The Sound of Heaven - Canto Gregoriano

Sometime in 1995 I read that some raves were sending the crowds home to the sound of Gregorian Chant. I wasn't a raver, so I had no idea if it was true, but I went to a small record shop in a nearby high street and asked if they had the album. On cassette. They did. I played it and immediately understood why this was good music to chill everyone out at the end of a long night of dancing to loud music.

Hymn singing assumes you can read. Not many people could read in 800AD, and Church services were conducted in Latin. That is not as daft as it sounds. Latin was the official language of the Roman Empire, and when that fell, the Catholic Church carried on, using Latin. Many ordinary people would have had some basic spoken business and religious Latin. They would have understood the words.

Gregorian chant is one tune sung by many voices. The choir sings a chord that moves up and down with the tune, but does not change within itself. The harmony does not change. Churches echo, so the notes change slowly, and the tune moves to nearby notes, not jumping around as tunes will much later. The tunes are also long and curving incorporating a number of phrases, far more than a modern song. The words often disappear into the echoes and the voices. All very different from the songs that the congregation would have sung at home or in pubs, and deliberately different: religion and its feelings are one thing, ordinary life is another. Gregorian chant was and is the sound of heaven.

(You can read about Gregorian chant in Wikipedia, and that article lists some fearsomely learned studies of the music.)

Why did this collection of songs take off - it went triple platinum - when so many others do not? It's the sound of the monks of the Monastère de Santo Domingo de Silos. A reviewer said: "the ensemble is not always perfect, but if these are not professional singers, they are, and they sound like, truly professional monks." It's the sincerity we respond to.

 

Settle in and enjoy.

So why do I play it? Because it is terrific background when I want to feel calm, maybe to focus on what I'm writing, or do something that is best done without a mind wanting to jump to something else. It removes distractions and is not itself distracting.

And sometimes because I want to chill out.

Hazy London

 

The 14th February this year was a wonderful day. The air was full of a haze at a distance, but bright, clear and sparkling immediately around one. I took a couple of shots over central London, but they didn't have the clarity I like in long-range photos. Better eyes than mine insisted that this one was a keeper. So here it is.

Artificial Intelligence and Aluminium Tennis Racquets: Same Opportunity, Different Sport

The PR flacks for ChatGPT probably deserve a bonus.

They have managed to convince a lot of people that anyone who currently has a desk job will be out of work by the end of the year.

ChatGPT and anything like it dips into the existing corpus of pictures / words / facts / academic papers / novels / poems / political speeches / whatever and produces something to your specifications from that corpus.

In response to "Produce a Theory of Everything that does not look like String Theory or Quantum Gravity" it will fail. Unless it tires pulling a Sokal Hoax on us. Likewise "Prove or refute the Collatz Conjecture" will draw a blank, though an icon of a blowing fuse might be appreciated.

"Paint a picture in a style nobody has seen yet" is logically impossible for it to do, since it has to draw on existing pictures. "Write a novel in the style of no previous writer about a subject nobody has written about before" would be equally impossible. A Real Person could attempt both, even if they failed through lack of checking for uniqueness - the point is that a Real Person could produce a painting or a novel that they had never seen or read before, but for ChatGPT it is a logical impossibility.(*)

Anyway, that isn't the point.

The point is that AI is just another tool. Like all new tools it will split a given community into those who can make it work to their advantage and those who can't get on with it. This was also true about spreadsheets, the metal tennis racquet, oil paint, sous vide and a thousand other new techniques and gadgets. AI in medicine would be a tremendous support tool, especially to older doctors who start to forget things or don't keep up (yes, I know Dreyfus used doctors as examples of Experts who could not be reproduced by AI, but after many years I've come to the conclusion that he wouldn't say those things now. He was writing in a medically-simpler age.)

How much of a difference is there between a writer turning out novels within a genre and an AI turning out a novel within a genre? The genre fans want the genre content, not the writer's unique personality (even if the genre is the writer, as in Chandler or Simenon).

There is probably an audience who would appreciate AI-generated genre novels, and one that won't. Publishers will produce both.

For decades, the British television has been producing TV that looks as if it was written to a set of rules and conventions that feel fake to me.

As for AI-Fake paintings, what else would you call a Thomas Kincaid? Or a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst or Takashi Murakami? Just because these are Human Beings, doesn't mean to say they aren't using AI techniques, or perhaps, that those are the techniques that can be incorporated into AI.

