First Published: 2022 September 13
Today I started juggling again after a long hiatus. I started practicing on my walk to work, and it’s much harder to relearn juggling while walking1 than I really thought it would be.
I also learned my first trick! It’s called Sky High. Literally all you do is throw one of the three balls higher each time it comes around. I’m currently learning the trick tennis, where one ball gets thrown differently, but that’s much harder than I expected.
When one of my friends watched me juggle, they commented that it seems that I am constantly showing new skills that they never knew I knew. It remains strange to me that people don’t have more hobbies and skills than they have time to practice in a day. I realized and remarked to a different friend that my life would be easier if I had fewer things I was interested in learning, so I could actually devote the time that any of them deserve. Instead, I think I’ll continue juggling until I misplace the balls, then not for a few years again.
Still, I think it’s worth remarking on what got me into juggling. In high school I went to a theatre camp. One of the breakout sessions was learning how to juggle. While I didn’t learn it perfectly there, I learned enough that I could teach myself when I had time.
That summer I was working at the city pool. The pool had2 a tube slide, and a lifeguard needed to stay at the exit to make sure the tubes get out safely. That summer there were many days that were cold enough that not many people wanted to go down the slides, and fewer lifeguards wanted to wait in the water. So, I had hours on end to sit and practice juggling with the rocks in the pool. I still feel kind of like I’m cheating when I juggle with bags or balls that are the same size and not jagged rocks.
Anyways, juggling is in many respects like most any other skill that I’ve learned. The second you start demonstrating even the most basic competence in it3, people are amazed at the skill you learned. It’s always weird to me, because I’m pretty sure it took me like an hour of dedicated time to get to that stage the first time I learned how to juggle. But, equally as exciting, a few other people will comment on how they juggle4, and it’s really fun to bond with others over shared hobbies. Also, the basic skills are fun and the advanced skills often look easier for all that they’re significantly harder.
First Published: 2022 September 12
Today I started working on the actual presentation portion of my presentation, rather than just the content. I really like the images showing how graphs of x=cos(at), y=sin(bt) change for different values of a and b. As a result, I spent most of the morning learning how to make gifs in python.1
Of course, then I had a bunch of pretty traces, and I am nothing if not easily distracted. So, I now all of the a=b+1 for odd a up to 99. They look really pretty, but they definitely distracted me from my actual goal, which was getting slides prepped. Also, I’m remembering now that Kepler points to regular polygons for his analysis of shapes, which means I might have wasted all this time. Eh, c’est la vie.
it’s shockingly easy↩︎
First Published: 2022 September 11
Exodus 32:9 “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are, continued the LORD to Moses. ”
This week is one of the prodigal son readings. The priest gave a really good homily that I’m going to shamelessly steal large portions of today’s reflection from.
First, the context for the parable is clear in today’s Gospel. Christ is speaking to sinners and scribes alike today. He begins with a parable about a herdsman with sheep.
Of course, losing a single sheep temporarily would be an everyday occurrence, so it would not be worth rejoicing over to find a lost sheep to your neighbors and friends. Yet, the Lord rejoices in our return. Again with the coin, finding a lost coin is not cause for an average person’s rejoicing to the community.
Then we get to the parable that my brother hates and I always loved: the prodigal son. Something the priest pointed out today that I’d never noticed, the second son doesn’t inherit. And yet, when he asks for an inheritance, his father loves him so much that he gives to his son something he does not deserve.
Too, our Lord gives us so many gifts that we in no way deserve or could ever hope to earn. When he returns contrite, the father dresses him in fine clothes, symbolizing that he is the favored son. Seeing this, it’s easy to understand why my brother dislikes the reading. Why does the elder son, who has been nothing but dutiful, not receive more than the sinful brother?
Again, this was being addressed to both Pharisees and tax collectors. The message of the parable is two-fold. First, for the sinner and the lost, it’s a reminder that no matter how low we are, how depraved our sin, there is nothing the Lord rejoices in more than our return to Him. Second, for the legalistic, the Lord’s Love and Justice are not man’s justice.
