I believe most people would say "Christian fundamentalists." Or maybe "Biblical literalists." The problem is that calling these people by those names associates everyone who holds the same beliefs about Creationism with a couple of violent lunatics. Much as they like to call themselves by the name, violent and hateful "Fundamentalists" are just as Christian as suicide bombers and black-hooded kidnappers in Iraq are Muslim.
Linux people usually dislike M$, but if one of them slashed Bill Gates' tires it would be a gross distortion to paint the whole OSS community as petty and vindictive.
To use another/. relevant example, not all hackers are crackers or "black hat," even if the general media seems to think so.
(I posted this comment the other day, but just as the article went off the front page... let's try again!)
I think that this a pretty unrealistic assessment of the issue of parental control. I don't know about you, but I had a job when I was in high school, and actually got my checks myself, not through my parents.
My parents had lots of rules about what I could and couldn't buy as far as music, movies, games, and such. Those rules didn't stop me from actually going to the store on the way home from my job and buying a CD they had forbidden, and it didn't stop me from listening to it on my headphones while holding some CD cases that were allowed.
Parents can only do so much to control what comes in to their house, even over-protective, controlling parents like mine were in high school. It's not realistic to expect parents to run a police state in their home, search their kids' backpacks every time they come in the door, track every dollar and hour their kids spend.
I don't know what I think of laws like this. I can see the concerns regarding free speech, but if I were a parent, I would appreciate there being some legal guidelines for retailers when dealing with my kids when I'm not there. I don't think this is as cut-and-dried an issue as both sides make it out to be.
Let the parents decide what is too violent and what isn't and be done with the whole thing. If parents cared then we would not be in this whole entire mess.
That's a pretty unrealistic assessment of the issue of parental control. I don't know about you, but I had a job when I was in high school, and actually got my checks myself, not through my parents.
My parents had lots of rules about what I could and couldn't buy as far as music, movies, games, and such. Those rules didn't stop me from actually going to the store on the way home from my job and buying a CD they had forbidden, and it didn't stop me from listening to it on my headphones while holding some CD cases that were allowed.
Parents can only do so much to control what comes in to their house, even over-protective, controlling parents like mine were in high school. It's not realistic to expect parents to run a police state in their home, search their kids' backpacks every time they come in the door, track every dollar and hour their kids spend.
I don't know what I think of laws like this. I can see the concerns regarding free speech, but if I were a parent, I would appreciate there being some legal guidelines for retailers when dealing with my kids when I'm not there. I don't think this is as cut-and-dried an issue as both sides make it out to be.
It's funny that you already started what I wanted to put here:
And if you think Bartok and Stravinsky are interesting, try Messiaen or Ligeti!
Or take a different tack altogether and take on some jazz... then if you put some jazz side-by-side with Messiaen's harmonic language, it's amazing to think they came to such similar sounding chords by such different routes, and how they use the same harmonic constructions in completely different ways!
Even after hundreds of years of western music, there still seems to be some life in those 12 tones. Who woulda thunk it?
Oh yeah, dude, and I totally didn't mean to come off unpleasant if I did. Sorry if I sounded like a jerk, my intent was to merely bruise your ass, not kick it.
And even though 7th (and other extended) chords seem to be mostly associated with Jazz, the dominant and fully diminished 7ths are ubiquitous in the cadences of 18th and 19th century music and beyond.
Many people don't realize that Bach's works have 7th chords sprinkled all over them in all kinds of forms.
I haven't been able to listen to much of it yet, although what I have is intriguing. You're right that there's a lack of what would be called functional tonality, in that there isn't much in the way of traditional chord progressions that follow "common practice" (basically the 18th to 19th centuries--Bach, Beethoven, and the [mostly] boys) rules of music theory. Instead, the tracks I've listened to tend to concentrate on one harmony and layer a lot of non-chord tones and busy rhythmic material over it. Its very minimalist.
What I find most interesting is that the few tracks I've been able to listen to bear a certain resemblance to what comes out of a lot of University-level electronic composition studios. I actually enjoy quite a bit of what I heard as a kind of listening exercise of sorts.
