Today after last night's storm it was hot and a bit sticky. The ground and plants had gotten a good soaking. The sky was clear with a bit of haze. The sun looked pale and almost white in the haze of the morning.
I'm back to my normal routine. I've finished seven of the ten comp sci (and related technical) courses I started back in May and June. I have three left to go, but I've half-completed all those. Nevertheless I'm shifting gears a bit. I'm doing one lecture a day from the remaining three, and adding in other activities, ones I doing on the trip, including a Machine Learning course (the one from Andrew Ng at Stanford).
Machine Learning is all the rage lately. It's fun getting a deep expertise in it, rapidly as I can process. In Ng's course I learned a new programming platform called Octave, which is what he said they use in Silicon Valley to prototype new algorithms, and only later port it over to Python or R for use in production. From the way everyone talks, you'd think it all happens in Python or R. You can tell Octave is for the gurus of the Valley.
I'm also making my way through a course on Udacity from a professor at Georgia Tech, about applications of Machine Learning to finance, specifically hedge fund trading algorithms. It's a really fascinating talk. One of the texts, which I already started reading, is about how hedge funds really work. It's fascinating. One can see how to apply machine learning algorithms to it quite easily, at least on conceptual level.
I texted Greg about this, telling him I was learning about hedge funds from a guy at Georgia Tech. Greg went to University of Georgia, and he's partisan about the state in general, and so I thought he would get a kick out of it, even though Georgia Tech is a rival to UGA.
He texted back, asked if I was going into investment banking. I laughed at that, and explained that it was about the machine learning algorithm behind it. I said I thought one could run any such sort of algorithm in the cloud at this point.
"With an iPhone interface. lol," I added.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
The Desert Has Mercy
Last night we got back into town from ten days being away. We were up in Colorado for what has become an annual gathering of the family in Estes Park, which is not far from where my sisters live with their family, and where we all grew up.
This year was poignant in that as part of the visit, we put mom's ashes in the memorial wall at that the camp Columbarium, as they call it. We did on the second full day. I met my sisters in the office next to Columbarium at ten that morning. The woman there had the new plaque ready, with my mom's name and vital dates next to my dad's, which were on the old plaque.
That evening my sister's asked me about the place where I had scattered some of mom's ashes during our trip to France, which we had taken in April. I told them that I had carried them (in the little purse Kate made for them, also with a little bit of dad's ashes too) with me in the basket of the bicycle as we went across Brittany and Normandy. I told them it had been beautiful and sunny the entire way. Even the locals were marveling at the weather for that time of year. So many twists of the paths along the sea were achingly beautiful. Yellow rape flower across the green lush fields. Cows at every turn. I mooed at nearly all of them along the way. I wound up saving the scattering until we got to Omaha Beach, where on the only grey day of the entire trip, I through them out in the lapping surf.
Colorado felt especially healing this time because I could walk out into the pines and sit beside rushing water in the streams that come down off the glaciers. In the desert I miss that forest cover, and the rushing of water.
Last night a couple hours after we got back, and just after dark, an intense nasty storm cell came over us from the northeast, part of the monsoon counter-cycle coming down off the rim, where we had just come from. It started as an intense storm that send the trees into torments, backlit by the motion-activated flood lights from the woman next door, down the hill from us. Then the rains came hard and dumped several inches until it ran in a steady cascade from the roof onto the rocks and cacti. Standing below it, it sounded not unlike a mountain stream.
This year was poignant in that as part of the visit, we put mom's ashes in the memorial wall at that the camp Columbarium, as they call it. We did on the second full day. I met my sisters in the office next to Columbarium at ten that morning. The woman there had the new plaque ready, with my mom's name and vital dates next to my dad's, which were on the old plaque.
That evening my sister's asked me about the place where I had scattered some of mom's ashes during our trip to France, which we had taken in April. I told them that I had carried them (in the little purse Kate made for them, also with a little bit of dad's ashes too) with me in the basket of the bicycle as we went across Brittany and Normandy. I told them it had been beautiful and sunny the entire way. Even the locals were marveling at the weather for that time of year. So many twists of the paths along the sea were achingly beautiful. Yellow rape flower across the green lush fields. Cows at every turn. I mooed at nearly all of them along the way. I wound up saving the scattering until we got to Omaha Beach, where on the only grey day of the entire trip, I through them out in the lapping surf.
