

Students should demand to watch DVD's of cable TV shows for their language classes.  It's better than learning to say "The pen is on the table" or "When  does the train arrive?"  And there is a TON of it out there.  In almost any language.

When I was in Taiwan, for instance, I noticed that their television did the admirable job of translating "South Park" into Mandarin.  I would love to hear a native speaker comment on how good a job they did.  I'm going to assume they slipped into the local dialect, Taiwanese, to get the more 'earthy' points across.

Personally, although I barely know any foreign languages, I was entranced last night by two straight hours of The Wire with French subtitles turned on.  One of the things I learned was that an anguished string of F-Words and sacrilegious phrases in English can be reduced to Je nes crois pas ("I can't believe this").

And imagine how cool it would be to hear Donald Trump saying "You're fired!" in German...

What I Learned About Love From Gilligan's Island

Having a partner (girlfriend/boyfriend) is like having an outrigger on a canoe.  Don't second guess the presence of the outrigger!  It may seem like slower paddling, extra weight, and less maneuverability.  But you have to realize that your canoe will go farther because now it can’t flip over. 

You won't have much chance crossing open water if you don’t permanently attach a good outrigger to your canoe. 

Image from http://inventioninspirations.blogspot.com/

It Depends on Your Definition of "The"

Data nuts can't resist looking for patterns in words.  Though the election is over, you still may be interested in what the raw data says about the NYTimes, WaPost, & WSJ.  Did they give uneven treatment to the two candidates?  Yes, for the first two papers.  The language, pronouns and syntax all showed a big difference in the flavor of how the New York Times and Washington Post covered Senator McCain.  (News coverage language analysis.)

Slicing and dicing the words of the candidates themselves, from the third debate also gives some interesting results.

Category	Examples	McCain	Obama	Interpretation
Word count		6596	7339	Obama talks more
Words per sentence		13.83	18.39	Obama longer sentences
Big words (over 6 letters)		17.77	18.72	Obama bigger words
Personal pronouns		10.22	9.22	McCain more personal in general

The complete table of candidate language analysis from the third presidential debate is here: University of Texas.

Did You Like 'Post Office' ?

After work tonight, I spoke to Kevin about books:
"If you were on the newlywed game, what would you say is your wife's favorite author?"
"That's easy:  Jane Eyre or Jane Austen...whichever one of those is the author, not the character."
"So we can say she's not into, say, Charles Bukowski books? How about you, you like Chuck?"
"I think I know him; the mode is chaos, right?"
"I think that's a good one-word summary."
"Then put me down for 'no'.  I'm either not smart enough or not stupid enough for Bukowski."

2000 shoppers at 5AM

Jdimytai Damour of Valley Stream NY, rest in peace.

Bag News Notes
.
Photos at Flickr.

Work for Cello: Polish It.

I set the alarm to get up an hour early (5 am) so I can do some studying and then pack for a trip to Corning NY.  Supposedly.

So what am I really doing?  I am ripping a gift for my host, a John Cage CD of the 1958 quarter century Cage retrospective concert, a CD I found while browsing the Performing Arts Library last week at Lincoln Center (there to look for a Badfinger CD that I became obsessed with after hearing their banal soft-rock "Day After Day" playing over and over on the store PA system at Home Depot by the Flatiron Building on 23rd Street).

But ripping the CD led to reading the fascinating liner notes about the Cage concert (available as a 3 CD box).  

It doesn't get more "Cage-y" than on CD 1 where a ‘song’ called The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), nominally a soprano / piano duet, consists of a woman singing a paragraph from Ullyses (Joyce) while the piano player accompanies her by rapping his knuckles on various parts of the wood piano superstructure.  It's just two minutes long at at the end, thunderous applause from the Town Hall audience, a 1958 crowd packed with his knowing peers, which being 1958 New York, includes not only his buddy Merce Cunningham, but apparently several nascent painting movements.  Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Willem DeKooning are seen in the photos of the hall.  The painters are wearing khakis and that ubiquitous 1950s bright white dress shirt.