Something that a friend and I were discussing once were the two concepts of mercy and justice. He saw them as two distinct pieces the Lord gives out, where justice is sometimes withheld for sake of mercy. I disagreed with that then, and disagree with it now. There is no weighing scales in the Lord’s mercy and justice. Rather, His justice is mercy.
When we repent, the evils we have committed against the Lord are gone. The Sacrament of Reconciliation truly frees us from what is otherwise an unbreakable cycle of failures. And yet, that’s not how the temporal world works, or maybe even should work by some interpretations.
Certainly, it was wrong for the younger son to demand an inheritance he did not deserve and spend it on a life of sin. And yet, his father saw him from a distance and ran to embrace him. Even after being told that his son wanted nothing to do with him, his father still held out hope for his return. When a sinner repents, the choirs of angels and saints rejoice with the Lord, for one more child has come home
First Published: 2022 September 9
I finally went to the library for some of the books that I need to write the talk I’m giving. While there, I browsed around and found another 8 books that seem interesting, if not relevant. Time to go read!
First Published: 2022 September 7
Today was the first day of the new semester and academic year. Unlike my last post about a new semester, I didn’t see friends. I also didn’t have any class today.1
Instead, I started my day by TA’ing, which looks like it’ll be fun. I’m helping with the graduate instrumental course, which I’m very excited for. Tomorrow I have my first actual class period, which I’m also pumped for.
In other exciting news, I got free breakfast2 and lunch3 from different organizations giving things to students today. I also gave blood, and got a t-shirt for that, along with other various knick-knacks from a fair.
Of course, there were some not bright parts of the day. On my walk to work I saw some horrible anti-semitic hate chalked brightly and in large letters in a central campus location. That didn’t really set me up for a happy day. While giving blood they missed my vein and wandered around for a while, jabbing the muscle more than once.4
But, I’ll move on from the less than happy and back to the joyful. I found out my band is planning to play a song I wrote next Monday!5 I got a free donut from someone whose birthday it was, and I got to go to a meet-and-chat with the person who discovered pulsars. I also finally placed requests for the different books which explain early thoughts on the harmony of the spheres.
All in all, this semester is shaping up to be a fun one!
First Published: 2022 September 6
Pre-reading note: It’s been nearly a month since my last post about this. There’s about a month until the talk. I need to do better at prep. Also, very rambly. Be forewarned
On to the actual post:
My talk is titled1 “Understanding the Musica Universalis, the Harmony of the Spheres”. What is the Musica Universalis? As a quick anglicisation, we end up with the Universal Music, or the Music of the Universe.
This concept is also referred to as the harmony of the spheres. The spheres2 refer to the Greek and general ancient belief of the multiple levels of the universe.
There’s the most obvious sphere, earth. Philosophers have known for millenia that the earth is round.
Above that is the sky, and above the sky is the rest of space. Most translations will say the heavens, and I see no reason not to. Anyways, before I get too distracted on this tangent, time to move on to what I’d planned to talk3 about.
In a modern context, especially one outside of academic music, harmony is generally understood as a vertical concept. That is, harmony refers to the immediate sounds we hear. (If I have access to a piano like I think I will, I’ll start to demonstrate). As an example, think of a chord. For those of you unfamiliar, this4 is a C Major chord. Without getting into what that means, I hope that all of you can hear5 that there is more than one note in that sound.6
There is another way to think of harmony, though, which is to think of the harmony as the notes being used over time. That is, just like this (block CM) is a chord, so is this (arpeggiate). Now that we understand what harmony is in music, how does that relate to the planets and universe?
As some of you probably already know, sounds as we hear them come from waves in the air. In general, most of the musical sounds we hear come from stacked integer multiples of a single base frequency, known as the harmonic series. The harmonic series shows up all over the place in modern physics, especially in quantum systems, where positions and energies are quantized to integer multiples of some value. This is also where the connection between music as we think of it today and the music of the universe comes in.