Colorado felt especially healing this time because I could walk out into the pines and sit beside rushing water in the streams that come down off the glaciers. In the desert I miss that forest cover, and the rushing of water.
Last night a couple hours after we got back, and just after dark, an intense nasty storm cell came over us from the northeast, part of the monsoon counter-cycle coming down off the rim, where we had just come from. It started as an intense storm that send the trees into torments, backlit by the motion-activated flood lights from the woman next door, down the hill from us. Then the rains came hard and dumped several inches until it ran in a steady cascade from the roof onto the rocks and cacti. Standing below it, it sounded not unlike a mountain stream.
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
Harvard in My Hotel Room
When I got back to Arizona, I immediately went back to my schedule of three computer science lectures a day. I'd streamlined my schedule of courses somewhat to concentrate on just a few---one of the intro courses from M.I.T., as well as Jerry Cain's CS107 at Stanford---a phenomenal course that I was savoring.
In Mexico, I had been diligent about continuing at least one lecture a day. That turned out to be pretty easy, since I was waking up long before the breakfast room opened, when the sky outside the big glass hotel window was still dark. I'd follow my normal home routine, without coffee of course, and had time to go through at least part of the Harvard intro course I had started right before leaving for Mexico.
It was just thirteen lectures, taught in the manner of a Ted Talk, on stage in front of several hundred Harvard undergraduates, and also beamed live to New Haven where Yale students could co-enroll in the course.
The professor was himself a Harvard graduate who had switched to computer science after a taking the same course as he was teaching now. He had empathy for beginners. He moved through subjects very quickly, with a quick patter. Many people on line talked about the course, so I had decided I had to sample. It was easy to follow. I knew almost everything in it (although not completely everything) so I didn't have to take very many notes. That allowed me to listen to it in almost real time, without stopping constantly to write down notes, as I must do with the M.I.T. and Stanford courses I was doing.
The conference was along enough that I almost finished the entire Harvard course while I was still in Mexico, but I had a couple left during the flight home, and it wasn't until I few days later that I could cross off the last lecture number on the sheet of paper where I kept a list of all the lectures of the courses I was intending to listen to, numbered in sequence under each course listing. It was like my own personal course schedule.
In Mexico, I had been diligent about continuing at least one lecture a day. That turned out to be pretty easy, since I was waking up long before the breakfast room opened, when the sky outside the big glass hotel window was still dark. I'd follow my normal home routine, without coffee of course, and had time to go through at least part of the Harvard intro course I had started right before leaving for Mexico.
It was just thirteen lectures, taught in the manner of a Ted Talk, on stage in front of several hundred Harvard undergraduates, and also beamed live to New Haven where Yale students could co-enroll in the course.
The professor was himself a Harvard graduate who had switched to computer science after a taking the same course as he was teaching now. He had empathy for beginners. He moved through subjects very quickly, with a quick patter. Many people on line talked about the course, so I had decided I had to sample. It was easy to follow. I knew almost everything in it (although not completely everything) so I didn't have to take very many notes. That allowed me to listen to it in almost real time, without stopping constantly to write down notes, as I must do with the M.I.T. and Stanford courses I was doing.
The conference was along enough that I almost finished the entire Harvard course while I was still in Mexico, but I had a couple left during the flight home, and it wasn't until I few days later that I could cross off the last lecture number on the sheet of paper where I kept a list of all the lectures of the courses I was intending to listen to, numbered in sequence under each course listing. It was like my own personal course schedule.
Roughening the Surface of Physics
On the flight down to Mérida (United---two legs from Phoenix, switching at Houston Intercontinental), I had watched a video of a talk Martin had given recently at Duke University. It was at a conference calls "Jews and the Ends of Theory." Martin's talk was called ""Against 'the Attack on Linking': Rearticulating 'the Jewish Intellectual' for Today". I had downloaded the Youtube video to my iPad so I could listen to it during the flight wearing my earbuds. I purchased an extra-wide seat upgrade from the leg across the Gulf of Mexico, the hop between Houston and Mérida, over the blue water. The talk sent me thinking in many different ways.
