I'm rather surprised that this would be offered as a suggestion. As a friend of mine recently found out, a lot of jobs are requiring a minimum of a bachelor's degree. Relying solely on your experience (in his case, 5 years as a manager) doesn't quite cut it, as there are people with that same experience and the degree out there.
But it's not impossible to do this without racking up debt. I work for a state university, and tuition here is dirt cheap: right around $1,500 for the semester.
I spent two years at a private school studying math and ended up with $60k in college loans, just for tuition. When I changed to music and went this state school where I currently am employed, I spent another six and a half years (four on undergrad, two and a half on a masters) and took out $40k over those six and a half years, working part time and covering my tuition, books and most of my rent.
I went to private high school on a scholarship, and they drilled it into my head that I needed to go to a "fancy" college. Now that I work as an administrator in academic, I can see how pointless that was. Also, many state schools can provide an excellent education -- we take pride in being labeled a "tough" school. Our teachers don't make lots of money, so you can bet that they probably teach because it's something they love to do.
A lot of states also have tuition assistance programs if the high school graduate goes to a state school. In Louisiana they have the TOPS program -- as long as the student had a relatively good GPA, their tuition was covered. If their GPA is higher, they received additional funds for books, etc.
I'm not in the best of situations with my loans and wish I had taken advantage of some programs like these when I had graduated. With $100k in debt, I can't afford the monthly payments ($750 a month!) so I'm working on another degree (that my employer pays for, thankfully) just to defer payments. Meanwhile, interest is accumulating. I think a book like this -- despite its negative message -- is good for students and their parents.
So your teacher emphasized making a lot of money and, essentially, not caring enough about your job for it to concern you in your every day life? Did she ever suggest maybe getting a job that contributes to the betterment of society? A job that provides some moral satisfaction?
We're not talking about greedy people here, we're talking about teachers. (Well, we were talking about Brawndo at some point...) They could get other jobs, but they enjoy the satisfaction of actually educating our youth. They know that someone has to do the teaching, especially when so many people just want to make money and "live life."
It doesn't sound like you had that great of a teacher. Essentially she was half-assing her teaching duties to make better money at another job? What kind of message does that give, and why even bother with the teaching? Is the paycheck from the other job really all that important? I think you'll find that someone in her position actually doesn't get promoted or receive tenure in academia -- no outside reviewer or department head/dean would ever recommend someone for tenure who only teaches half time. Tenure is reserved for only the most dedicated of educators, educators who feel that teaching is their life, not money hungry part-timers. If she did receive tenure, I'd think twice about sending my own children there. (I'm assuming you're referring to a college professor.)
You're probably at a point where you can't change your life much, so you'll never have the opportunity to stand in front of a classroom and know what it feels like. If you're still young enough, though, I really think you should give it a try -- you'll either find that it's too much for you to handle (as it is for most new teachers -- I almost didn't make it) or that you love it and that all of the "living life" you were doing before was just biding time.
I've had the high paying job, and I've taught for crap money. You know what? I'll take the crap money any day. I'll be content to say at the end of my life that I've made a difference in someone's life, not just made and spent money.
I had to deal first hand with the stress and anxiety of Katrina -- to see that the government agency which I hoped would have learned from its mistakes not only did not learn but blatantly lied and misled its citizens is very disheartening. This is not something that is a simple mistake. Nobody mistakenly holds a fake press conference. Someone decided this, and someone made this happen. This whole situation is shallow, pathetic and insulting. I would love to hear one justified reason why this even happened.
This has been proved to be more than just a tech site. This here is about your rights as a citizen of the United States of America (though if you are from elsewhere you can disregard it). This is about the right of the government to be honest with its citizens. This is about a government blatantly lying to its citizens.
This is about a whole lot people having to deal with a problem that most people in the country would hope to never experience.
HarryCaul, you said back in April that you would go elsewhere if Slashdot went "down this road," in regards to politics. Is it so difficult to admit that politics are undeniably tied to technology? And honestly, if it doesn't interest you, then why bother reading and why bother replying?
The tag of this site says "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." Are you implying that this stuff does not matter?
No. Piezo-electricity generates voltage, not current. Commonly seen as a type of microphone or instrument "pick up" as the voltage changes created by the piezo-electric materials in response to physical vibrations are analogous to the changes in air pressure (that are usually referred to as "sound waves").
