Previous - 77. YouTube + Alice
Not exactly karma
I hate it when you sneer at something and then realize you are doing the very thing you just sneered at. Today it was "Retail Therapy." I was walking past the upscale Crocker Galeria where I noticed the sign suggesting that this was the place to process your trama. I sneered... just as it occurred to me that I was in the process of doing two errands that were not at all necessary and that I would have put off indefinitely a couple weeks ago.
It occurred to me weeks ago that I would have a much easier time seeing pens sitting on the black-stained counter above my desk that holds my computers, if I had a white pen. Good idea but low priority. Today I sought out and purchased a white pen. I've been wanting to replace more of my lights with LEDs for a long time, but they are expensive, I have few lights, and the compact flourescents I have last a very long time the way I use them. But last night, in the first step of this retail therapy chain of events, I purchased an air cleaner online -- now in transit -- so I have a "good" reason to try to reduce my electrical overhead by a few watts (five, I think). So after my stop at the stationary store, I hit my hardware store for a new LED lamp. I can't wait to test out my new toys. (According to the the date I wrote on the old CFL lamp I replaced, it has been in use for over seven years. I'll probably move it to an HOA common area fixture the next time a light burns out.)
Five watts doesn't sound like much, but then I use very little electricity. My refrigerator consumes the most power and I've considered replacing it with a new, more energy conserving unit, but I'm not sure I can really save that much and my current unit still works fine. The thing is, my power bill is already so low that these little improvements won't really make much of a difference. I'm just doing this to please myself.
It could be that the real reason I'm thinking about this now is that last night was our first "cold" night. Soon I will need to turn on my space heater, (I have indeed) that's the only time I use a serious amount of power. In a normal year though, I only run my space heater for three or four weeks and then only during the evening. Enough to double my power bill for a couple months, but since the base usage is so low, it still doesn't amount to much. Many people pay more per month then I pay per year. I once calculated that it would take centuries for me to amortize the cost of replacing my windows with better insulated ones, even if it cut my heating needs to zero.
That bastard Kant
It occurred to be me this morning that it is not Utilitarianism but rather a sociological interpretation of morality that stands in opposition to both Kant and Utilitarianism. And this is because a sociological interpretation has no foundation at all in reason, moral laws are simply arbitrary group rules that bind people together and exclude non-group members.
Fundamentalism -- regardless of the religion -- is simply the formation of a new, smaller group without seeming to break the rules of the larger group they are breaking away from. My favorite example of this is the ultra-Catholic group Mel Gibson's father belongs to. As I understand it, they are such "good" and "pure" Catholics that they are forced to contradict the Pope. This is all amusing until the fundamentalists start blowing things up.
Ohhh... It occurs to me that you can hypothesize something like a Sociological Strong Force that holds these groups together until they get too large and then can spontaneously "decay" into smaller, again stable, groups. Cool.
Chemistry/physics question
Why is it that titanium, in the form of white titanium, and mercury both reflect all frequencies of visible light but mercury reflects the light in an orderly fashion while with white titanium the reflected light is diffuse?
"Top Songs" of the '50s and '60s
I clicked on something different in YouTube and then spent the past two nights listening to popular songs from my formative years (1952-1970). How they select the songs to include is a mystery. (I had no idea Eddie Fisher and Rosemary Clooney were so big the year I was born. And how have I never heard of Joni James? It's also interesting that Tony Bennett's tone got richer over the years.) It would be impossible to produce a really complete collection unless you had hours rather than minutes for each year. Country music is short changed and the TV theme version of "Route 66" is ignored (the Nelson Riddle instrumental version. I would try to get the Nat Cole vocal version of the much earlier "Get your kicks on Route 66" on my list somehow), and the late '60s seems to be especially bad as music got more and more diverse -- almost nothing of the San Francisco bands and no Led Zeppelin!
But the late '50s and early '60s are surprisingly good. I've always been a fan of instrumental songs and it seemed like virtually every year from '57-'62 had at least one good one. "A Summer Place" is probably the instrumental song I recall the best, but there were others including "Canadian Sunset" which I had forgotten until I heard it again.
I had originally gone with '54 as the beginning of my formative years, but after listening to music from '52 and '53, I realized I knew some of this music just as well. I have the edition of the National Geographic from the month I was born (such a different world) but listening to the "Top Hits" from the year I was born turns out to be just as revealing.
One thing that surprised me was how much of the Everly Brothers was included in this series. They were never popular in my family and, reading more about them, I'm sure it's because they were originally from Muhlenberg county, Kentucky, so my mother would have dismissed them as hillbillies. I hadn't realized their influence on artists that followed, like Paul Simon and even Lindsey Buckingham -- who even toured with them at one point.
I don't think my mother ever realized how fond I became, as early as my college days, of Bluegrass music. Ironically, Muhlenberg county is the subject of one of my all time favorite Bluegrass songs, "Paradise."
There's also almost no Jazz included in these collections, which I can understand since Jazz has rarely been mainstream.
The visuals that accompany the music varies from contemporary TV, to the bands playing their hits much later (disconcerting), to neo-Ken Burns photo montages to my favorite -- shots of 45 singles sitting on a turntable so you can see the recording label and related information. I would have done them all this way so you would also get a bit of history of the music industry. Of course I would also have added a note if either Ahmet Ertegun or Clive Davis had been involved in any way.
Getting back to instrumental songs, I can't think of many that have been "top hits" in recent years or even decades. When I started writing this, "Europa" was on the "radio" here at my favorite pizzeria -- their fondness for Santana may be a reason I like the place. I can think of (and have written about) some other guitar god masterpieces that would be on my list of hit instrumentals, but I can't think of anything similar to the orchestral pieces I mentioned above. Maybe music from special movies like Star Wars or The Godfather. Vangelis's music for "Chariots of Fire" might be the last music (I can think of) to crossover to become a radio hit? Not at all sure of this. (I just found a list of the most popular movie music but the page was so media intensive that it crashed my computer. So I'm sticking with what I think I know.)
A Century of Wisdom
Finally finished the book! She, either Alice or the author or both, chooses not to dwell on Alice's feelings about Judaism except to emphasis again her fondness for Spinoza's God who is but isn't particularly interested in us. My first thought when I opened this book and read her quote of Epictitus was that Alice is probably the one and only Survivor I could have asked my question, If you could snap your fingers and change history so that the Holocaust didn't happen, would you? In fact, I would never ask the question, but I do wonder what she would answer.
