While this is not exactly new stuff, I still found it very relevant.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Declining GOP
According to the CNN Political Ticker, even Texas is becoming a swing state. A formerly conservative stronghold, the change within Texas shows how the GOP has lost touch with reality and the mainstream political view. I believe that the GOP looks backwards to most Americans in these modern times. The entirety of the political spectrum has shifted slightly to the left, but the GOP has failed to adjust. Until it corrects this mistake, it will fail to return to its old grandeur and political domination.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Math and Music
I play the violin, viola, and piano and have always marveled at how similar music is to math. To me, time signatures are like fractions; notes are numbers. A musical phrase is an equation to be written into sound through the instrument. Scales are series; chords are complex operations.
The connection runs deeper. Starting from the middle C, every octave above and below increases or decreases the frequency by a factor of 2. An A below a middle C is 220hz. One above is 440hz. Two below is 110. Two above is 880. Although the other notes are not as exact, they too follow a similar pattern. What is interesting here is although the frequencies change by powers of two, we perceive them linearly.
Music and math are both (almost)-universal. Pleasant sound and numerical operations have no face, language, ethnicity, and race. But why? Have both been evolved into our development; are we hardwired to learn math and enjoy music? Perhaps they developed out of evolutionary benefit--pattern recognition would help, and that would lead into mathematics. Music was a form of creative expression and probably stemmed out of a more developed brain. It most likely served unify groups and create a common culture.
The connection runs deeper. Starting from the middle C, every octave above and below increases or decreases the frequency by a factor of 2. An A below a middle C is 220hz. One above is 440hz. Two below is 110. Two above is 880. Although the other notes are not as exact, they too follow a similar pattern. What is interesting here is although the frequencies change by powers of two, we perceive them linearly.
Music and math are both (almost)-universal. Pleasant sound and numerical operations have no face, language, ethnicity, and race. But why? Have both been evolved into our development; are we hardwired to learn math and enjoy music? Perhaps they developed out of evolutionary benefit--pattern recognition would help, and that would lead into mathematics. Music was a form of creative expression and probably stemmed out of a more developed brain. It most likely served unify groups and create a common culture.