The youtube video was actually a two-talk session. Martin's was the second talk on the video. The first was by a woman from Harvard, a Russian Jewish woman professor in her Forties. I tried to listen to her talk, but her accent was too thick for her to be picked up well on the microphones in the classroom at Duke.
All I could get out of her talk was that she mentioned Victor Shklovsky a couple times. I knew exactly who that was, because we had just covered that in the Yale Introduction to Literature course I was taking online. He was one of the greatest of the group of literature critics called the Russian Formalists.
I mentioned this Martin during our first conversation, which was over breakfast in the hotel dining room on the morning after I arrived. Martin was blown away that. Sadly he said the woman who gave that talk had since passed away from cancer.
I wound up brining up Victor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists over dinner on the last night of the conference, when a bunch of the older Americans and the remaining Israelis dined at the fancy restaurant just across the street from the hotel, including several of the wives who had come, and including Alex Gerstein and his wife, who had come all the way from Beersheeva, and who had been the senior attendees at the entire conference.
I was sitting in the middle of the table, and over drinks, I told everyone that I thought that what we were doing at the conference had a lot to do in spirit with the Russian Formalists.
I explained that the Russian Formalists had begun as a school of thought that literature could be studied in terms that close to being scientific---for example, in defining what makes "literariness," which is something they thought about a lot.
But there advanced over time among the Formalists the desire as well to accomplish something beyond a rational study of literature, and towards a value-driven goal, of using literature to create a "roughening of the surface" of everyday life, which otherwise could dull and boring.
"That's what this conference is about," I said. "It's about roughening the surface of physics, in a way."
They understood what I meant, I could tell.
The youtube video was actually a two-talk session. Martin's was the second talk on the video. The first was by a woman from Harvard, a Russian Jewish woman professor in her Forties. I tried to listen to her talk, but her accent was too thick for her to be picked up well on the microphones in the classroom at Duke.
All I could get out of her talk was that she mentioned Victor Shklovsky a couple times. I knew exactly who that was, because we had just covered that in the Yale Introduction to Literature course I was taking online. He was one of the greatest of the group of literature critics called the Russian Formalists.
I mentioned this Martin during our first conversation, which was over breakfast in the hotel dining room on the morning after I arrived. Martin was blown away that. Sadly he said the woman who gave that talk had since passed away from cancer.
I wound up brining up Victor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists over dinner on the last night of the conference, when a bunch of the older Americans and the remaining Israelis dined at the fancy restaurant just across the street from the hotel, including several of the wives who had come, and including Alex Gerstein and his wife, who had come all the way from Beersheeva, and who had been the senior attendees at the entire conference.
I was sitting in the middle of the table, and over drinks, I told everyone that I thought that what we were doing at the conference had a lot to do in spirit with the Russian Formalists.
I explained that the Russian Formalists had begun as a school of thought that literature could be studied in terms that close to being scientific---for example, in defining what makes "literariness," which is something they thought about a lot.
But there advanced over time among the Formalists the desire as well to accomplish something beyond a rational study of literature, and towards a value-driven goal, of using literature to create a "roughening of the surface" of everyday life, which otherwise could dull and boring.
"That's what this conference is about," I said. "It's about roughening the surface of physics, in a way."
They understood what I meant, I could tell.
The Last Time I Saw Martin
The host for this year's conference---the guy who had been put in charge of organizing it---was a Mexican physics who works at the Technical Institute in the capital. He brought about half dozen other people with him, his graduate schools, all of them Mexican as well. Our host gave the opening talk. It was out-of-the-ballpark good---on one of my favorite topics, namely the ongoing mystery of why the corona of the Sun (the outer fringe) has a temperature that is much greater than the surface of the sun.
There was a Russian, who has a position in Mexico as well. He gave a talk on field theory on the second day. Very mathematical, the way a Russian talk usually is.