Ancient and pre-modern philosophers saw the regular orbits and rotations of heavenly bodies and thought that they must be moving to some primal music, far slower than our ears can hear. It’s not hard to see why. Take the most fundamental cycle we can observe: the sun’s rising and falling. Every day we see the sun make a full lap around the earth. Every six months we have exactly 12 hours of sunshine. Every year the cycle of equinoxes and solstices are repeated.
Next we could look at the moon. The moon goes from dark to light every 28 days.
As we continue to add celestial bodies, it’s not hard to see how this harmony keeps filling in more and more.7
That’s about as much time as I think I can justify as an introduction before I get into the actual meat of the talk, going through historical views and such. Then again, maybe I should tie that in like this and spend more time by just introducing the development of views.
Ideas include:
Setting sin generators at different frequencies of orbits to show how planets make a nice chord
Above but with other phenomena, esp. as early thinkers had it.
Make sure to hit on how when we say 2:3 in music we can mean a wide range, not exact to mathematical meanings.
Maybe have a drifting fifth for above
Making sure to talk about how the concept of the universe as a beautiful thing is inherent to early thought.
First Published: 2022 September 4
Wisdom 9:13 “For who knows God’s counsel,
or who can conceive what the Lord intends”
The Gospel today tells us that in order to follow Christ, we must hate those closest to us, including ourselves. The priest’s homily focused on the idiomatic meaning of hate in this context. Hate is meant instead as a less-preferred option, rather than our general usage of an actually unwanted thing.
I’m reminded of two lessons that have been taught to me, however. The first is that anything earthly is only good only in how it orients us to He who is Good. That is, if love of our family or life keeps us from following Christ, we do need to actively choose to not love them in that way in order to follow Him. I personally cannot think of a better example of hatred than actively choosing not to love.
Of course, this takes us to the second lesson: Christ asks us to be willing to give up everything, not to give up everything. That’s a bit of a narrow distinction for many to understand, but the examples are easy. Imagine two monks, both with a vow of poverty. One owns a single book, which he treasures and refuses to share.
The other owns dozens, at least in theory. In practice, he lends them out constantly, never expecting the book returned. Which of these two monks is living free from material attachments better?
More than that, we are not all called to a life of physical poverty and celibacy. But, if the Lord should demand it of us, we are told that we need to be willing to give anything of ours to Him.
First Published: 2022 September 3
As I mentioned in my monthly reflection, I finished a journal that I’d been working on for a while. Since I finished it, I went back to look at the other journals I’d written. One of my major goals, back when I started filling these journals, was to improve my handwriting.
I still remember when I was in sixth grade and a teacher was completely dissatisfied with my handwriting. She told me to come back to the classroom after school, where she would fix my penmanship. A few minutes into the practice, she gave up and told me I should go to become a doctor.1
Other comments like that followed me through most of my schooling. So, when I went abroad2, I decided that I could work on my penmanship. It’s really fun to look and see how each of the four notebooks looks notably3 different than the others in terms of writing. The speed at which writing changes has slowed down for sure, even ignoring the fact that each journal lasted longer than the one before.
Still, since starting this journey to good handwriting, compliments of my penmanship happen fairly often, which still feels really nice. I think a large reason I get compliments is that I have a very distinct pen.4 Since I was teaching myself to write well as a college student, there was almost nothing which restricted what I can do.
So, I write in all capitals, with the first letter of each word larger. Double letters share everything but a vertical stroke if possible5, and a’s are written as a caret with a diagonal line from the bottom right to halfway up the left stroke. The only reason a’s are shaped like that for me is that a professor my senior year told me that he couldn’t read my caret a’s, and I needed some sort of horizontal stroke. This seemed to work as a compromise. For the newest journal, I decided to add a new trait to the handwriting, so now I have the top stroke of some letters6 extend across the entire word.
