Comments left on Althouse about Democratic Party Presidential Nominee Ages
Comments made on the
“”Clinton will take a long, much-deserved vacation, then assume a low-key schedule of advocacy work and lucrative speaking engagements.””
post from January 9, 2013.
Overlong Speculation on a Weird Little Piece for Epiphany
Christmas is done, the tree is down, and I’m still vacuuming up the needles. I’ve finally put together a post that is like taking a moment to look at the old, treasured angel from the top of the tree before putting her back in her box for another year.
Despite the pronounciation of his surname, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, was NOT a mop-haired hearthrob. Instead, in the mid-17th century, he was arguably the best violinist in Europe, a prolific composer, a devout Catholic, and Mozart’s predecessor, by 100 years, at the Archepiscopal court of Salzburg. But Heinrich Ignaz Franz DID have long, bushy hair, or at least an amazingly large wig, if his portrait does him justice.
Biber composed music not just for violin, but in all genres of his time, both sacred and secular. He even wrote an opera or two. He is probably best-known today for his so-called “Mystery Sonatas,” a collection of 15 sonatas for violin and basso continuo, each a musical meditation on a different Mystery of the Rosary. The violin is tuned differently than normal for 14 of the sonatas, giving each a distinct and symbolic sonic character. This is different than merely playing the music in a different key.
Here is another of Biber’s works I’ve found that seems to incorporate acoustic symbolism, although more hidden and implicit than the Mystery Sonatas. At the end of a collection of instrumental ensemble pieces entitled, Sonatæ, Tam Aris, quam Aulis servientes, published in 1676, there are twelve short fanfares for two trumpets. The fourth one here is striking and, I think, meaningful for Epiphany. It’s played here on two “natural” or “Baroque” trumpets, which are essentialy folded brass tubes about 8 feet long, fitted with bells and mouthpieces.
The notes that these instruments can play are given by the overtone or harmonic series, the basic acoustic material of all music. The lower notes are the same as bugle notes. But things get interesting when you get to the top of the bugle range. An entire octave (and more) of something like a major scale, with a few sharps and flats, is possible via the higher harmonics on these clever and subtle instruments. But the harmonics that produce a useable scale lie in a very high range, hence the brilliant, high notes in so many Baroque compositions that include trumpet. 17th and 18th century players had a scale to work with if they screeched high enough. The only problem is, the “scale” has some out-of-tune patches compared to an ordinary tempered scale. These may have been used to make a point, as here, or avoided, if possible and apprppriate.
Biber’s piece consists of three repeated sections, each of six bars. The first two sections begin with variants of a “happy” or celebratory dotted figure, played mostly in thirds, as befits a fanfare. The first of these “happy” few bars consist of an ascending figure, the second has similar music descending. These initial two sections then each conclude with the same slow three bars that I think are symbolic of the Cross: The two parts are intertwined in a 4-3 suspension, representing the crossbeam, and a descent of the lower trumpet to G, ending on an open G-D fifth, symbolic of the upright.
(An aside about pitch: Music for natural brass instruments is notated as if in C major, irrespective of the actual key of the music. The sounding key depends on the length and therefore the pitch of the trumpet or horn. The pitch of the trumpets used here seems to be C at about A=440 Hz, or more likely, D at A=392 Hz, a more plausable historical pitch. Most trumpets in the 17th and 18th centuries were pitched in the key of D, but pitch standards were generally flatter than today’s, at least in the last half of the 17th century through the 18th century. A trumpet pitched in D at A=392 Hz, close to the lowest pitch used at the time, would be the same as an instrument in C at our modern pitch of A=440 Hz. This should be confusing enough.)
