So it begins.

Our first practice was today. Because the ex-scobolers (Cliff, Greg, Charlie, Elyse) came, it wasn’t very productive or official-feeling. I’ll need a whole bunch of practice to get back to where I was at the end of last year. My plan this year is to dominate at science, and it looks like I’m well on my way.

No matter how much you want something, sometimes all you can do is cross your fingers and hope.

I’m doing epsilon-delta proofs in MV, which is nice because pretty soon I’m going to have to explain epsilon-delta to the BC class I’m TA-ing. Particularly nice was #6 (lim{x->0} sin(x)/x = 1) because it had an elegant geometric proof. Add to that the fact that its veracity isn’t obvious until you know the series expansion for sine (or l’Hopital’s rule), and you have a pretty interesting problem.

I know why everyone has problems with epsilon-delta. They panic because they can’t find a pattern in all the proofs: each one works differently. But as long as you understand what’s going on (i.e., as long as you understand the definition of a limit) then you should be alright. I’ll try insisting that everyone attempt to conceptualize, but it never works–there are two good types of math students, the type that understands very well, and the type that apes very well. Proofs separate the thinkers from the apers. We shall see.

Until next time, may you always/sometimes/never evaluate the limit definition of a derivative with l’Hopital’s rule.

I’m not unhappy school is starting. I mean, I like having all my time to myself, but there’s something nice about seeing everyone you know and having the mental stimulation of school. I seem to be acquiring the bad habit of spending my free time in the math office (I was in there two and a quarter periods today…) but I did manage to talk to about seven different teachers.

My schedule is proving very good. My morning has the “funner” classes (chem, last year’s math, this year’s math) and my afternoon the rest (English, physics, Spanish), all spaced out fairly nicely. I think I’m going to put my writing center time during seventh period, because I’m at a loss what to do then anyway. Other than, y’know, go to the math office.

I do like my teachers too. I generally feel like my teachers and schedule are better than the people in my classes. (Except of course MV, the most interesting and hyperactive group of people at New Trier.) But I can’t be greedy. I do like my schedule. Now to see whether any of the 8/9 Physics C folk are available to distract me on their free days.

So here’s to an interesting year.

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

I have mine. Do you have yours?

Every year I feel like I’m very different from the previous year. Maybe I just forget who I am over the summer, and have to make up my mind again. At least the changes have been for the better.
So while I don’t really care for the whole senior year hoopla, it’s my last chance for a lot of things. There won’t be any more math team. And depending on where I go next, there might not be much more quiz bowl either. And of course, my last chance with everyone I know.

School can’t be this close to starting! I have so much else to do!

Ah, who am I kidding. During the school year I pursue all of my own projects anyway.

Oh yeah, on that note, I pulled out a calendar and counted all the Mondays we have school, freaked out, and promptly changed Monday Mathematics to biweekly instead of weekly–that is, every two weeks, not twice a week, silly. I still need lots of topic ideas, so send ‘em my way.

I opened my shiny new AP Chemistry textbook to the table of contents, looking for the section on organic chemistry. Expectantly, I flipped to the section on nomenclature, and looked for examples using infix numbers…and saw “2-propanol” and the same sort of crap from sophomore year.

You’d think that while teaching the nomenclature rules, they’d want to teach the right rules. I even checked the IUPAC Blue Book to make sure, and yes, it’s infix. So why, if it should be called “propan-2-ol,” do high school textbooks tell us it’s “2-propanol”? The textbook is a new edition, and the nomenclature was last updated in 1993.

Is infix notation just too much for highschoolers? Is putting numbers in the middle too radical? Last time, we conveniently glossed over the fact that a molecule might have more than one group that needs numbering. “Well, that’s more complicated.” Not really, if we had learned the right rules in the first place.

My problem isn’t that we’re not learning the right naming method, my problem is that the book is teaching the wrong one. I mean, how many of us are actually going to need to know how to name organic molecules in our lives? But why teach the standards in a non-standard way, the one time that most of us will ever learn them?

Until next time, may you always be able to draw out 4,5-Dichloro-2- [4-chloro-2-(hydroxymethyl)-5-oxohexyl] cyclohexane-1-carboxylic acid.

to you…

Yeah, yeah, so everyone wants to know everyone else’s schedule so they can get all excited over who’s in their classes. So just in case anyone wanted to be excited about me:

EB — AP Chemistry — 179
1 — SILC (AP Calculus BC) — ? (Viktora)
2 — MV/Linear Algebra — 234 (Kick)
3 — Lifetime Activities — Big open spaces
4 — Lunch — Food
5 — AP English 4 — 334
6 — AP Physics C — 140
7 — AP Physics C (MW) — 153
8 — AP Spanish 5 — 366
9 — Free/Writing Center — Somewhere, 320M