Daydreaming lazily of Shakespeare, reconciling the great characters and the great existential void to be filled…

It comes in and out of focus, a field of blurring thoughts, visions, imaginary landscapes…

Waiting, wishing, hoping, dreaming–filling my mind with outlandish fantasies that only further break my heart; wondering whether to close my eyes and savor the future, or stare at the calendar with unfathomable dread of the present.

What shall I make of myself before I shuffle off this mortal coil? What is my part in this play?–for all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. What will the audience remember, mulling over my cameo, my brief candle‘s flicker of life? For some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Or perhaps a pair of star-cross’d lovers, though the stars have not yet proven kind. But what better reason to live than to complement another being, to fulfill myself by fulfilling another?

Look on her, look! Her lips! Look there, look there! I toss and turn uneasily, stuck between my reality and my equally real! unreality. She is so close, so close, I can hold her in my arms, feel her warmth–and yet, so far.

Lord, what fools these mortals be! Maybe I’ve got it all wrong–there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

All wrong! All wrong! How beauteous mankind is! How inordinately caring we are, how deeply committed we are; how spiritual, religious, irreligious; how caring, how caring!

Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill… 

As I will read it on the PA tomorrow before advisery:

This is Carlo Angiuli, co-captain of New Trier’s Scholastic Bowl team. I am pleased to announce that on Saturday, our Scholastic Bowl team won its first-ever IHSA state title in Peoria, beating the three-time state champions, Wheaton North, with a score of 325 to 218 in the championship match. This marks the first time in the 21-year history of IHSA Scholastic Bowl that a CSL team has won the title. My co-captain was Nick Matchen, and our players were Ben Cohen, Robert Sido, Jonah Greenthal, Jeff Hirschey, and Sohaib Qadri. I’d like to give special thanks to coaches David Reinstein, Carolyn Gerhardt, and Benjamin Yang, who had to endure driving our team almost every weekend to competitions all over the state.

(Part two in a series of epsilon posts.)

It’s been a crazy year. I’m in a different world than I was in January.

The college process, for instance. Way back in April, I took the SAT and ACT for the first time. Soon after, I took my first AP tests. And in the past few months, I’ve gone from having no idea where I’d end up at college, to formally accepting the Wells at Indiana.

Scholastic Bowl has been quite the whirlwind too. I proved myself at the varsity level, going from a novice junior with only one year of experience to traveling down to Florida in June as a member of the six-person Team Illinois.

Then during the summer, I helped start a question-writing company that’s writing for tournaments and conferences around the state, from suburban Winnetka to deer-hunting Wayne City. It’s been a lot of work–I’ve written 640 questions myself, which translates to about 150 pages’ worth. And besides that, I learned Perl and wrote a 1500-line web application that hasn’t failed us yet.

And this year in Scholastic Bowl? I’ve been a playoff moderator at three tournaments, all of which I helped compile, and two of which I helped administer. I came out on top at this year’s Scobol Solo (of 112 individuals). Our team placed second and fourth at Northwestern NAQT, so we already have a bid to Nationals–last year, we didn’t have one until NAQT State in February. Can we place higher at NAQT Nationals this year? Are we going to PACE Nationals too?

In math team, I continued my streak at Regionals and State, tying for first individually at Regionals and placing second at State. I’ve placed all six times–can I make it eight in 2007?

I’m assistant-teaching–indeed, doing a great deal of the teaching myself–for the AP Calculus BC class I took last year.

And, as hectic as it has been, I’ve mostly managed to hold on to my closest friendships and cultivate some new ones I value dearly. And a whole host of new friendships is on the way in college.

It’s been a great run in high school. This leg might be almost over, but there are many to go–I’m not planning on slowing down.

If pictures are worth a thousand words, I’m sure that knowledge ought to be worth more, at least fifteen hundred words per gram. I mean, I guess I’d have a hard time choosing between two pieces of knowledge and three quality pictures. Depending on what was in the pictures, of course. Or what the facts were. Anyway, we all know that knowledge is power. (It does a lot of work in very little time, hence the high wattage.)

