Interview with Paul MacKay

Paul MacKay is an economist who promotes the concept of anthroposophy. He believes that resources should be given value based on how people make use of them, as opposed to having value by themselves, since they exist independent of human work and ingenuity. He also thinks that the economy would be healthier if there were less focus on "virtual value," which is value created in terms other than human labor and intelligence. Virtual value is displayed by things such as the stock market and high prices for natural resources. MacKay believes more of this money should be used to fund more tangible needs, like education and research.

Genius ch. 14

So this chapter is talking about metaphors to labyrinths and touchstones, and horizontal and "vertical" movement. "Horizontal" movement represents the physical transaction, and "vertical" movement represents the metaphysical value of the transaction. At this point I really think Bloom is pulling shit out of his ass, cause I don't know what the relevance is to anything. Just more stuff about physical and spiritual sides of money, I guess.

Genius of Money, ch. 6

This chapter deals with the presence of distinct and often conflicting values in society and business. Bloom describes a Renaissance painting in which material and spiritual values appear to be competing in many ways, some of them very subtle. He describes these conflicting values as "polarities," and likens their presence in the painting (and implications about the society of the painting's provenance) to similar conflicting values in his own life. The conflict, as well as the balance, between material and spiritual values is as strong in today's society as it was in the time that the portrait was made, although many aspects of the values have switched over time.

3 paragraphs about nothing

Player pianos are pianos that can play automatically when loaded with a specially formatted ream of paper. These rolls of paper have holes in them, so that as they scroll past the hammers the piano plays the notes. Most models have a variety of levers and switches in order to control dynamics, speed, and articulation. They were fairly popular in the early 20th century, and lost mainstream popularity once phonograph technology developed further. In their day, they actually caused some controversy among companies that published sheet music, for threatening business and de-emphasizing the need for actual piano-playing skills.

But some piano roll artists made a name with pieces that couldn't possibly be played by an actual person. From around 1950 on, we have the works of Conlon Nancarrow, who found that most pianists of his day could not meet the demands of his complicated pieces, so he turned to write music specifically for the player piano. Most of his studies deal with complicated meters and polyrhythms. Many contain distinct voices playing the same line at different tempos, often in odd ratios. On top of this, most of the lines themselves tend to be highly dissonant and hard to actually play. While some of his earlier studies were influenced by jazz - some of them are quite catchy - the later ones are basically just random, and don't really sound like much as a whole.

Marc-Andre Hamelin, already a virtuoso pianist in his own right, has also made a few unplayable pieces for piano roll. His tend to be a lot more friendly to the ear than Nancarrow's polytempic experiments, give or take an assortment of random glissandi and tone clusters. One of his most well-known pieces of this type is Circus Galop. To actually play it would take at least four pianists, preferably on separate pianos, but would still be near-impossible to pull off faithfully because of the precise, multi-octave glissandi. While tamer than Nancarrow in terms of consistent tempos, it does throw an occasional polyrhythm around in the faster sections. Many internet users have created their own pieces in this vein, thus creating the genre of "black MIDI." I like it when people create a genre without knowing it. Especially if it doesn't take off until long after the founding work was created. And then people look back, and it's like, "oh yeah, that guy made that thing that sounds weirdly similar to what we have now, but it was a long time ago!" But I hate when the reverse happens, and you think you've found something like that but it's actually not. Like this one abstract animation they showed us in History of Animation from, like, the 20's that had an electronic-sounding soundtrack, and I was like, "oh, that's pretty awesome that they were able to make stuff sound like that way back then," but then the teacher mentioned that the soundtrack was added later from like the 60s or something. But even when it is real, the derivative works have often expanded the concept so much that looking back at the original is like, "meh," because compared to the later stuff it's only kind of interesting. Okay bye!

Food Post 3

The author's troubles with the deer eating his apple trees reminds me of the deer near my house. They eat some of our roses every so often. It also amused me to read about some of his attempts to deter the deer, and how one section he ignored for several years actually grew enough weeds to keep the deer from finding the trees. Heh, he mentions Pollan's Botany of Desire. And recalls how the plants and animals are basically "using" humans to thrive. I should probably watch the rest of that video some time. And he goes from finding the baby lambs cute to happily eating them. Classic comedy.