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System of Down with their anti-capitalist bent, fills the bill when us dirty socialists need to rock out.
I’ve read about somewhat arcane nature of piano tuning and the various temperaments used through the ages, but Minute Physics succinctly describes what is going with all the math behind the production of sound.
Many factors cause pianos to go out of tune, particularly atmospheric changes. For instance, changes in humidity will affect the pitch of a piano; high humidity causes the sound board to swell, stretching the strings and causing the pitch to go sharp, while low humidity has the opposite effect.[1] Changes in temperature can also affect the overall pitch of a piano. In newer pianos the strings gradually stretch and wooden parts compress, causing the piano to go flat, while in older pianos the tuning pins (that hold the strings in tune) can become loose and don’t hold the piano in tune as well.[2] Frequent and hard playing can also cause a piano to go out of tune.[2] For these reasons, many piano manufacturers recommend that new pianos be tuned four times during the first year and twice a year thereafter.[3]
An out-of-tune piano can often be identified by the characteristic “honky tonk” wah-wah or beating sound it produces. This fluctuation in the sound intensity is a result of two (or more) tones of similar frequencies being played together. For example, if a piano string tuned to 440 Hz (vibrations per second) is played together with a piano string tuned to 442 Hz, the resulting tone beats at a frequency of 2 Hz, due to the constructive and destructive interference between the two tones. Likewise, if a string tuned to 220 Hz (with a harmonic at 440 Hz) is played together with a string tuned at 442 Hz, the same 2 Hz beat is heard.[4] Because pianos typically have multiple strings for each piano key, these strings must be tuned to the same frequency to eliminate beats.
The pitch of a note is determined by the frequency of vibrations. For a vibrating string, the frequency is determined by the string’s length, mass, and tension.[5] Piano strings are wrapped around tuning pins, which are turned to adjust the tension of the strings.
History
Piano tuning became a profession around the beginning of the 1800s, as the “pianoforte” became mainstream.[6] Previously musicians owned harpsichords, which were much easier to tune, and which the musicians generally tuned themselves. Early piano tuners were trained and employed in piano factories, and often underwent an apprenticeship of about 5–7 years. Early tuners faced challenges related to a large variety of new and changing pianos and non-standardized pitches.
Historically, keyboard instruments were tuned using just intonation, pythagorean tuning and meantone temperament meaning that such instruments could sound “in tune” in one key, or some keys, but would then have more dissonance in other keys.[7] The development of well temperament allowed fixed-pitch instruments to play reasonably well in all of the keys. The famous “Well-Tempered Clavier” by Johann Sebastian Bach took advantage of this breakthrough, with preludes and fugues written for all 24 major and minor keys.[8] However, while unpleasant intervals (such as the wolf interval) were avoided, the sizes of intervals were still not consistent between keys, and so each key still had its own distinctive character. During the 1700s this variation led to an increase in the use of equal temperament, in which the frequency ratio between each pair of adjacent notes on the keyboard was made equal, allowing music to be transposed between keys without changing the relationship between notes.[9]
Pianos are generally tuned to an A440 pitch standard that was adopted during the early 1900s in response to widely varying standards.[10] Previously the pitch standards had gradually risen from about A415 during the late 1700s and early 1800s to A435 during the late 1800s. Though A440 is generally the standard, some orchestras, particularly in Europe, use a higher pitch standard, such as A444.[11]
Yes, this series is purposefully very user friendly – but it does cover some new stuff – who knew about Magnetars? You will. :)
I’m almost done with Sorrows of Empire so I will stop deluging the blog with quotes, but I cannot forgo Johnson’s explanation of the mutating monster that Neo-liberalism is. I’d like to reproduce the entire chapter because it is that good, but instead we’ll look at how insidious neo-liberalism is when it comes to being critiqued by the intelligentsia residing in centres of Western power.
“It is critically important to understand that the doctrine of globalism is a kind of intellectual sedative that lulls and distracts its Third World victims while rich countries cripple them, ensuring that they will never be able to challenge the imperial powers. It is also designed to persuade the new imperialists that “underdeveloped” countries bring poverty on themselves thanks to “crony capitalism”, corruption, and a failure to take advantage of the splendid opportunities being offered. The claim that free markets lead to prosperity for anyone other than the transnational corporations that lobbied for them and have the clout and resources to manipulate them is simply not borne out by the historical record. As even the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a former director of research at the World Bank, has come to acknowledge, “It is now a commonplace that the international trade agreements about which the United States spoke so proudly only a few years ago were grossly unfair to countries in the Third World… The problem [with globalists is] … their fundamentalist market ideology, a faith in free, unfettered markets that is supported by neither modern theory not historical experience.
[…]
There is no known case in which globalization has led to prosperity in any Third World country, and none of the world’s twenty-four reasonably developed capitalist nations, regardless of their ideological explanations, got where they are by following any of the prescriptions contained in globalization doctrine. What globalization has produced, in the words of de Rivero, is not NICs (newly industrialized countries) but about 130 NNEs (nonviable national economies) or, even worse, UCEs (ungovernable chaotic entities). There is occasional evidence that this result is precisely what the authors of globalization intended.
In 1841, the prominent German political economist Friedrich List (who had immigrated to America) wrote in his masterpiece, The National System of Political Economy, “It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of combing up after him.” Much of modern Anglo-American economics and all of the theory of globalization are attempts to disguise this kicking away of the ladder.
-Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire. p.262.
So really, colonialism by any other name… I’m so glad we’ve progressed so far.
We have truly breached new moral ground, made the world a safer place (for oligarchic capitalism), and ensured the continued well being of right class of people.
For more on ‘ladder kicking’ see Cambridge’s Ha-Joon Chang and his post on this very topic.
Do you snore? Get tested for sleep apnea.
I (used to) snore. Loudly. One time, when I fell asleep before Arb, he took his phone and recorded me snoring, then played it back in my ear until it woke me up. It was ghastly.
I also used to be incredibly tired all the time, and just about never woke up feeling like I’d gotten enough sleep. Most days I felt like I needed a nap, but then the nap wasn’t awfully helpful either. I assumed it was either the remaining depression symptom that my meds just couldn’t help, or else a medication side effect that was worth living with because it beats the hell out of being suicidal.
Arb had been after me for years to do something to treat my snoring, as much for his comfort as mine. I was resistant – not for any good reason, just stubborn. I didn’t want to have to wear one of those Darth Vader mask machines. I didn’t want another chronic illness diagnosis. I didn’t want to be told losing weight would cure it all, when I’ve snored since I was a medium sized, very active teenager.
This summer I finally gave in and got tested for sleep apnea. The link says people with sleep apnea may stop breathing as many as 30 times an hour – the night I was tested, I stopped breathing an average of 47 times an hour (not sure when I actually was breathing), and my blood oxygen saturation was dipping into the low 80%s. That freaked me the hell out, and I agreed to do a trial with a CPAP machine – the dreaded Darth Vader mask.
The first night with the machine, I had a hell of a time getting comfortable. I think I slept two or three hours at the most. And I woke up… feeling rested! It was the weirdest feeling: the thought of getting out of bed didn’t make me want to cry; I was ready to get up and face the day. And that day, I did ALL THE THINGS, without needing a nap.
The next night I slept six hours, and woke up feeling great in the morning again, with no tiredness-hangover from having done all the things the day before. So I got up and did all the things again. And again and again and again. It’s literally been that kind of night and day change. It seems some very large percentage of what I thought was pure laziness, was actually due to untreated sleep apnea.
I will disclose up front, using a CPAP machine is not all kittens and roses. Or maybe it is, complete with claws and thorns:
- You pretty much have to sleep on your back for the mask to seal properly against your skin, which takes some getting used to
- If the seal breaks during the night, you’re woken up by your whole face blowing a raspberry
- The mask and hose make it awkward to fall asleep in your partner’s arms (but hey, your partner won’t be driven to the sofa by your snores; it’s a trade-off)
On the other hand, besides giving you crappy sleep and pissing off your partner, sleep apnea can:
- increase the risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, obesity, and diabetes
- increase the risk of heart failure, or if you have heart failure, make it worse
- put you at increased risk of motor vehicle and workplace accidents
- may be linked with depression, though causation has not been established
- in rare cases, it can kill you directly
In conclusion, gentle readers, again I urge you, if you snore, or if you are tired all the time and don’t know why, or especially if you have both those symptoms, go get tested for sleep apnea. I’m telling everybody who will listen in hopes that somebody else can be helped as much as I have been.
So I was perusing a Christian’s blog, as I am sometimes wont to do, and she was discussing the Biblical creation story (version 2, which contradicts version 1 from a few verses earlier, but anyway…) In this creation account, Yahweh creates everything else, then places one man (Adam) in the Garden of Eden. He sends all the animals to Adam to be named, and to see if any of them will make a worthy companion for him, and Adam names all the animals and likes some of them but none are quite right.
And God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (and creates Eve from Adam’s rib).
No shit, Sherlock. Humans are social animals. We need one another, deeply and desperately, both for physical and psychological survival. And here, God goes and creates a man, and puts him in a (very large and very beautiful) solitary confinement cell.
Now, when you confront Christians with the fact that the world today is full of needless suffering, and God, being omnipotent, could alleviate all that suffering with a word, but he never does, Christians will tend to respond with some bafflegab about this being a fallen, sinful world and/or God working in mysterious ways. Here’s the thing: in the above story, Eve hasn’t even been created yet, let alone been tempted by the devil/snake to eat the apple and feed it to Adam.
Adam is perfectly innocent; sin has not yet entered this shiny, new, perfect world that God has declared good. And here is Adam, suffering for no reason except that God did creation this way and not some other way. (Hey God, when you declared your creation good, was Adam’s suffering part of that good?) What would it have cost God to create Adam and Eve at the same time, or better yet, breathe on enough dust to create a whole tribe? Being omniscient, God knew before he put Adam all alone in that garden, that it would not be good for him to be alone. And the God who is Love went ahead and did it anyway.
It’s also interesting to note, in the most famous story of gratuitous suffering in the Bible, the Book of Job, God doesn’t actually directly cause Job’s suffering. He agrees to let the devil do whatever he wants to Job – who is not innocent like Adam, but still a very good and devout man. In the creation account, God sticks it to Man directly. Either way, what a dick this Supreme Arbiter of Morality seems to be.
Ever wondered about your writing style and the message your ‘word medium’ conveys?
The Tone Analyzer will tell you. :)
I put one of my previous endeavours through the mill. This is what was returned.
I’m still looking into if any of the analysis is congruent with reality. If it isn’t at least it puts pretty colours around your text. :)
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…