The Fry Side

As I was getting my bag ready for work this morning, I pulled out some papers left from last week. They were work from my son’s school. Glancing through them while setting them aside, I found he had started doing more work for grammar. He is now identifying adjectives.

My son is 6. He is very much a six year old, oft found bouncing off the walls pretending to be inside a video game. He is the epitome of a six year old boy.

My son is six and knows what an adjective is.

This is added to the list of nouns, verbs, articles, and prepositions he already knows about.

I explained this to him last week: I didn’t start learning grammar until 8th Grade. Until I was 13. Over twice his age. And I didn’t even fully grasp it until 9th Grade when I had an awesome English teacher who kicked my butt. And I was one of the bright kids. Plenty of people I knew, even while in the midst of coursework, couldn’t point out a noun even if it bit them in the face.

My bouncing boy of six is learning grammar nearly ten years before I did and, as his teacher told me early last week, he just gets it.

Let this wash away any doubts about the self-directing, self-correcting Montessori method of education.

That, and my son is a genius.

That is all.

From Flowing Data:

FloatingSheep, a fun geography blog, looks at the beer belly of America. One maps shows total number of bars, but the interesting map is the one above. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.

(Found via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

This voiceover is fabulous!

(Found via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

Holst – The Planets, Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age

When picking up my son from school yesterday, I got some good news. I called to him from across the gym (he stayed after school to play), and while he walked back his teacher mentioned that Austin ‘just adores’ me.

“Yeah, I’m pretty fond of him too,” I reply.

“He does though! All day long it’s, ‘My Dad said this’ and ‘my Dad said this’ and ‘my Dad, my Dad, my Dad…’”

“How sweet. It’s been quite a lucky coincidence that the last two subjects he’s studied, composers and astronomy, are things I just happen to have studied about a lot. So we’ve had lots to talk about.”

“That’s great,” she said. “Still, either way, that boy loves you.”

As she was saying this, Austin was running to grab a book he made of all the things he has learned about the planets this past week. He made it for me. ‘My Spas Book’. It is official fridge material, my friends.

It struck me wonderfully to hear this. It’s one thing to get that generic ‘love you’ from family. But to hear it from someone outside the home, from where that boy operates completely separately from the rest of us, was grand.

It felt good to know he thinks highly of me. He regularly gets on my nerves, and I feel as though I am constantly correcting his behavior and don’t get the opportunity to actually be nice and fun. He is so active and so often in his own head; it is just tough. Frequently.

Of course, he doesn’t know I regularly sing his praises to anyone with ears. But that’s part of fatherhood, I think. It’s a quiet pride and love. You never know how much your father cares until you either hear about it from someone else or you see it from him, but indirectly as when he’s talking to someone else.

All from February 9th. The lad and I playing a game of Go. I felt like taking some snapshots.

There’s my little gamer.

“Why do I have to take another picture?”

Plotting the next move.

Read the rest of this entry »

A cool article showing how the advancements in making pianos have changed the sounds of music from what their composers may have heard.

The prime example of what I’m talking about is perhaps the most famous piece ever written: Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. Hector Berlioz called its murmuring, mournful first movement, “one of those poems that human language does not know how to interpret.” At the beginning, Beethoven directs the performer to hold down the sustain pedal through the whole first movement, so the strings are never damped. With the pianos of Beethoven’s time, on which the sustain of the strings was shorter than today, the effect was subtle, one harmony melting into another. On a modern piano, with its longer sustain, the effect of holding the pedal down would be a tonal traffic jam. Today you have to fake the effect, and it never quite works as intended. Here’s Alfred Brendel playing the beginning of the “Moonlight” about as well as anyone on the ubiquitous modern Steinway.

Compare that to Gayle Martin Henry playing a piano from around 1805 by the Viennese maker Caspar Katholnig.

The sound is startlingly different from a modern piano and takes a while to get used to. These instruments were mostly played in small to medium-size rooms. The sound is intimate; you hear wood and felt and leather. The voicing is varied through the registers rather than the homogenous sound of modern pianos. On the Katholnig, the effect of holding the pedal down in the “Moonlight” has a ghostly effect, most obvious in the longer-sustaining bass notes that can sound like a distant gong. All these elements of the pianos Beethoven knew shaped the music in the first place, including the way he picked out high and low notes around the murmuring figure in the middle of the keyboard.

You’ll have to click over to the article to hear the music clips to hear what he’s talking about. It’s very cool, and something I’ve often wondered. It is a bit of a musical history musing as to what Mozart would have come up with if he had access to more modern pianos with far greater dynamic ranges.

(Found via Megan McArdle :: The Atlantic.)

