Tag: The Breakfast Club

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

The hydrogen-filled airship Hindenburg explodes and crashes; Psychologist Sigmund Freud and actor-director Orson Welles born; Roger Bannister is the first athlete to run a mile in fewer than four minutes.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.

Orson Welles

The thing about Shubert is that he actually completed 7 Symphonies and a large body of other compositions and didn’t really leave very much  unfinished in comparison with other composers who often labored longer than his entire lifetime of 31 years on one singular work they considered their magnum opus.

Schubert was remarkably prolific, writing over 1,500 works in his short career. The largest number of these are songs for solo voice and piano (over 600). He also composed a considerable number of secular works for two or more voices, namely part songs, choruses and cantatas. He completed eight orchestral overtures and seven complete symphonies, in addition to fragments of six others. While he composed no concertos, he did write three concertante works for violin and orchestra. There is a large body of music for solo piano, including fourteen complete sonatas, numerous miscellaneous works and many short dances. There is also a relatively large set of works for piano duet. There are over fifty chamber works, including some fragmentary works. His sacred output includes seven masses, one oratorio and one requiem, among other mass movements and numerous smaller compositions. He completed only eleven of his twenty stage works.

On the other hand he did die relatively young, some say due to complications of syphilis or Mercury (which was commonly used to cure it) poisoning.

So he was a James Dean type character that people could impose their own interpretations on after his death and he soon rose to great heights of popularity in the Art Music crowd in particular because of this supposedly “great” unfinished work that was merely #8 of 9 (or 10 depending on who you believe).  Among his admirers were maybe Beethoven (because serious musical historians, doubt the veracity of that story) but certainly Listz, Schumann and Dvořák.  He is beloved by a certain type of Art Music fan not just because he led an appropriately Byronic (said descriptively and without a trace of byrony which is a pun and not a misspelling) existence, but because his music was considered a bridge between the late Classical style of Mozart and the early Romanticism of Beethoven.

Compared to his contemporaries he was a tunesmith, putting together new melodies, rather that a technician stealing folk songs and orchestrating them so I think he deserves a little recognition for that.  I just feel that the adoration lavished on the “unfinished” Symphony by virtue of its unfinishedness is mostly projection.  It isn’t even his only unfinished one, he laid out the sketches for a Symphony in D minor mere weeks before his death.  He also wrote other symphonies you know, including today’s 9th Symphony which is nicknamed “Great” since it mostly is.

It’s hell on the Woodwinds and String Section though and is performed less frequently than it might be due to the difficulty (lazy musicians).

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

The Beatles release their ‘Sgt. Pepper’ album; Actress Marilyn Monroe born; CNN hits the airwaves; Mormon leader Brigham Young born; Blind and deaf author and activist Helen Keller dies.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.

Helen Keller

In the begining there was machine code, a series of ones and zeros that got entered directly into your computer in order to make it do useful stuff, but you need to take a step back in time to see how even that worked.

The fundamental operations of a general purpose computing machine are to accept a value, perform an operation on that value, and return the result.  Now the fact of the matter is that it’s complicated and tricky to get anything done with that since on this primitive level what you can mostly accomplish is turn 0s to 1s simply because they are 0s and vice versa.  On the other hand, since they can evaluate the input and produce a measurable result they are theoretically capable of solving any problem that can be solved by computation (see Alan Turing).

This is incredibly tedious.

The great break through is when you can work with more than one piece of information at a time, retrive and store the results and accept multiple instructions.  Both the instructions and the results are stored in what we commonly call memory and are loaded into the machine, operated on, and returned to memory.

Now there are all kinds of funny math tricks you can perform that look like addition and subtraction in a binary world as well as transformations based on values you examine, but a LOT of the instructions that even a simple computer will execute have to do with managing it’s work flow in terms of retrieving things from memory including the next action to perform.

The computer doesn’t care what its next activity is, in fact results, information yet to be processed, and instructions all look exactly the same so the prospect of writing instructions (self modifying code) based on previous processing is absurdly easy.

