I’m stoked for my classes. I was thinking of adding a 5th one so I could get more poli sci credits, but decided against it. It probably wouldn’t have been too hard, but I’d rather make sure I’m not too busy with classes this semester, and I can always add a summer class or something if I need more credits somewhere. My classes are:

Global Environmental Politics
This class is sweet for me. I’m minoring in political science because politics is how things get done, so if you want to change the world based on the facts of science, you need to know how to work with the system. That seems to be a central theme in this class. The book we’re reading (Heatstroke) focuses on the science behind the environment, but there’s other readings dealing with the politics of implementing policy based on environmental science. I love how the prof relates the science and the politics.

Sustainable Communities
The syllabus lists this under the discipline of architecture, so I’m a little unsure about that, but it doesn’t seem like it will be too technical in terms of architecture. Seems like a good class so far, hopefully it’ll build on some of the things we did in my peak oil class last spring.

Politics of Economic Development
This class is so tight. Again, it relates something I care about (economic development) to politics. Like the first class I mentioned, it goes beyond simply talking about what would be best to do, and talks about how to actually accomplish those goals in the real world. This class builds on the inspiration I got from Mountains Beyond Mountains. In the book, Paul Farmer focuses on improving the medical situation in developing countries because he’s a physician, but the overarching theme of the book is the need for all sorts of development in those countries. Economic development will bring better medicine, and quality of life in general. I’m so excited about this class.

Global Studies
Meh. Everyone has to take this class. I’m not so stoked for it. Seems way to basic and easy. The only grading is 3 multiple choice tests. I wish I could take globalization instead, but oh well.

I would go on, but I have a class in 5 minutes. Tomorrow I’m off to Spain. I have a city orientation on the first day, then I go to Sevilla/Cordoba, then I have a visit to a solar and wind farm, although I’m tempted to skip that and take a visit to Granada.

Also, I apparently missed the boat on the whole Stanford Invite recap, not to mention the rest of the season. But to summarize: we won Stanford Invite, then won Centex and Regionals handily, which was awesome. And I forget what happened at nationals… not important really. Except for Eli Friedman winning the Callahan – that was important. Hooray for that.

In short, it was awesome. Oregon’s women’s and men’s teams both won their respective divisions. The weather was just about perfect (partly sunny and warm), the fields were quite nice, and most of our games had observers, with some new experimental rules, which I liked very much, for the most part.

Observers:
I love having observers in general, and I think every competitive frisbee game would be better off with them. This tournament not only had observers, but implemented some increased roles for them, which is a move in the right direction, I think. The following is my explanation of the changes, along with my analysis and grade of how beneficial they were, as implemented in this tournament. A C+ or better means it was beneficial, while a C- or worse means it was detrimental.

1) Active up/down calls: This one is pretty obviously beneficial in my opinion. Along the lines of active out of bounds calls, which weren’t even included in the “experimental rule changes,” presumably because they are already the norm for observers. Grade: A

2) Active checking the disc in: On any dead disc (i.e. after a call of some sort, or a timeout), the observer would check to make sure everyone was ready, say “coming in at [what the stall was at]” and then, “three, two, one, disc in.” I wasn’t fond of this change. For one thing, it doesn’t really accomplish much. Teams weren’t getting any advantages from checking the disc in themselves, so it’s not at all important to switch this responsibility to observers. I suppose it could help to regulate the time at which the disc is tapped in, so if it was executed perfectly, it might improve the game. At this tournament, though, its execution was far from perfect. It wasn’t always clear exactly when the disc was in, and people couldn’t always hear it, which resulted in several pointless delays after people moved too early. One time, our defense wasn’t even aware he was calling it in at all, which resulted in an easy score for the other team. This tournament’s implementation of this rule gets a grade of D, but I could see it being beneficial after being ironed out.