There was a Cuban professor there too. She gave a great talk on neutron stars. She invited us to come to her astrophysical conference in Havana next year.
Everyone else was either from the United States (by birth or by immigration), or from Israel.
Ironically Larry Horwitz from Tel Aviv was not there. Martin said he can't travel anymore unfortunately. The guy has put in his years.
Martin, who now runs everything, was Larry's graduate student the last time we met, in Houston, at the first conference twenty years ago.
There was a Russian, who has a position in Mexico as well. He gave a talk on field theory on the second day. Very mathematical, the way a Russian talk usually is.
There was a Cuban professor there too. She gave a great talk on neutron stars. She invited us to come to her astrophysical conference in Havana next year.
Everyone else was either from the United States (by birth or by immigration), or from Israel.
Ironically Larry Horwitz from Tel Aviv was not there. Martin said he can't travel anymore unfortunately. The guy has put in his years.
Martin, who now runs everything, was Larry's graduate student the last time we met, in Houston, at the first conference twenty years ago.
Gaelic in Mexico
The physics conference in Mexico was tremendous, even more than I anticipated. I met several dozen new people, some of whom may become collaborators at some point.
I left the conference as the Secretary of the four-person executive committee of the organization that puts the conference together.
Mérida was fantastic experience. It was the first time I'd been that wonderful city. The Paseo del Montejo, where our hotel was located, is a nice modern neighborhood. We ate almost every night at the Irish pub next door. I translated some of the Gaelic in the Guinness posters for some of my friends at the conference.
I left the conference as the Secretary of the four-person executive committee of the organization that puts the conference together.
Mérida was fantastic experience. It was the first time I'd been that wonderful city. The Paseo del Montejo, where our hotel was located, is a nice modern neighborhood. We ate almost every night at the Irish pub next door. I translated some of the Gaelic in the Guinness posters for some of my friends at the conference.
Sunday, June 3, 2018
In which I wake up in a Mexican hotel
Just spent the morning in a long rambling talk with two physicists whom I had not seen here in twenty years, namely Martin Land and Tepper Gill. It was marvelous beyond words to see them again.
Both them remembered me from the conference in Houston in 1998. Tepper said I looked younger than then, even though I'd gone grey. I told him it must have been graduate school.
Martin and I spent about two hours talking over breakfast in the hotel before Tepper showed up. The waiter must have refilled our coffee cups half a dozen times, I barely noticed.
As is usual for physicists meeting over breakfast, we talked about everything except physics.
For example, we spent half an hour discussing our mutual interest in the Russian Formalists, as well as the linguistic theories of Roman Jakobson. Martin mentioned that his son had read Jakobson and believed he had one of the forms of aphasia that Jakobson described.
"I just read that essay!" I said.
Both them remembered me from the conference in Houston in 1998. Tepper said I looked younger than then, even though I'd gone grey. I told him it must have been graduate school.
Martin and I spent about two hours talking over breakfast in the hotel before Tepper showed up. The waiter must have refilled our coffee cups half a dozen times, I barely noticed.
As is usual for physicists meeting over breakfast, we talked about everything except physics.
For example, we spent half an hour discussing our mutual interest in the Russian Formalists, as well as the linguistic theories of Roman Jakobson. Martin mentioned that his son had read Jakobson and believed he had one of the forms of aphasia that Jakobson described.
"I just read that essay!" I said.
Saturday, June 2, 2018
My Elective Schedule, Humanities and All
Although my full-time preoccupation lately is barnstorming through an M.I.T.-centric computer science curriculum, I'm also following other courses, which I call "my humanities electives," although they happen to include a biology and a psychology course too.
They are:
They are:
- Yale LIT 300, Introduction to the Theory of Literature (Fry, Spring 2009)
- Yale HIST 276, France Since 1871 (Merriman, Fall 2007)
- Stanford BIO 150 Human Behavioral Biology (Sapolsky, Spring 2016)
- University of Toronto PSY434, Maps of Meaning (Peterson, Spring 2016
- Université Paris-Sorbonne, Linguistique générale (Monneret, Spring 2016)
Except for the Sorbonne linguistics course, which I picked up only recently, "with the approval of my advisor," as I joked to Red, all of these courses date from before our recent trip to France, and thus from before my rigorous comp. science "virtual degree program."
