2003-2009

Rhapsody on Chinese Themes

The seemingly celebratory language is farcical. It is in fact a most depressing and suffocating piece.

Terribly orchestrated in this draft, but the instrumentation outline is there.

listen to Kennedy BS

… in this ad:

Here’s the quote in question at 0:37:

One of the things which I think has increased the cost of living has been this administration’s reliance on a high interest rate policy.

In fact, the issue of the day was over fiscal policy being too tight and being overly concerned about the threat of inflation.

old problem about mirrors

Why do left and right flip but top and bottom do not in a mirror?
After all, the plane of mirroring is neutral to all directions parallel to the plane.

(Read the article)

daylight savings time

… is a stupid idea. Yes, daylight is nice to have, but then go to work from 7 to 4 instead of 8 to 5. The only reason to change the clocks instead of changing schedules is because changing schedules (and habits in general) is hard. So we must pretend 7AM is 8AM. In fact, as long as artificial lighting exists, having a non-symmetric waking schedule will always be the norm, I argue. If daylight savings time existed year-round, people would start going to work at 9AM, and end up with no savings of daylight at all. Why don’t I break all my light bulbs and start getting up at 4AM and going to bed at 8PM. That maximizes daylight usage not to mention you see both sunrise and sunset. Sounds good to me. Why doesn’t everybody do that?