December 14, 2024
New York, N.Y.
Like many people who turned 11 years old in 1964, the first record album I bought “on my own” — in other words by pleading “Mom, can you get this album for me?” — was Meet the Beatles!, their first release in the United States. But so what? I have about as much inclination to listen to that album now as to watch episodes of My Favorite Martian, which was my favorite television series at the time.
October 20, 2024
New York, N.Y.
It might seem silly for a retired technical writer and obscure blogger to endorse a Presidential candidate. I am not vain enough to believe that my prestige (such as it is) has the power to influence people’s electoral choices. But I believe this election to be too important for anyone to remain silent. Silence is not an option. Silence equals complicity.
September 29, 2024
New York, N.Y.
I’ve been working on a graphical web project that requires an interactive roll of a pair of dice. Dice are cubes and would be most convincingly rendered with 3D graphics. But because these dice are only a tiny part of this project, I was reluctant to call out the big guns. I didn’t want to wrestle with the low-level WebGL to do 3D graphics or even a friendlier WebGL wrapper such as three.js.
August 2, 2024
Roscoe, N.Y.
This has been on my to-do list for 40 years.
June 17, 2024
New York, N.Y.
Memes can be fun and sometimes even informative, but when memes contain numbers — and particularly numbers without a source — memes can be deceptive and just plain wrong. For example, here’s a meme that’s been floating around that purports to illustrate income inequality in the United States:
May 28, 2024
Roscoe, N.Y.
I’m a fan of Bridgerton (Team Penelope, if you care), the feel-good Netflix series portraying a fantastical harmoniously multiracial Regency England, and renowned for its steamy sex scenes, the marvelous Shonda Rhimes touch, and clever quasi-“classical” arrangements of pop songs. These arrangements avoid the anachronistic incongruity of 19th century sets and costumes accompanied by the disconcerting sounds of drum kits, electric guitars, synthesizers, and pitch correction.
May 27, 2024
Roscoe, N.Y.
One of my 2024 projects is to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at the rate of about 10 pages a day, and so far it’s been successful: I’m currently heading towards the end of the 3rd volume, The Guermantes Way. During a long dinner party in this novel, seemingly everyone has taken sides in the Dreyfus Affair. This is an episode in French history centered around a wrongful arrest and conviction for an act of espionage, but characterized by a shockingly overt manifestation of antisemitism.
April 8, 2024
New York, N.Y.
When called upon to perform basic arithmetic these days, most of us grab the nearest device with a calculator app. On the rare occasions when the power is out and the batteries have run down, we might need to resort to doing the calculation by hand. In either case, we’re performing a digital calculation, meaning that we’re manipulating discrete digits in an algorithmic procedure.
February 21, 2024
New York, N.Y.
Some crazy stuff pops up in the news these days, but I truly wasn’t ready for the Chief Justice of a state Supreme Court to invoke the “wrath of a holy God” in a court ruling.
January 31, 2024
New York, N.Y.
Music has the power to speak very directly to us over decades and centuries. Yet often some context and additional information can enhance the experience. The innovations of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, for example, can become more evident with knowledge of the earlier symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. Familiarity with the later works of Beethoven and other composers allows us to consider the Third Symphony as a pivotal work in western music.
January 26, 2024
New York, N.Y.
Vienna, 1901. A budding 19-year-old author named Stefan Zweig has written something for the feuilleton section of the Neue Freie Presse (“New Free Press”) — the part of the paper that covered literature and art rather than news and politics. He brings his “little prose essay” to the feuilleton editor who, to his surprise, begins reading it on the spot, and when finished, puts the manuscript in an envelope and tells the young man “I am glad to tell you that your fine piece is accepted for publication in the feuilleton of the Neue Freie Presse.”
January 22, 2024
New York, N.Y.
Can an AI experience music? Has an AI ever had an emotional reaction to music? Has an AI ever felt its heart rate increase while listening to music? Has an AI ever felt the hairs on the back of its neck stand up while listening to music? Has an AI ever swooned while listening to music?
December 29, 2023
Roscoe, New York
Earlier today I published a blog entry with an interactive graph that had some visual flaws. Here’s that questionable graph again:
December 29, 2023
Roscoe, N.Y.
One argument sometimes advanced in favor of the Electoral College is that if the voters happened to blunder and select someone who was clearly unfit, unsuitable, or unqualified to serve as President, the Electoral College could step in to override the people’s choice and choose a more appropriate candidate.
December 22, 2023
Roscoe, New York
Two candidates face off in a Presidential election: One candidate gets 22% of the popular vote and the other gets the remaining 78%, but the one who gets 22% is declared the winner. How is this possible?
December 18, 2023
New York, N.Y.
The concept of one-person-one-vote is central to democracy. No person’s vote should have more power or influence than anyone else’s. In a 1964 case Wesberry v. Sanders, the Supreme Court stated this explicitly: “As nearly as practicable, one man’s vote in a Congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s.” In Reynolds v. Sims the concept was extended to state legislatures. In 1964, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote “People, not land or trees or pastures, vote.” (These quotes are from a 1986 New York Times article “One Man, One Vote: Decades of Court Decisions”.)