An Album Review 35 years in the making

 

In high school, I read a review of something and the writer described an event as being as 'jarring as encountering a scratch on your new Steve Reich record".  I don't recall what the review was about or who wrote it, but boy do I remember that line!

Well, the next time I was in a record store, I looked for something by this artist whom I had never heard of and found a CD of "The Desert Music" which had only come out a few years earlier.  I flipped it over and read the words 

"Begin, my friend

                 for you cannot,
                                  you may be sure,
take your song,
                 which drives all things out of mind,
                                  with you to the other world."

And then later

    

               "Well, shall we
think or listen? Is there a sound addressed
                 not wholly to the ear?"

(turns out the lyrics are from poems by William Carlos Williams)

I bought the CD on the spot.  When I got home, I discovered an in-depth review of the piece in the liner notes by a critic.  So, as I hit play, I read about how this reviewer pictures music in color and light.  I remember specifically that Mozart to him is a "slow moving barge of bright white light". I think about that line a lot.  Even today.

Years later, I attended a performance where Steve Reich was interviewed and he confessed that he had picked up a book of poems by William Carlos Williams having never heard of him, but just intrigued by the symmetry of his name.  How cool, I thought.

I miss the era of rolling the dice on the spot in a record store, not knowing whether what you were buying was even worth the $14.99 or whether it would be life-transforming.  Now, I google and read at least 3 reviews before I buy a new can opener online.  

If you are willing to spend 48 minutes of focused appreciation, see if The Desert Music transports and transforms you as it did a 15 year Ken Rideout some 35 years ago:

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

I have often been fascinated by this idea that everything happens in the squishy space between things:  it's all about relationships  - you are not so much what you are made of, but the relationship between those items (within and without).

Well, my man Dr. Derek Muller has knocked it out of the park again.  In a recent video he shows how the very color of light - its frequency or wavelength, is a construct of relationship. Whether the photon is blue or red depends not just on its intrinsic properties but also your relationship to the photon (are you moving away/towards? Are you cosmically far from it? Are you at a different location in a gravitational well?). Mass, color, your personality:  all constructs of relationship.  So little is actually intrinsic!

If a real tree falls in the woods, it certainly creates sound waves even if no one is there to hear it.  But, if a quantum particle pops into existence and then out again and no one sees it, was it ever there?  If I live by myself on an island for my entire life, do I even have a personality? I'm not so sure...

Even the attributes of fundamental particles are ones of relationship: Spin Up or Down?  Need an external field to define up and down.  Intrinsic mass?  Needs Higgs field to interact with. Charge?  Wouldn't know you have it if I didn't have another one to respond to it...

I find myself returning to that classic Carl Sagan saying that gives us all a reason to exist: "We are a way for the Universe to know itself."  Deeper every time I think about it, Carl.

Now, What is that frequency, Kenneth?

Illusions of Fluency

Although it's well known phenomenon (thinking you understand something better than you actually do), this crazy experiment in education during the pandemic is really driving the "Illusion of Fluency" issue home for me.

All this remote and hybrid learning has led to less testing.  

Sure, students are being exposed to the material and given ample opportunity to practice problem solving, ask questions, etc.  They are even doing virtual labs.  In fact, much of the material is even more accessible this year because teachers are so focused on presentation and accessibility and scaffolding since they can't rely on the usual classroom dynamic to provide opportunities to respond spontaneously. (Okay, maybe the virtual labs aren't as good as the real thing, but you'd be surprised!).  Less testing has led to a greater ability for students to fool themselves into thinking they understand something.  With unlimited time and lots of resources and ample opportunity to redo problems until you experience success, you can really feel like you are getting it.  However, there's nothing like drawing a mental blank during a quiz or test to let you know you really aren't quite there yet.  Also, the motivation to study and the intensity of the reviewing really does need a performance event at the end of the day.  So few of us are intrinsically motivated in the same way that an external judging can provide.

I've said it before (here and here), but now I say it with evidence of the contrapositive: testing is important in learning.

A GENIUS IDEA

I had this idea a while back, but I didn't have the technical chops to pull it off. So,  I enlisted my daughter to bring it to fruition:

If you don't get, well, then you don't get it...

Cleaning Out your Subconscious

Step One:  Descend into your subconscious.  Examine what is down there.  Spend some time sorting, weighing, pondering.

Step Two:  Haul out the garbage.  Jettison the stuff weighing you down.

Step Three:  Set up some habits of mind that are positive and healthy for you as you step into the future:

Social Mores and Conservation Laws

You ever notice that it's hard to define exactly what social expectation are but you certainly notice right away if you deviate from those norms (try wearing your speedos to go to the grocery store)?  The more you deviate, the more you will be identified as being out-of-the-norm.  It's the differential that actual winds up defining what the norm is!

In physics, there are these very abstract, hard-to-define conserved quantities:

Momentum

Energy 

Angular Momentum

Charge

Here's the interesting parallel that I just realized today:  Although these conserved quantities are hard to describe and abstract, their rates of change are well understood and approachable:

Rate of change of momentum is ................ Force!

Rate of change of energy is ....................... Power!

Rate of change of angular momentum is... Torque!

Rate of change of charge is........................ Current!

I feel like there is a deep truth here.  Although the deep truths of life  are not readily apparent, one can infer the truth from the importance and weight of their deviations and their rates of change.  

No matter how deep the ocean, it's the waves that get ya!

Follow the clues, people, follow the clues.

Chaffee Elementary, White Middle, and Grissom High

I am from "Rocket City USA" aka Huntsville, Alabama.  We were proud of our NASA connections and all the work done there on rockets, astronaut training, and the Shuttle program.  Little did I know I would grow up to teach what was considered the very water we drank back then and there as a unit in astronomy.

Each year, around this time, I do a deep dive with my astronomy class into the 1960's race to the moon by watching several of these episodes:

    

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Left_Earth:_The_NASA_Missions)

Every year, I tear up at times and am deeply moved by what the astronauts went through and what was being accomplished by our country that might have been, in retrospect, the greatest accomplish ever made by a single country.  The hardest hitting, of course is the Apollo 1 fire that killed Gus Grissom (likely to have been the first man on the Moon until then), Ed White (first American to do an EVA), and Roger Chaffee.  Although my pathway through the Huntsville Public Schools did not include these, I had friends that went to all of these schools:

Grissom High

White Middle School

Chaffee Elementary

12 year old Kenny: "Who were those guys?  They died in a training fire? Oh okay."

50 year old Mr. Rideout tearing up at the back of the classroom: "Oh, I feel like I knew those guys."

Funny, how time changes your perspective, isn't it?