Author: catsynth

Festival of Contemporary Music, San Francisco

Last night I got out to hear the second concert in the 6th Annual Festival of Contemporary Music hosted by the New Music Forum. That is quite a grand name, and of course the festival gave but a small sampling of contemporary music.

By coincidence, this was at the Community Music Center, the same location as the Edgetone New Music Summit. Although both ostensibly “new music,” this program had a much more traditional feel to it.

The second night focused on pieces for piano, electronics and wind ensemble, all instrumentation I have experience with (as opposed to my more limited experience with string ensembles). The programming seemed to have been done to balance the instrumentation, rather than the pieces themselves, with one piano, one digital media piece, and a piece for wind ensemble in each half.

The second half opened with a virtuosic and theatric performance by pianist Jerry Kuderna of Schematic Nocturne by Bruce Bennet, and probably the best performance of the evening. It was followed by Staring at the Sun, a piece for “stereo digital audio media” by Andrew Cole. It interesting how programs are finally catching up to the contemporary world and no longer calling such pieces “tape music.” I did recognize in Cole’s piece many examples of key clicks and other extended woodwind techniques, which made it fit better into the full program than just a piece for computer-generated sounds. The final piece, Woodwind Quintet by Martha Stoddard was a departure from the rest of the evening in that it was the only piece with multiple movements, and also had a more traditional feel, with traditional harmonies, Middle Eastern scales, and other elements that almost made it seem like the curators were saying “now that you have sat through all this new music, here is something simpler to enjoy.” But of course, I came specifically to hear “new music”, so I preferred the earlier pieces.

Weekend Cat Blogging: In memoriam

It has been a sad week for many of our friends in the Cat Blogosphere. We have decided to go on with hosting Weekend Cat Blogging and dedicate it to those who have gone and to their families.

We start by joining Tesla in lighting a candle in memoriam:

Violets in memory of Violet Noelle “Sprout”.

Our thoughts are with her family at Monty Q. Many are posting tributes this weekend in her honor around the theme of the color “violet.”

We also give our thoughts to the families of Felix, Frieda:

And Max, Neelix and Zeppy.

The Cat Realm remembers those who left us this week.

The Criz Cats Sanctuary offers a serenity prayer for Violet.

It’s “a cat’s life” with Breadchick and LB, with photos of LB’s morning routine. They also have a tribute to Violet.

The Kashim, Othello, Salome and Astrid have turned their site violet as a tribute. The also have posts for Felix and Maxime.

Samantha and Tigger are remembering as well. We hope they stay safe with a tropical storm possibly heading towards Florida.

Mind of Mog presents a pic of Meowza and a tribute to Violet.

We invite anyone who has a tribute this weekend to share it here. You can do so by leaving a comment or contacting us.


Weekend Cat Blogging: Chat Noir et Fromage

Our friends at the House of the (Mostly) Black Cats are hosting a special food edition of Weekend Cat Blogging, in honor of Sher.

Luna inspects the new poster for our kitchen area:

What could be more appropriate for the kitchen of CatSynth HQ than a chat noir and fromage. Luna certainly bares quite a resemblance to the cat in the poster, including the green eyes. And we have some fromage for today’s post:

The hard cheese on the left from Wensleydale Dairy in the town of Hawes in Yorkshire, UK. The round is a California Crottin, an artisan goat cheese, from Redwood Hill Farm in Sonoma County, just an hour or so up the coast from us.

I did offer Luna a small piece of the Crottin, as she occasionally likes cheese, but more to sniff than to eat. She was far more interested in the wrapping paper from the poster than the fine selection of cheeses:

Check out the other cats and food at Weekend Cat Blogging. Lots of fish for the enjoyment of humans and cats alike.

The Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos is being hosted at The Tuxedo Gang Hideout.

The Carnival of Cats will be hosted this evening by Miz. Mog and Kitties.

And of course the Friday Ark is at the modulator.


Carnival of Mathematics #38: 8-8-8

We at CatSynth are happy to be hosting the 38th Carnival of Mathematics, a bi-weekly round-up of mathematical posts from around the blogosphere. This is our second time hosting, and it falls on an auspicious day, August 8, 2008 or 8-8-8!

Eight is associated with good fortune and prosperity in Chinese culture, and so a trio of eights is especially fortunate. It is no accident that the Olympics in Beijing opened today.