The legacy this small group would leave is remarkable.  It could seem a little depressing to consider that a couple dozen NY artists, an insider’s gang, would go on to dominate the next few decades so much, but it is really liberating when you consider their DIY boldness and lack of legacy connections.  They were outsiders, here to make a go of it, sticking together out of psychological neccesity.  There's nothing to say a band of tiny nobodies couldn't still do the same.  The message to us today: "Go for it!"

Anyway, back to Cage.  The rest of the concert included a six minute symphony of found sounds recorded to reel to reel tape and then cut with razors and reassembled (presumably with 'scotch tape' holding the fragments onto a new blank tape as backing).  'Sheet Music' for Williams Mix (1952) shown below:

Here is the sound file to accompany the above sheet music, "Williams Mix (1952) ".  After the symphonic tape loop finishes listen to his friends cheering  enthusiastically. 

Finally, maybe the most often-heard, and to me most enjoyable music here, are the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano.  (File link to download one MP3 of this below. 

Download Sonata #5  Download Sonata #2

Sorry -- my Typepad page will probably take over 5 minutes to download if you right click and then 'Save As' the file link).  The pieces for prepared piano were supposed to reflect some Hindu concepts which Cage had been exposed to when he  "... began living at the East River and first became seriously aware of Oriental philosophy" especially Ananda Coomaraswamy.  The sheet music for the Sonatas includes instructions on where to jam rubber erasers and sheet metal screws between the piano strings.  

Cage notes that with the music for prepared piano he was trying to depict the eight permanent emotions of Indian Philosophy:  the heroic, the erotic, the wondrous, the mirthful, sorrow, fear, anger, the odious, and their common tendency toward tranquility.  It is tempting to assign one of these emotions to each of the short sonatas.  If you listen to the download, I would be curious to hear which of the eight emotions you feel it represents.

If you are a fan of this Cage music you may be interested to see a list of the required listening for a course in post-1960s music taught at M.I.T..

To this already lengthy post, I have appended, from Rolf W Stoll's voluminous liner notes the following annotation for the sheet music (vida supra) accompanying Williams Mix:

This is the fifth page of the Williams Mix.  It is a full-size drawing of 8 tracks of ¼ inch magnetic tape running at 15 inches per second.  It is intended as a pattern for the cutting and splicing of tape-recorded sounds. These sounds are catalogued as A city sounds, B country sounds, C electronic sounds, D manually produced sounds.

 

They are further catalogued tin terms of pitch, timbre and loudness.  When one of these has been controlled or is known, a “c” designates this;  absence of control or predictability is designated by a “v”.  …

The categories overlap,.  For example, the sound of laughter might be catalogued A, B, or E.  Nevertheless, the system served to establish a library.  Any other set of sounds, answering the same designations, could be used to make another Williams Mix.

The composing means employed chance operations derived from the I-Ching Chinese Book of Changes.  These means, as they pertain to two earlier works, Music of Changes, and Landscape for 12 Radios, are described in detail in trans/formation.  Briefly, three coins tossed six times give one or two numbers from 1 to 64.  Separate charts were made having 64 elements, one to determine the rhythmic structure [11 times 46 divided 5, 6, 16, 3, 11, 5] another to determine factors which shortened or lengthened the structural parts, 16 for sounds and silences, 16 for durations, 16 for attack and decay of sounds.  

But What is the Best Computer Operating System During Lent?

In Unix class we learned the command GREP last month.  What's it good for? I had to test my new GREP command on something interesting.

As arbitrary fodder I took the entire page called "Catholic FAQs" and tried to robotically dissect it with grep.   Say what you want about Linux but with just a few keystrokes (see below!) I sifted just the good parts, leaving a crude catechism ex machina. 

The first GREP command below tells the computer that you want it to take all the text from a file called catholicQs, sift it for any line that ends in a question mark, and save it someplace. 

• cat catholicFAQs | grep '?$' > catholicQs
• cat catholicQs | grep [^Lent] > catholicQno_lent

The second GREP command tells the system to throw away any questions that deal with lent ( [^Lent] means not Lent) and save the remaining questions in a file called no_lent.

---------------------------------------------------

I'm sure at this point you are wondering what vital theological questions my Unix commands found at 'Catholic FAQs'.

