One thing that stands out to me about choral music is how much smoother it makes dissonance sound. Eric Whitacre is one of the most popular living composers of choral music and he routinely uses huge tone clusters in his works. When sung by a choir, his pieces sound dreamy and atmospheric, but if you were to play them on the piano they would be much more challenging to listen to. I have a theory that choral music tends to be sidelined by more "serious" classical music for precisely this reason.
As an addendum, for anyone interested in choral music I highly recommend listening to Caroline Shaw. She is among the most interesting new voices in the genre. Her piece Partita for 8 Voices [1] won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back. For a somewhat more accessible piece I also really like Its Motion Keeps [2].
dissonance is a function of the instrument (and the notes -- and other stuff), not only the notes.
so notes that are dissonant on piano are not necessarily dissonant with human voices.
a big reason for that is apparently overtone matching (and i guess that because of formants/resonant cavities of the human vocal tract, there must be a lot of matching overtones in more cases, maybe? i wonder if there is a youtube vid about that, there must be...)
I wonder if human singer instinctively chooses another note, that is not 100% same frequency as in piano. You know, there are always imperfections in piano tuning even if it's done in today's standard way(all intervals are not perfect). I'm not a piano tuner but this is my understanding. Possibly trained singers can sing in a better harmony somewhere where piano gets it (very) slightly wrong?
It's not (just) instinctive. Good choral singers adjust their tuning purposefully to match the overtones of the harmony.
For example, if you are on the fifth in the chord, you adjust the tone slightly up. If you are on the major third, slightly down. Minor third, slightly up. These rules are consciously applied by choral singers, and are even genre-defining for things like barbershop.
because pianos are real physical things, high and low strings have overtones that do not match the harmonics (and in different ways), so for stuff to "sound good" piano tuners tune on overtones and not fundamentals.
on a more fundamental level our perception of pitch (the musical psychoacoustic thing) also vary with loudness and frequency (physical reality)...
add to that, that at low frequencies we have difficulties tracking the pitch in the first place (so we rely on overtones/harmonics) -- which makes it even more important to tune on evertone (because our heads can recreate/track the note through psychoacoustic effects... so we will ear it "nice" when without the overtones we would be lost)
i might be wrong on some points since i starting learning about music 2 years ago as a hobby but i think it is mostly correct. the whole thing is fascinating.
I suspect there's something to this. I find with guitar you can do something similar if you tune by ear, getting the strings to resonate with each other rather than perfectly matching a tuner. To my ears it produces a richer sound.
Caroline Shaw is one of my favorite contemporary composers, despite her mostly writing for voice.
Smoothing out the dissonance may be a bug, not a feature. I live for timbre and new sounds. Choral music can have the feel of overly polished rocks.
And funnily enough, as I wrote this, music of Bernard Parmegiani started playing. This gave me a (mostly) good jolt, following the more atmospheric music of Alan Hovhaness.
As a counterbalance to the "renegade" character of these kinds of podcasts I do recommend Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. He does a good job representing the "establishment" position in physics, so to speak.
A good episode to start with is "The Crisis in Physics" in which he (unusually?) argues that there is no real crisis in physics.
I absolutely love Sean Carroll's podcast. He's so good at explaining things in terms most people can understand, but also not afraid to get into the weeds and spend an hour building up to a point. Also not afraid of politics or how he will be seen by taking a political stance.
He seems like a great guy on top of being an excellent communicator.
Based on the code in the repo it looks like they designed the chip in verilog and then ran it in a simulator. But if they have the verilog code in principle they could send it off to a fab and get real hardware back.
There's an interesting extension of the Central Limit Theorem called the Edgeworth Series. If you have a large but finite sample, the resulting distribution will be approximately Gaussian, but will deviate from a Gaussian distribution in a predictable way described by Hermite polynomials.
> Right now I'm trying to figure out how to consistently make $1/day as a POC exercise.
You can do this with the following strategy:
1. Buy $10,000 of Treasury bonds.
It might be more interesting to target a particular Sharpe ratio rather than an absolute dollar amount since that will be proportional to the amount you invest.