3) Active stall counts: Players initiate the stall by saying “stalling” within 3 meters from the thrower, and then the observers counts out loud to ten. The play calls “stall” if he feels the observer said “ten” before the throw went off. On sunday they changed it so that the observers counted from 1 to 5 silently in order to preserve their voices. I like the idea of keeping the stall more regular, but the observers counted much slower than players usually do, and I think it gave too much time to throw. If this change were to become permanent, I think I would recommend also decreasing the stall count to 8. This change ended up being pretty confusing, as most players kept counting out of habit, and were often a second or two ahead of the observer. Overall I like the idea, but it took some getting used to and just seemed a little strange. Grade: B

4a) Travel calls (immediate referral): On Saturday, the players called travels, which were automatically either upheld or overturned by the observers. I like immediate referral over giving players the option to debate it themselves because players usually don’t have a great idea whether they traveled, and there’s almost no way anyone will change their mind by discussing it. There weren’t too many travels called, so this wasn’t very noticeable. It’s a solid rule with absolutely no ill effects. Grade: A

4b Travel calls (active): On Sunday, players could not call travels, and the observers called them actively. This resulted in a very substantial increase in travels called, which slowed down play quite a bit, and brought back two of our hucks. I’m not sure how I feel about this – it does increase the number actual travels that are called, which seems like it’s a good thing, but it also slows down the game. Frankly, it was annoying. I’m still not sure if this is better than the immediate referral system or not. Grade: A

This has been a fairly long post already, so I’ll finish with the write-up of our games in another post.

Josh vs. Florida

That is all.

I don’t think this will ever get old. I am a cuteness rating machine.

(The audio player doesn’t seem to be working on my computer, so here’s the link directly to the song.)

A Short History of Medicine

I have an earache:
2000 B.C. – Here, eat this root.
1000 A.D. – That root is heathen. Here, say this prayer.
1850 A.D. – That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.
1940 A.D. – That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.
1985 A.D. – That pill is ineffective. Here, take this antibiotic.
2000 A.D. – That antibiotic is artificial. Here, eat this root.

Yamaha P155

I’ve learned a few Chopin songs in that time and recorded them on the digital piano, but hadn’t gotten around to moving those recordings from the piano to my computer until now (motivated by my need to free up the recording slots on the digital piano without deleting the recordings I had made). It turned out to be somewhat of an ordeal.

The only way to move the file from the piano to a usb drive is in MIDI format, which apparently doesn’t actually contain a recording of music like an mp3 file, but contains the information about the sound (or something like that), which needs to be interpreted by a program. Windows comes with a program that can do a very basic job of this, but it sounds terrible, so in order to get anything that sounds decent, or even like a piano at all, you need some program to interpret the MIDI file and then convert it into an mp3. The best option is a virtual piano program, but those are at least $180-$250 dollars from what I saw. Instead, I managed to find a free program that uses “sound font” files to interpret MIDI files, and then I managed to find a decent, free, sound font file. In the end, after two+ hours of scouring the web in an attempt to enlighten my confused state of mind, I finally got a decent, but not great-sounding version of my recording.

It seems that you just can’t get a really good piano sound from a MIDI file without paying a bunch of money. The other option would be to buy cords to link directly from my piano to my computer, allowing me to skip the MIDI format (I think), but that would require buying new cords, plus from what I can tell my computer and piano both have suboptimal audio line in/out  jacks, so the sound quality might not be great that way either. In conclusion, if anybody wants to donate $200 for a virtual piano program, that would be awesome. I will give you free recordings of my songs… and possibly cookies! But if you don’t love art, beauty, and generally everything good with the world, I can understand that too.

Anyway, here is my recording of Chopin’s Nocturne No.20 in C# minor. This was the first song I learned in February, and this particular recording was made soon after I got the piano, some time in June. I’d say most of the song is decent, but the ending is quite awesome by my standards, so it deserves the distinction of my first posted song (I’m speaking of my performance of the song, of course; the song itself is obviously amazing, as is everything written by Chopin).

Recording songs like this has made me appreciate just how difficult it is to perform these things. I have the ability to nail every part of the songs I’ve recorded, and I usually at least do rather well in every section, but it’s incredibly hard to get through a whole song without substantially messing up somehow. I’ve yet to make a recording that I just felt great about, all the way through. I’ve also noticed that simply the fact that I’m recording makes me nervous; these people have to get up and play in front of thousands of people and a professional video recording, which in some cases will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. That’s quite a feat.

Well, it’s good to know that almost every contemporary world leader has political views pretty much opposite mine.

Via Talking Points Memo.

Both sad and funny, but mostly funny.

ABC reporter who doesn’t understand how income taxes work finds rich people who don’t know either and makes a story out of it.

Both Sad and Funny
Josh Marshall
Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:01:28 GMT