Actually, its fantastically difficult (if not impossible) to write good or interesting music without using dissonant chords! Dissonances are necessary to make a harmonic progression interesting, whether they are dissonances between harmonies, or within them.
Um, let's see, what else? Ah, the tritone (augmented 4th/diminished 5th) was the Devil's tone, and it was in fact essentially verboten for some time, but has certainly been in wide use both in and out of the church for the last 300 years at least. Oh, and Mozart wrote a string quartet which was dubbed "Dissonances" that very successfully makes dissonant harmonies a fundamental part of it's materials.
I'm a pretty competent musician, a composer no less, and I couldn't imagine keeping a musical line interesting without the use of dissonance at some level--it really is not feasible. Its like trying to discern depth without light and shadows... contrastless mush.
I suppose I should clarify that I don't actually think ill of a liberal arts education, or indeed of my music degrees. It's just a sardonic joke I have with my wife: how much easier would things be right now if we had taken career paths with more immediate tangible rewards?
I don't expect music (or writing, foreign languages, film studies, etc...) to make me rich, but I do expect to find the life we lead more rewarding long-term in intangibles like contentment, creativity, personal pride in accomplishments, contribution to culture and such.
Not to say I wouldn't mind a few tangibles as well!:)
Don't worry, you'll be just as poor after graduation... or worse! Unless you're one of those foresightful individuals who major in business or accounting or something. Bastards.
(Liberal arts my ass. Two degrees in music and I work in a frickin' bookstore. But I'm not bitter!)
Interesting (hopefully) point to make on your post:
Your reference to a journalist or other writer presenting a thesis and then maintaining it through the rest of the paper (or whatever it is) is actually pretty applicable to the largest segment of atonal composition: serialism. In simple 12-tone serialism, the tone-row is typically stated completely in its most basic form (P-0, for those who know...) before being continually restated throughout in its various permutations. In these permutations, the intervalic content never changes. It is transposed, reversed, and inverted--often all at once--but it is always a crystalline whole, just "viewed" from different "angles."
I would think that would at least make listening to strictly 12-tone music fairly easy, leaving other forms of atonality aside for the present discussion. You hear one pattern and set of intervals, and then listen for them again in different arrangements. It does take more dedicated listening than tapping your foot to the LatestHotArtistOfToday on the ClearChannelReceptotron, but as far as basic pattern recognition goes, we tend to be a fairly gifted bunch of apes...
I don't know... The cooling system in the new G5s is pretty well thought out, I don't think I'd want to go cramming things where they don't belong for fear of messing with airflow.
Of course, now that we're going liquid cooled, some of that will be less of an issue, but overall the case still needs good airflow if it's going to stay cool (i.e., not melt), right?
Just to point out the possibility you seem to leave out:
I am a Christian. I believe in the Trinity, that Christ came, was born, crucified, died, entombed, and raised up again. I believe that the Bible is God's written word to us.
I also believe in evolution. I believe that the world is almost unimaginably old, that the Big Bang happened, that life evolved from simple seeds to what it is now.
The thing is, I believe all that physical evidence is also God's word to us. Nowhere in the Bible is the "Sola Scriptura" mantra given to us, but we are told to consider the world around us and what it tells us about God. Seems to me that it tells us that God uses his established "rules of nature" to accomplish most (if not all) of what he wants done here. Do I necessarily know how? Nope, I'm not a scientist, but I know many of them who are, in fact, Christian and believe the same as I do.
You misunderstand science: it is not a quest to prove your hypothesis, but rather a quest to disprove it. It's easy to line up data that appears to back up what you claim is the truth (this is where Creation "Science" usually ends up... seeking proof for a foregone conclusion), what's difficult is to formulate a hypothesis, and then attack it with everything you can muster to see if it survives; if and when it passes, you publish your findings in a peer reviewed journal, and everyone else attacks it with everything they've got, goes over you equations, checks everything, and tries to replicate your findings. Only after something repeatedly survives this kind of rigorous testing is it accepted as a theory (not the "theory" that people mean when they try to denigrade Darwinism, that's a different meaning for the word... look it up).