I think an important question is whether or not a closed community of people could survive long enough to make it to the destination without destroying each other or the ship they're on. A lot of people have discussed this already (so many unread posts here!) but I am reminded of an interview I once read about how to keep people away from a plot of land that has been radioactively affected. The answer was not signs, or fences, as those things will eventually disappear, but was to form a religion, stick a priest nearby and make people fear the land. I think a similar idea could be used on the Ark -- you build an all-encompassing religion that doesn't discriminate from color, gender, class status, etc. Give the people a purpose, and also give them fear: breaking the windows would be a very bad thing, not just because they'll die, but because the quest that God (or whatever entity) sent them on would be ruined, or something like that.
I think solving this problem is more important than solving any technological problems, but that's just my opinion.
This is almost as bad as when they told us all about a black hole emitting a Bb thirty octaves lower than middle C. (A period in the wave was about a lightyear long, or something ridiculous like that.) Or whatever the specifics were.
As someone who studies music, I'm fascinated by nature creating "music," but if it needs to be sped up to be heard, well... that's sort of pointless to me. Bird calls, the buzz of cicadas and the sound of tropical storm-force winds growling through a neighborhood are wonderful, but not this.
Find me some icebergs that are creating sound at audible frequencies, and then you might get my attention... ah, crap. This useless article got my attention. I guess it worked, then. Dammit.
Ah, poor choice of wording on my part. Didn't mean to correct, but to clarify.
I admit I never saw the video -- most people tend to make incorrect assumptions on the origins of some classical pieces, which is a serious pet peeve of mine.:)
My apologies!
Just to correct both of you, Emerson Lake and Palmer did a cover of Mars, Bringer of War, the first movement of The Planets by Gustav Holst.
And no, Holst didn't write the music for American Beauty. Holst wrote The Planets in 1916 (well, started in 1914, completed in 1916). I'm pretty sure that's a little before American Beauty was made.
They got excited when they figured out the whole butterfly farting and causing tornados in the midwest thing.. now someone wants to try and change the course/destroy an asteroid and they all just wet their pants.
Anyone considering the implications of removing a stellar object from the cosmos? I know this one is small, but what is it possible that there is some sort of junction of asteroids/comets/etc., and they all exert some sort of gravitation pull that keeps them on their current courses? How do we know that just by removing this little one, some far-off solar system doesn't just collapse?
I'm a music composer, so I apologize for my ignorance. It's always fun to make people think a little, though.
Part of the whole fireworks experience for me, and I'm sure for others, is the bombarding of the senses: sight, sound, and even smell.
Fireworks with no gunpowder smell? With no black snow falling? I have so many memories of watching the fireworks over the lake in Epcot, the clouds of smoke only visible when the fireworks explode and light up the sky.
Sounds like something I could just watch on my computer or TV, if I wanted. I'll pass. It was bad enough that they had to take away Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, now they're robbing of me of smoke filled fireworks.
I mainly hang out in Slashdot's science page, and always wait for something about music to come up in the topics -- while the science lover in me is fascinated with things like string theory and genetic manipulation, I can't ignore the 6 years I've spent so far studying composition.
But I'm not sure how to respond to this, since there seems to be so little of a point to this kind of study. To come out and say, "Hot news! Musical lines are put together like sentences!" is fine and dandy, it should raise the brow of any musician who might think in response, "Well, duh."
I can't understand the point in analysing pieces of music and counting notes (as if that had any sort of relevancy) -- one of the first thing a composer learns is that it's not the number of notes that make a piece of music enjoyable (see John Cage's 4'33"). A tonal piece will always return to tonic (for example, a piece in the key of C will have quite a few Cs in it). We'll call this the "subject matter" of the conversation. If this one note, then, is so important to the sentence, how do you explain some of Beethoven's later works, where he would avoid the tonic for long periods of time? Dancing around the subject?
It just seems like a completely pointless study -- you can not compare early Schoenberg works, which were more like experiments in sound than anything, to works by Beethoven and Mozart. I would suggest he take a look at Schoenberg's later works, or maybe pieces by his students Berg and Webern. Serial music, as it's called, uses fragments that are repeated in different shapes and forms (inverted, backwards, etc). While they're not always the same notes, they have the same distance between each note. Serial music grew out of pure atonal music, and would be a much better basis of comparison. To look at early Schoenberg and comparing it to Mozart would be like comparing the babblings of a baby to the writings of a Poet Laureate.