And you may think this is a good thing rather than a bad one because of course you want your computer to be responsive to the fact that the result of the previous operation was 4 rather than 5 but in practice a whole lot of programmers would forget just exactly they were trying to accomplish and the pointer that told the computer where to get the next instruction would end up directing it somewhere the value was not just wrong, but random.

So hardware came to make a distinction between programs and operational data, but because it is so damn useful sometimes to make an exception it’s more a guideline than a rule.

In the 50s, 60s, and 70s programming itself kind of branched between those who were mostly interested in getting the damn things to work at all and those who were more interested in practical results.  This led to the rise of symbolic languages of the types most programmers today would recognize like COBOL, FORTRAN, and BASIC.

All these seminal languages had the great virtue of seeming more like real English than POP and MOV and didn’t actually care how many registers you had or the exact bit width, and the instruction pointer was not easily spoofed (though try a recursive subroutine sometime, I dare you).

COBOL is in most implemetations a strongly typed language.  I remember an interminable amount of time being devoted to analyzing exactly what data would be needed to solve the problem and what types of values would be acceptable.

Because that is the BIG difference between a strongly typed and a weakly typed language.  Without specifically stating that you are going to transform your data from one type to another, from numbers you can add and subtract to characters you can alphabetize for instance, a STRONGLY typed language will reject your program and refuse to work at all if you attempt to perform a disallowed operation for that type of data.

FORTRAN and BASIC are weakly typed and BASIC doesn’t even require that you pre-declare variables.  It just assigns them on the fly based on what it thinks is appropriate.  They both operate on them whatever way you tell them you want and if you add ‘A’ and ‘B’ unless they are previously assigned values as symbols for a memory location (variables) your result will be 131 and if you subtract ‘A’ from ‘B’, 1.

This is incredibly handy for certain types of operations.

In the early 80s there was a great debate between supporters of COBOL strongly typed programming and weakly typed programming.  The standard bearers of strong typing were PASCAL and Modula 2, the champions of weak typing, BASIC and C (actually older than BASIC but not nearly as popular).

Looking back from a perspective of 30 years (and oh yes I have my news stand copy of the August 1984 Byte) I think we can declare weak typing the clear victor.

As a practical matter (and I have written and maintained hundreds of thousands of lines of code) with any of the “unstructured”, “weakly typed” languages you can be as structured as you want to be and I’m a great believer in structure.  But you don’t have to, and that is the beauty part of the craft languages as opposed to the academic ones.  The academic languages mitigate in favor of comprehensive analysis in advance of practical application and the craft languages…

Well, they solve problems.

Today, when I write poetry for machines, I do it in ‘C’ which has useful concepts like structures which are containers for disparate types of data and pointers which can point to anything from a value to a sub-routine.

And this big A?  It stand for Anarchist.

Science Oriented Video

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• NASA probe shows Pluto might have a polar ice cap, by Michael Franco, CNet
• North-south climate divide: Researchers find 200-year lag between climate events in Greenland, Antarctica, Phys.org
• Small Jurassic Dinosaur May Have Flown Without Feathers, By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times
• Hail and Farewell: A Robot From Earth Dies on Mercury Today, by Danielle Venton, Wired
• Robotic telescope discovers three super-Earth planetary neighbors, By Robert Sanders, UC Berkely
• Water could have been abundant in the first billion years, Phys.org
• Hot Vents on the Seafloor May Hold the Origins of Life, by Catherine Griffin, Science World Report
• Black Band Coral Disease Killing Kauai Reefs, By Rajender Bhatia, Clapway
• Overfishing Increases Threat of Fast-Growing Sponges to Endangered Corals, AZO Cleantech
• Russian Space Station Cargo Ship Is Said to Be Out of Control, By ANDREW ROTH, The New York Times
• Embedding classic MS-DOS games into tweets is now a thing, by Samuel Gibbs, The Guardian

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Rioting hits Los Angeles after four white officers are acquitted of most charges in beating of Rodney King; Dachau concentration camp liberated; Jerry Seinfeld born.

Breakfast Tunes

RIP Jack Ely 1943 – 2015

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

It take many a year, mon, and maybe some bloodshed must be, but righteousness someday prevail.

