Blog
Voyagers Like Us
And yet, when I leash up my big fuzzy dog Tiny and take him outside for an evening walk in rural Northern Minnesota in a season of ever-shorter days, I still look up. A clear night sky on a crisp evening still inspires that sort of wonder that projects like Voyager and science communicators like Sagan (not to mention the late great Patrick Stewart and Star Trek: The Next Generation) once imparted to me. And I recognize that despite the fact that science as a publicly-funded enterprise (rather than an avocation of pallid upper-middle class eccentrics, as in the more distant past) has been put with less than noble motives to less than noble ends, there is still a message in milestones like Voyager that remains important, maybe even more so now.
Sabbatical’s End
People sometimes think a sabbatical is a vacation. And though I joked to that effect at times, it is not. It is a chance to step back from teaching for (in my case) an academic year, to rebuild and decide what direction to take with one’s future (I already taught a class this summer, but this is officially coming back now). I loved being an academic, it was my dream job; but after all that, I admit there were moments when I thought about doing something else with the last couple thousand weeks of my life (noting that 40 years is about 2,040 weeks, and if I am lucky and attend to my health a bit better, I might have that long). Being a public educator and scientist is a really difficult place to be right now. I understand why people in my profession are leaving, not just the profession, but the States, though I think we as a country will be lesser without them.
AI, Music, and Social Science
There are a lot of criticisms of AI. Some strike me as valid; others do not…but when I pause to think about exactly what AI applications in a certain domain, such as music, should be allowed or forbidden, I am at something of a loss. This is a shift from social problems to the aesthetic, artistic, dimension. I can’t seem to escape the Enlightenment tendency to treat the aesthetic as something subjective, relative to the eye of the beholder. As a middle-aged guitar player who has spent thousands of hours learning to play, there’s the tempting reactionary tack, that people who use AI to make music aren’t “really” musicians, because they don’t “really” play an “instrument.” Here’s why I think that’s arbitrary, silly nonsense…
Parsimony, Plans, and the Gum Wrapper Guitar Amp
I found two easy ways to practice what I preach, to stop functioning from overwork to burnout like that crappy old guitar amp.