While an interesting study, I think there are many bases left unconvered and many things unaccounted for -- if anything, this is a good "starting point" for more in-depth study. I think this is, along with studies regarding the "Mozart Effect", is a fine example of scientific research that requires assistance from people who actually study music. (Though this can apply to any kind of research that tries to blend science and something non-scientific.)
Then again, I think this is another example of why scientists should keep their hands off music. I would never dare try and clone three headed chickens. *grin*
I'm surprised no one has brought this up yet, and I apologize if this seems out of context for me to be commenting, since I'm a musician and a composer, but has anyone read the article and felt that all of this information "makes sense" only if Earth is the center of the creation of universe?
We can measure the distances to far off galaxies to get a "radius", but a "radius" implies a center, primarily the Earth. I have some serious problems with us, because it implies that the "Big Bang" occurred right here, where we are now in the universe. Absolute and utter bull.
Cornish's "explanation" does not make up for the idea that we are not at the center of the creation of the universe. 156 billion light years is not a good number to go by, then, because it doesn't take into account for how far we are from the creation site.
Unless Cornish or anyone else can pinpoint exactly where the Big Bang (or Big Burp or whatever else it's been called over the years) has occurred, this article is completely and utterly pointless.
Please prove me wrong. I study Debussy and Schoenberg, so I may have no right commenting, but this seems like common sense to me.
Actually, he was more like a Michael Jackson. Britney was 17 or 18 (I think?) when she made her "pop debut". Mozart was less than half that age. (And, if you want to get picky, Beethoven was one of the first "pop" artists. Until him, most composers/performers had patrons -- Beethoven supported himself through his publishing deals, and even had an agent: his brother.)
And actually, the period is very important. Mozart might sound boring now, but at the time it was new and innovative. All of the composers from past years that we're familiar with, including the ones you mentioned, are famous for exactly that reason.
But you are right about the whole structure thing. The only composers who actually stepped away from structure were the impressionists, such as Debussy, who introduced people to the idea of "through-composed" music that had no repetitions or formal structure. (But they did it for a reason.)
As a composer and an on-going student of music (you never really stop learning), I feel I should comment on this.
Mozart's music may be extremely structured, but it was also innovative because of it's lack of structure. If you listen closely, you can see that Mozart would write out "improvised" sections, as his best asset was his ability to improvise just about anything. Calling a simple chord progression structure is like saying, "This pile of mud is a house."
A lot of new music, and I don't mean anything you can find on the radio, is highly structured. Minimalists, such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, build their music off of a few (or many) simple rhythmic/melodic elements that are repeated.
In all honesty, there may not be any logical explanation. Have they tried other recordings of this piece? Or just one? What about some of his other piano sonatas? Or maybe Beethoven's Piano Sonata in Cminor (which was based, nearly measure by measure on Mozart's Piano Sonata in Cminor)? What about Bach? Or Haydn?
Before they can make any real conclusions, I think they have a metric butt-ton of research to do.
So you wouldn't care if you were to be able to view the pages of Beethoven's 9th symphony? You wouldn't care if you were able to view the original scribblings of Einstein?
It's not whether or not you can understand what you're reading, it's the idea that you're looking at a piece of history.
Keep in mind that it's because of people like DaVinci and Galileo, who invented and theorized despite of social (read: religious) stigmas that we have the science and technology that we have today.
If you don't care at all about the historical value of what's on the linked pages then you have no inherent right to read anything at all that is posted on/. After all, none of this would be here if it weren't for pioneers like them.
While it seems strange, it almost seems to make sense. The Fibonacci sequence is found in nature all the time, and as you can see in shells, a spiral fits it perfectly. As old as the universe may be, isn't it possible that it's only the beginning of this spiral, shaping it like a horn?
Also, I'm on the page now where you can see a city, but it's so QUIET that people wat to get out ASAP after being there a few minutes. I totally want to go see this!
Can you say, "giant paintball game"?
To quote Boston, "Everything looks unusual when there aren't enough pixels."
How true. How very true. I used the same resolution and found a crab on a picture of one of my favore porn stars. Creepy.
If I could somehow gain control of a Mars satellite, I'm sure I could snap some pictures over the variety of deserts it has that people could say, "Hey! Look at that two pixel mass! It must be a Mars elephant!!"