The last section, fast again, begins with a three-note figure, rising to the third degree of the scale. It also incorporates written F#’s for the fourth degree. This note is the lynchpin. On a natural (valveless) brass instrument, the written F is the 11th harmonic, and is noticeably out-of-tune. It is somewhere between the F and F# of a tempered scale. It is unclear how much it was possible to correct this and other tuning discrepencies on natural trumpets of the past. There is some scant evidence of small holes (much used today) cut into the tube, that the player could open and close to improve intonation. There is also evidence of clever mouthpiece and bell design, thin and thick sections of brass tubing to be squeezed by the player to correct certain notes, etc. Also, a strong player with good intonation can go a long way personally to play the intstrument tolerably in-tune to a conventional scale. So, the question remains, how much, in fact, did Baroque trumpeters “let it all hang out,” and how much did they, and could they, correct their intonation? Did they even want to?
I think the answer varied a lot, and that may help explain Biber’s ambiguous use of F and F#. In any event, the players here don’t make much of an effort. They’re content to play the notes God intended, which I think is the point. The strange, “neutral” third and momentary out-of-tune fourth are jarring, but they’re manifestations of God’s Creation, construed in Nature by the simple tube of a trumpet. Man’s art is revealed in turning Nature to his ends through an instrument of such noble simplicity.
This “cross-like” musical gesture is a pale, artistic reminder of the actual cross, and the real, grisly, bloody death Jesus suffered. But because its notes are intrinsic, real, out-of-tune, and created by God (if played by Man), it is a reminder that suffering (or at least unpleasantness) is also intrinsic to existence. Unpleasantness here can be an artistic stand-in for suffering. A deeper question is why we find certain musical notes pleasant or unpleasant, and what does that mean about our relationship with other pleasant and unpleasant sensations? This is an obvious nexus of Buddhist and Christian thought, but I’m writing a little musicological bagatelle here, and leave that question to more profound philosophers.
So, the last section of our piece concludes with the ringing, haunting harmonies of the untrammeled overtone series. A perceptive YouTube commenter says it is “simultaneously so brilliant and so somber. Right inside you and yet far away.” I think it symbolizes man’s reconciliation with God. There is no obvious dissonance, as in the earlier “Cross” figure, but it is strange and brilliant, made only of the unaltered sounds in God’s Creation—the Holy Spirit made manifest, but by Man’s imperfect means—right inside you and yet so far away.
The Cross was never far from Christmas in traditional Christian art. The Cross is the pre-ordained fate of the Babe in the Manger. A Cross is often tucked into corners of Renaissance and Baroque Nativity scenes, and Bach used the well-known Easter chorale, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” as the concluding piece of his Christmas Oratorio. I’ve read this Biber piece may have been intended for Christmas, and so it was half-celebratory and half-reminiscent of the Cross.
I may be getting far afield with the next bit of speculation, but there are 159 notes total in the piece. The number 318—significant from Genesis 14:14 as the number of Abram’s servants in pursuit of his captive brother—was interpreted By St. Clement of Alexandria, among others, as a foreshadowing of the Cross (T, tau, an upright with crossbar, standing for 300) and of Jesus (ΙΗ, the first two letter of his name ΙΗΣΟΥΣ, standing for 18). 159 is half of 318, and it could be that, because this piece is only half about the Cross, and half about the Nativity of our Lord, such a number was chosen. My son says this sounds like a conspiracy theory. When I was a student, a pianist friend used to call these kinds of musicological notions “wiggy.” But if you’ve ever delved into the numerological coding in J.S. Bach, for example—a torture commonly inflicted on musicology students—you will appreciate how such wiggy ideas were common currency in the days of those musical gentlemen with too much hair, fake or real as it may have been.
FUN! Featuring the World’s Best Pickpocket!
You can read the whole thing here, but first a sample to whet the appetite:
A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.
“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”
Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.
“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.
Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.
A brief thought about Lance Armstrong
Part of Lance Armstrong’s cancer treatment was chemotherapy. Is it any wonder he became convinced of the truth of better living through chemicals?
Magic
All modern Americans are taught not to believe in magic. Our magicians are entertainers who do fake magic. We are told that believing in real magic is primitive superstition, and we are mucher smarter than that now.
But actually, magic is religion and religion is magic. It is that way now, and it always was.
