James’s Blog

Tomorrow morning I say goodbye to Lansing, and begin a new chapter in the city of Chicago. It will be the first time in my adulthood that I live in a major city. Let’s see what happens.

(Via Andrew Sullivan’s sub Ana Marie Cox)

I really can’t describe it better than Ms. Cox has already. It’s supposed to tone your abs, core, etc. This video demonstration shows you how. It is “fun to ride,” and it costs $600. (When is Rosi’s birthday??) From the looks of the ad, iGallop is mainly for women, but I suppose that a guy can enjoy it, too. Might have to lean forward a little bit. There’s gotta be mods that personalize your iGallop somewhere.

Pluto is no longer considered a planet! It is now a dwarf planet, an object that “has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and is not a satellite.” Pluto’s orbit crosses Neptune’s occasionally, so Pluto doesn’t clear the neighborhood, so it’s a dwarf planet. Sounds reasonable.

Two other objects are now dwarf planets: Ceres and 2003 UB₃₁₃ (”Xena”). CNET.com has a picture list of some Kuiper Belt objects, some of which might eventually be classified as dwarf planets. All over the news they’re calling Pluto’s change of status as a “demotion.” I’m not sure about that characterization–they just created a whole new category in which Pluto is the prototype, which seems pretty special to me. Incidentally, this CBC article says that something like this has happened before: Ceres was also considered a planet when it was first discovered, and later the word “astroid” was coined for objects like it.

Hmm, we can now play Holst’s The Planets without that nagging feeling that we’re missing Pluto. Maybe someone ought to compose The Dwarf Planets now.

I wonder what the percentage of the vote is, whether there is enough dissent that this definition might change later again. But I can’t seem to find the detailed voting results in all the news articles. Here is the result of the vote; only resolutions 5A and 6A were passed.

Update: it was sort of a voice vote: people were asked to raise a yellow card if they agree with the resolution, and it was passed thusly.

Also, this NPR listener (click on “listen”) had the same thoughts as I did with Holst’s The Planets. Wikipedia reminded me that a few years ago someone did compose a movement for Pluto. I heard it once; I don’t remember it being very good.

Today I discovered the treasure trove that is classical music on YouTube. For example, I’ve heard plenty of versions of Paganini’s Carpice No. 1, but never seen anyone actually playing it.

That was 楊天媧 (Yang Tianwa). She supposedly recorded the clip at the age of 12. There seems to be a lot of criticism on the YouTube thread about how she plays too unemotionally, like a robot. First of all, she’s 12. Second of all, here an example the complete opposite, but not necessarily better.

Obviously Esther Kim is also a very good young violinist. But lady, calm down. It’s just Mozart; no need to be so spastic. It kinda distracts from the music. Here is a superb peformance of a more understated Ms. Kim playing one of my favorite solo violin pieces, Ysaÿe’s Sonata No. 3 “Ballade.”

There are more clips at Ms. Kims website. What started all this was when I came across a thread in the violinist.com forum. The following exchange about Ms. Yang is typical violinists banter, but still amused me:

From Pieter Viljoen
Posted on April 16, 2006 at 11:50 AM (MST)
O my god…
It’s not the arpeggiando that floors me, it’s the descending thirds she does as if it’s twinkle twinkle little star…

From Stephen Mayhew
Posted on April 16, 2006 at 12:08 PM (MST)
What! You don’t play Twinkle Twinkle in descending thirds?

From Pieter Viljoen
Posted on April 16, 2006 at 12:39 PM (MST)
Fingered octaves, but whose keeping track.

From Amy F.
Posted on April 16, 2006 at 3:48 PM (MST)
i do it in fingered tenths

Update: Vote is on Aug. 24.

Well, they still have vote for the proposal. Summary of the New Zealand Herald article: Three new planets–Ceres, Charon, and that new one out there people are calling “Xena” because dorky astronomers dig Lucy Lawless. (They’re calling “Xena”’s moon “Gabrielle”, as in Xena’s sidekick in the show. Give me a fucking break. Why don’t we just call it Buffy? Or Ally McBeal? They’re better shows.)

2003 UB₃₁₃, aka “Xena”; Pluto and Charon; Ceres

There is allso one new category–plutons, which includes Pluto, Charon and “Xena.” By the way, two exciting space missions are planned for some of the new guys. New Horizons is currently heading to the Pluto-Charon system and should be there around 2015; the Dawn mission is set to be launched next year and should also arrive Ceres in 2015.

I discovered that jamestung.com is already at 2nd place when one googles my name. Funny I thought, because non-university sites supposedly don’t get indexed very quickly. I don’t particularly feel like having my future students and college administrator bosses read my blog, so I’m going to take off the Blog link at the homepage. Anyone who wishes to read the blog can still type in the link or bookmark it.

Ralf König is one of my favorite cartoonists; his website has a good sample of his work. (The German site has more content. It is entertaining to run the cursor up and down the menu selections.) He reponded to the Danish cartoons of Muhammad and the violence thereafter in the way of the following cartoon in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [cartoon] [article]. In a recent interview with Die Welt, he said that it was his first ever cartoon as a political statement, even though in the US most of his cartoons might be considered as political statements just because they deal with gay or sexual topics.

Wikipedia has a detailed report on the cartoons themselves and the events following their publication. There are many cartoon responses to the whole debacle. This is one of my favorites, by the Chilean cartoonist Alen Lauzan Falcon:

Of course, the most awesome one is the Alien. For me, the whole thing was the first time I thought that perhaps the Middle East is really teeming with those crazy religious types that one can’t reason with, at least enough of them to incite deadly mob violence, burn down embassies, and issue death threats, in the name of their religion, all because a cartoon.

According to NPR and the Sydney Morning Herald, there is supposed to be an original, higher quality version of the above footage. The transmission was received in three tracking stations around the world, but it couldn’t be played directly by commercial broacasting equipments. So they mounted a commercial camera in front of a monitor in the tracking station, hence the lower quality in the usual TV footage. Brilliant solution if you ask me; sort of like taking picture of a picture, which I do all the time when it’s too much hassle to find a scanner.

However, losing the original footage isn’t so brilliant, but perhaps understandable, knowing some of these scientist types. Still, one would think that something like the moon landing would be kept track of a little more carefully than, say, 70s cinema. Hope they find it eventually.

I heard on NPR that Gioacchino Rossini, of William Tell Overture [audio] [wiki article] fame, wrote a duet for cats, duetto buffo di due gatti. I can’t decide if it’s funny or incredibly annoying, but the cat/music people I know might like it. Here is a dramatic live performance with piano accompaniment [audio] [website], and a cleaner, more feline version with guitar accompaniment [audio] [website].

From the NY Times article about the Wal-Mart pullout in Germany:

In Germany, Wal-Mart stopped requiring sales clerks to smile at customers — a practice that some male shoppers interpreted as flirting — and scrapped the morning Wal-Mart chant by staff members.

“People found these things strange; Germans just don’t behave that way,” said Hans-Martin Poschmann, the secretary of the Verdi union….

Ah, surly German clerks. Brings back fond memories. Some description of the Wal-Mart chant can be found in this article. Americans are probably the only people on earth who can do it convincingly.