But I digress. I suppose now’s as good a time as any to offer the readers of this blog–almost all of whom know me to some good degree–some miscellaneous advice, knowledge, news, and any other odds and ends which, piled together into a little heap in the corner of the internet, might be enough to merit a little frilly imaginary bow on top. In other words, this is my attempt at a purely verbal holiday present for my readers and friends.

Wells Scholars Class of 2011

I am about to inform four colleges that I plan to matriculate at Indiana University in the 2011 class of Wells Scholars. The Wells Scholars Program is a unique program offered by Indiana extended this year to 29 individuals, who have proved to be some of the most interesting and exciting people I have ever met. (Any of you reading this? Carol, are you there?) Despite widely varying interests and talents, all of my fellow scholars showed an incredible spark that is uncommon even in the most intelligent students. I thank Tim Londergan, Charlene Brown, and the rest of the faculty associated with the Wells program for their impeccable taste, and their ability to pick 57 deserving finalists out of a pool of what I hear to be well over a thousand applicants.

In addition to providing full tuition, room and board, and other expenses, the Wells program will provide a summer experience stipend and pay for two semesters’ study abroad. Because outside scholarships (and Indiana’s National Merit scholarship) get refunded to me by the bursar, I will actually be making money every semester. Plus, I have my eye on a few people who might be able to jumpstart Indiana’s College Bowl team with me. No matter how you look at it, it’s an opportunity I can’t pass up.

xkcd

If you haven’t heard yet, you really ought to read xkcd, the funniest webcomic I have come across. Updated three times a week, it is written by Randall Munroe, a former NASA roboticist who quit his job to live on revenue from xkcd merchandise. While often about pop culture or romance, the comics also frequently reference physics, college math, and computer science, so you have been warned.

The Daily WTF

If you are a computer programmer, you absolutely must read The Daily WTF, a hilarious website powered by disgruntled programmers and database managers that share stories about the obscenely idiotic professionals and code bases that surround them. My personal favorite is one about a content management system that assumed a user was authenticated unless he had a cookie to the contrary (isLoggedIn = False), and deleted pages by clicking on a link. Google’s web crawler happened upon the system and proceeded to delete the content of every page…

Foxit Reader

If you are wondering why you have to read PDFs with the clumsy and slow Adobe Reader software (or you’re just sick and tired of waiting on the splash screen for five seconds each time), I highly recommend you download Foxit Reader, a tiny and blindingly fast substitute to Adobe Reader. While it lacks a few bells and whistles, it is a single 4 MB executable file that starts up immediately and seeks in files much faster than Adobe Reader does. Many plugins are available on the website–both free and paid–that add various functionality. But if you’re still filling out some printable PDF forms for college, you may be glad to hear that it saves the content of PDF forms! No more retyping the same information every time you open a PDF!

Winamp

Continuing the software parade, I highly recommend Winamp for your music listening purposes. It’s another lightweight snappy program that offers more functionality than Windows Media Player and iTunes. Its library management is by no means inferior to that of iTunes, and unlike iTunes, it supports global keyboard shortcuts to control playback (something that I cannot now live without). Plugins are available to transfer music to iPods (all versions and generations). I have it configured to minimize to the system tray so it doesn’t use up my precious taskbar space.

Winamp is free, but Nullsoft also offers a Pro version that offers many additional features, like full-speed CD ripping and encoding.

More coming soon…

I overheard the following conversation on the bus today after school. I swear that it was just like this–I haven’t embellished anything or made anything up. I tried to memorize it as exactly as possible because I wouldn’t hear many things like it ever again. Hopefully. The conversation stands on its own, though I would like to add one comment: these two people are going to join the American electorate.