All this to say, I like liking how my handwriting works.
that part I remember slightly less well, but it was definitely a joke, just whether about how common computers were or that doctors have bad handwriting I no longer recall.↩
coincidentally when I started this blog↩
hah↩
is pen the term there? I’ll assume so↩
so not in c,s, sometimes e↩
t,i,s,c,g,j,f still unsure of b,p,r↩
First Published: 2022 September 2
When last I mused about running, I mentioned that I had achieved my goal of running 3 continuous miles. My goal with that post was to prepare for the race I ran today, which at the time was set to 5.39 miles, but ended up being 5.1 or so. My mile splits were much more regular, and I ended up going faster in my first three miles today than I did in my 5K, which is fun to realize as I write this post.
That being said, I did not train really at all in August. Near as I can tell, I went for a single run in August, which was only about 1.5 miles. Still, I decided I wanted to run the race today, and I managed to run the entire time.1 It’s really cool to know that I can, in fact, run as long as I end up needing to.
All this being said, I still don’t really love running. I think I’m going to take up swimming again. Expect future musings on that.
for very slow definitions of run↩︎
First Published: 2022 September 1
Wow, once again, I have watched as a month slipped by my life. I finally finished the journal I started in November of 2019 which is really exciting.1
My goals were:
Blog daily! As with last month, I prefer having a record of my times. I also have an idea for a chemistry book/curriculum I’d like to work on, so may post notes there.
Stretch daily. I really do feel better when I stretch more
Be able to run 5.49 miles. As I mentioned, I need to be able to, so might as well try.
Keep up with my reading buddy for BiaY. That feels self-explanatory to me
Practice guitar daily. I’m doing open mics with a friend2 and I’d like to not hold them back.
Practice accordion at least 3x a week. The above friends mentioned wanting some accordion on a song, so I’d better get better.
Revise the book I wrote? I don’t know if this is a good goal, but I would sure like it to be. I have certainly become a better writer since I started the book and I’d sure like to demonstrate that to myself.
Write 20000 words of a new story? I have an idea for an urban fantasy novel. Well. I have a few things I’d like to explore at least. At worst I can probably just write the sequel to the above book.
Decide what I want to write my Research Proposal on. That’s the next exam in my life, so I should work on that.
Well once again, let’s see how we did:
I wrote a total of 13 blog posts over I think 10 or so days. I did work on the curriculum a bit, but not as much as I would have liked to.
I did not do this, and I can really feel it.
I don’t even think I ran that much total this past month.
I did it! We made it up to day 151 in August.3
I think I practiced every other day, but managed to keep up.
I don’t think I did, but everyone seemed ok with my performance this past Monday, so maybe I did well enough.
I did not revise it at all.
I wrote about 1700 words
I have not done this
Overall, I met almost none of my goals, but I’m ok with that. I was having a rough month in a lot of respects, so I’m mostly proud of myself for doing as well as I could. That being said, I’m going to strive to do better this month. So, monthly goals are:
Blog daily! The more I blog, the better I do at blogging, and I think it also helps me with writing more generally.
Stretch daily. My body is starting to ache fairly often, and I’d like it to not do that.
Manage to run the entire race tomorrow. That’s not really a monthly goal so much as a goal I’d like to accomplish, but it goes here anyways.
Continue keeping up with my BiaY buddy.
Write a poem every day. I find that my ability to write songs has started to suffer, plus I really like filling my notebook more quickly.
Journal every day. As much as I love this blog, its inherent semi-public nature means that there are a lot of topics I won’t4 write about in it. I still think it’s good for me to discuss them, plus I need to fill this new notebook.
I’ve taken the musical goals off the list because I don’t really know if that’s a goal I have anymore. I certainly want to practice enough to not hold my band back, but that’s not necessarily a quantity thing for me anymore. Now it’s more about learning specific songs.