The main difference between these and my computer science courses is that for these, I don't follow any rigid daily schedule, but instead listen and take notes at an irregular pace that suits my schedule, often in leisure. Sometimes weeks go by between lectures for any given one, often because I am doing outside reading. Nevertheless I'm committed to finishing all of them eventually.
In the case of Robert Sapolsky's excellent Human Behavioral Biology course, for example, he is such a fast speaker, and his lectures are so crammed with mind-blowing information, that I typically nibble at them, taking in only ten minutes at a time on any given session, and often looking up many references to learn details of things he talks about.
I've already mentioned Paul Fry's Theory of Literature course, which has changed my life, and for which I am doing a huge amount of outside reading.
The other Yale course, taught by John Merriman is the one that kicked off this whole revolution in my life of following online college courses, as much like a student as possible. That being said, I'm only a third of the way through the course, as I've suspended watching new lectures until I finish reading Germinal by Emile Zola, since it's one of the main reading assignments for the course.
From that course, I quickly saw that Yale had tremendous online offerings that included the lecture notes. They are probably second only to M.I.T. in terms of having their act together this way (and both are far ahead of Harvard, for example).
Maps of Meaning is somewhat of an outlier in the list. Jordan Peterson has been so much in the news lately, often in controversial ways, given the ideology of the media class. Just mentioning his name probably makes some folks fly into apoplexy. I had already seen many of his shorter videos and lectures, and I wanted to "sit it on" one of his real classes.
I have been well rewarded for this, and have enjoyed the lectures very much (I am almost done with the course). They are fascinating mix of psychology, neurology, evolutionary theory, religion, mythology, history, philosophy and literature. He will go from talking about brain functioning to Jung, Nietzsche, the Soviet gulag, the Egyptian creation story, all over the course of twenty minutes. Yet he cycles back around to the same subjects in a way that makes it coherent over time.
The difference between his course and the others, however, is that Peterson's lectures are home-brewed*, and apparently not at all assisted by anyone official on the university level (if you knew Peterson's troubles with the U of T, you might not be surprised at this). He sets up a camera and records himself, then uploads the video. This means, at least in the 2016 course, we rarely see what he is talking about on the projector screen.
Also there are parts missing from some of his lectures. That brings to mind the funny fact of how I used to not care so much about missing class when I was younger. Now it's a huge deal to miss out, and I feel massively deprived in such a case.
Last week I found out that the last fifteen minutes of Lecture 11 of my M.I.T. mathematics course was chopped off. Van Dijk just left off in the middle of a proof on partially ordered sets (something that comes up in computer modeling of task scheduling). Several other folks had already noticed this, and the M.I.T. Youtube account folks apologized for this in the comments to the video.
Fortunately I was able to go the typeset course lecture notes on the M.I.T. website and recreate the note-taking experience, pretending that I was narrating the material in Dr. Van Dijk's patient patter until I had everything down as I needed.
*Edit: I just realized that, of course, Monneret's linguistics course is probably home-brewed tube. One only gets the audio, which is ok because he speaks clearly enough for me to understand most of the time, and he has a separate site where one can see all the slides he is using. In a way, that's better than regular video.
Ironically (since it's a linguistics course) one of the funniest things about the lectures is the automatic captioning of his lectures into French, which at times butchers the French into nonsense. I'm not surprised at this. Not only is French arguably a harder language than English to transcribe using Speech-to-Text (because of having fewer phonemes at play in its core vocabulary), but also because the A.I. at work here has had, I would suppose, much fewer "good" examples to work with, and is thus less accurate. That's how A.I. works. It learns by being taught.
Friday, June 1, 2018
Virtual M.I.T.
Today was the last day of the regular weekday M.I.T./Stanford class schedule I've following. For the last month, Monday through Friday I've been pounding away at this:
both:
both:
- MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming (Grimson and Guttag, originally taught Fall 2008)
- MIT 6.002 Circuits and Electronics (Agarwal, Spring 2007)
and on alternating days, either of these:
- MIT 6.042J Mathematics for Computer Science (Leighton and Van Dijk, Fall 2012)
- Stanford CS107 Programming Paradigms (Cain, 2012)
By "pounding away," I mean watching each lecture on Youtube, and taking detailed notes.