Here are the most popular questions good parishioners were asking their priests.  (Because there was an enormous preoccupation with Lent, way out of proportion with anything Jesus or Paul ever said about fishfries, I am listing those questions seperately at the end):
1:Do ghosts exist?
2:Can Catholics celebrate Halloween?
3:Why meat but not fish?
4:What are the rules for attending weddings?
5:How do I address a bishop?
6:What's the Catholic theory behind such phenomena as ghosts?
7:Are Lenten fumbles mortal sins?
8:Can you answer a question about masturbation?
9:Is this really a rule of Lent?
10:Where did Lent come from?
11:Can I eat eggs on Fridays during Lent?
12:Is adultery always adultery?
13:What is the Lenten fast?
14:Should I eat meat at a company dinner party on a Friday of Lent?
15:Why are holy water fonts drained during Lent?
16:Can I eat meat on Friday if I abstain another day?
17:Why the covering of statues during Lent?
18:Should I get a rosary tattoo?
19:When does Lent end?
20:How do vegetarians observe Lent?
21:Can you explain for me the evilness of the Harry Potter series?
22:It is wrong to change what you "give up" for Lent?
23:Should I care that Dumbledore is gay?
24:Must I be celibate in my marriage?
25:Can Catholics be comfortable with C. S. Lewis?
26:Do you have to confess if you break your Lenten resolutions?
27:What does one do if he/she falls in love with a non-catholic?
28:Is "Amazing Grace" Catholic?
29:What do I do if the priest cuts me off in Confession?
30:Should the holy water fonts be drained during Lent?
31:Do our beloved pets go to heaven when they die?
32:What do we do if my wife is ordered not to become pregnant?
33:May we eat juices and sauces from meat on Lenten Fridays?
34:Is "steady dating" really a sin?
35:Why did God create hell?
36:At what point in Mass does a later arrival not fulfill the Mass obligation?
37:Do I really need to confess this now?
38:Is Christmas a holy day of obligation this year?
1:Are Lenten fumbles mortal sins?
2:Is this really a rule of Lent?
3:Where did Lent come from?
4:Can I eat eggs on Fridays during Lent?
5:What is the Lenten fast?
6:Should I eat meat at a company dinner party on a Friday of Lent?
7:Why are holy water fonts drained during Lent?
8:Why the covering of statues during Lent?
9:When does Lent end?
10:How do vegetarians observe Lent?
11:It is wrong to change what you "give up" for Lent?
12:Do you have to confess if you break your Lenten resolutions?
13:Should the holy water fonts be drained during Lent?
14:May we eat juices and sauces from meat on Lenten Fridays?

I think #12, #18, and #36 (non-Lenten) are the funniest.

OSU vs MSU Saturday at 4.

If Ohio State loses this Saturday (ABC-TV, 4 pm EST) I will feel personally responsible.
As an OSU alumnus I dutifully gathered a talisman last month in anticipation of next month’s University of Michigan game (also known simply as "The Game") and tucked it away in a jar.  But look what happened to my little buckeyes (click for larger). 

I'm afraid to even open the jar, fearing the smell.  If this were a dream it would be rich in interpretable culpability but here it is just bad luck. 
This is not the ideal time for a bad omen: Saturday afternoon (tomorrow as I write) is a crucial game: Michigan State and Ohio State are tied for first in the, albeit in the admittedly weak this year, Big 10.  Both Michigan State and Ohio State are (6-1). 
A tiny consolation, viz the still-distant University of Michigan game is that their ability to perform even the most basic tasks on the field is currently doubtful. 

From Russia With Love

I checked my anti-virus log on McAfee to see if anyone has been pinging my PC.  (It took four clicks from the Anti-Virus home screen: Reports and logs/Recent Events/Inbound Events/Trace This Address.) McAfee seems to show that on October 5 somebody tried to make "an unsolicited connection to Port 68" on my computer.  The source IP looked strange.  Here is the map that McAfee proposed for the source of the event.

IMHO The interface on McAfee anti-virus is much less useful than the one on Norton.  Unfortunately McAfee just auto-renewed itself for a third year...gotta make a note on my to-do list for September 2009.