Regardless of where we're photographing, I think it's very important to remember that in cases like these, probability is out the window. Anything is possible: dunes in the shapes of faces, bits and pieces of the lander looking like a "claw" (though if it were a claw I'd call it a bottom-of-the-chain crab, regarding it's ridiculous shape), or entrances to pyramids. (Go ahead,/PROVE/ it.)
A lot of people are anxious to find proof that we came from something other than primates, or are looking for an explanation for our existance. In reality, we should accept that we are here because things happened to make it possible.
Even if a civilization existed millions of years ago, would anything exist to prove so? Some could say, "Teah, there are pyramids there!" Take a look at our own pyramids, and how much they have weathered after only a few thousand years. Imagine MILLIONS of years passing with nothing but DUST (a very excellent eroder) blowing on a daily basis.
A lot of you who "look" for hoaxes are probably the same people who look at 10 year old tobacco reports and make pay more money for cigarettes than I do for gas.
Do something useful. Anything. Set up a blog. Make a web page. Download porn. See if I care.
By the time NASA or any other country starts to really care about what happened to Sojourner, we'll most likely be there, and can just swing by and pick it up or will have had more missions that were able to collect enough data to outweigh the importance of the others.
Comparing Sojourner to Spirit, however, is about as relevant as comparing a quadrapalegic weiner dog to a pure bred great dane -- it's larger and can do a lot more. Why waste time with Stumpy the Wonder Rover?
And likewise, once we establish ourselves on the moon, and then on Mars, the rovers will be nothing but tourist traps or landmarks. ("Hang a right at the Gustav Crater, go three miles until you see Spirit, then make a left. Look for a red brick house.")
Getting back the old rovers/etc. would have no real scientific value, other than to see how well an $x million rover/satellite ages on Mars/in space.
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I'm rather surprised that this would be offered as a suggestion. As a friend of mine recently found out, a lot of jobs are requiring a minimum of a bachelor's degree. Relying solely on your experience (in his case, 5 years as a manager) doesn't quite cut it, as there are people with that same experience and the degree out there.
But it's not impossible to do this without racking up debt. I work for a state university, and tuition here is dirt cheap: right around $1,500 for the semester.
I spent two years at a private school studying math and ended up with $60k in college loans, just for tuition. When I changed to music and went this state school where I currently am employed, I spent another six and a half years (four on undergrad, two and a half on a masters) and took out $40k over those six and a half years, working part time and covering my tuition, books and most of my rent.
I went to private high school on a scholarship, and they drilled it into my head that I needed to go to a "fancy" college. Now that I work as an administrator in academic, I can see how pointless that was. Also, many state schools can provide an excellent education -- we take pride in being labeled a "tough" school. Our teachers don't make lots of money, so you can bet that they probably teach because it's something they love to do.
A lot of states also have tuition assistance programs if the high school graduate goes to a state school. In Louisiana they have the TOPS program -- as long as the student had a relatively good GPA, their tuition was covered. If their GPA is higher, they received additional funds for books, etc.
I'm not in the best of situations with my loans and wish I had taken advantage of some programs like these when I had graduated. With $100k in debt, I can't afford the monthly payments ($750 a month!) so I'm working on another degree (that my employer pays for, thankfully) just to defer payments. Meanwhile, interest is accumulating. I think a book like this -- despite its negative message -- is good for students and their parents.
So your teacher emphasized making a lot of money and, essentially, not caring enough about your job for it to concern you in your every day life? Did she ever suggest maybe getting a job that contributes to the betterment of society? A job that provides some moral satisfaction? We're not talking about greedy people here, we're talking about teachers. (Well, we were talking about Brawndo at some point ...) They could get other jobs, but they enjoy the satisfaction of actually educating our youth. They know that someone has to do the teaching, especially when so many people just want to make money and "live life."
It doesn't sound like you had that great of a teacher. Essentially she was half-assing her teaching duties to make better money at another job? What kind of message does that give, and why even bother with the teaching? Is the paycheck from the other job really all that important? I think you'll find that someone in her position actually doesn't get promoted or receive tenure in academia -- no outside reviewer or department head/dean would ever recommend someone for tenure who only teaches half time. Tenure is reserved for only the most dedicated of educators, educators who feel that teaching is their life, not money hungry part-timers. If she did receive tenure, I'd think twice about sending my own children there. (I'm assuming you're referring to a college professor.)