I was raised as a Young Earth Creationist, and it took a lot for me to be able to give that up and accept the scientific proof of these things. The thing is, my faith grew as I accepted them. Does believing that much of the Bible is not meant to be taken literally bother me, or hurt my faith? Not at all! Do you believe that all of Christ's parables were literally true, or was he telling a story to get a point across? I believe the same benefit can be taken from a lot of the Bible: look for what it tells you about God, about his relation to the world and to us. That's the meat of the whole book...
Except, of course, that Osama was in (Taliban) Afganistan, and the "war" (which it is continually called, although Congress has never declared it) has been against the (secular) Saddam regime in Iraq. That's like bombing the US because you're pissed at Mexico.
Really? Maybe some places. My wife and I waited until we were married, and most of our friends did, too. So we went to a private school, whatever. Even at the university where I did my grad work, there were a lot of people waiting for engagement or marriage. I think it tends to get exaggerated that people don't wait for marriage anymore. A lot of people do, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Suppression, as opposed to repression, is not a bad thing... it just means you think something is special or important enough to reserve it, despite the fact that it may mean delaying gratification. Repression gets people into trouble because it's hard to break the guilt and shame association that they've convinced themselves of, and it ends up screwing up their married sex lives.
Also, I have to say that it's pretty shallow to break off a relationship because your partner wants to wait to have sex. It's only one part of a multi-faceted interaction, and you'll do just fine without for a while.
Problem with the programs you named is that they are not designed for notation, but rather just sequencing (valuable, to be sure, but if you need notation features, you won't get good ones uf there are any at all). A lot of people will say Cubase, Performer, ProTools, etc., etc., but those programs are also all geared toward Sequencing and not notation. There are comparatively few true notation programs for OS X (or at all, really), and by far the two biggest are Finale and Sibelius.
There are others, but at this point they really play no true part in the competition game. Now, when one of them is capable of creating scores as attractive, flexible, and (most important for 99% of users) easily (which means not CLI-based, sorry), the big guys will start paying attention. Combine that with a simlar or lower price-point, and you have recipe for success, because I have yet to meet a user of any notation program who didn't have some gripes about it, or who would be unwilling to look to other programs.
It's about time, really. I've been using Sibelius for two years now, and mainly because it was the best notation software available for OS X. I've been watching this thing with Finale, and occasionally sending them emails asking about it, and now I'm pretty psyched to try the demo.
What I'm really waiting for, though, is an option in both (or all) programs to save in some open file format. That would mean true victory for us music tech dorks, and longevity for our files.
Interestingly enough, there is no Classical music at all! Even something as common as Beethoven.
I'll stick with iTunes for myriad reasons, but here are the biggest ones: 1. WalMart has excluded me based on my status as a Mac user. For some reason, they saw fit not to include me and my ilk in their business plan. 2. There is no classical music, which is 90% of what I buy. Here even iTunes isn't so great, as what I'm interested in is new music by living composers, and the selection there is limited. 3. WalMart is an evil, unscrupled company.
Reading this, WalMart? You could turn me into a customer, but I imagine it's not likely to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux people usually dislike M$, but if one of them slashed Bill Gates' tires it would be a gross distortion to paint the whole OSS community as petty and vindictive.
To use another /. relevant example, not all hackers are crackers or "black hat," even if the general media seems to think so.
:)
I think that this a pretty unrealistic assessment of the issue of parental control. I don't know about you, but I had a job when I was in high school, and actually got my checks myself, not through my parents.
My parents had lots of rules about what I could and couldn't buy as far as music, movies, games, and such. Those rules didn't stop me from actually going to the store on the way home from my job and buying a CD they had forbidden, and it didn't stop me from listening to it on my headphones while holding some CD cases that were allowed.
Parents can only do so much to control what comes in to their house, even over-protective, controlling parents like mine were in high school. It's not realistic to expect parents to run a police state in their home, search their kids' backpacks every time they come in the door, track every dollar and hour their kids spend.
