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Tamar Haspel, Oyster farmer, James Beard award-winning Washington Post columnist and general nuisance feels - I think - treated unfairly by a colleague.

I needed to stop reading his piece after a few sentences. I didn't even make it to "I could go on. (And I do, ad nauseam, in the notes below.)"... which is way to far down for my taste. Yes, he went ad nauseam.

Also, "Medium member since August 2019". Yeah, no. Thanks.

My experience is that meds take the symptoms away. You no longer feel sad, but you are still "depressed". Kind of like pain medication takes the pain away, but your leg is still broken.

I experienced depression as symptom of a deeper "illness" of the brain that needs to be cured with psychotherapy. If it wasn't for that I'd still make the same mistakes again and again that made me depressed in the first place.

Stimulus generalization comes to mind. IIRC Pavlows dogs at some point reacted not just to the food, but even earlier on him entering the room.

I doubt that they train dogs like "Steve's having a seizure. Good! Get that dog here."

I imagine that you do a preliminary training with faked seizures to get responses right and then hope (meaning: Train under real conditions) that the dog will react on a real seizure as well.

Sick Societies by Robert Edgerton changed my view on pretty much all aspects of mankind.

By giving vivid examples of failing or badly functioning and "maladaptive" (processes in) various (indigenous) societies he made made me value our current state of existence very much: Government, rights, laws, police, infrastructure, jobs, and all that really are a great achievement of mankind.

Thanks, I’ll check that out. But otoh it’s another thing you’d have to carry around.

I‘ll also try buying glasses online as suggested elsewhere. I do that with contact lenses already (dailies for when I’m on stage).

70$ for glasses in Germany? I have to pay about 200€ per glas. Maybe weaker glasses are cheap. After all you can buy glasses in the supermarket for a few bucks.

Those modern glasses get scratches after just a few years of careful handling and cleaning only with „Mikrofaser“ in my experience. No fun having weak eyes in Germany.

Sorry, but no: Don't keep cats indoors or on a leash.

Cats are predators. And they need freedom. If you're concerned for birds et al. don't get a cat.

Don't be cruel to cats to satisfy your need for a pet by forcing your view of how nature should work onto them.

I paddled alot of these: The old wodden "Deltas" width the ridiculous beam width of 75cm as well as a monstrous version made out of composite that was near impossible to trim in windy conditions. I hated those.

I made a few strokes in the famous 2001 model Olimpia that was extremely difficult to trim. Like dancing on a toothpick. I liked the characteristics of that boat though: Very stiff and always straightening itself up. Due to it's shape it had bad directional stability. In situations with wind or a competitor next to you, you had the disadvantage of having to steer alot. Steering slows you down and costs stamina as hell.

Then the Dominator that had a much better directional stability, but would always tilt unless you kept in in balance. I never really liked that.

Now Plastex uses a trapezoid geometry in it's Fighter-line. For me that's the best of both worlds. It combines the characteristics I like from the Olympia and the directional stability of the Dominator. It's a pleasure to drive that boat! Still, it's even less stable in waves than the other ones and I regularly get frightened in churned up water. The Dominator was much more smooth here.

Edit: Spelling

My sister instead of her hand turns the page nearly 90° counter clockwise. She writes "upwards". I always thought that was pretty neat.

Well, transfers are "reversible". There's nothing technical stopping a bank to wire money back.

But, banks are not allowed to mess with your funds. If it's in you account, then it's yours. It would be illegal for a bank to simply reverse a transfer. Crooks are protected by the laws as well.

Even if some obvious mistake was made at a e.g. payment provider and funds were wired to the wrong bank account, your bank has to send you a letter asking for your permission to reverse the mistake. Reading a batch file twice is a nice example: You get two credit entries, but the bank is not allowed to reverse one.

What happens with smaller scams is that crooks withdraw funds as soon as they've been booked. So most of the time the money already is physically lost before a (legal) claim arrives. So there's that.

I usually just grab another paper towel or toilet paper to open the door. I also carry a small bottle of hand disinfection with me especially in the winter. I use it after e.g. grabbing handle bars or seats on the train. Comes in handy as I not always remember to not touch my face (eyes especially when I'm tired).

> In other words, the perception of dissonance isn't musical, it's cultural.

Very well said.

As my prof for music ethnology said: There's no agreement on intervals in the world except for a prime being a prime.

The guy dedicated a couple of pieces to my professor - a classical singer. What's your point?

> It doesn't sound wrong to hear tritones, or minor seconds, or diminished and altered triads, or stacked fourths.

That depends on the composer. I'm doing Hollander currently. I got to sing a hell lot of tritoni and chromatic progressions. That's pretty difficult.

But it doesn't sound that way at all. If you hear it "from the outside" you just think "yeah, that's how it's supposed to be.

I also did a contemporary Serbian opera a couple of years back than. Serbian folk music as I experienced it always sounds a litte "wrong but cool". Was near impossible to sing, but to the listener: Yeah, sounds good.

All but Peter and the Wolf maybe.

And as my top poster dharma noted: Jazz and "classical music" share many similarities. Definitely true. Think of Scriabin piano somata No 5 written in 1907. Or even go back to Beethoven No 32, 2nd movement.

I think you are oversimplifying this.

Many classically trained pianists are excellent at improvisation. Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart were respected pianists. Wagner wrote the Hollander by improvising on the piano reciting the lyrics. Beethoven was feared by other pianists for his level of skill at improvisation. Mozart improvised most of his piano sonatas as far as I remember.

