> You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too.
You really can't. They aren't laws of nature, but they are based on observation: "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character. Unless I want that effect, I should avoid that." "When I frustrate a leading tone, it makes the harmonic effect less clear."
Schoenberg's system starts with the arbitrary: pick a tone row and use it! But there are rules based on observation there, too: if you use tonal constructions in atonal music, it frustrates the listener's expectations, so don't do that. The ear can recognize the rows when transposed, reversed, and altered by other techniques, so those are good. Serialism is less fully-developed and lacks the deep cultural background of tonal music, but it's not entirely arbitrary either.
> "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character."
This is partly true, but that rule (as with many other rules of strict composition) originated with purely vocal music which had to be made easy to sing. There's plenty of music for instruments like the piano or the guitar (even literate music, starting from the early 20th c. or so) where consecutive fifths are played all the time and such a "blending" effect is not really heard. Probably a result of timbre (these instruments have a bit of perceptual "roughness" to them that helps prevent a blended tone) as well as musical context (when consecutive fifths are just part of the music, that kind of sound is expected and easier to understand for the listener).
James O'Keefe's minor infractions seem out of place on this list. It sounds to me like Forbes might be disappointed in him for other, more philosophical reasons.
This is certainly a topic of debate (obviously) and not settled within, as far as I can tell, any "section" of society.
Anyway, even assume you buy into that, it's usually unidirectional: a person's personal infractions don't necessarily have to destroy one's appreciation for their artwork.
The O'Keefe case (not that I necessarily do or do not agree with it) is the reverse: his work reflects poorly on his character. This directional flow, as far as I can tell, is not really hotly debated. People don't really debate "does engaging in bad behavior make you a bad person?" they just debate whether specific behavior is bad or not. Totally different from the art/artist debate.
Do you think it makes a difference if the person is bad person but their work contributes meaningfully to their field vs if the person is affable but their work is geared towards reducing the signal to noise ratio of other channels of communication?
> Project Veritas is an American far-right activist group founded by James O'Keefe in 2010. The group produces deceptively edited videos of its undercover operations, which use secret recordings in an effort to discredit mainstream media organizations and progressive groups.Project Veritas also uses entrapment to generate bad publicity for its targets, and has propagated disinformation and conspiracy theories in its videos and operations.
> In 2009, Project Veritas associates published misleading videos that depicted ACORN employees providing advice on concealing illegal activity, causing ACORN to shut down after losing funding; the Attorney General of California cleared ACORN of wrongdoing in 2010, and the associates paid a total of $150,000 in settlements to an ACORN employee who sued for defamation. NPR CEO Vivian Schiller resigned in 2013 after Project Veritas released a deceptively edited video portraying another NPR executive making controversial comments about the Tea Party movement and NPR's federal funding. Project Veritas unsuccessfully attempted to mislead The Washington Post into publishing false information about the Roy Moore sexual misconduct allegations in 2017; the Post won a Pulitzer Prize after uncovering the operation.
> The organization's board fired O'Keefe in February 2023 for what it said was financial malfeasance with donor money.
To be frank, what has Project Veritas done that is objectively right? All of their explosive "revelations" turned out to be fake, and when they tried their scam on an investigative journalist, said journalist instead pulled the thread and thoroughly outclassed Project Veritas. Only then did they have the temerity to proclaim that their goal all along was in trying to keep media honest.
I only know him from his Project Veritas work, so I went to his personal Wikipedia page to see what redeeming activities he’s performed but it looks like just a lot more of the same - lies, attempted entrapment, attempted sexual assault, attempted voter fraud, etc.
So I must ask, what has he done that’s “objectively right?”
O'Keefe's content isn't much more egregious than Maddow's Russiagate coverage or any of the insane content pushed by politics streamers with huge reach (to children, no less) like Hasan Piker...but yet they're media darlings for being on the correct side along the overton window.
But if that ML tool is trained on modern video, depending on its capabilities it may subtly modernize aspects of the video in ways that lessen the "past is a foreign country" effect, leading us to believe that the past was more like the present than it in truth was. It's a trade-off between removing technological barriers between us and the person, so we can connect to their recorded legacy, and removing sociological barriers, which we probably want to preserve.
The past was more like the present than we like to believe. The past was no more sepia than it was black and white. Just like the 80s wasn’t as bold and neon as pop culture portrays.
In media we use colour to exaggerate the differences of the past, to make it feel different and foreign to our senses, rather than represent them accurately. So if you want a more accurate representation then you absolutely should be training your models on modern video.
If the colors are just someone guessing I would honestly not want to see it. I find those kind of wishful fantasies harmful. Not much different than when favorite book is converted to a movie and actors stomp out your imagined characters.