Mathematically, 8 is of course a power of two, the third power of two in fact. 8 * 8 * 8 is 512. 8 raised to the 8th power raised the 8th power is…well…a very big number:

6277101735386680763835789423207666416102355444464034512896

Coincidentally, “888” is the name of a popular former product by my current employer.

So, with so much coincidence and good fortune surrounding the three eights, one would think this would be a great day for us at CatSynth. And they would be wrong, it is in fact rather bad day, capping a not-so-great week. So does that make us uniquely star-crossed? Probably not, but it does call into question the idea of using numerical patterns to divine good fortune.

And that brings us to our first entry, entitled Don’t Listen to Numbers from epsilonica. People have found significance in the patterns of digits of ? and the square root of 2 and countless other numbers for centuries, but as this post suggests, such patterns are inevitable. And very profound, when you think about the fact that this blog post, or any great work of literature or digitized music file can be represented by a unique number in binary, or English text in base 27.

So numerical patterns should be viewed with caution. So should the well-known statistical tool, the histogram, as described the Parable of the Histogram at ecthathy. The parable shows how the partitioning of data in to histograms can lead to very different interpretations, as a slight offset produces very different results for a group of students.

A numerical reality today is the explosion of online math videos, as report by the Teaching College Math Technology Blob. Videos on mathematical topics can be quite interesting and entertaining, especially for people who read blog posts about math. But they can be a source for media-oriented students to get answers to math problems without fully understanding the solution. And since correct solutions should be identical, it is more difficult to track down such sources than it is for essays.

Some of us learned mathematics not just to pass a class in school, but for the enjoyment, and perhaps for the realization that it is valuable to many aspects of our lives. You can read more about why we learn math at the blog It’s the Thought That Counts. This site has a lot of articles about science, religion and politics, and Barack Obama as well, so worth a detour…

Ok, back to mathematics. Sam Shah offers us a mind-boggling maximization problem, it is deceptively simple, but ends up brining in some rather difficult numbers (which I am sure have some strange and mystical patterns hidden inside of them). He also explains the Richter Scale and Logarithms, a topic close to many of us here in California.

Larry Ferlazzo presents a math word game, in which players have to chose the words that correctly describe the displayed numbers. It is geared towards beginning English Language students. I wonder if they can find the solutions to these problems on YouTube…

One of my favorite disciplines within mathematics is number theory, and our friends at Walking Randomly offer a method to generate Fibonacci numbers from matrix determinants. In particular, they can be generated from the determinants of a tridiagonal matrix with the imaginary number i in the “side bands.” It is always fascinating to see interesting mathematical concepts unified, in this case imaginary numbers, linear algebra and the Fibonacci sequence.

More interesting ideas with matrices and sequences can be found in this discussion of Phylogenetics and Algebraic Geometry at Rigorous Trivialities. Again, this crosses over into the complex numbers, and vector spaces.

The order of operations is a fundamental concept in arithmetic and computation. Apparently, it does not apply to the world of reality television, where producers have about as much mathematical literacy as a $1 calculator. Our friends at 360 analyze a recent mathematical puzzle given to contestants on the popular British TV program Big Brother.

I wonder how those contestants would do at coloring a plane, a interesting problem posed by Skeptics Play and explored in detail by Yoo at Stochastic Scribbles

Jon Ingram presents the game of Nim at Lessons Taught; Lessons Learnt. He starts with volunteers at conference to introduce this simple but fascinating game, and then plots the losing positions using Autograph. The result is quite surprising.

More observations on innumeracy in Why Can’t Johnny Add? at Staring at Empty Pages. The problems illustrated are not so much basic arithmetic as basic algebra, and how students can lack these basic skills in both 1983 and 2008.

From basic algebra, we move back to probability statistics, and normal errors for binomial and Poisson distributions. Textbooks say the normal distribution is good when “n is large”, but how large is large enough?

Next, The Endeavor presents an article on connecting probability and number theory. Prime numbers, and some properties of integers like the number of distinct prime divisors, can behave like random variables. This is an area of interest for me right now, not only with prime numbers, but also the other problems such as the Collatz Conjecture.

The above link to the Collatz Conjecture and related problems is from our friend Andrée of meeyauw, who this week presents aFriday Fractal: Pink Dragon Spewing Pink Flame.

That concludes the carnival for now. We will continue to post submissions through the weekend (including any we have missed due to 8-8-8 contrary fortunate), so please let us know if we missed you.