You're probably at a point where you can't change your life much, so you'll never have the opportunity to stand in front of a classroom and know what it feels like. If you're still young enough, though, I really think you should give it a try -- you'll either find that it's too much for you to handle (as it is for most new teachers -- I almost didn't make it) or that you love it and that all of the "living life" you were doing before was just biding time.
I've had the high paying job, and I've taught for crap money. You know what? I'll take the crap money any day. I'll be content to say at the end of my life that I've made a difference in someone's life, not just made and spent money.
I'm not sure I could have said it better. Brava.
I had to deal first hand with the stress and anxiety of Katrina -- to see that the government agency which I hoped would have learned from its mistakes not only did not learn but blatantly lied and misled its citizens is very disheartening. This is not something that is a simple mistake. Nobody mistakenly holds a fake press conference. Someone decided this, and someone made this happen. This whole situation is shallow, pathetic and insulting. I would love to hear one justified reason why this even happened.
This has been proved to be more than just a tech site. This here is about your rights as a citizen of the United States of America (though if you are from elsewhere you can disregard it). This is about the right of the government to be honest with its citizens. This is about a government blatantly lying to its citizens.
This is about a whole lot people having to deal with a problem that most people in the country would hope to never experience.
HarryCaul, you said back in April that you would go elsewhere if Slashdot went "down this road," in regards to politics. Is it so difficult to admit that politics are undeniably tied to technology? And honestly, if it doesn't interest you, then why bother reading and why bother replying?
The tag of this site says "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." Are you implying that this stuff does not matter?
No. Piezo-electricity generates voltage, not current. Commonly seen as a type of microphone or instrument "pick up" as the voltage changes created by the piezo-electric materials in response to physical vibrations are analogous to the changes in air pressure (that are usually referred to as "sound waves").
I think an important question is whether or not a closed community of people could survive long enough to make it to the destination without destroying each other or the ship they're on. A lot of people have discussed this already (so many unread posts here!) but I am reminded of an interview I once read about how to keep people away from a plot of land that has been radioactively affected. The answer was not signs, or fences, as those things will eventually disappear, but was to form a religion, stick a priest nearby and make people fear the land. I think a similar idea could be used on the Ark -- you build an all-encompassing religion that doesn't discriminate from color, gender, class status, etc. Give the people a purpose, and also give them fear: breaking the windows would be a very bad thing, not just because they'll die, but because the quest that God (or whatever entity) sent them on would be ruined, or something like that. I think solving this problem is more important than solving any technological problems, but that's just my opinion.
This is almost as bad as when they told us all about a black hole emitting a Bb thirty octaves lower than middle C. (A period in the wave was about a lightyear long, or something ridiculous like that.) Or whatever the specifics were.
... that's sort of pointless to me. Bird calls, the buzz of cicadas and the sound of tropical storm-force winds growling through a neighborhood are wonderful, but not this.
... ah, crap. This useless article got my attention. I guess it worked, then. Dammit.
As someone who studies music, I'm fascinated by nature creating "music," but if it needs to be sped up to be heard, well
Find me some icebergs that are creating sound at audible frequencies, and then you might get my attention
Ah, poor choice of wording on my part. Didn't mean to correct, but to clarify. I admit I never saw the video -- most people tend to make incorrect assumptions on the origins of some classical pieces, which is a serious pet peeve of mine. :)
My apologies!
Just to correct both of you, Emerson Lake and Palmer did a cover of Mars, Bringer of War, the first movement of The Planets by Gustav Holst. And no, Holst didn't write the music for American Beauty. Holst wrote The Planets in 1916 (well, started in 1914, completed in 1916). I'm pretty sure that's a little before American Beauty was made.
They got excited when they figured out the whole butterfly farting and causing tornados in the midwest thing .. now someone wants to try and change the course/destroy an asteroid and they all just wet their pants.
Anyone considering the implications of removing a stellar object from the cosmos? I know this one is small, but what is it possible that there is some sort of junction of asteroids/comets/etc., and they all exert some sort of gravitation pull that keeps them on their current courses? How do we know that just by removing this little one, some far-off solar system doesn't just collapse?
I'm a music composer, so I apologize for my ignorance. It's always fun to make people think a little, though.