What magic mostly involves, as far as I know, is trying to influence the world with words — magic spells and incantations. And liquids — magic potions. And animal sacrifices, usually involving blood.
Ok, well just look at our most popular American religion — Christianity. Praying is trying to influence the world by using words, just like magic spells. Jesus was the ultimate blood sacrifice, for Christians. The ancient Israelites performed blood sacrifices (animals, not human, but human sacrifice has been very popular in other ancient religions).
And the Catholics have Holy Water, their magic potion.
Am I trying to say that modern religions are bogus because they are really just magic? No, I am trying to say that magic is real.
I don’t want to make this a long post. But I want to say that, in alternative science, the idea of words and liguids having power is not ridiculous at all.
As just one example (there are many, and alternative science has a long history): One of the scientists who discovered the HIV virus, Montagnier, now does research on the memory of water: http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/306/1/012007.
Montagnier is a “real” scientist, not one of the fringey alternative scientists.
I have a lot more to say about this.
Modern science and modern religion have both renounced magic. But magic is real, and real scientists are beginning to figure that out.
Why It Happened
We do not know why it happened — I mean the school shooting the other day. There were some articles describing Lanza as being kind of strange — he was a very smart nerd who belonged to the technology club. He lived in his mother’s basement and played violent computer games. He wore different clothes than the other kids, and always carried a black briefcase.
And all this was said in a way that seemed to imply “Well no surprise he murdered 27 people — he looked and acted strange!”
I was shocked by the murders, of course, but I was also shocked by this reaction. Unpopular nerd playing violent computer games — well OF COURSE he went on a killing spree.
Can you see that there is absolutely no logic whatsoever in that line of thinking? And it’s outrageous, and insulting to every person who wasn’t the most popular kid in school.
And it’s dangerous, because people could lose their rights and freedoms, all because someone decided they were a little “odd” and therefore potentially a threat to society.
I saw posts on facebook saying that this type of kid should be diagnosed and showered with love and hugs, and that will prevent him from going beserk.
Well, for one thing, not every misfit wants to be showered with love and hugs. Being a little different is not a disease.
And there is no evidence whatsoever that I ever heard of that, if a person actually were a potential mass murderer, love and hugs would cure them.
We DO NOT KNOW why these things happen, and we don’t know how to prevent them.
I am concerned that now parents and teachers will be start rounding up all kids who are too different, or too smart, or too strange, and send them for psychiatric “treatment.” And psychiatric treatment now days means brain-numbing drugs.
Amba and I make new cars….
So, I was chatting with our bloggeress who mentioned she had rented a Honda Odyssey, and I wondered aloud why Honda had not made the Honda Iliad while they were at it….and we took off from there….
Toyota Aeneid
Plymouth Decameron
Volvo Vedas
Ford Inferno
Mercury Paradiso
but why limit it to cars?
Mazda Xanax
Toyota Celexca
Rolls-Royce Rogaine
Lotus Lithium
Fractalized
Update 12/4/2012: Seriously, everyone is watching you. Do you really think the government isn’t?
And the sad thing is this falls under the category of REALITY.
Original Post:
NOTE: The following is a draft of a post I started writing back in September. I didn’t publish it then because (a) I wasn’t finished with it and (b) the mathematical portion is a mess. In that portion I haven’t really used the mathematics correctly or clearly – what is there was a place holder until I could get back to it to clean it up.
Since then I haven’t actually returned to the piece. I kept meaning to, but it seemed like work and required more effort that I was willing to commit to at any one time. That remains true today.
However I have in the meantime come to a couple of decisions. More about those, at least one of them, later. But those decisions mean I’m not really going to go back and correct this piece. Rather than throw the whole thing out I’ve decided to publish the danged thing anyway. With a few minor edits, the original is posted below.
One Wednesday night back in September my neighbor came over and started a conversation. This was unusual as mostly our interactions have been about whether or not his dogs are trespassing on my property or my cats are trespassing on his property.