[the conversation hasn't caught my attention yet]
Male: “You are SO Jewish!”
Female: “I’m Christian.”
“Wait, really? Anyway, you’re still so Jew-ish. You get it?”
“Ha ha.”
“Y’know, like ‘This thing is bluish,’ y’know.”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“So it’s like, Jew-ish. You’re so totally Jew-ish.”
“Yeah. I get it. Very funny.”
“Oh hey, can I drink some of your water?”
“Well, okay, but it’s warm, you won’t want it.”
“No, I love warm water!”
“Eww, it’s so disgusting.”
“No, it’s great! And it’s good for you too.”
“Wait, really?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Why?”
“Well, have you taken bio yet?”
“Yeah, I took it last year.”
“Oh okay, so you know how body temperature is like 98.6 degrees, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Our body can’t use water if it’s below 98.6 degrees. So we need to use energy to warm it up if we drink cold water.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. So if we drink warm water, it’s more healthy for us. I love water when it’s hot, but not scalding or anything.”
[At this point, I want to interject that the claim about water is completely bogus, and besides, room temperature is a lot closer to 98.6 degrees than hot water is. I refrain to see what happens.]
“Wow, I never knew that.”
“Yeah, it’s true.”
“Y’know, I hate Dasani. I opened it once and it fizzed when I opened it, and I was like, ‘What? This isn’t supposed to have carbonation.’ This is stupid. And it’s like so salty.”
“Yeah. I love Fiji water though.”
“It’s really expensive.”
“Yeah, but you can, like, taste the Fiji in it. It’s really good. Oh, have you ever had dry water?”
“What?”
“Well, you know how like, wine makes your mouth dry after you have it? Well, there’s like dry water, it makes your mouth dry afterwards.”
“Really? That’s so cool.”

There was absolutely no sarcasm in the conversation, either. At this point, my head was starting to hurt, and I tuned out. Besides, the conversation turned to a discussion of racial topics, and I decided I wasn’t all that interested in hearing what this budding scientist had to say about politics.

After Facebook implemented news feeds announcing everyone’s actions on Facebook, a big fiasco broke out, and groups were formed left and right to protest it. Soon everyone’s news feed read something like

20 of your friends have joined “I HATE THE NEWS FEEDS!”
8 of your friends have joined “The New Facebook Really Sucks”
34 of your friends have joined “Bring Back the Old Facebook!”

Kudos to Andy Frukacz from Loyola, my only friend who thought to exploit this feature. All of his friends logged onto Facebook to see something like the following in their news feeds:

11:20 PM: Andy is single.
9:50 PM: Andy is in a relationship and it’s complicated.
9:00 PM: Andy is married.
7:30 PM: Andy is engaged.
6:45 PM: Andy is in an open relationship.
6:30 PM: Andy is in a relationship.

(It kept going.) Andy Frukacz, I salute you.

So Mark Zuckerberg quickly wrote a note to the community explaining that the news feed information was already available, and it was simply aggregating it into an accessible format. I understand this, but the information isn’t actually available–it would require crawling every page on Facebook continuously to monitor when it was changed.

I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the news feeds, but I wasn’t as incensed as a lot of other people were. So I silently joined the largest protest group, and thought no more of the matter.

Facebook decided they had made a big mistake (their online suggestion box was likely suffering from integer overflow by this time) and apologized. So they added privacy controls specific to the news feeds. I turned off the feed timestamps, and figured nobody actually cared about what I did anyway, so I left everything else on.

The obvious question is, did anyone win? Luckily, the big protest group was run by an intelligent member who concluded that no “winning” was involved. I agree.

If everyone using your service dislikes your new feature, you have to make adjustments. Ideally, you have a focus group that tells you not to include it in the first place, but Facebook isn’t a huge software corporation–in fact, they don’t even make software. They provide a service. That’s the Web 2.0 movement, I guess: replacing software with services.

It’s not democracy, it’s common sense. Mark stuck by his position until he realized that the protest just kept getting larger. Even afterwards, the feature wasn’t rolled back: it was only mitigated by privacy controls.

In fact, democracy itself is necessarily a sham. It assumes that everyone is equally capable of contribution, which is far from the truth. Yes, I am Very Liberal (as the Facebook option calls it) but not because I think that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. In fact, depending on your definition of liberal and conservative, I might be Very Conservative instead.

