By American ideology I meant that everyone can become anything they want if only they work hard. Everyone can be a hero and defy their fate. Therefore if someone is in need, it's their fault for not working hard enough. If they don't have the money to afford medicine, then they don't deserve it, end of story.
And additionally, a gut-level fear of government and way too much trust in corporations.
A beginner can grasp musical notation; its rules are simple and consistent, and the conventions are well-documented and reasonably straightforward. This blog post should be evidence of that: the beginner who wrote it clearly has the basics of notation down, and there are no inaccuracies at least with regard to the notation.
A beginner can't grasp the motivations behind the design of musical notation, and I don't expect a beginner to grasp the motivations behind the design of any complex system. That does not make the system absurd.
Maybe the notation is optimized for efficiency for experts, at the cost of beginner-friendliness. Maybe it's representing something genuinely hard. Absurdity is possible but not the only possible reason.
If a beginner can't immediately grasp mathematical notation, or a programming language - or a native language for that matter - is that evidence that it is, in fact, absurd? The musical notation has evolved (toward some local optimum) to be useful for practicing musicians and composers, at the expense of having a learning curve.
Programming languages are a lot easier to grasp. ;)
The oldest programming languages are only 50 years old, whereas the oldest music notation is at least 4000 years old.
Most programming lanuguages haven't crossed any spoken languages, but modern music notation & terminology has been heavily developed by countries all over Asia and Europe.
This is a big reason why musical notation seems so weird at first, especially to engineers, because it is a legacy that comes from a different time, a different context, in a different language. The people who developed musical notation had different math, different logic and different musical motivations than we have now.
Think about this for a while and it starts to feel like a miracle that musical notation works at all, not to mention how well it works.
Programming languages were developed by people nearer to us in every way, and made to be logical and simple, so it makes sense that they're easier to grasp quickly.
Can't speak for the parent, but as far as I can recall, I did. Well, maybe not literally immediately, but to me, the syntax was generally the easiest part of learning a programming language. (It probably helps that they are often very similar to each other.)
The only things that were hard were forgetting to write semicolons after statements in C (I have previously mostly written Pascal), and C declarators — but even the latter were easy after I learned that "declaration reflects use".
Well, in our programming world new languages seem to come out every week, trying to find better ways to write programs. By this standard a new way to encode music is long overdue.
In that metaphor, coming up with a new way to encode music is like releasing a new programming language and then asking everyone to write their own compiler for it. Not impossible, but it would have to be a hell of an encoding!
Maybe not as many as programming languages, but new notations do appear time to time. It's just that none has ever got as popular as the traditional notation, I guess.
I mean, it's generally agreed that English as a language has accrued so much historical baggage that it's shed any elegance or coherence it may or may not have once had. It would honestly be surprising to me if the same thing didn't happen to musical language.
well a beginner can't really grasp shorthand or kanji either, right? A beginner not being able to get things means that the learning curve is higher.
Most musical notation is meant for non-beginners, right? And a lot of the beginner confusion is from features that are useful for advanced users. So there's a tradeoff.
There might, of course, be changes to be had. But a lot of beginner confusion is because the higher-level abstractions are needed.
A good example in mathematical notation is order of operations. Why not just do left to right? Or just going with Polish Notation?
Standard order of operations work well for people working with large formula, because they allow you to write many common things without many parentheses. But mandatory parentheses + left-to-right only would be easier for beginners.
But it is not about what theory is most likely. If two theories or models generate exactly the same predictions, they are equally true. Occam just says that in this case we should chose the simpler.
But if the theories produce different predictions, then it doesn't matter which one is simplest, the one which most closely match reality is the truest.
In practice we are often in situations where multiple hypothesis explain the data we observe but diverge from each other on data that we have not yet observed and it may be difficult to create the necessary situations to tell between them. In these cases we may still wish to choose a hypothesis to make predictions from.
There are an infinity of possible models to choose from, with most of those models containing no less information than the phenomenon they seek to model. Predictive power is what is important for models; a model that has enough dials to be adjusted to work with any new piece of data might be 'correct' but it is not useful. My favourite example of this is the fact that when the heliocentric model of the solar system was being developed, the geocentric model was providing much more accurate values for the positions of celestial bodies for a long time because it had had years of being tweaked to do so. Initially, it was the simplicity of the heliocentric model rather than its accuracy that was appealing.
Take high school physics, where you assume that there is no resistance, cows are spherical, gravity is exactly the same everywhere, and so on. Assuming all that, you can make a much simpler model than when you don't.
The most dangerous part of the whole surgery is what happens if something goes wrong midway after they've cut the heads out?
Scenario 1: Irrecoverable scenario where they can't sew the head to the new body. Now what? Will they sew it back to the original body? Let the guy die(What does this even mean at this stage)?
Scenario 2: Head can be put on new body but they can't do it all properly, when and how do they call it quits? What will be the state of the guy? Will they just him?
Other unknown unknowns.
Apart from the fact that the patient has taken a leap of faith, to prefer death over suffering a medical condition all his life. You have to say the doctors involved in this, and you need some really crazy amounts of courage to even attempt something like this.
In practice there are three properties that help with schema evolution:
1) open types - typically applications consuming Ion data
do not restrict the fields included (that is, they
gracefully ignore, and often even pass along additional
fields). Schemas may grow while being backwards
compatible with existing software.
2) Type annotations allow embedding schema information into
a datagram without the need for agreeing on special
fields. Datagrams may have multiple values at the top
level, so its possible to provide multiple
representations without introducing a new top-level
container.
3) The only data might need to be shared between a producer
and consumer is a SymbolTable which may be applicable to
several schemas and may be shared inline if necessary.
Otherwise, objects in a datagram are always inspectable
and discoverable without additional metadata.