Part of the whole fireworks experience for me, and I'm sure for others, is the bombarding of the senses: sight, sound, and even smell.
Fireworks with no gunpowder smell? With no black snow falling? I have so many memories of watching the fireworks over the lake in Epcot, the clouds of smoke only visible when the fireworks explode and light up the sky.
Sounds like something I could just watch on my computer or TV, if I wanted. I'll pass. It was bad enough that they had to take away Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, now they're robbing of me of smoke filled fireworks.
I mainly hang out in Slashdot's science page, and always wait for something about music to come up in the topics -- while the science lover in me is fascinated with things like string theory and genetic manipulation, I can't ignore the 6 years I've spent so far studying composition.
But I'm not sure how to respond to this, since there seems to be so little of a point to this kind of study. To come out and say, "Hot news! Musical lines are put together like sentences!" is fine and dandy, it should raise the brow of any musician who might think in response, "Well, duh."
I can't understand the point in analysing pieces of music and counting notes (as if that had any sort of relevancy) -- one of the first thing a composer learns is that it's not the number of notes that make a piece of music enjoyable (see John Cage's 4'33"). A tonal piece will always return to tonic (for example, a piece in the key of C will have quite a few Cs in it). We'll call this the "subject matter" of the conversation. If this one note, then, is so important to the sentence, how do you explain some of Beethoven's later works, where he would avoid the tonic for long periods of time? Dancing around the subject?
It just seems like a completely pointless study -- you can not compare early Schoenberg works, which were more like experiments in sound than anything, to works by Beethoven and Mozart. I would suggest he take a look at Schoenberg's later works, or maybe pieces by his students Berg and Webern. Serial music, as it's called, uses fragments that are repeated in different shapes and forms (inverted, backwards, etc). While they're not always the same notes, they have the same distance between each note. Serial music grew out of pure atonal music, and would be a much better basis of comparison. To look at early Schoenberg and comparing it to Mozart would be like comparing the babblings of a baby to the writings of a Poet Laureate.
While an interesting study, I think there are many bases left unconvered and many things unaccounted for -- if anything, this is a good "starting point" for more in-depth study. I think this is, along with studies regarding the "Mozart Effect", is a fine example of scientific research that requires assistance from people who actually study music. (Though this can apply to any kind of research that tries to blend science and something non-scientific.)
Then again, I think this is another example of why scientists should keep their hands off music. I would never dare try and clone three headed chickens. *grin*
I'm surprised no one has brought this up yet, and I apologize if this seems out of context for me to be commenting, since I'm a musician and a composer, but has anyone read the article and felt that all of this information "makes sense" only if Earth is the center of the creation of universe?
We can measure the distances to far off galaxies to get a "radius", but a "radius" implies a center, primarily the Earth. I have some serious problems with us, because it implies that the "Big Bang" occurred right here, where we are now in the universe. Absolute and utter bull.
Cornish's "explanation" does not make up for the idea that we are not at the center of the creation of the universe. 156 billion light years is not a good number to go by, then, because it doesn't take into account for how far we are from the creation site.
Unless Cornish or anyone else can pinpoint exactly where the Big Bang (or Big Burp or whatever else it's been called over the years) has occurred, this article is completely and utterly pointless.
Please prove me wrong. I study Debussy and Schoenberg, so I may have no right commenting, but this seems like common sense to me.
- wafwot
Actually, he was more like a Michael Jackson. Britney was 17 or 18 (I think?) when she made her "pop debut". Mozart was less than half that age. (And, if you want to get picky, Beethoven was one of the first "pop" artists. Until him, most composers/performers had patrons -- Beethoven supported himself through his publishing deals, and even had an agent: his brother.)
And actually, the period is very important. Mozart might sound boring now, but at the time it was new and innovative. All of the composers from past years that we're familiar with, including the ones you mentioned, are famous for exactly that reason.
But you are right about the whole structure thing. The only composers who actually stepped away from structure were the impressionists, such as Debussy, who introduced people to the idea of "through-composed" music that had no repetitions or formal structure. (But they did it for a reason.)
Actually, Beethoven was deaf, not Mozart.
As a composer and an on-going student of music (you never really stop learning), I feel I should comment on this.
Mozart's music may be extremely structured, but it was also innovative because of it's lack of structure. If you listen closely, you can see that Mozart would write out "improvised" sections, as his best asset was his ability to improvise just about anything. Calling a simple chord progression structure is like saying, "This pile of mud is a house."
