So the bank where one of my businesses has its commercial checking account sent us the following letter:
Dear — Bank Customer:
Protecting the privacy and security of your personal and financial information is a responsibility we take very seriously at — Bank. We also know it is our responsibility to alert you to any situation that we are aware of that may be confusing or cause concern. We have learned that our recent Consumer Privacy Policy notice was misaddressed due to a simple mailing error. Regrattably, you may have received a Consumer Privacy Policy notice addressed to another — Bank customer.
The mailing error was te result of a misalignment between your name and your address in the envelope mailing file sent to printing. As a result, your name may have been paired with another customer’s address. I want to personally reassure you that the file did not contain any of your nonpublic personal information or account information.
Blah, blah, blah …
When you screw up the mailing of your privacy policy, what does this tell you?
Oscar Peterson, one of the most talented pianists the jazz world has ever known, died this past Sunday (23 Dec.). It was Peterson who really got me interested in jazz. His artistry and virtuosity (which sometimes threatened to overhelm his artistry) just astonished me when I first heard him. Listening to him led me to seek out other jazz musicians, and I have been a jazz fan ever since.
This clip is of Oscar playing You Look Good to Me at the 1977 Montreux Jazz Festival. The trio is rather unusual, with two stringed basses backing him up.
This story has fascinated me since I first heard it.
World War I was one of the bloodiest wars ever. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives. Britain lost almost an entire generation of young men. The conflict was up close and personal - much of it was fought with soldiers dug into trenches sometimes only 30 yards from each other, close enough to see and hear the enemy. The trenches were absolutely miserable places to be. Wet, muddy, freezing in the winter, sometimes collapsing, sometimes filled with the decaying bodies of the fallen, it was not difficult for the soldiers to have some sympathy for their counterparts on the other side but so close to them.
On Christmas Eve, 1914, British and German troops informally and in defiance of orders from their superiors arranged cease-fires so they could celebrate Christmas. The sounds of carols being sung and gifts being exchanged led soldiers from each side, hesitantly at first, to leave their trenches and venture into no-man’s land to fraternise with their opponents. They serenaded each other and exchanged small gifts and tobacco (the currency of the soldier), played soccer, exchanged addresses, buried their dead.
Their officers, having no use for nonsense like “Christmas”, “Peace on Earth” or “Goodwill Towards Men”, issued orders for fraternisation to stop. But the truce held, mostly, through Christmas Day.
For more on the Christmas Truce, see this article. Military historian Stanley Weintraub has written a well-reviewed book about the Christmas Truce called Silent Night.
(click on the images for larger sizes)
This the Chapel of King’s College at Cambridge University in England. We usually think of chapels as small spaces for worship, but this one is mammoth, the interior being 290 feet long and 40 feet wide. The foundation stone of the chapel was laid by King Henry VI in 1446, who caused it to be built and was determined that it be the largest and most beautiful college chapel around. Work was interrupted in 1461 when Henry was taken prisoner by Edward Duke of York during the War of the Roses. Work was begun again under Richard III, continued under Henry VII after he overthrew Richard, and eventually completed in 1547 under Henry VIII.
The world-famous chapel choir was part of Henry VI’s plan for the chapel from the beginning. It exists to participate in the worship life of the chapel, but its reach and influence is world-wide. The choir is in the English cathedral choir tradition, which means that, among other things, the trebles (sopranos and altos) are boys whose voices have not yet changed. The tenors and basses are music students at the college, the boys attend a boarding school run by the college.
Every year on Christmas Eve the chapel holds the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ using nine scripture lessons interspersed with congregational carol singing and anthems sung by the choir. The first Festival was held in 1918 and has been held every year since. It is so popular people begin lining up early in the morning on Christmas Eve for the 3:30 pm service. Except in 1930, it has been broadcast over BBC radio every year since 1928. It was broadcast even during World War II though the glass (and heat) had been removed from the building in case it was bombed. Every few years a shorter version is filmed for television. The service is now heard and watched by millions of people worldwide, and the format of the service has been adapted by churches worldwide for their own use.
Every year since 1919 the service begins with the carol Once in Royal David’s City. The first verse is a solo by one of the choirboys. The choir director never tells his charges ahead of time who he has chosen as the soloist, he simply beckons him forward at the start of the service.
Another carol sung at the festival is In Dulci Jubilo (Good Christian Men Rejoice), an old German carol dating back to the 14th century. One of the verses (”O Patris caritas”) was likely written by Martin Luther in the 16th century. It is a macaronic carol, which means that the text combines Latin and a vernacular language - German in the original, English in this arrangement written by R. L. Pearsall in 1837. Pearsall’s absolutely beautiful arrangement sometimes splits the choir into two 4-part choruses and sometimes combines it into one 5-part chorus. It also uses a small group of voices in the beginning of verse 3 (”O Patris caritas”) and an octet in the middle of verse 4 (”Ubi sunt gaudia”).
