I was pleased yesterday that the Supreme Court decided to uphold health care reform. For what it's worth, I think it's pretty clear that the dissent was originally the majority opinion and that Roberts switched his vote late in the process. This is all just speculation on my part, but I think what probably happened is that Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Kennedy didn't think there was a good solution to the severability problem and wanted to strike down the whole law.
I've been re-listening to a lot of Mozart piano concertos recently, which are, along with his operas, his best work. I'm always a little bit surprised that stereotypical, "popular" Mozart consists, by and large, of music that is relatively boring and plain in comparison (things like Eine Kleine Nachtmusic and so forth - essentially composed as background music). Even most Mozart symphonies, except for the latest few, are pretty light and unremarkable.
So this is a pretty silly post, but whatever - I had lots of fun doing it. Basically, I had "The Final Countdown" stuck in my head because I was excited about the new Arrested Development, and then it occurred to me "that guitar riff would make a really great fugue subject." So I went ahead and tried to do a fugue. It's been a while, so it it's a bit sloppy, there are probably a few voice-leading errors and parallel fifths, but it still sounds pretty good. So here you go - the FUGAL COUNTDOWN!
I recently decided to take advantage of Finale's advanced MIDI features (and my new blazingly fast PC) to re-do some of the sequencing on this. Not perfect (some parts are weirdly soft) but I was able to make it do things that I couldn't before and I'm pretty pleased with the results. Also, YouTube no longer has a length limit, so I can put the whole thing in one video. (This composition was my senior project at Bowdoin - give it a listen if you haven't heard it before!)
Update 12/2/2013: System76 has acknowledged that the original keyboard was terrible and has sent every Galago owner a replacement keyboard for free (actually the second time they've done this - the original keyboard was apparently extremely flimsy, so they put a metal plate behind it - that was the revision that came with mine - and now they've redesigned the keyboard a third time.) This new keyboard is thousands of times better than the old one - I feel like a normal person and don't need to pound the keys to get all my keystrokes to register.
Hello, and welcome to my new blog. I've created this site to practice my web design and programming skills, as well as to give me a place to write about whatever happens to be on my mind. Let's see if my shiny new "submit" button works...
I've created a Javascript animation below that demonstrates the mathematical concept of a Fourier series - the idea that any periodic function can be represented as a sum of pure sinusoidal waves whose periods are integer multiples of the periodicity of the original. Currently, four examples are demonstrated - a square wave, a triangle wave, a rectified wave, and a sawtooth wave.
Fourier series come up all the time in physics, and they're fundamental to the physics of musical sound, so, unsurprisingly, I think they're pretty cool.