It's the last day of this particular schedule, because I finished the 6.00 course (24 lectures in all).
I've still got 4 lectures to go on Circuit, and I'm only half way through the Math course, and one third of the way through the Stanford course. I'll continue with those up after a week's break.
I'm going through a couple other M.I.T. comp sci courses besides these, but I've put the others on hold until I finish these.
I'm going through a couple other M.I.T. comp sci courses besides these, but I've put the others on hold until I finish these.
The 6.00 course was fantastic. Absolutely worth it. Although it was introductory, I still learned quite a bit, and it was great to formalize the knowledge I already had. Professor Guttag wrapped it up today with a nice review and summary that featured a description of his own research, as an example of applications of computer science.
Among other things, his research group was (as of 2008) using applied machine learning to build seizure warning devices for epileptics that recognize variations in the brain patterns of individuals (currently a difficult problem), and similar A.I.-based implanted defibrillators for people with cardiac disease. Fascinating!
His teaching partner, Eric Grimson, is one of the big researchers using A.I. to develop advanced medical imaging.
All of the professors I have for these courses (like Paul Fry for my Yale lit course) are very inspiring. Tom Leighton, for example, founded Akamai, a company that runs the servers that power a good chunk of the Internet, including (at least at one time) Facebook. He was able to develop mathematical algorithms at M.I.T. that allowed for efficient distribution of load balancing of a gazillion web requests, and leveraged this into a fortune.
Likewise Anant Agarwal turns out to have founded the online learning platform edX. I had no idea until about week ago that his old Circuits course that I've been following has evolved into one of the flagship courses on edX. He's a huge reason why M.I.T. is the head-and-shoulders leader of online web-based learning on the university level. Just one more amazing thing that has come out of that place.
The Transitioning of Shadows Before Dawn
Rising before dawn, one sees the bright moonlight differently then in the evening after sunset, which is how I have seen it most of my life.
When one expects deep darkness at an hour, it is startling, even shocking, to wake up to the delineated contrast of the milky glow on the patio pavement alternating with the deep shadows cast by the side of the house..
In modern times, with our typical hours, we tend to experience the emergence of the full moon from its playful debut on the horizon in gradual increments of increasing radiance towards its solo performance is blazing whiteness against the night sky..
To view the reverse outside my window as the dawn approaches---the powerful orb on dark blue sky losing its shadow-casting power while still so bright---is a curious phenomenon that captures my attention, and distracts me from an attempt to read an essay on French poetry before breakfast.
When one expects deep darkness at an hour, it is startling, even shocking, to wake up to the delineated contrast of the milky glow on the patio pavement alternating with the deep shadows cast by the side of the house..
In modern times, with our typical hours, we tend to experience the emergence of the full moon from its playful debut on the horizon in gradual increments of increasing radiance towards its solo performance is blazing whiteness against the night sky..
To view the reverse outside my window as the dawn approaches---the powerful orb on dark blue sky losing its shadow-casting power while still so bright---is a curious phenomenon that captures my attention, and distracts me from an attempt to read an essay on French poetry before breakfast.
Thursday, May 31, 2018
Hacking With Bach
Today I finished my work a little earlier---by around noon, so when I went out onto patio to take a dip in the pool, and brought my new bluetooth speaker, it was not playing jazz but classical music, specifically Mozart's 39th Symphony.
I usually do classical in the morning, specifically short Bach pieces in between note-taking of the video lectures for my computer science courses (three different courses each day, mainly from M.I.T. but also one from Stanford).
Bach is fantastic for relaxing one's mind after bearing down on highly technical subjects. In fact, this is how I became such a music fanatic recently after going years hardly listening to music at all. I needed this kind of break, something that kept my mind going, but in a way that was sideways to way one uses with my computer science and engineering.
It varies day by day, but by the end of the third class in the morning, I will have often moved from Bach onto Haydn, or, as today Mozart.