> when the realignment caused ten days to be subtracted from the year, mobs across Europe attacked Jesuit houses to protest the time stolen from them
The outrage over the implementation of the Gregorian calendar had more to do with landlords in some areas charging a full month of rent for a month that lacked 11 days.
Almost invariably when large groups of people did something really dumb in the past, we just don't have the full story. Not wanting to pay 11 extra days for nothing is completely reasonable, as opposed to the portrayal of dummies going around with pitchforks because someone stole 11 days from their lives.
Prior to this he had composed in the dissonant, serialist style that was expected of "serious" art music in the middle of the 20th century. This was the first piece where he broke with the contemporary style and introduced his unique "tintinnabuli" style.
If you have even a basic familiarity with music theory it's worth taking a look at the structure of the piece because it's surprisingly simple for the effect. As the right hand plays the melody, the left hand simply plays notes from a b minor chord, with the particular note being whatever is just beyond one octave below the note that the right hand is playing. However there is one exception towards the end where the left hand plays a C# instead of a D as it would be expected to, and this marks the climax of the piece.
If anyone is interested in getting into cocktails I really can't recommend Cocktails with Suderman enough. The early posts are free and go into the theory of how cocktails are structured and why they work. Once you start to understand the structure of the major cocktails it makes it a lot easier to understand how you can play with the ingredients and make something new.
For instance, tons of cocktails fall into the "sour" category. They usually have proportions of 2:1:1 or 3:1:1 of a liquor, a sour, and a syrup. If you have rum, lime juice, and simple syrup it's a daiquiri. Swap out the lime juice for lemon juice and the rum for whiskey and you get a whiskey sour. Swap out the simple syrup for honey syrup and you get a Gold Rush. Use tequila, lime juice, and a blend of agave syrup and Cointreau and you have a margarita. Gin, lime, and simple syrup is a gimlet. And so on.
Also, as others have mentioned, the quality of the ingredients and the brands often matter a lot. A Manhattan calls for whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters, but the choice of whiskey and vermouth makes a big difference in the character of the drink. (And if you are using old vermouth that has been sitting out on the counter for a few years, or making a drink with bottled lime juice, it's just not going to turn out all that good.)
My second advice would be ice ice ice. A bartender uses copious amounts of ice. It's for a reason. If you make a mojito at home and just chuck two ice cubes in, you will either get waaayyy too much soda in when filling the glass, a too hot drink, too watered down etc.
Hehe. But where I'm from (Norway) it's only allowed to serve drinks with 40 cl (edit, I meant 4 cl heh) of liquor (with exceptions for international recognized cocktails). So if you were to get less ice you wouldn't get anything more for your money anyways. Except more soda water and a diluted taste.
International recognized cocktails must be quite popular in Norway. I remember when going to Norway for a friend's wedding and they explicitly asked all guests to bring the maximum allowed limit of liquor with them. I understood this after I saw the ridiculous high prices at those liquor stores, which they shamelessly call "wine monopoly" and have higher security than bank buildings. You guys sure have a special relationship with ethanol.
Yeah, strict rules. But the Wine Monopoly is great and quite beloved. For more expensive wines/liquors where the alcohol tax is a small amount of the total price, it's actually reasonably priced. The monopoly get good prices due to the volume they purchase of stuff.
And the selection is great. In Denmark for instance, every store has a selection of alcohol, but it's quite limited and always the same everywhere. You have to hunt for specialty stores. But the monopoly has everything even in smaller cities.
In Denmark you're not dependent on a monopoly for your selection, you can order whatever you like.
Wine Monopoly is by definition a specialty store. It's state subsidised, operating and capital expenses are almost irrelevant so that's why you have everything in smaller cities as well. This comes at a financial cost of course.
It is a state owned monopoly, whose purpose is to address the actual problem of too high alcohol consumption, and not necessarily to make profit.
I'm sure not everyone likes it though.
If it's anything like Sweden they have coddled reactionaries that are incapable of even the slightest planning and hence are constantly whining about the monopoly not being open at night or some weekend when they get a sudden urge to get drunk.