If you hadn’t had a picture of your grandma at all, would you want AI to generate one based on a description of her and tell you it’s a picture of your grandma?
There is a short movie on Google which is a film of a train rolling into a station, and then the same one sharpened by AI. The second one is marvelous to watch.
There's another of a colorized ancient movie of a trolley ride in Europe. It's very fun to watch.
Ya know, when people restore old cars, if they want to drive them, they'll usually do a few upgrades to make the car safer and more driveable. And there's nothing wrong with that.
I'm curious. Do you ever watch and enjoy movies from the 20's and 30's? For the silent flicks, do you think that the music played during the screening by some random starving artist plinking on a crummy piano or squeaking away on a violin is part of the "vision" of the director?
Lots of people today simply turn away from any movie that is black and white.
I’d like to see rolling data on how people are turning away from lower quality media. Or what premium is being placed on 720p+ video versus standard.
There’s a reason video sites offer a filter for HD and YouTube videos get keyword stuffed for 8k even when they aren’t.
I am very curious how Apple’s spatial video lands.
From reviewer descriptions, the experience is such a major change from standard HD video I am wondering if depthscaling “old” video will become a thing too.
Personally, I find the constant breaking of the flow in a silent movie so the dialog card can be shown very irritating after a while. It's also annoying that the card is shown for too long (for slow readers) and there's a fair amount of dialog you can lip read that is not on the cards.
I seriously doubt dialog cards are part of any director's "vision".
The bad music slapped on the DVDs is also a serious turnoff. Music easily makes or breaks a movie. For example, the music on Lord of the Rings adds greatly to my enjoyment of it. The Hobbit music is utterly forgettable, and makes the poor movie even worse.
For another example, the movie "Hawaii" has a most excellent music soundtrack. Its sequel, "The Hawaiians", has a completely forgettable soundtrack, which contributes to the movie falling flat on its face.
I suspect much of "Star Wars" success came from the music.
If the colors are just someone guessing I would honestly not want to see it. I find those kind of wishful fantasies harmful
I think disclosure is high priority here. If you know it's been cleaned up, and colourized, then you can watch it as you would the original.
Because, what I think people are saying here is that older cameras already have made the equivalent of "someone guessing". The framerate is variable and jumps, the colour is off and variable, rhe film is degraded, and even the people in the films act quite unnatural, for they are very aware of being filmed.
I get what you mean about authenticity, but I think full disclosure takes care of that.
I wonder how much the actual average level of education has changed, though the topics may be different. Could those 4th-grade dropouts read and understand a newspaper, calculate how many pounds of barley it takes to plant the south field now that we cleared that new area, and work out a 1-in-10 slope for the new shed roof? I bet most of them could, and that a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs — which may be less easily ascertained.
The examination reflects the curriculum, and the preparatory schools taught to the examination.
Henry Adams on the Harvard of his day (he entered in 1854):
"disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong prejudices. He knew little, but his mind remained supple, ready to receive knowledge."
"In the one branch he most needed--mathematics--barring the few first scholars, failure was so nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value, and whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an accident or the personal favor of the professor. Here his education failed lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathematician; at worst he would never have cared to be one; but he needed to read mathematics, like any other universal language, and he never reached the alphabet."
But a) perhaps the mathematical curriculum had improved over the fifteen years between his entrance and that exam, and b) a large proportion of those who write about their schooling speak so poorly of it that one ends by suspecting exaggeration.
I can't even figure out what some of these are asking.
Question 5 of the History and Geography section is just "Leonidas, Pausanias, Lysander."
Am I supposed to write about what they have in common? Who they each were? When and where they ruled? Other questions seem to include some form of instruction while being equally short ("Compare Athens with Sparta") but that one and a couple others are just a topic with seemingly no direction at all.
I would expect most Harvard-bound high school seniors to be able to breeze through the math section. Geometry was a ninth grade subject for me so I probably would have forgotten some bits if I took this unprepared as a senior, but it wouldn't have taken much studying ro refresh on that. There may be some trick question I'm not noticing, but the Latin section seems extremely simple. Ancient Greek has certainly vanished from HS curriculums, but if Harvard was testing on it two years of Latin and two years of Greek would suffice to pass those sections.
I think overall a Harvard-bound student today would do better on this test than a Harvard student from 1869 would do on the SAT, but I'm not sure if that even means anything.
That's an amazing test, if what you want to evaluate is the candidate's immersion in the wellspring of Western culture (and some math). I'm struck by how little fluency the Greek test requires, though: it looks to me (with my "small Latine and lesse Greeke") like it's mostly grammar work, since the difficult words are all supplied.
I would have loved living among people whose elites valued Western culture so highly.
