watching the sunset from cornell's Slope is something of a community event. there's the old couple, sitting side by side, not touching, not speaking, drinking in the sun color. there's the group of nameless teenyboppers, potential students with disposable cameras and high giggles and miniskirts. there's the lonely photographer, headphones in place, gazing intently as his camera twists and struggles. there are internationals from india and korea and france, boisterous, quick line everyone up on the railing, ok smile *click*, gone. the singletons, post-docs, sitting five feet from everyone and shyly making quiet conversation as the evening passes. all the while the sun slips lower, now cloud-hidden, now gone. and you stand, pick up your blanket and brush the grass from your legs, and walk back to your car with your new family. no goodbye's, no have-a-nice-evening's, no friendly smiles. just silent anticipation, silent knowledge of future encounters.
there was a car crash as the sun set last night. (you can hear everything that goes on in the city from the slope.) *srreeeweeereeweweeerewewerewTHUNK* it was the impact that did it--we hear brakes squealing all the time, that's not unusual. they're not followed by THUNK's. quite a dramatic effect. all conversation stopped in midsentence, all heads turned toward downtown. we didn't hear any ambulances afterward, so maybe it wasn't serious.
in other news, there's a nature article about the corollaries between music and language. there's a study that found that the number of times a word appears in a literary work is roughly equivalent to the inverse of its frequency (or frequency squared, depending on your source--the details aren't relevant at the moment). the explanation is that literary works create their own context--in my first paragraph, it's more likely that i'd type sun than ferrari, for example. a physicist from argentina found that the same principle applies to notes in tonal music. makes sense, if you think about it--a work in g major is going to contain a lot of b-naturals. what i found interesting, though, is that the principle doesn't really apply to non-tonal works (also makes sense). the article (not the study, i don't think) explains that they have a much lower level of "meaningful context" than tonal works.
well, that's bunk, as any musician with theory training can attest. much atonal and non-tonal music is highly systematized at the pitch level, at least as much if not moreso than tonal music. (in particular, those schoenberg pieces the study used.) good grief, part of the definition of atonal/non-tonal music is that it doesn't recognize one pitch over another, so of course this study won't say much about it. i wonder what would have been the result had the study not used individual notes as its word corrolaries. individual notes are more like individual letters, savez? a piece in g major can contain a g-sharp and still be tonal, but you won't know it without the context. now, you take a set--that'd be a bit more along the lines of a musical "word." and i'll bet it would show a high level of "meaningful context" in atonal/non-tonal music. anyway. be interesting, no? (the actual study is available for download in a variety of formats, if you're interested.)
lessee, other notables. the us computer emergency readiness team is recommending that people use a different browser than ie, due to the latest ie security exploits. so it's official, guys! ie sucks, ditch it! also, the sovereignty handover in iraq happened this morning, two days ahead of schedule. be interesting to see if we're really leaving....
o, i've still got gmail invitations to give away, get 'em while they're hot.