Anyhow, it got interesting. He has recently been borne unto the spiritual safety of the Heavenly Father. That is, he’s Born Again. He’s also gotten into conspiracy theories. This is where it gets interesting.
Now some of his ideas are just wrong. I’m not going to go into it, but they’re just wrong. Other ideas appear, at first blush, to be crazy. And this is where it gets interesting.
For example, take the idea that an international conspiracy of bankers and financiers is controlling everything. Crazy! Except that he then goes on to mention the Bilderberg Group. To quote the BBC
On Thursday the Bilderberg group marks its 50th anniversary with the start of its yearly meeting.
For four days some of the West’s chief political movers, business leaders, bankers, industrialists and strategic thinkers will hunker down in a five-star hotel in northern Italy to talk about global issues.
What sets Bilderberg apart from other high-powered get-togethers, such as the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), is its mystique.
Not a word of what is said at Bilderberg meetings can be breathed outside. No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes of meetings are taken, names are not noted.
Hmmm. About 150 of the most powerful people in the world get together for a few days each year to do what? In complete secrecy? What the Hell? Nothing is completely secret these days. When was the last time ANYTHING was kept completely secret by that many people? It’s hard to not feel a little … strange … when contemplating this group. I mean, how would you even get all those people to agree to meet in one time and place each year?
A lot of these same people also meet each year at the Jackson Hole (Wyoming) retreat for central bankers. There is some overlap between the two groups. This just sounds worse. And then consider things like the IMF, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the rest of the World Bank Group, the fact that this all got its start at Bretton Woods*, the fact that these folks have WON (in succession the group behind this has defeated the Fascists, the Nazis, the Japanese Imperialists, fractured international communism, rolled the Soviet Union and its empire, and even converted the Maoists) and the whole damned thing starts getting scary.
But wait! Hang on a second! This is all crazy talk! Right? Right?! Well, yes, it is all crazy talk. After all, think about it. The nations of the free world had to set up some kind of organizational structure to figure out how they would run things after the end of WWII. Quite obviously the old order was dead, and Hitler’s order seemed likely to fail. Then what? Well, let’s get our BESTEST and BRIGHTESTEST together to figure this out! They needed to have an eye towards rebuilding the devastated nations of Europe, they were looking how to handle exchange rates, how to work out repayment schemes for the vast sums that had been borrowed, what to do with the European colonies, how to confront their good friend and ally Joe Stalin, et cetera. It only made sense that they would get together and plan.
And it makes sense that the central bankers get together to work out various issues on a regular basis. This really isn’t all that crazy.
Except for that Bilderberg Group. What exactly are THEY doing? And why do they keep what they do so hush-hush? Most of the attendees come from nations that are what we call democracies. A fair number of political leaders from those nations attend. Why won’t they tell us what they’re up to? I’ll come back to this a little later.
Consider something else my neighbor brought up the other night. He mentioned that the government can track everyone by their cell-phones, that they can even turn them on and off so that they can listen in on you whenever they like.
Crazy! Balderdash! Except that they CAN track you by your phone. We all know this from watching any number of missing person cases. We know this because it was written into the law after 9/11 that all cell-phones had to have this feature. Steve Sailer used to highlight cases of dumb criminals that would steal cell-phones and carry them around right up until the point when the police nabbed them. So this part is well known.
Turning them on and off to listen in on you whenever they want? Would they do that? Could they do that? Well sure they could. That can’t really be all that difficult a hack given that the government has the geniuses at the NSA working for them. (I went to grad school with a guy that ended up working for the NSA. Believe it or not, I qualify for crap like the Triple Nine Society. That means I’ve got a BIG BRAIN, top tenth of the top percentile, IQ in the 150s. When I bother to use it, I’ve got a nice brain. This guy was noticeably more intelligent than I was. I wasn’t in his league. That’s the kind of brain the NSA likes to get hold of – and use.) Not to mention that some 15 year-old is working on doing that tonight in the hopes of turning on a schoolmate’s phone in the hope of catching a shot of her boobs. There’s no reason to believe that your phone couldn’t be turned on remotely.