Proof that it’s all in the editing and music.

Epic Box

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

[From 1984 by George Orwell]

There is an easily understandable truth to the phrase, History is written by the victor. The victorious are the ones left after the battle to tell the tale, so it is their story. Even ‘his story’ seems like the etymology of the word, though it is not.

Logically, however, it seems as though it should not be the case. Fact is fact. What happened, happened. Right? The American Revolution went from this, to this, to this.

But we humans are limited, isolated souls. We cannot truly know anything beyond our own experience. So when we look upon the past, we see it through our own eyes and nothing more. Try as we might to keep the past even-handed, it remains clouded by what we believe actually happened.

And that belief as to what happens tempers our current state of mind. We justify our current decisions based on that foggy history, to either follow the path or run counter to it. The hardest to cope with of all is when evidence points to a different conclusion than what is believed to be true.

This is where a new battlefield has opened up, and it follows the words of George Orwell exactly.

In Texas, there is a board of education that controls the content of a huge amount of school textbooks. A single board, in one state, dictates the content they want in most schools.

How this is possible is through textbook manufacturing. Texas publishes a single list of approved textbooks for all of its schools. Texas is a huge state. So, if a publishing company wants guaranteed millions in sales, they cater to Texas. And since they’ve catered to Texas, those books become the books for much of the whole country.

As one would expect, Texas, as a whole, has stronger religious leanings than average. And this board has a solid voting bloc of religious conservatives. This fact would normally be balanced out by California’s liberal-secular leanings, but since that state won’t be purchasing textbooks for another half a decade (good planning, that’s what that is), Texas is now wielding far more influence over the market than it previously did.

Up now for their curriculum decisions is social studies. History. Our very past is going to be altered by the present. Alterations to make sure that there are well-mentioned gaps in Darwin’s and Galileo’s advances in our very world. Show Reagan as a hero, followed by the grandeur of Newt Gingrich. And be sure people see that our very founders were espousing Christianity and rule under Biblical law.

It is the last point that is most confounding to my knowledge. I have read our founders, not just read about them. Most of them were Christians, yes, but that was merely the default. The far more reaching fact about them was that they divorced their personal faiths (which were from numerous sects) and knew that their inspirations came from Enlightenment philosophy of reliance on themselves to get through existence.

These people honestly believe they are setting history right. That is what is so tough to fight. And it is a subtle fight over words. What is most impressive is that they are thinking in terms of generations. If they rewrite history now to deceptively emphasize the religions of our Founders over their actual beliefs, then it will be thirty years before the ramifications are fully felt.

As Mr Coates mentioned when I first read about this on his blog (also followed up by Mr Sullivan), it is hard not to leave this subject on a sour, depressing note. The effects of such an intellectual coup are difficult to see as too harmful in a world becoming coated with ubiquitous information. It also requires a vast amount of effort to maintain a campaign such as this over decades.

Still, it is always worth fighting against such willful acts of ignorance and deception.

Last night, I took my son to a concert. It was an orchestra playing the full suite of The Planets by Gustav Holst. Before each planet, a science teacher stood behind a corner podium and gave a musical and scientific introduction, and each performance had a slideshow of images for each celestial body. Austin has been studying astronomy in school, so for this night The Planets were aligned.

[HA!]

It had been quite some time since I last listened to the full suite. Sitting and listening to them ten years later has given me far more perspective on just how massive this work of Holst’s is.

I remember being bored by Venus and Saturn. But especially with the introduction to Saturn as the dignity in aging and death, the way that movement ended was simple and spectacular. And Neptune works as the great anti-finale. It leaves you adrift, wondering what could be beyond it, knowing full well that there has to be something.

It is something significant about who we are that changes what we hear in and get out of music throughout our lives. The speaker mentioned that Saturn was Holst’s favorite of the suite, and now I can understand why.

There was also something else to the music. It has been a long time since I attended a concert that I was not actively either playing in or working on. So I sat and got to just absorb this art laid out over time.

Music is the only art that requires time in order to actually exist. It is the closest thing we have to a tangible fourth dimension. Anything else can be looked at again, gone back over, re-read, etc. Even plays can be read without being acted and the impact of the art is nearly there.

With music, as any of us who know how to actually read its nomenclature can attest, until it happens, it sits as a potential. No art or impact is conveyed without hearing it, and it can only be heard as part of its own sequence.

So I sat in the audience and just listened. There was nothing else going on. I wasn’t working on something else, I was there just for the music and I got to hear so much more of it. It wasn’t a background to the movie of life. So much great art is thrown to the dogs of daily life without being appreciated.