A lot of new music, and I don't mean anything you can find on the radio, is highly structured. Minimalists, such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, build their music off of a few (or many) simple rhythmic/melodic elements that are repeated.
In all honesty, there may not be any logical explanation. Have they tried other recordings of this piece? Or just one? What about some of his other piano sonatas? Or maybe Beethoven's Piano Sonata in Cminor (which was based, nearly measure by measure on Mozart's Piano Sonata in Cminor)? What about Bach? Or Haydn?
Before they can make any real conclusions, I think they have a metric butt-ton of research to do.
So you wouldn't care if you were to be able to view the pages of Beethoven's 9th symphony? You wouldn't care if you were able to view the original scribblings of Einstein?
/. After all, none of this would be here if it weren't for pioneers like them.
It's not whether or not you can understand what you're reading, it's the idea that you're looking at a piece of history.
Keep in mind that it's because of people like DaVinci and Galileo, who invented and theorized despite of social (read: religious) stigmas that we have the science and technology that we have today.
If you don't care at all about the historical value of what's on the linked pages then you have no inherent right to read anything at all that is posted on
While it seems strange, it almost seems to make sense. The Fibonacci sequence is found in nature all the time, and as you can see in shells, a spiral fits it perfectly. As old as the universe may be, isn't it possible that it's only the beginning of this spiral, shaping it like a horn?
What schools in this country, other than some uber-select private school, would be able to afford something like this?
With the way the education budget is all mucked up, schools are lucky to have an art department, or even teachers in general.
And if some school were foolish enough to spend the $1.6M on this, they better use it every day for the next 40 years, or else it's a complete waste.
I'm curious to see how many of these have actually sold.
This site has information on what you need to do to be a sperm donor.
It's actually a little more involved than most people think, but once you get through all the paperwork and all, it seems to be rather worthwhile.
Also, I'm on the page now where you can see a city, but it's so QUIET that people wat to get out ASAP after being there a few minutes. I totally want to go see this!
Can you say, "giant paintball game"?
To quote Boston, "Everything looks unusual when there aren't enough pixels." How true. How very true. I used the same resolution and found a crab on a picture of one of my favore porn stars. Creepy. If I could somehow gain control of a Mars satellite, I'm sure I could snap some pictures over the variety of deserts it has that people could say, "Hey! Look at that two pixel mass! It must be a Mars elephant!!" Regardless of where we're photographing, I think it's very important to remember that in cases like these, probability is out the window. Anything is possible: dunes in the shapes of faces, bits and pieces of the lander looking like a "claw" (though if it were a claw I'd call it a bottom-of-the-chain crab, regarding it's ridiculous shape), or entrances to pyramids. (Go ahead, /PROVE/ it.)
A lot of people are anxious to find proof that we came from something other than primates, or are looking for an explanation for our existance. In reality, we should accept that we are here because things happened to make it possible.
Even if a civilization existed millions of years ago, would anything exist to prove so? Some could say, "Teah, there are pyramids there!" Take a look at our own pyramids, and how much they have weathered after only a few thousand years. Imagine MILLIONS of years passing with nothing but DUST (a very excellent eroder) blowing on a daily basis.
A lot of you who "look" for hoaxes are probably the same people who look at 10 year old tobacco reports and make pay more money for cigarettes than I do for gas.
Do something useful. Anything. Set up a blog. Make a web page. Download porn. See if I care.
Cut nitrous intake? A million Phish fans weep.
Now the Nanonuns can show them disrespectful Nanocatholics some discipline!
By the time NASA or any other country starts to really care about what happened to Sojourner, we'll most likely be there, and can just swing by and pick it up or will have had more missions that were able to collect enough data to outweigh the importance of the others.
Comparing Sojourner to Spirit, however, is about as relevant as comparing a quadrapalegic weiner dog to a pure bred great dane -- it's larger and can do a lot more. Why waste time with Stumpy the Wonder Rover?
And likewise, once we establish ourselves on the moon, and then on Mars, the rovers will be nothing but tourist traps or landmarks. ("Hang a right at the Gustav Crater, go three miles until you see Spirit, then make a left. Look for a red brick house.")
Getting back the old rovers/etc. would have no real scientific value, other than to see how well an $x million rover/satellite ages on Mars/in space.