I don't know what I think of laws like this. I can see the concerns regarding free speech, but if I were a parent, I would appreciate there being some legal guidelines for retailers when dealing with my kids when I'm not there. I don't think this is as cut-and-dried an issue as both sides make it out to be.
That's a pretty unrealistic assessment of the issue of parental control. I don't know about you, but I had a job when I was in high school, and actually got my checks myself, not through my parents.
My parents had lots of rules about what I could and couldn't buy as far as music, movies, games, and such. Those rules didn't stop me from actually going to the store on the way home from my job and buying a CD they had forbidden, and it didn't stop me from listening to it on my headphones while holding some CD cases that were allowed.
Parents can only do so much to control what comes in to their house, even over-protective, controlling parents like mine were in high school. It's not realistic to expect parents to run a police state in their home, search their kids' backpacks every time they come in the door, track every dollar and hour their kids spend.
I don't know what I think of laws like this. I can see the concerns regarding free speech, but if I were a parent, I would appreciate there being some legal guidelines for retailers when dealing with my kids when I'm not there. I don't think this is as cut-and-dried an issue as both sides make it out to be.
And if you think Bartok and Stravinsky are interesting, try Messiaen or Ligeti!
Or take a different tack altogether and take on some jazz... then if you put some jazz side-by-side with Messiaen's harmonic language, it's amazing to think they came to such similar sounding chords by such different routes, and how they use the same harmonic constructions in completely different ways!
Even after hundreds of years of western music, there still seems to be some life in those 12 tones. Who woulda thunk it?
Getting these things right actually is important, as getting them wrong lowers the clarity and intelligence level of discourse considerably.
Not to be an ass, I've just seen too much of that one. Next up: "Could of..."
:)
Many people don't realize that Bach's works have 7th chords sprinkled all over them in all kinds of forms.
What I find most interesting is that the few tracks I've been able to listen to bear a certain resemblance to what comes out of a lot of University-level electronic composition studios. I actually enjoy quite a bit of what I heard as a kind of listening exercise of sorts.
Um, let's see, what else? Ah, the tritone (augmented 4th/diminished 5th) was the Devil's tone, and it was in fact essentially verboten for some time, but has certainly been in wide use both in and out of the church for the last 300 years at least. Oh, and Mozart wrote a string quartet which was dubbed "Dissonances" that very successfully makes dissonant harmonies a fundamental part of it's materials.
I'm a pretty competent musician, a composer no less, and I couldn't imagine keeping a musical line interesting without the use of dissonance at some level--it really is not feasible. Its like trying to discern depth without light and shadows... contrastless mush.
I didn't think it was possible to slashdot MIT!
That was only two hundredths of a cent?? :)
I don't expect music (or writing, foreign languages, film studies, etc...) to make me rich, but I do expect to find the life we lead more rewarding long-term in intangibles like contentment, creativity, personal pride in accomplishments, contribution to culture and such.
Not to say I wouldn't mind a few tangibles as well! :)
(Liberal arts my ass. Two degrees in music and I work in a frickin' bookstore. But I'm not bitter!)
:P
Your reference to a journalist or other writer presenting a thesis and then maintaining it through the rest of the paper (or whatever it is) is actually pretty applicable to the largest segment of atonal composition: serialism. In simple 12-tone serialism, the tone-row is typically stated completely in its most basic form (P-0, for those who know...) before being continually restated throughout in its various permutations. In these permutations, the intervalic content never changes. It is transposed, reversed, and inverted--often all at once--but it is always a crystalline whole, just "viewed" from different "angles."
I would think that would at least make listening to strictly 12-tone music fairly easy, leaving other forms of atonality aside for the present discussion. You hear one pattern and set of intervals, and then listen for them again in different arrangements. It does take more dedicated listening than tapping your foot to the LatestHotArtistOfToday on the ClearChannelReceptotron, but as far as basic pattern recognition goes, we tend to be a fairly gifted bunch of apes...
Of course, now that we're going liquid cooled, some of that will be less of an issue, but overall the case still needs good airflow if it's going to stay cool (i.e., not melt), right?