Why? Because I think the ideal government wouldn’t have to worry about getting elected the next term. Good politicians always have to pervert their actions so that the people like them, often at the cost of things beneficial for the public. Republicans have been completely ignoring the truth to get as much of the public behind them as possible–which is exactly why they’re doing so well. Democrats listen to experts, listen to advisers, think ahead about the future…but the public doesn’t care. They just want a “strong” government that doesn’t take crap from other people, and if somebody attacks us in our homeland, by God let’s go and pay them back. Doesn’t matter if it’s a bad idea: the people will like it.

But that’s a whole other topic for another day. I’ll have to continue this later.

Flame away.

The “Featured” category will hereforth contain my more extensive and worthwhile musings.

“I thought you only listened to classical music,” Nick confessed only a few months ago. The comment got me to thinking about what “classical” music even was. And more importantly, the difference between classical and other genres.

In brief, I think the difference is mainly in the instrumentation and emphasis on lyrics. In the middle half of the twentieth century, classical music runs into a dead-end, as no new paradigms have been introduced. One can ignore tonality, but it always keeps creeping back. Patterns can be found, after all, in anything. One could also destroy tonality, destroy structure. But this fragmentary manner is only interesting for a very little time. Likewise with John Cage. 4’33″ might be an interesting concept, but seriously now–who actually listens to Imaginary Landscape No. 4? Playing twelve radios at once is avant garde. But only the first time.

But I think popular music still gets many of its cues from those moments right before avant garde turned academic. If centuries of development has gone into what sounds pleasing, there’s probably something to it. Rock uses the same scale, the same notes, the same chords. It just takes the foundation in a different direction. If Glass and Dufay are in the same genre, why aren’t Glass and Coldplay?

Take “Clocks,” for example. 2004′s Record of the Year at the Grammys. Everyone likes it, everyone thinks only musical geniuses can write something like it. Now, I’m not saying they’re derivative, but it’s practically classical.

Good ol’ E flat major. The repeated falling arpeggios are simple but immediately draw interest. (Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, anyone?) They continue throughout, never changing. The interest isn’t the melody. It’s the mesmerizing repetition of the painfully simple motif. (Isn’t that practically the definition of minimalism in classical music? See–I told you it was like Philip Glass.)

The backdrop to the entire piece (so it’s like a passacaglia?) is E flat, D flat, C. E flat, D flat, C. Three notes, falling, almost mimicking the falling arpeggios that form them: E flat major, first inversion. B flat minor, second inversion. F minor, root position. The major/minor shift adds more color. (Isn’t this straight from music theory?) And then there’s the switch between triple and duple meter. 3+3+2=8, after all, and eight is a measure. (I always did like complex meters with hemiola.) And heck, they use a piano.

Fine, you say. But what about other less melodic genres? Well, even Schoenberg had people half-speaking on stage. Screaming into microphones without any pitch isn’t anything new–just ask anyone who has ever heard the seventh inning stretch. Maybe the term “sprechstimme” doesn’t quite apply. Perhaps “gellstimme” would be more appropriate. But it has been done.

ID3v1.1 defines over a hundred “genre” tags for MP3s. From A capella to Vocal, they have everything. I’m not sure what the difference is between Acid, Acid Jazz, and Acid Punk is, nor why Alternative Rock and Alternative aren’t the same thing. (They have “Porn Groove”? Are you kidding me?) I’ve never even heard of Negerpunk. And what’s a Power Ballad? Actually, I’m not sure I want to know. It’s probably horrifying.

These genres are totally ridiculous. Classical, on the other hand, doesn’t get Classical (Medieval), Classical (Renaissance), Classical, Classical (Romantic), Classical (Avant Garde) and the twenty other tags that would be necessary to classify it. I don’t know about you all, but Dufay’s harmonies sound like they come from Mars. But Beethoven? Now That’s What I Call a Cadence.

Mars isn’t just my favorite sketch from Holst’s Planets, it’s also my preferred disc of Stadium Arcadium. Coldplay’s Clocks is good, but so is Haydn’s Clock Symphony.

So let us listen to good music. Let us listen to “classical” music, if we like it. Classical music used to be the only music.

But above all, let us not combine genres that should not be mixed. Just as cesium should not touch water, may no orchestra ever perform Porn Groove on the G String.

–Carlo Angiuli