For someone who drinks moderately and enjoys variety and access to obscure alcohol products it's likely a very good deal, as it is in Sweden. If I want a single bottle of lebanese Ksarak it'll cost me roughly fifty euros and I'll walk across the street to pick it up after a week or so. Unless I'm misunderstanding something the danish have to get it from german suppliers, though it'll be a bit cheaper (~33 euros), probably due to taxes.
Sometimes I've engaged in tentative planning of imports, e.g. ukrainian bubbly wine and whatnot, but it typically falls through because people don't actually want to put in the effort to organise a drive or getting someone to mail a package, even if there would be a bit of money in it. On the other hand it's trivial to get into contact with people running rather large scale imports of cheap beer and wine from Germany that sell for less than the monopoly takes.
I don't think there is actually any improvement to gain from getting rid of the monopoly, it would quickly turn our local alcohol availability into something similar to what I've seen in Russia and Bulgaria, fifty shades of Flirt vodka, sour wine and useless lager. The rest I'd have to import myself.
I mean give the reactionaries a little credit. The systembolaget by my house closes at 1500 on Saturdays. Come on.
It is a really reasonable deal to buy from there though often. Selection is pretty good and the taxes on beer and wine are less and as a result due to the flat markup you can get really good deals on fine wines and the like.
The one where I live closes at 1400. I've never been bothered by that, if something social suddenly comes up that I'd like to be tipsy for I'd grab something I already have or buy some "people's beer". I.e. 2.8 or 3.5 percent alcohol, available at any grocery store, cornershop or petrol station, sometimes lovingly called "emergency rockets".
In my area it's also trivial to find both illegal vodka and legal beer people make at home, which is common outside the larger cities in Sweden. This compensates for the lack of greyzone importers from Germany and Denmark.
Yeah, that's another perk. Service is typically very good as well, you can ask for advice and get decent, trustworthy answers beyond what shelf something is on.
It's a quite different experience compared to regular profit optimised mass retail.
Now, I'm very aware of the drawbacks for local producers. It's a bit tricky to get things onto the monopoly shelves, you can't have anything the least provocative or advert-like on the label and even if you're only going to sell through your local monopoly shop you still need to price in sending your bottles to a logistics hub in Örebro or wherever. This is surely annoying, but pretty much every monopoly shop has inventory from local smalltime craft brewers and distillers and the like anyway.
As I see it, this is an unexploited business opportunity, one could likely live quite comfortably skimming a margin from small alcohol producers in exchange for lower transport costs and reliable advice in product design that shortens time to market.
In general the NA game of Sweden (and Denmark) is incredible compared to many other countries. My understanding is that there is a law in Sweden that indicates that bars must offer non-alcoholic options and as such there's a pretty large market demand and opportunity for the popular craft breweries like Mikeller to come in and make awesome NA beer that the whole region gets to enjoy.
It's definitely not loved by everyone here! Really the main concern a lot of people have is what will happen to prices if they got rid of it. The limits on how much they can mark up the prices does, like the previous commenter noted, mean that the more expensive stuff is actually more "reasonable".
Long ago there was a law that every farm in Norway had to produce beer, because the king could potentially visit.
It’s said coffee was introduced to try to reduce the alcohol consumption, but Norwegians kept consuming alcohol like before and staring to drink large amount of coffee also.
It's because of the insane taxes and government-owned monopoly on sales. But you'll still find apologists in this thread saying with a straight face that "it's actually reasonably priced" which is objectively false.
It's really only because of the taxes. Vinmonopolet prices are marked up by 10.4 NOK per liter plus 21% of the purchase price excluding taxes and duties up to a maximum of 250kr per item. Of course, this means they can't have loss-leaders, but at the same time, you can end up with very good deals on expensive drinks relative to many other countries.
Of course I would love to see Norway lower some of it's sin taxes - these mostly only hurt poor people.
Interesting that the size of the ice is not mentioned. I find large pieces of ice to be ideal as they cool the drink for longer yet don't overly water down the drink due to less surface area melting off.
Also, I HATE when bartenders add too little ice to shaken drinks and end up shaking it to oblivion. Makes me not want to order drinks from that particular bar.