I usually do classical in the morning, specifically short Bach pieces in between note-taking of the video lectures for my computer science courses (three different courses each day, mainly from M.I.T. but also one from Stanford).
Bach is fantastic for relaxing one's mind after bearing down on highly technical subjects. In fact, this is how I became such a music fanatic recently after going years hardly listening to music at all. I needed this kind of break, something that kept my mind going, but in a way that was sideways to way one uses with my computer science and engineering.
It varies day by day, but by the end of the third class in the morning, I will have often moved from Bach onto Haydn, or, as today Mozart.
Homeschooled at Yale
Over coffee in the morning, when it is light enough by sunlight, I typically do some morning reading for the Theory of Literature course I'm following from the Yale website, taught by Professor Paul Fry.
I started the course a couple months ago before we left for France (I even had one of the lectures downloaded to my iPad so I could listen to it on the plane).
The course is magnificent. It has changed the way I think about not only art, but the entire world, although I am still only on the tenth lecture. I have been moving through it slowly, taking extremely detailed notes, and then rewriting them later.
Although I didn't do so at first, I now faithfully do all the assigned readings before listening to the next lecture. For a while, that meant using Google to find PDF's online of the assigned essays, if available, but a couple weeks ago I finally bought the textbook, The Critical Tradition, on Amazon.
It's a very large anthology of essays covering the history of criticism starting in Antiquity and going all the way to contemporary times. Most of the assigned readings for Fry's course are from later in the book, but, having felt so much joy in what I learned so far from Fry, and inspired by wanting to learn as much as possible about the subject in general, I decided to read the entire book from the beginning, even if it took a year (which it probably will).
This morning I made my way through a few pages of the included passage rom Plato's Republic, which is included as the first essay in the anthology. It is the section Plato famously describes poets and artists as imitators who are "thrice removed" from truth.
I started the course a couple months ago before we left for France (I even had one of the lectures downloaded to my iPad so I could listen to it on the plane).
The course is magnificent. It has changed the way I think about not only art, but the entire world, although I am still only on the tenth lecture. I have been moving through it slowly, taking extremely detailed notes, and then rewriting them later.
Although I didn't do so at first, I now faithfully do all the assigned readings before listening to the next lecture. For a while, that meant using Google to find PDF's online of the assigned essays, if available, but a couple weeks ago I finally bought the textbook, The Critical Tradition, on Amazon.
It's a very large anthology of essays covering the history of criticism starting in Antiquity and going all the way to contemporary times. Most of the assigned readings for Fry's course are from later in the book, but, having felt so much joy in what I learned so far from Fry, and inspired by wanting to learn as much as possible about the subject in general, I decided to read the entire book from the beginning, even if it took a year (which it probably will).
This morning I made my way through a few pages of the included passage rom Plato's Republic, which is included as the first essay in the anthology. It is the section Plato famously describes poets and artists as imitators who are "thrice removed" from truth.
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
The Gregorian Coffee Ritual
When I hear the click of the electric kettle, indicating it has reached it boil, I go into the kitchen and pour the hot water onto the grounds in the filter atop the glass carafe. The carafe has a special design to the hold a metal filter on top. It comes with a reusable metal filter, which is messy to clean, so I use a paper filter as well.
It is a ritual of patience to refill the water as it slowly drains through the grounds. When the carafe is half filled, I remove the filter and place it into glass, then pour the initial coffee into my earthenware mug. Then I put the filter back and keep pouring the water until the water is gone, at which point the carafe is almost fill up again.
At this point, with water still in the filter, I go to the fridge to get the half and half for my coffee. When I open the door, the light from the fridge is usually the first bright light I see in the morning, even after being awake for nearly an hour, so it always a little startling.
I remove a spoon from the drawer to stir the half and half in the mug, then place it in the empty sink. Then I pick up the mug, which is almost full to the brim after putting in the half and hour, and careful navigate through the darkness back to my office room, where I put the bug onto my desk.
By this time, I can see out the windows that the sky is getting light. The sun will be coming up in a few moments.