Bob Marley

Since we were just talking about Homer, his other great work was The Odyssey which was considered by most to be as fictional as The Illiad until Schliemann discovered what he thought was Troy (and was, just not on the level he identified).  It is certainly peopled with exotic locales and fantasical monsters which may or may not correspond to actual geography and now extinct creatures (yes on the first, no on the second for me).

One thing that is hard in this day of 100 hour wars, instant communication, and rapid transit to wrap your mind around is that someone could go off and fight a 10 year war and take 10 years to get home.  To be fair, Troy was a seige with individual challenges and small unit skirmishes until Odysseus figured out a way to breach the walls.  We’ve spent spent how long in Afghanistan now?  And the Hundred Years War lasted, well, a hundred years more or less (this is not a trick question).

During his return Odysseus only spent 3 years wandering around (many sea voyages in the Age of Sail lasted as long or longer) and then another 7 as a captive of Calypso.  I’ve met people who were locked up longer than that.

Anyway, the central tale of The Odyssey (after eliminating all the crypto-zoology and magic) is the return of Odysseus in disguise to find his wife besieged by many moochers and people looking to steal his stuff who he then proceeds to kill in a bloodbath of epic proportions.

Remind me.  What are the Rules of Opera?

The 3 rules of Opera.

1. It must be long, boring, and in an incomprehesible foreign language (even if that language is English).
2. The characters, especially the main ones, must be thoroughly unsympathetic and their activities horrid and callous.
3. Everyone must die, hopefully in an ironic and gruesome way.

Ballet is the same, but with more men in tights and without the superfluous singing.

Why, this is perfect!  As for the wacky excuses?  Well, what would you tell your significant other after 10 years, 7 of them spent shacking up with someone else, standing covered in gore in the living room among heaps of dead bodies?

Honey, I’m home?

Montaverdi is considered one of the revolutionaries of Baroque music.  His L’Ofeo is just about the earliest recognizable Opera still regularly performed.  It was written in 1607 as near as we can tell when he was about 40.  Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria was written in 1640, 3 years before his death at the age of 76 and with L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642) is considered one of his 3 greatest works.

What distinguished Monteverdi from many other Opera composers of his generation was the lack of moral judgement (a hold over from the sacred music that was the money machine of the time) and humanity of his characters, something I think is captured by this contemporary performance in casual dress with period instruments and orchestration.

It little profits that an idle king, by this still hearth, among these barren crags, matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race, that hoard and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees!

All times I have enjoyed greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those that loved me, and alone on shore, and when through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vext the dim sea-  I am become a name for always roaming with a hungry heart.

Much have I seen and known.  Cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments.  Myself not least, but honored of them all.

And drunk delight of battle with my peers far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met; yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use!  As though to breathe were life.

Life piled on life were all too little, and of one to me scant remains, but every hour is saved from that eternal silence something more, a bringer of new things.

And vile it were for some three suns to store and hoard myself and this gray spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bounds of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle, well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill this labour, by slow prudence to make mild a rugged people, and through soft degrees subdue them to the useful and the good.  Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere of common duties, decent not to fail in offices of tenderness, and pay meet adoration to my household gods when I am gone.  He works his work, I mine.

…

There lies the port, the vessel puffs her sail.

There gloom the dark broad seas.

My mariners, souls that have toiled and wrought, and thought with me; that ever with a frolic welcome took the thunder and the sunshine, and opposed free hearts, free foreheads…

You and I are old.

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.

Death closes all- but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks.  The long day wanes.  The slow moon climbs.  The deep moans round with many voices.

Come, my friends!  ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world, push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds!  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down.  It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles, and see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides, and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved heaven and earth; that which we are, we are-

One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Ulysses, Tennyson

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Do you know why the muse of history plays a lyre?  Well it’s because in the western classic tradition the earliest recorded history is the Iliad.  It’s an epic poem, sung rather than spoken, legendarily written by Homer between 760 – 710 BCE though it’s far more likely that it was assembled out of much older pieces.

It recounts events of the Trojan War which was generally considered by the Greeks to have occurred sometime between the 14th and 12th century BCE.  Modern Historians associate it with Troy VIIa which was destroyed by fire sometime around the 1180s BCE.