It does make a difference. The big rock ice is great for whiskey and scotch the reason you mentioned; keeps it cold with minimal dilution. Crushed ice is great when you want dilution, like in a mint julep. It really depends on the style of cocktail and personal preference.
it's really not though. you're getting 1.5 oz liquor whether I put it in a shot glass, a rocks glass with no ice, a rocks glass with half a scoop of ice, a shaker with a full scoop of ice and then strain into a martini glass, a highball glass full of ice, a pint glass with no ice, w/e. Most mixers are so dirt cheap compared to the tremendous margin on alcohol that it doesn't make a ton of difference.
A decent bartender will measure the drinks regardless of ice. I've been doing them at home and a generous amount of ice leads to better results, especially if you like ice cold drinks!
This. As someone for whom food & bev was a career for 18 years and now it's a dedicated hobby Suderman is the Salt Fat Acid Heat of booze. It's graduating past memorizing recipes and into theory and framework.
Also please God pour out that old vermouth, get a new one and put it in your fridge.
I also want to shout out The Sprits which serves as a book club for cocktails. Very good if you're just exploring. Each week you get a cocktail and a themed playlist to go with it, plus some other random musings.
My rule of thumb for cocktails is - they were created to mask the flavors of shitty base liquors so this is what should be used. The best old fashioned comes from jim beam white label. Unless you use some really strong medicinal smoked whiskeys you probably won't be able to pick up much of the delicate flavors from the good stuff with so much syrup and bitters in it. and if you want to add complexity - just make a more complex syrup.
I'm not advocating to use limited release bourbons, but when 90% of your drink is the base spirit, you'll get a lot of value out of using a traditional top shelf bourbon vs well like Jim. Try a $40 bottle like Eagle Rare or Angel's Envy. There's not much syrup in a good old fashioned -- go with 2oz bourbon, a teaspoon of simple or good maple syrup, and a couple dashes of Angostura. Maybe a dash of black walnut bitters, too. The higher quality whiskey should be apparent.
When I treat myself to an expensive bottle as a treat, I go against conventional wisdom and use it at least once to make my favourite cocktails. While I agree that a simple bottle is best suited for cocktails, I can't remember an expensive base liquor ever spoiling a cocktail. For some, this is a waste because the premium taste takes a back seat to the cocktails, but often the result is better due to the subtle flavour profile of higher-quality spirits.
Yes and I don't know how they manage it but Woodford Reserve somehow makes the worst old fashioned money can buy. I find Wild Turkey makes a decent tasting old fashioned that you can make at home with not much knowledge.
> It actually needed more cycles to explain than the geocentric version of the model!
This part is not true. The main advantage of Copernicus's model was that it reduced the number of epicycles needed. In the Ptolemaic system every planet (except the Moon and Sun) required an epicycle with a period of one year, which we now know was needed in order to account for the relative motion of the Earth on its own orbit. In a heliocentric system these epicycles could be eliminated. Copernicus presented his model more in terms of it requiring fewer calculations.
The Ptolemaic system was already not particularly favored and was well and truly killed in Gallileo's time (in part by his observations). The competition was Tycho Brahe's model, in which the sun revolves around the earth but the planets revolve around the sun. They for the most part make identical predictions as far as astronomical observations, but Brahe's was very slightly simpler and didn't cause the other objections.
That's not exactly what is meant by luxury beliefs. Luxury beliefs aren't simply beliefs that rich people hold. It more refers to social opinions which would (allegedly) impose high costs on the poor, but from which the wealthy would be insulated from the consequences. Something like "defund the police" is usually pointed to as an example of a luxury belief. The poor, who live in high crime areas, would see crime go up and bear the brunt of the consequences. Whereas the rich, who live in pricey, low crime neighborhoods, wouldn't see much of a change and would be able to afford private security anyhow if they did.
It's a luxury belief in the sense that they're in a position to have an impact on the zeitgeist. People have been complaining about bad movies for a while now but now The New Yorker has an opinion. The rest of us proles can't afford Broadway. We get what we're served.
As an addendum, for anyone interested in choral music I highly recommend listening to Caroline Shaw. She is among the most interesting new voices in the genre. Her piece Partita for 8 Voices [1] won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back. For a somewhat more accessible piece I also really like Its Motion Keeps [2].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDVMtnaB28E
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT1PqR97urc
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