I might normally begin reading at this point, but I don't like turning the light on, and it is usually not light enough yet to read by sunlight through the window. So I often open the iPad and load Gregorian chants on Youtube, and listen while I take sips of coffee. It's the first music of the day, on a typical cycle that might take me through the entire breadth of music history by the time I go to bed.
I like this time of suspension. Soon it will be time to work, but for the time being, there is just chanting.
It is a ritual of patience to refill the water as it slowly drains through the grounds. When the carafe is half filled, I remove the filter and place it into glass, then pour the initial coffee into my earthenware mug. Then I put the filter back and keep pouring the water until the water is gone, at which point the carafe is almost fill up again.
At this point, with water still in the filter, I go to the fridge to get the half and half for my coffee. When I open the door, the light from the fridge is usually the first bright light I see in the morning, even after being awake for nearly an hour, so it always a little startling.
I remove a spoon from the drawer to stir the half and half in the mug, then place it in the empty sink. Then I pick up the mug, which is almost full to the brim after putting in the half and hour, and careful navigate through the darkness back to my office room, where I put the bug onto my desk.
By this time, I can see out the windows that the sky is getting light. The sun will be coming up in a few moments.
I might normally begin reading at this point, but I don't like turning the light on, and it is usually not light enough yet to read by sunlight through the window. So I often open the iPad and load Gregorian chants on Youtube, and listen while I take sips of coffee. It's the first music of the day, on a typical cycle that might take me through the entire breadth of music history by the time I go to bed.
I like this time of suspension. Soon it will be time to work, but for the time being, there is just chanting.
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Routine Aquinas
Every day lately begins much the same. Since coming back from France, I get up around 4 a.m., give or take a half hour. Then I go out onto the patio and sit in the darkness, in prayer and meditation for a half hour. Then I go inside to my office desk and use the iPad in the darkness to read scripture in night mode, white on black text.
By then I'm ready for coffee. I go into the kitchen and turn on the electric kettle, which I make sure to fill with water the night before. The blue electric light comes on, and I go back to my office and open up Youtube red on the iPad, and then scroll to my philosophy playlist, where I tap on the video for the audiobook of Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas. While the kettle heats up---it takes a while, I listen to some of the audio recording, usually just a few moments.
While I do this, I often turn my office chair to face the open window, looking east. By then the twilight will have spread out against the mountains, halfway up into the sky.
I'm about half-way through the seven-hour recording of Summa Theologica (I'm currently on Question 11 of Part I). I've actually been at it since before France. I don't know how long it will take me to get through, probably the entire summer at least. It feels pleasing to follow through on a plan.
By then I'm ready for coffee. I go into the kitchen and turn on the electric kettle, which I make sure to fill with water the night before. The blue electric light comes on, and I go back to my office and open up Youtube red on the iPad, and then scroll to my philosophy playlist, where I tap on the video for the audiobook of Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas. While the kettle heats up---it takes a while, I listen to some of the audio recording, usually just a few moments.
While I do this, I often turn my office chair to face the open window, looking east. By then the twilight will have spread out against the mountains, halfway up into the sky.
I'm about half-way through the seven-hour recording of Summa Theologica (I'm currently on Question 11 of Part I). I've actually been at it since before France. I don't know how long it will take me to get through, probably the entire summer at least. It feels pleasing to follow through on a plan.
Kind of Bluetooth
A perfect afternoon of late May. Summer heat has been making itself known lately, but today was moderate and bearable, even in the late afternoon.
The day's work being done, I tried out the new portable Bluetooth speaker that arrived today via Amazon Prime. A nice little device.
After charging up, it worked seamlessly from the get-go. The iPad seemed to want to play Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (1959), so I went with that. I took the little device out onto the patio and let it play while I swam in the pool in the golden-tangerine sun and the long afternoon patio shadows.
The day's work being done, I tried out the new portable Bluetooth speaker that arrived today via Amazon Prime. A nice little device.
After charging up, it worked seamlessly from the get-go. The iPad seemed to want to play Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (1959), so I went with that. I took the little device out onto the patio and let it play while I swam in the pool in the golden-tangerine sun and the long afternoon patio shadows.
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