3rd Presidential Debate

It was surprising to me how the debates went. 
I am a diehard liberal (Kucinich or Sharrod Brown would be my ideal candidates).  I came close to voting for Joe Biden in the Democratic primary but he was out of the race by the time we voted in NY and I wanted to weigh in on Obama-Clinton the side of the equally smart but less neoliberal, way less pro-war  Obama. 

And yet I would score the first two prez debates with McCain the winner.  Only last night's debate, do I feel, belonged to Obama.  The difference was dramatic.  McCain's cognition and emotions are now clearly a notch below the requirements of the job description.  His mental freshness date seems to have expired in 2000.  And McCain should really be held accountable for his impulsive choice of Palin to be second in command.  I think even if I were a McCain supporter, that mystifying choice alone would have been a deal breaker.

Speaking of Palin, the most interesting idea I have seen is that the SNL parody actually helped her.  I think many people thought that the script of that skit was an invented parody of Palin rather than, largely, her own words.  Moreover, the SNL parody set the bar so low that, most people's second exposure to her, via the VP debate, may have come across to many inquiring voters as an improvement over the Tina Fey portrayal, when all she was really proving was that she was less laughable than the opening skit for Saturday Night Live, hardly a qualification for VPoTUS.

We linear humans are plodding at best in Cancer analysis

How can you think like a tumor cell?  How can you untangle the chemical dance of cancer?  Those are my thoughts while studying for my Cancer (BIOL 472) mid-term at Hunter College.

Scientists are at a disadvantage when trying to eavesdrop on the transformations of a normal cell changing into a tumor cell.  We humans are overwhelmingly reliant on vision for input and linear events for analysis.

That kind of thinking sets you up for solving Newtonian mechanics, i.e. controlling the trajectory of an Apollo mission to space or at least the distance that a kicked football will travel but in the symphony that is cell chemistry, we really need a brain suited for wholistic, simultaneous events, based not on the visual image of something but more on the smell of something. 

Non-visual humans are out there, subverting paradigms in their fields.  I know we read about a blind biologist that achieved breakthroughs in shell analysis because he would feel the bivalves instead of just looking at them.  That gave him a headstart on figuring out some of the aspects of their symmetry.  For chemistry we need not a feeler but a smeller.  Oh to be a dog.  Man’s best friend, if he could evolve a better cerebral cortex.  The insights of a dog-scientist into the biochemical signaling pathways of a neoplastic cell would be deep.

But since we aren’t dogs, the complex chatter of cell signaling has to be teased apart and interpreted by what are less straight science and something bordering on graphic design and the visual representation of data seen in the work of artists like Edward Tufte.   Check out the artfulness of the data in some papers we studied this semester:

 

 

Personal Time Zone: How Do You Relate to 'Time'?

I found a sort of Myers-Briggs test that analyzes your perceptions of time.  It is an instrument that finds what time zone your psyche is dominated by: Past, Present, Future.  The theory is robust and has seven categories in all.  You may know the author, Philip Zimbardo, as the past president of the American Psychology Association and narrator of the PBS series Discovering Psychology.

Zimbardo  has done demographics studies that use this categorization tool to evaluate different populations.  For example, while nothing is absolute, being raised in poverty is correlated with producing a person who is fatalisitic and present-oriented toward hedonism.  Further, Zimbardo says the test scores are predictors of future personal success, citing a correlation between people who are future focused and how far they go in life. 

One part of his research may already be familiar to you: the marshmallow experiment, where 4 year olds are left alone in a room and told that if they stay out of the treats bowl, they'll get more treats after the researcher returns.  Zimbardo gives dramatic longitudinal data for the kids from that study.

You can take the test for free.

I always hope that these tests will give a clear score, not some middling result, and so I was satisfied that at least two of my scores were in the outer fifth of the data collected so far by the site.  Here are my results:

 

The red dots on the graph are Zimbardo's recommended levels.  The middle stripe, marked 50%, is the list of average scores (i.e. the average for all people who have taken the test is a score of 3.0 3.7, 2.4, 3.4, 3.5, 3.3 in the six categories).

If you take the test, let me know how it comes out!

(I discovered the Time Paradox Test while listening to the largely excellent podcasts which archive current presenters from meetings of the New York Academy of Science.)

UPDATE: I added my scores to the graph with an E mark.