icarus_drowning

You'll find that listening to music in a single key for extended periods of time can become extremely tiring. Most (not all people) need fresh tonality, or they get bored. (Obviously all of this depends on what kind/style of music you are listening to, etc., but I would wager that even if you switched from "classical" music to "pop" music and stayed in the same key, most people would find it aurally tiring).

I think it would be worth doing with older students as a supplement to the curriculum. One of the bad things about my "major scale-centric" approach is that I never explain why a major scale is WWHWWWH, which is actually a barrier to some students, who are either curious or who need more context for their information.

I teach mostly middle-school and high-school kids, and we barely have enough time to get through what I have, so I skip it. I wish I didn't have to.

I teach Music Theory (and piano) for a living-- this is an excellent introduction to the most practical concepts.

I was somewhat disappointed that the OP showed us a C Major scale without really explaining what a "major scale" is-- a collection of whole and half steps-- especially since they used a keyboard as an example, which is laid out in exactly the right pattern for teaching the major scale. (Notice that the black and white notes are arranged so that you skip some keys-- whole steps-- but sometimes you can't: half steps). I always teach how to build scales based on this pattern- WWHWWWH. Using this pattern, you can build any major scale beginning on any arbitrary note-- including notes that are sharped or flatted, which is neat. From here, you can figure out all of the scales, and thus all of the keys.

The advantage of learning in this fashion is that you can tackle intervals first, which are the distances between notes. (Note that major and minor intervals are named as such because they fit into our major or minor scales). Since a chord is simply collection of intervals, you end up with a more powerful understanding of them by learning which intervals (and which scale degrees) build which chords.

All the same, I really think the more "practical" approach here is really interesting, because you can start writing music earlier, albeit mostly in C Major.

Cool link, it really gives me insight as a fellow music educator.

...and none of this says anything about the facts that have been reported (most of which, you'll note, have not been pretty for pro-nuke advocates). Are the facts that have been reported wrong? If you don't have evidence that they aren't, this is just a "hunch", and not really worth serious consideration.

Which facts that he posted were inaccurate? And note that I'm not talking about his opinions based on the facts, but rather the facts that he used as evidence?

UPDATE: I'm not trying to be snarky here. I'm very interested in this situation and want a clearer picture of it, and it would be nice if someone who understands the complexities of this matter would comment, as the facts in the original post (which is now being slammed) seemed to indicate at the very least cautious optimism.

(FYI, the post that was originally on the FP has moved here: http://mitnse.com/)

While it is true that there are many people attempting to call the crisis "over" without adequate evidence that this is the case, I think it is equally obvious that there are many people who are doing the opposite: namely, attempting to make the case that the crisis is far worse than the incomplete facts indicate.

I applaud your more measured approach, but I must say that, as someone who has read most of the stories and comments regarding this topic that have hit the front page, I do feel that you are decidedly in the minority. There are plenty of people rushing to call this a horrendous disaster, who are privy to the same limited information, and who are likewise doing very little to contribute to the discussion.

Sure. Major investment and infrastructure improvements are needed to make its alternatives viable too.

EDIT: I should note that even the above is somewhat irrelevant to my original point, which was simply that one cannot dismiss nuclear power as a whole simply because one type of fuel supply is "limited".

Thorium isn't.

I think the suggestion is that this represents a pretty 'worst case' scenario-- an old reactor of obsolete design that is dramatically less safe than many modern designs (at least as I understand it)and one of the worst earthquakes on record. If the "no fallout" situation does occur, it seems like a pretty powerful argument on the "pro-nuclear power" side of the debate.

And no, I don't suspect the anti nuclear crowd will buy it at all.

Because it isn't certain that it is going to end badly. And because it is axiomatic that if it does there will be major repercussions on the power industry.

If it ends well, it might have positive repercussions-- "even in the worst case, these are still safe" will probably be the line.

Well, sure. But we don't usually get dramatic video illustrating just how well engineered they are.

I tried to think of an incident where a skyscraper was significantly damaged in an earthquake, but I couldn't off the top of my head. All I remember was how well Taipei 101 stood up to the earthquake that occurred while it was being built[1].

1: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Taipei_101#St...

Ironically, it is the ambiguity that is causing so many problems in the first place. It is ambiguity over where they plan to extract revenue that is causing 3rd party devs to choose Twitter-based business models that later threaten Twitter's new revenue model. It is ambiguity in their rules/TOS that is getting 3rd party devs banned (see: Twitdroyd). Etc.

At this point, Twitter needs to realize that the ambiguity isn't helping their PR, its the reason they have a PR problem in the first place.

EDIT: Minor grammatical correction.

Certainly blew my balls off.

Of course its older than he is. I was referring to his apparent affinity for inserting "dick" in front of everything.

Pedantically nitpick much? ;)

What is particularly galling is that Twitter has been saying for years that they want to monetize without slapping ads over everything. Now they're monetizing by... slapping ads over everything. And ensuring that no one can threaten the business model they supposedly didn't want to use.