This is the interior of a church in Maastricht, the Netherlands, which was converted into a bookstore. Do follow the link, it has many more pictures. Magnificant, don’t you think?
Someone put together a page of 101 covers of Stairway to Heaven. Some are absolutely (albeit unintentionally) hilarious (like Pat Boone’s [!]), others rather endearing (like Dolly’s).
This version by an Australian Beatles tribute band is rather cute.
I recently finished Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. In it, he tries to understand and explain intuition, the process by which we make instant decisions without consciously thinking about how we make them. He opens with a story about the Getty Museum, which in 1983 was contacted by an art dealer to see if it was interested in acquiring a kouros which the dealer claimed was made in the sixth century BC and was in almost perfect condition. Since almost all of the two hundred kouroi in existence today are badly damaged, this would be a fantastic acquistion for the museum if true. The museum had a geologist analyze the stone using an electron microscope, electron microprobe, and other instruments and he concluded that the stone was indeed very old. On this basis, the Getty agreed to buy the statue and in 1986 put it on display.
There was one problem. It did not look right. Art historians, curators, and other art experts all thought there was something wrong with it as soon as they saw it, but couldn’t quite say what. Upon further examination, they concluded that the style was wrong for the period it was supposedly from - in fact, it seemed to mix the styles of several periods. One expert thought it look too “fresh”, and a 2,600-year-old statue should not look “fresh”. Further investigation revealed that the statue was in fact a fake produced by forger in the 1980s.
It took just a few seconds for the art experts to realize that something was wrong. Blink explores what happens in those few seconds.
Gladwell talks to a number of psychologists, training experts, doctors, and other people to explore how people make snap decisions. He discusses how people are so very often right when they make those decisions, but how they can also go tragically wrong - he spends an entire chapter on the Amadou Diallo killing. The book is anecdote-driven rather data-driven, so it seemed to me to be more superficial than it should have been. I prefer more data, but that’s just me. However, I found it very interesting with a lot of insights into how we process information.
All of the signs above appear in stores and buffets in mainland China. No, the Chinese are not trying to offend their English-speaking visitors, or convulse them in laughter. What is really going is the use of poorly-designed language translation software by people with no knowledge of English.
The confusion comes from several Chinese characters which have been represented in digitally by one character, the one which looks like a “T” with two cross-bars (干). The original characters have many different meanings, such “dry”, “do”, “undertake”, “be rude, impolite”, and many others, including, I guess, “fuck”.
I have never studied language translation algorithms and have no idea how they work, but were I writing one and I had a character or word with many different meanings, only one of which was “fuck”, I would probably cause the algorithm to pick another word.
This, and countless other examples of computerized mistranslations, point up that the human capacity for language is rich, deep and subtle, and for all our advances in modeling the real world digitally and logically in computer software, we are a very long way from doing it well.
according to the New York Times, whose article on the 53 Places to Go in 2008 lists Detroit at number 40, right between San Francisco and Itacaré, Brazil.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is intended to protect copyright owners from piracy, but is so poorly written (perhaps intentionally) that it makes criminals out of almost all of us.
Wellington Grey put together demo of the law’s absurdity.
DG now has an online store, and it is freakin’ awesome. It has over 2400 releases, including 600 out-of-print releases, any of which can be downloaded instantly. All the downloads are in 320kpbs mp3 format, which is a very high-quality format. The files are DRM-free, that is, not copy-protected, which means you can download them to your computer and copy them to whatever playback device or other computer you wish without restriction. You can, of course, import the files into iTunes and then to your iPod. The one drawback to 320kpbs is that the files are really large, but that is a tradeoff I will gladly make.
You can purchase entire albums or individual tracks. The store keeps track of what you have purchased, so if your internet connection craps out during the middle of a download, you can simply reconnect to the store and try downloading again without having to repurchase the track. Their pricing is very reasonable, although they charge different prices for different tracks, unlike iTunes which charges a flat $0.99/track. I haven’t figured out their pricing yet.
As I write this I am downloading a performance of the Beethoven Quintet for Piano and Wind Quartet in E-flat, performed by Friedrich Gulda and the Vienna Philharmonic Wind Ensemble. My dad purchased the LP of this performance probably in the 1960s, and it was always a favorite of mine. Both the LP and CD reissue have long since gone out of print, and I was frustrated by my inability to find a copy. So I was really happy to find it available for download from the DG store.
The only problem I had with the site is that they make a big deal out of something called the Download Manager, but I could not get it to start (and I am pretty competent in these matters). It wasn’t a huge deal as there are other ways to download files besides using the Download Manager, but it was a little frustrating to be unable to get the thing to work. Other than that minor issue, I am really impressed with the store.