Which actually helps to make a point I'm exploring in a long essay on the Philosophy of Mathematics, that technique rather than specific content is where originality really lies.



(*) This may be debatable, depending on how one thinks of the difference between "originality" and "variations", and at what point a "variation" becomes a "novelty" becomes "original". Those concepts are related but also have differences.

Parliament Hill Viewpoint Viewers

I bought an adapter to put the Zuiko lenses from my analogue Olympus onto the Fuji. The lens I wanted to try was the Zuiko 35-105 zoom. The X-E4 made didn't know the f-stop and seemed to default to the minimum ISO in the range of the setting (160 in this case), and then made reasonable decisions about shutter speed. (The sensor knows how much light it's getting even if it doesn't know the f-stop, so it may have some default speeds against various amounts of light.)

I took a few shots just to get the feel of the camera with a heavy lens on it, and to see if the results were even reasonable. This one came out well, and the others suggested that I needed to put more work into focussing. Getting the shutter speed "right" will be about treating the first shot as a test, and making adjustments using the manual dial

 

Guitar-Induced Shoulder Ache

There is nothing like having a clenched muscle in my right shoulder to make me feel like resigning quietly from all forms of human interaction and activity. It’s a permanent reminder that something is wrong, that I haven’t fixed, as well as that I did something dumb, that I don’t know what it was.

Yes, I’ve had a massage. The poor girl had to take a break from digging her elbows in to the concrete slab that is my back if I leave it too long.

No, the massage didn’t make it go away. It was only a couple of days later I realised what had brought it on.

I’ve been playing the guitar standing up. With a strap. And I’ve been tightening a muscle in my right shoulder to stabilise my right arm, which is the one attached to the plectrum. That’s what suddenly went clench at the weekend. It’s a sod to get to, and was just one of many tight muscles that the masseuse was dealing with.

There are reasons for standing up and playing an electric guitar, mostly to do with access to the frets above the twelfth. When sitting down, the body blocks the left arm from reaching the higher-octave frets comfortably.

The trick is to learn how to hold one’s right arm without clenching any muscles, and also to get the right hang height and angle for the guitar.

The angle matters. The more towards the vertical the fretboard, the greater the difference in distance from the bridge one picks the strings: the 6th E string will be twangier than the 1st E string.

It also affects the angle at which the left arm and wrist need to be to make barre chords.

And you thought this was simple. You know, pick up my guitar and play.

Whisky, Cigarettes and the Meaning of Life - Redux

One of my constant themes is that the meaning and purpose of any person’s life is for them to choose, and exists in the dedication and work towards whatever goal they have chosen. It's not the goal that gives us meaning, but the work we do to achieve it. Any athlete, artist, scholar or entrepreneur will tell you that. Children provide meaning through the work their parents do in raising those children.

If you are religious, then God brings meaning, through your service for him in this life.(*)

Conversely, changing the objective can sometimes turn what feels like meaningless work into meaningful work. When, in my day job, I adopted the goal of making my colleagues more effective by providing them with the data they asked for (and more) quickly and accurately, what had been tedious 'SQL bashing' became meaningful. (Especially when it meant that customers got money from us: "how can I help our customers prosper today?" I used to ask one of my colleagues.)

The idea that it's not so much what your want to achieve, but that you do something to achieve it, can seem peculiar. Isn't a life spent curing people more meaningful than one spent making money in the markets? Maybe it is more valuable to other people, but the sense of meaning is personal. A doctor could feel that her efforts (to cure drug addicts) were meaningless wasted effort, and a trader could feel his efforts (on behalf of a pension fund) were useful and meaningful in that it provided money to pay the pensioners.

Or as Michael Cherrito says



For me, the action is the juice.

There's a (possibly apocryphal) story about a man who was having a slow recovery after heart surgery. One day the doctor suggested he put something on his bedside cabinet to remind him of why he was getting well. A couple of days later the doctor returns and is shocked to find a bottle of whisky and a carton of cigarettes on the man’s cabinet. “What’s all this?” the doctor asks, and the man reminds him about his suggestion. “Well, I meant a photograph of your wife and children, or a pastime like walking or sailing,” the doctor stutters. The man looks at him. “I’m not married,” he explains, “and I’ve worked hard all my life. I have no hobbies. This, the whisky and cigarettes, this is what I like to do, and it’s why I want to get better.” And the doctor did indeed notice that the man had improved even over the last two days.

