History Is A Nightmare
People often claim that my interest in antiquity is misguided. The standard complaint is that a society from 2000 years ago has little relevance to us today and littler effect on us. Personally, I think there is a confusion in assuming that the effect of a society is proportional to its distance in time from [...]
Idealism, Pragmatism, Failure And Technology
The Neuros is a fascinating thing and the company, Neuros Audio, is substantially more fascinating. It marks an attempt to bring the open source ethos directly into the manufacture and sale of hardware. The Neuros is the only MP3 player that supported Ogg Vorbis files and functioned properly and reliably for years. (The Rio Karma [...]
Perl Regex Matching Is NP-Hard
Perl Regular Expression Matching is NP-Hard For real nerds, this is a fun read and not very technical. For the vast majority of CS students, who are only dorks, it’s probably neither interesting nor easily read. For the general population, it will probably call up bad memories of high school math class. Personally, I think [...]
Meritocracy
Music, like mathematics, is surprisingly meritocratic — provided one measures the definition of merit carefully. (It must be measured with the same care that one measures Darwinian fitness, which is too often confused with strength though it is utterly distinct and at times even directly opposite.) Fame and success in music go easily and often [...]
Our Friends
We nearly always find a way to forgive the hurt our friends cause others and seldom a way to forgive the hurt they cause us.
Learning How To Learn
To develop any ability, you really need only to do two things: learn how to learn and then learn what to learn. The problem is that no one in our society ever learns how to learn. I myself simply had no idea until I was quite old: having been very intelligent as a boy, I [...]
While Beginning
While a beginner, you only waste your time trying to practice advanced techniques. An entire life can be wasted if you insist on skipping necessary stages of development. And I have seen many lives wasted in this way.
Our Screams
The force of our screams is given to them by the depth of our silences.
Abstraction Barriers
The concept of abstraction barriers so much discussed in the classic programming book, the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, has analogues in nearly every field. In music, one can make the task of composition and recording simpler by insisting on perfection within each part, one at a time. Without enforcing this separation of concerns, [...]
Slavery
How are we to understand the post-slavery conditions of African Americans in America? Why did they not proceed to rise socially as freed slaves had done in so many other societies? Is it simply that the people called African Americans today were never a people at all, but put together from a mixture of mutually [...]