Bhargava

A nice interview with Princeton mathematician and musician Manjul Bhargava

Bach Cantata Pilgrimage

"Study Bach.  There you will find everything."  -Brahms. 
"Not Brook (Bach), but Ocean should have been his name." -Beethoven
 
I recently got ahold of about a third of the Bach cantatas from John Elliot Gardiner's "Pilgrimage" project.  It is supurb, far better than the other two sets of cantatas I've heard before.  I've written before about cantata BWV 106, which is impeccable in this collection.  I'm also listening to some I've never heard before.  BWV 33 jumps out at me as another great example.  The rousing first movement theme culminates in a simple hemiola, that is so incredibly effective I smile just thinking of it.  I don't often wish I played the oboe, but I certainly do now.

Why a Detroit bailout is a terrible idea.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122669746125629365.html

I agree completely, especially with the oft given rationale that it would allow GM to retool to build fuel efficient vehicles.  "It's like asking the cigarette industry to help with cancer research".

Update:

Here's another one.  I hadn't heard of Leyland.  Perhaps the WTO may actually keep us from doing something stupid this time, rather than keeping us from protecting sea turtles. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/business/economy/18car.html?em

Update:

Yet another, from Mitt Romney.  I haven't agreed with anything he's said since his presidential campaign.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html?em

KDE menu bar

If the menu bar disappears in a KDE app, you can recover it by hitting Ctrl-m.

Coach

Great coach story.

Inspiring guy

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/sports/othersports/14haverford.html?em

Malik Rahim

Last night I went to an awards dinner for the Thomas Merton Center.  The main award recipient was Malik Rahim, a community organizer from New Orleans.  The stories he had to tell were horrific, but the speech overall was empowering.  Mostly he stressed getting involved in social justice work where you are. 

Cannonballs

A nice essay from an inspiring outdoorsman.

Like, totally

Nice article about using "like" in modern English, and how it's really not that bad.

The Irrelevant South

A very upsetting article about the racist South.  The only silver lining is that the South is becoming increasingly irrelevant in politics.  It's almost a shame how much they will benefit from the expected expansion of infrastructure and social services.

Evil

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

-Solzenitzen, The Gulag Archipelago

The Problems of Philosophy

I'm reading The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.  It's a pleasing introduction to some of the basic problems.  The jargon is minimal, and the explanations are, I think, as clear as could be hoped for.  The final chapter, The Value of Philosophy, which I read first for its catching title, is a good place to begin if you are tempted to think, as I was, that philosophy has little of value to offer us today.

iPod fiasco

My iPod had a little accident while I was home in CA for my grandfather's funeral.  It was raining for the first time in six months, and I happened to be out doing errands.  Somehow, my iPod managed to fall out of my pocket while I was getting in the car.  The door closed on the cord though, and I didn't notice.  I then proceeded to drag the ipod along the pavement and through big puddles for 3 blocks or so.  Surprinsingly, the ipod structure didn't look damaged, but all the water did its work, and after a few death throes (flickers), it became a no longer I-functioning body.

I got a new iPod the next day.  Besides CoverFlow, which is truly annoying, the new iPod nanos are nice.  I also discovered a good auction site, uBid, something like ebay, but for new things.  There I got a Macally mirage cover for it.  It's very nice.

Unison Aborted

I use the Unison file synchronizer extensively.  I was very disappointed when I was recently trying to copy a directory structure I copied from a cd lately.  I ran unison, and it failed with the sole message "Aborted".  No file or directory name, no hint to the problem.  After much frustration, I finally found the problem.  The Windows machine that made the cd had for some reason created a bunch of files beginning with a ".".  (perhaps for indexing purposes?)  After deleting these files with

find . -name "\.*" -exec rm -f {} \;    

Unison worked correctly.  Why couldn't they issue a reasonable error message?

Update:

Turns out those '.' files were "Resource forks", a Mac HFS relic.   If you
add "rsrc = false" to the profile, it will ignore the offending files.