Selection of the week

Let’s bring in the fall with Vivaldi’s Autumn from the Four Seasons. Detroit is mostly known for cars and bankruptcy but it also has great culture.  Here is the Detroit Symphony Orchestra with Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti.

Selection of the week

The Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903 by Johann Sebastian Bach played by Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt, perhaps the best Bach interpreter since the great Glenn Gould.

Julia update

I’m totally committed to Julia now.  It is blitzing fast and very similar to Matlab with some small differences (improvements). I particularly like the fact that when you declare an array with one argument, like x = zeros(10), it immediately gives you a vector of length 10 and not a 10 X 10 matrix. The broadcast function is also very useful.  There are still many things I don’t yet know how to do in Julia like how to import and export data.  Plotting is also not fully solved. I’ve been using PyCall to import matplotlib.pyplot, which works pretty well but not perfectly. There are things I miss in Matlab like context dependent history recall, i.e. I can recall an old command line by just typing the first few letters.  If anyone knows how to do this in Julia please let me know.  Right now, I’m hitting the uparrow button continuously until I find the line I want. I do worry that my abandoning Matlab means someone will lose their job, which is certainly not my intention. However, I am well ahead of schedule for zero Matlab.

Selection of the week

I think the Meditation from Jules Massenet’s opera Thais is appropriate for the day after September 11.  Here is violinist Sarah Chang.

Unintended consequences

Here is a true story. A young man is trained to hit people as hard as possible and to react immediately to any provocation with unhindered aggression. He signs a 5 year contract for 35 million dollars to do this 16 times a year or more if he and his colleagues are very successful at doing it. One day he gets upset with his fiancée and strikes her in the head so hard that she is knocked unconscious in a public place. This creates a minor stir so the employer mandates that he must apologize and is prohibited from smashing into people for 2 of the 16 times he is scheduled to do so. The fiancée-now-spouse also refuses to press charges because she doesn’t want to jeopardize the 27 million over the next 3 years owed to the man. However, a video showing the incident is made public creating a huge uproar so the employer abruptly fires the man and condemns him since he now is no longer financially useful to the employer. The public now feels vindicated that such a despicable man is no longer employed and that domestic violence now is given the attention it deserves. However, the spouse is very unhappy because her comfortable lifestyle has just been pulled from right under her. Now, other spouses who live with violent but rich men will be even more silent about abuse because they fear losing their livelihoods too. If we really cared about victims of domestic violence, we would force the employer to set up a fund to ensure that spouses that come forward are compensated financially. We would also force them to support institutions that help the many more victims of domestic abuse who are not married to rich and famous people. This young man is probably an upstanding citizen most of the time. Now he is unemployed and potentially even angrier. He should not be thrown out onto the street but given a chance to redeem himself. The employers and the system who trained and groomed these young men need to look at themselves.

The morality of watching (American) football

The question in this week’s New York Times Ethicist column is whether it is wrong to watch football because of the inherent dangers to the players. The ethicist, Chuck Klosterman, says that it is ethical to watch football because the players made the decision to play freely with full knowledge of the risks. Although I think Klosterman has a valid point and I do not judge anyone who enjoys football, I have personally decided to forgo watching it. I simply could no longer stomach watching player after player going down with serious injuries each week. In Klosterman’s article, he goes on to say that even if football were the only livelihood the players had, we should still watch football so that they could have a livelihood. This is where I disagree. Aside from the fact that we shouldn’t have a society where the only chance to have a decent livelihood is through sports, football need not be that sport. If football did not exist, some other sport, including a modified safer football, would take its place. Soccer is the most popular sport in the rest of the world. Football exists in its current form because the fans support it. If that support moved to another sport, the players would move too.

Selection of the week

I think we should start September off with Beethoven.  Here is the first movement of the Sextet in E-flat op.81 b for two horns and strings performed by the Amici Ensemble Frankfurt. Note that they added a double bass, just to make it more special.