All of this would have been better had Twitter just started off by slapping ads on their service and making it clear how they were going to protect it. Instead, they've grown their userbase (at least among the technorati) by asserting that they weren't going to pursue the exact model they seem so ardently chasing now.

Sure, 3rd party app devs might be "suckers" for having latched on early, but I don't think that excuses Twitter for such a (to use a Gruberism) dick move.

Currently reading Pournell/Niven's "Lucifer's Hammer" right now. This was an excellent companion to it.

This particular article actually seems to focus more on the seawalls designed to protect from the resultant tsunami.

Isn't the point of the article that Japan's regulation did result in better safety?

That might not be an argument that can support any and all regulation in every part of the world, but it seems to suggest that these particular regulations in this particular country were effective.

The existence of the vulnerability itself is now obvious-- no one is arguing against it. (And thus, I don't think anyone's arguing that a fully-patched OS X system is fully impenetrable). But the fact that the winner gets to keep the hardware certainly has a lot to do with which target they choose to attack.

Did Safari fall first because it is the least secure, or because it is the hardware everyone wants to win? It really is difficult, if not impossible to tell.

Personally, I'm quite sure that the Windows machines are at this point far more secure, simply because Microsoft takes so much battering by being in the dominant position. But I wouldn't use this as evidence for it.

EDIT: Question about your quote-- later in that article, Miller suggests that there is no "randomization" in OS X, while this year's article says his exploit bypassed ASLR in OS X-- is this a new feature in OS X that wasn't present in 2009?

A whole new genre of music concrete[1] has just been born.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concr%C3%A8te

I will admit to being of the political persuasion that tends to keep me away from the Huffington Post most of the time, but when did the site become such a massive clutter of bloated ads, social media widgets, and meaningless navigation bars? Has it been like this for long? I haven't visited in a long time, but it shocked me how my poor little netbook almost froze under the strain.

The article, nonetheless, was very amusing (once you actually got to it, scrolling past tag clouds and crappy social media "tools").

While this is true, there is certainly a point where backward compatibility becomes a bit absurd. I'd personally peg it around the 15-year mark.

I think where this gets annoying is when it becomes impossible to discern when Gruber is just "explaining what Apple is thinking" and when he is putting forth his own opinion. Its tiresome to criticize his Apple apologism and constantly run into the counter-argument that "he isn't really saying that its OK for Apple to engage in X practice, he's just explaining it", because it is often difficult (if not impossible) to discern if that's the case.

I do think Gruber intentionally blurs that line to insulate himself from criticism. And I think that's pretty dishonest and petty-- much like his irritatingly self-satisfied one-off comments aimed at his opponents. (Technology related and otherwise).

EDIT: Minor grammatical correction

At least the phrase gives you a point of attack if you disagree. You get to say "it isn't ad hominem because of reason X".

I find this far better than responding to arguments that deliberately attempt to obfuscate avenues of attack by couching everything in terms of "opinion" or "I have opinion X, but".

This was my first thought too. I was half expecting an essay on how they imagined the Irken language from Invader Zim. Then I realized that they all speak English.

The question is: do they want to compete with Apple for developers? Given Apple's huge success, I can't see how the answer to that question could be anything but "yes".

If RIM's strategy doesn't have some component that involves trying to woo iOS developers to their platform, I predict they will fail.

This is a fair point, but its a fair point that completely misses the point. If RIM wants to attract the huge numbers of developers that are flocking to iOS (and, presumably, doing all of their dev work in OS X), they should be doing everything possible to make the switch from iOS development to Playbook development as smooth as possible. And there is no way to do that without addressing the question of Playbook development on OS X.

Yeah, this has been my experience as well. Even cheap Firewire audio interfaces are light-years better than their USB counterparts.

I still use a USB 2.0 MIDI controller and the latency is absolutely killer. Press a key, a beat later, see the note appear on piano roll...

But we're not talking about Apple's marketshare. We're talking about Intel's influence. And that's quite a bit different.

>Wow, did you read the same sentence I did? They weren't implying Valve had a lust for profits, they were indicating that Gembe wasn't motivated by profit.

Fair enough. I think its a fairly straightforward example. Reading it again, I still think its fairly obvious that the piece was designed to minimize the clearly stupid, clearly wrong actions of an individual, and in order to do so, they needed to paint Valve as the villain. But I appreciate that this is my own interpretation and certainly one could read it differently. (The example I cited should have been changed regardless, as I don't think its necessary to the story and to me still reads as an attempt to vilify Gembe's victim).

> we can see that it didn't actually affect them negatively in any tangible way

Red herring. This probably helped Valve's sales, but that doesn't mean that it necessarily would have, and has nothing to do with the morality/legality of the matter, and as such, it has very little impact on my view of Gembe's actions.