Gould made a recording of Strauss songs I think. The singer said in an interview, that Gould just started to improvise in Strauss' style and harmonics (Strauss is pretty damn difficult).

Contemporary pianists often know both. Anecdotal evidence: A colleague of mine from music university studied classical piano and was a regular at jazz clubs in Dusseldorf.

It is very interesting to see differences in brain structure from classical to jazz pianists. Maybe a hint at how (muscle-)memory and motion planning is stored? A hint at how volatile brain structure is? It would be interesting to see, if e.g. a classically trained pianist switching to jazz exclusively also has a significant restructuring of his brain.

Edit: Now that I've read the article and the abstract of the paper (the paper is behind Elsevier's paywall), I understand that jazz pianists are quicker at planning new movements (a.k.a. Chord progressions) with the downside of making making more mistakes, while classically trained pianists are slower here, but faster at recognizing and repeating unlearned ("unusual") finger movements.

Would be interesting to see a comparison to pianists doing both jazz and classical music.

Professional orchestras can play the standards without a conductor and effectively often do in those cases where the conductor is borderline incompetent. I've sung Beethoven 9 for example. The "conductor" (one of the several hundred assistants of Karajan...) bought a good orchestra from prague. He did the whole piece in ones. Nobody watched him. The orchestra members know this piece well and played without him.

Often you'll find conductors where you can't read anything: "Now where's the 1? Well, last bar he did it with his wrist, now he's doing it with the tip of the stick, o wait,now he's swimming (unclear speed) again. Ok, now he's changing his frame of conducting (the area in which a conductor does his movement). Wait, what? Now he's giving the one behind his back. How am I supposed to ... Screw him. I'll just listen to the music and start a little early (you hear the orchestra with delay, as you often only get the reflection from the audience's walls).

Edit: We use the rehearsals to get to know a new conductor and to decide when to actively not look at him and get our marks from someplace else. Often you'll get so confused that it's better to "just do it, it'll be ok."

Also I have seen musicians in the orchestra conducting their colleagues in difficult parts where the "masterchief" wasn't any good. We do the same on stage in those cases.

And the merchant needs to have a valid direct debit mandate that he has submit to his bank which in turn transmit it to your bank for it to check. After your bank has confirmed the mandate the transfer can be initiated.

SDD can be reversed without giving any reason for a whooping 8 weeks by the customer sometimes simply by clicking "reverse" and entering a TAN.

B2B is a different beast though.

Think of it this way: If we knew that star is going to go nova within the next 100 years, could we (science-fiction hat and faster-than-light travel on) send help?

No, because it already went nova a long time ago.

It seems to me that humans can predict 3D spaces pretty good.

I've done alot of construction work. After some practice you can measure quite precisely what does fit where and even how long something is. Our brains seem to be able to "compute" such things despite all the difficulties of constructing a coherent image of our surroundings in the first place.

Or think of moving your huge couch through the narrow stairway of your house - we can predict how you need to turn it so it fits. Or think of truck drivers that are able to maneuver their large vehicles within cm range. Even when they can't see some of it (dead angles) and need to rely on their mental model.

Did I misunderstand your comment? Could you elaborate what I am missing?

I also do remember somewhat fondly when Dresden still had actual police officers regulating traffic by hand. It's been some time since I left Dresden and I don't remember the crossings. Oh, and the frequent power outages..

I am no physicist and I cannot make heads or tails from stress-energy tensor.

However, I get suspicious when someone argues by analogy. Your "my car remembers a crash, furthermore humans do remember, therefore space could also remember gravity" does not seem reasonable to me.

I am also not sure why my post got downvoted.

Edit: As I think about it, "but Einstein showed that you can bend space without mass" again is an argument by analogy. It doesn't matter what analogies exist. The theory should be tested according to empiric evidence. Pulling your analogies together judt for the sake of abandoning a different theory - where's the point in that?

You can apply Occam's Razor here. Which is more likely?

That there's stuff that has a mass but doesn't interact well with light, or that space is able to curve itself without mass, thus also rendering Einstein false.

This immediately raises further questions: How long does space remember? How's the exact mechanism? Where and how does empty space store that information? What happens to E=mc2?

Yes, it does. But I had completely forgotten about it until now.

I think there already is a kind of therapy. I read that they basically determine the exact frequency of your tinnitus. Then you give them music you like and they filter the frequency out. By listening to the altered music, the tinnitus is reduced. It seemed to work quiet well, but I forgot what the procedure is called.

I'm hearing a tinnitus for over 10 years now, so I know what it's like. :)

Can we agree, that there's no one 'best interest for the people'? That there's a multitude of different opinions and interests that may be good to some and bad for others, that can be 'good' and still mutually exclusive?

I assume the benevolent dictator would be someone, who allows different opinion, and who allows his policy to be changed by his people. And if they want to be governed by someone else, he would step down, have his own power limited or stripped. That wouldn't be a dictator then.

And you'd still have to deal with his administration which has it's own momentum. The 'benevolent dictator' could simply be replaced (killed) by his own clique with someone more in line with their interests.

The 'benevolent dictator' is a nice oxymoron, but that's it. For a good and stable dictatorship you really want to control all three powers. What good is a dictator if I can sue him and his clique?

What does 'genuine good intentions' even mean? Whose intentions? His, yours? Mine, or the ones from the guy next door? Who decides what good intentions are?

I too sing on my way at to work. I'm using public trains so I usually can't sing with full voice. I have several exercises I can do quietly. Also, whenever I need to learn scores for a gig or an upcoming production, I do this on the train. Here I'm more productive than at home on the piano.