The point of that story is exactly that what provides us with meaning, or motivation, is intensely personal, and may be incomprehensible to someone else. What matters is that the man started to get better, which was the point of the exercise. As with all decisions, one has to take the consequences on the chin without complaint, and not ask for a Government bail-out.

Every Current Political Issue in Two Lines or Less

What has happened to the incisive political and social commentary for which this blog was justly noted?

I write to help sort out my thoughts on a subject. When I'm sure about my views, I have nothing more to say.

As opposed to newspaper columnists, who only write something when they are sure of what they believe. At least on that day.

And the matters of the day have not changed since about 2016.

So here's a quick summary.

The Trans stuff. They should be taxed, rejected for jobs, and stand on the rush-hour trains from Richmond to Waterloo like everyone else. Of course Trans women should not compete with ordinary women, and nor should they be put in female prisons.

The War in Ukraine. Other than pointing out that not one bullet, rifle or Leopard 2 tank that gets sent over there will ever come back, of course it's a tragedy and Russia should back off.

Working From Home. If you give them pleasant spaces to work in, they will return. But they ain't coming back to the horribly over-crowded offices of 2019.

Dinghy People. What part of you-need-a-passport-and-visa-to-enter-this-country don't they understand? We don't have jobs for our own people, let alone illegal immigrants. Of course the French are practically towing them to our side of the Channel.

Human Rights Lawyers. Strangely, not one of them represents the rights of the ordinary British taxpayer. It's almost as if the lawyers who aren't working for the people traffickers, or Islamic terrorists, are working for the EU. Oh. Wait.

Nicola Sturgeon. Will no-one rid me of this turbulent First Minister?

The Covid Enquiry. Put it in a tin, shake well, and you can paint your walls white with it. (And it hasn't even begun to report yet.)

The British Economy. Would be a lot better if the bankers didn't still want Gordon Brown as Chancellor, and the civil servants didn't still want to be in the EU.

Woke Training. It's a huge grift, which would go away if about ten hedge funds dropped DIE and ESG, which they have only adopted as a distraction from their predatory investment strategies.

The Climate Emergency. An even bigger grift. Al Gore is a multi-multi-millionaire. This BS has been going on since the mid-1980's. I'm still cold every winter.

The NHS. Has a quarter of the beds, ten times the number of doctors and three times the number of nurses it had when it was started in 1949. It takes 30% of total Government spending now as against about 10% in 1949. And you can't get an appointment for a year. I say, take off and nuke it from orbit.

ULEZ. Will no-one rid me of this turbulent Mayor of London? Someone voted for him - was that you?

Low Traffic Zones. Councils should confine themselves to collecting rubbish and mending street lights. Not trying to save the planet (allegedly).

Bullshit Diet and Health advice. Will continue to thrive as long as people want quick or easy fixes.

Woke Movies. Don't go see them. Let the studios go broke.

Woke Publishing. Don't buy the Woke stuff. The publishers are re-printing Real Authors from the pre-Woke days so they can make some money.

China. Needs telling where to get off. Just as soon as we re-shore the manufacturing they do for us.

Social Media. If you ignore it, it does not exist. Let other people get turned into hypo-attention zombies by Tik-Tok.

Mobile Phones. Give your kids dumb phones.

House prices. Totally out of control. Have been since 1972 / 3.

Woke advertising and TV. Let the advertisers go broke, and the TV programmes go unwatched. Read a novel by Dumas, Victor Hugo or Emile Zola instead.

British Education. When it's good, it's very very good, but when it is bad, it is awful. Woke. Staffed by people on contracts who weren't smart enough to realise they could earn three times as much in the private sector. Nobody needs to think anymore because the Woke Manual has all the answers.

Will AI do all our jobs? Oh come on. Remember what happened to Big Data?

But robots? Will be economic in large warehouses, in the same way they are economic on huge production lines. Totally uneconomic anywhere else.

3D Printing. Is already a Thing.

Declining population. In 1954 the population of the world was 2.7 bn. A lot of the world's problems are caused by having 8 bn people on a planet that can just about take 2.7 bn.

So there you are. I doubt my views will change in the next decade.

What you really want to ask is: why are these BS issues occupying the media channels? Would it be so the real issues don't get covered?

Maybe I'll do a thing about the real issues at some point. Here's a taster: Climate Change is not one of them.