But would they? We already know what they will do. They’ll admit to an ever-increasing number of warrant-less wiretaps. That doesn’t mean they’re turning your phone on when you’re not using it, of course. But can you really truly say they wouldn’t do that? Think about that the next time your phone has mysteriously lost its charge….
…
Now for a brief (I hope) digression about mathematics. And by brief I mean largely non-mathematical.
Fractals are marvelous mathematical objects. They’ve got all kinds of neat properties that make mathematicians feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like non-differentiability. And beyond that they can be used to create really incredible images. The objects exhibit self-similarity, can be computed iteratively and frequently are nowhere differentiable.
…
So now let’s imagine a line. On one side of the line is reality. On the other side is, for lack of a better term, crazy. And by crazy I mean that which isn’t real, the delusional, the made-up, the phantasms of deranged minds, and even just the nutty ideas of otherwise sane individuals. If the line is nice and straight, it’s easy to determine if an idea is on the real or crazy side of the line. Even if the line is curved, but otherwise smooth, one can probably discern where an idea resides.
But what we have is a fractal line. And it is bobbing and weaving all over the plane. Oh, some stuff is clearly far enough away from this line to know whether the idea is real or crazy. Examples: Reality is that Season 9 of the original Dallas sucked donkey balls; Crazy was the idea held by millions of teenage girls back in the day that George Michael might be interested in them.
But what about the stuff closer to the line? Is some cabal of international financiers and their government cronies secretly running the world? We have to dig down through many iterations, perhaps an infinite number of iterations, to figure out if the existence of the Bilderberg Group makes that Real or Crazy. At some iterations the idea is clearly Crazy. At some it is clearly Real. At others we can’t really tell where the line is.
Discerning what is Real and what is Crazy becomes more challenging every day. “Is the government spying on us with our cell phones?” “Well they CAN.” “But ARE they?” “I don’t know. Do you mean all of us?” “Sure, all of us.” “Uh, I don’t think they have the tech to spy on all of us at once yet.” “Are you sure? Isn’t that what the cloud is for?” “Uhhhhhhh….”
Somewhere, in the Byzantine complexity of the federal government, there may – MAY – be someone that can say “Yes, we are.” And that person could give a definite answer. But that person isn’t going to tell us. The government is so complex that no one, not one single person, can definitively say “No, we are not spying on everyone by using their cell-phones.” There is no such person because no one person knows everything that the government is doing. They may make such a statement, they may even believe it. But they don’t KNOW it.
* Which came to an end, of sorts, thanks to Richard Nixon.
At Last! News of Randy.
Annie,
I apologize for not responding sooner. Randy’s main email account was lost soon after his passing in March and we could not retrieve information to send details to friends online. I know you and the others he met online/in person were a great part of his attempt at recovery from the cancer. You helped to make his final months as he wanted – to continue to experience life on his terms.
I certainly understand the need for closure. Randy accepted his passing with courage, grace and love. He was surrounded by his family and close friends and was himself until the very end. In fact, the Monday before his passing he was sitting at the kitchen table discussing with my son what to do with the investment account they created and how to prepare himself for entering college this fall. Randy was always enthusiastic about listening and sharing with his neices and nephews. It brought him great joy to know he and my son shared the same keen interest in investing, architecture and Asian art.
Thank you for your making our brothers’ life so rich.
Keep the faith,
Ron
On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 5:46 AM, Annie Gottlieb <a-twelve@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
Many of us love Randy and need to know about the last months and weeks of his life. We have heard absolutely nothing.
If this e-mail address is still alive, please make contact. Karen, who met Randy and his mom in Vermont; Annie, who hosts the blog “Ambiance” to which Randy sometimes contributed, and about a dozen more of us need — I hate the word “closure,” we just need to know.
Thanks.
Ambiance 