I am a Christian. I believe in the Trinity, that Christ came, was born, crucified, died, entombed, and raised up again. I believe that the Bible is God's written word to us.
I also believe in evolution. I believe that the world is almost unimaginably old, that the Big Bang happened, that life evolved from simple seeds to what it is now.
The thing is, I believe all that physical evidence is also God's word to us. Nowhere in the Bible is the "Sola Scriptura" mantra given to us, but we are told to consider the world around us and what it tells us about God. Seems to me that it tells us that God uses his established "rules of nature" to accomplish most (if not all) of what he wants done here. Do I necessarily know how? Nope, I'm not a scientist, but I know many of them who are, in fact, Christian and believe the same as I do.
You misunderstand science: it is not a quest to prove your hypothesis, but rather a quest to disprove it. It's easy to line up data that appears to back up what you claim is the truth (this is where Creation "Science" usually ends up... seeking proof for a foregone conclusion), what's difficult is to formulate a hypothesis, and then attack it with everything you can muster to see if it survives; if and when it passes, you publish your findings in a peer reviewed journal, and everyone else attacks it with everything they've got, goes over you equations, checks everything, and tries to replicate your findings. Only after something repeatedly survives this kind of rigorous testing is it accepted as a theory (not the "theory" that people mean when they try to denigrade Darwinism, that's a different meaning for the word... look it up).
I was raised as a Young Earth Creationist, and it took a lot for me to be able to give that up and accept the scientific proof of these things. The thing is, my faith grew as I accepted them. Does believing that much of the Bible is not meant to be taken literally bother me, or hurt my faith? Not at all! Do you believe that all of Christ's parables were literally true, or was he telling a story to get a point across? I believe the same benefit can be taken from a lot of the Bible: look for what it tells you about God, about his relation to the world and to us. That's the meat of the whole book...
I don't know why, but when I first glanced at this post, I mentally inserted a period after the seventh word:
I'm Canadian and I'm always really happy.
:)
Resistance is futile.
Except, of course, that Osama was in (Taliban) Afganistan, and the "war" (which it is continually called, although Congress has never declared it) has been against the (secular) Saddam regime in Iraq. That's like bombing the US because you're pissed at Mexico.
Really? Maybe some places. My wife and I waited until we were married, and most of our friends did, too. So we went to a private school, whatever. Even at the university where I did my grad work, there were a lot of people waiting for engagement or marriage. I think it tends to get exaggerated that people don't wait for marriage anymore. A lot of people do, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Suppression, as opposed to repression, is not a bad thing... it just means you think something is special or important enough to reserve it, despite the fact that it may mean delaying gratification. Repression gets people into trouble because it's hard to break the guilt and shame association that they've convinced themselves of, and it ends up screwing up their married sex lives.
Also, I have to say that it's pretty shallow to break off a relationship because your partner wants to wait to have sex. It's only one part of a multi-faceted interaction, and you'll do just fine without for a while.
There are others, but at this point they really play no true part in the competition game. Now, when one of them is capable of creating scores as attractive, flexible, and (most important for 99% of users) easily (which means not CLI-based, sorry), the big guys will start paying attention. Combine that with a simlar or lower price-point, and you have recipe for success, because I have yet to meet a user of any notation program who didn't have some gripes about it, or who would be unwilling to look to other programs.
What I'm really waiting for, though, is an option in both (or all) programs to save in some open file format. That would mean true victory for us music tech dorks, and longevity for our files.
So it would be like a new Australia in the works?
I wonder what a Martian dingo would look like...
Interestingly enough, there is no Classical music at all! Even something as common as Beethoven.
I'll stick with iTunes for myriad reasons, but here are the biggest ones:
1. WalMart has excluded me based on my status as a Mac user. For some reason, they saw fit not to include me and my ilk in their business plan.
2. There is no classical music, which is 90% of what I buy. Here even iTunes isn't so great, as what I'm interested in is new music by living composers, and the selection there is limited.
3. WalMart is an evil, unscrupled company.
Reading this, WalMart? You could turn me into a customer, but I imagine it's not likely to happen.