"Jam," by Karen Chase

I usually hate stream-of-consciousness writing.  It confuses and irritates me.  (See "Susie Asado," by Gertrude Stein.)  However, the poem "Jam," by Karen Chase, is a definite exception.  The stream-of-consciousness style fits the subject matter of "Jam" perfectly.  The end result is unique, interesting, and very enjoyable.  You can read "Jam" here.

π

I wrote a calculator program a couple days ago to calculate pi.  It was a very interesting experiment!

I used a Taylor series to do this.  If you let f(x) = arctan(x), then if x = 1, f(x) = π/4.  So if you calculate the Taylor series for f(x), the sum as the number of terms approaches infinity will approach π/4.  Here's the series:

     ∞
y = Σ  (-1)^(n-1) * x^(2n-1) / (2n-1)
    n=1

Let x=1, and then multiply the series by 4.

I programmed my brother's TI-84 Plus SE (because that's much faster than my TI-83) to calculate about 10,000 terms of the series.  The calculator thought for about two minutes, and returned an answer that was only correct to four or five digits.  That gave me a new respect for supercomputers that can calculate billions of digits of pi!  I wish I knew of a way to plug this equation into our computer and see how it did.

Poetry

I've been taking a course in and extracurricularly studying a lot of poetry lately, as part of my preparation for the English Literature AP exam which I so stupidly signed up for.  I didn't know very much about poetry before, so I've been finding this very interesting.

• Poetry is approachable, and by normal people.  It can be read, understand, and enjoyed.
  
• Poetry is very interesting.  Poets express extremely complex thoughts in the most compact, effective way possible.
• Poetry appeals intellectually.  For me, poetry requires more brainpower than prose.  You have to really concentrate to read and interpret poetry, because poets don't waste words.  Even the aesthetic aspects of poetry are intellectually interesting (e.g. seeing how the poet's use of devices such as alliteration, assonance, meter, etc. make you feel a certain way).

Poets.org is a great resource.

"Remarkable family connections" *cough

MSNBC had an interesting headline this morning: "Researchers find remarkable family connections for the candidates" (link).  Namely, Barack Obama and Brad Pitt are ninth cousins, and Hillary Clinton and Angelina Jolie are ninth cousins, twice removed.  That all the major news networks are going crazy over this is nothing short of ludicrous.

Let's do the math.  If each of your parents have two siblings, and each sibling has four children, you will have 16 first cousins, 64 second cousins, 128 third cousins, and so forth, ending up with 1,048,576 ninth cousins.  You will have 17,891,328 ninth cousins, twice removed (number of ninth cousins + number of children in seventh generation + number of children in eleventh generation).  These numbers are astounding!  For reference, the population of New York State was 19,306,183 in 2006 (US Census Bureau).

Remarkable family connections?  Hardly.

News story

When I was warming up before a competition last week, some photographers from a local news station came into the room to take pictures and video clips.  The video clips were on the news, but I didn't see them and couldn't find them online.  I did find this news story, however, and that's me at the piano in the picture.

Tasmin Little

British violinist Tasmin Little has posted a few of her recordings as free downloads on her website, www.tasminlittle.net. The recordings are of the Bach Partita No. 3 in E major, Ysaye's Sonata No. 3 in D minor, and the Luslawice Variations by Paul Patterson. You can visit the download page here.

This is a very interesting idea. It's interesting both as a means of addressing copyright law and as a means of getting more people interested in classical music. The problem is, I listened to her recording of the Bach Partita, and it's terrible. It was horrendously out of tune, and her interpretation was extremely strange (way too fast!). I happen to be playing this piece, and I know how insanely difficult it is to get it in tune, but a professional violinist should be able to do better.

You can listen to the recording of the Preludio (the hardest movement) here.

(If you want to hear an excellent recording of this, check out the Milstein or Szeryng ones. You can watch the Milstein one on Youtube here.)

I'm still alive!

Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted.  Lots of things have been happening to me lately - good things, but they make my life crazy.

Fortunately, the piano competition business is slowing down.  For that I am very grateful.  Now I need to catch up in school, and, unfortunately, the AP exams are looming on the horizen.