Before the development of writing, songs and poems were the best way of preserving the accuracy of oral traditions because they are easier to memorize than prose and errors are recognizable through a failure of rhyme or meter.  Even after written language a sense of history, the concept that there is a continuous sequence of cause and effect and not a random collection of happenings mediated by the actions of gods and fortune, can be slow to emerge.

The “father” of history as is commonly taught today (at least in U.S. primary and secondary schools) is Herodotus who in the 5th century BCE wrote The Histories, an account of the Greco-Persian Wars that occurred in the early to mid part of the century.

Thucydides is often labeled the first “scientific” historian and his great work the History of the Peloponnesian War which recounts events of the late 5th century BCE conflict between Athens and Sparta in which he probably participated or had access to first hand accounts.  Xenophon, another early historian, was considered his successor and wrote about the last stages of the war as well as his own experiences as a mercenary in Persia.  He was a contemporary of Socrates, Plato, and Aristophanes.

Of course the century long slice of time recorded by these authors 2600 years ago really represents the parochial views of a single state, Athens, and as we know today time is much longer than that, even recorded time.  Egypt, Minos, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, and China among others had vast organized civilizations with their own written language and histories predating the earliest Hellenic efforts by thousands of years.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.- George Santayana, The Life of Reason

All great historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice … the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.- Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.― Mark Twain

The great fascination of history is that it’s really a study of human nature.  Because of our underlying psychology and methods of social organization, tantalizing patterns tend to emerge, different in detail but often with the same result.  What I think is important to remember in its study is that the people were no dumber or inherently primitive than you or I.  The thought experiment I frequently propose is the phonograph.

The mechanics of recording and playing back analog sound are not particularly difficult.  You need a diaphragm and a stylus (one unit), a recording medium and a method for moving the recording medium at a constant rate relative to the stylus/diaphragm (another unit).  When recording the diaphragm vibrates with the air pressure generated by the sound and the stylus creates an image of those patterns in the recording medium.  When playing back the stylus follows the pattern recorded in the medium and generates vibrations in the diaphragm which moves the air in a duplicate of the original event.  Now there are some minor details such as amplification but there is no inherent advantage to wax on a cranked cylinder as opposed to clay on a well regulated potter’s wheel.

Where then is the Voice of the Pharohs?

It may in fact exist.  Certain pots with strange spiraling “decorations” do suggest the surface of a record, the problem may be that we have lost the knowledge we need to play them back.  Do you think you could recognize spoken Sumerian if you heard it?  Me either.

And gaps like this are more the rule than the exception.  We can’t fix the Iowa because the tools needed to do it have long since been sold for scrap and most of the craftsmen are dead.  Until the recent revival of vinyl the future of musical recording seemed to be fast deteriorating magnetic films in a variety of incompatible formats or optical dots in a whole different panoply of incompatible formats.

Anyway, many of today’s featured stories have to do with history about which it must always be remembered that it is written by the victors.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.― Winston S. Churchill

Science and Technology News and Blogs

• First in Flight? Connecticut Stakes a Claim, By KRISTIN HUSSEY, The New York Times
  
  • More info on Whitehead
• Quick Note on Slavery, Finance, Minsky, and the Panic of 1837, by Lambert Strether, Naked Capitalism
• Clockmaker John Harrison vindicated 250 years after ‘absurd’ claims, by Robin McKie, The Observer
• “Albert is an old fool”: Einstein vs Schrödinger in battle of the Nobel laureates, by Paul Halpern, Salon
• The banker behind Hitler’s shadow empire, by Pierpaolo Barbieri, Salon
• Stegosaurus back plates differed between sexes, new study reveals, by Hannah Devlin, The Guardian
• Scrabble debunks Malcolm Gladwell: What the board game teaches us about expertise, by David Z. Hambrick, Scientific American
• Dark Matter’s Deep Reach, by George Johnson, The New York Times
• Astronomers discover largest known structure in the universe is … a big hole, by Hannah Devlin, The Guardian
• Scientists want to blast space debris with frickin’ lasers, by Andrew Tarantola, Engadget

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science Oriented Video

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.