You still can. You just need to play online matches of Rome Total War, which is where I learned the vast majority of my classical historical knowledge, lol
> a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs
When most people lived on farms (up until the 1950s), there was less need to be good factory workers. But there were more factories offering more employment in America, so the stats say you are correct.
And pretty much all those jobs you're talking about are gone or low paying. Farmers aren't calculating how many pounds of barley per acre they need. They are operating computer controlled heavy equipment that does a huge amount of the calculations for them because someone thousands of miles away wrote magicial electric symbols in sand. The world is a vastly more complicated place now.
Where I live it's almost all third generation "family farms", those that are still here after others have left.
The farms are bigger but they're still at core family farms and businesses with capital costs in the millions to tens of millions, run and worked by people that farm and almost all whom have other jobs and|or businesses in parallel.
One typical neighbour is planting out several hundred acres, has a side supply business with the grain coop to site several five story concrete grain silos, owns and runs four or five local school buses (and employs drivers) with a partnership in a bee hive placement business (for honey but mainly for pollination in the district).
Between them they all have a basic grasp of (with different members specialising) building, radio equipment, GPS equipment and data managment, double entry bookkeeping and employee paperwork for a million+ per annum turn over, mechanics for cars, tractors, bob cats, etc, agonomy, animal health, first aid, welding, carpentry, . . .
Hmm, while I think of it the same family has the local volunteer fire chief (another part time job) who handles bush fire preparedness in the area, fire breaks etc.
There's no reliance on "magical someones" thousands of miles away - those services are used, sure - but they're not counted on to be always available or there when needed - farming would just grind to halt with that level of unquestioning dependance.
Pretty poor assumption being that I come from a family of midwestern farmers that have been integrating high technology into their operations for decades.
>There's no reliance on "magical someones" thousands of miles away
You just listed out a huge number of things before that where they do have said reliance. Those bobcats/cars/tractors are not made in their neighborhood. Instead there is a vast network that supplies these objects to them at a national and worldwide level. If the fertilizer doesn't show up in spring, yields plummet. If the fuel trucks supplying petro stop farming in the mid-west stops. We aren't running steam engines that can be fed off of locally sourced wood (ok, maybe the Amish still are).
You live in a global economy that farming depends on. This entire rugged individualism works ok with short term problems, and falls apart as long term problems build up.
> operating computer controlled heavy equipment that does a huge amount of the calculations for them
They're also measuring soil nutrient and nitrogen content, integrating global price signals into their sourcing and supply chain, and paying attention to the genetic characteristics of their cultivars. I'd wager American farmers, today, are vastly more knowledgeable about their craft, at a fundamental level, than farmers in the 1930s.
> i bet most of them could, and that a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs — which may be less easily ascertained.
Interesting to order it this way because, as the engine of meritocracy, education is supposed to determine life direction, not be reflective of it. Of course this isn't how people actually think of it, but we don't live in a meritocracy either now do we
What did they receive for humanities though? School is and should be about you making a better more complete member of society, not just a better cog in the economy.
The fractious minority is here, yes, but also a large number of people like me who don't care about display quality, "desktop interaction semantics," or surface consistency at all, but care deeply about being able to use their computer as they please.
I'm very happy with my Linux desktop. I think MacOS looks like a child's toy and Windows looks like it was created by 100 different people who hate each other. Each to their own.
After reading the article, I'm struck by a single thought: while that was imaginative and at points interesting, what did the writer actually say? It was a little like the sticky guy at the coffee shop who keeps talking, changing subject multiple times without finishing any, and won't let you get a word in edgewise: you like him well enough, but the conversation was for his own benefit, not yours.
I have a hard time using Google Maps when driving these days, especially on vacation - I prefer to take the scenic route, but google’s got no eye for it.
What would an absolute frame of reference with regard to political opinion look like? I'm having a hard time conceiving such a thing, since not only does the range of opinion shift over time, but issues move into and out of relevance unpredictably.
It would be something like "select * from [reality]", except there are various problems like physically manifest reality is not the entirety of it, and our records of reality are often technically from the fantasy realm and the truth has been lost to time without our knowledge.
In the case of allsides.com, they're only comparing ~mainstream US media outlets against each other, but there are many cultures that would consider even left leaning US culture to be insanely far right.
In a more serious world, competent philosophers/linguists/historians/anthropologists/etc would deconstruct and expose these organizations for what they really are: propaganda outlets.
That applies both ways - there's no shortage of religious-rightist cultures on the planet that'd treat many sections of the U.S. right as quite left-leaning.
Even comparing to Europe, the memes that the US is to the right or left of Europe is just grossly wrong, often driven by taking one pet issue like public healthcare and using it as the base, when it's just one aspect of policy and there are others where Europe is markedly more moderate or conservative compared to the US.
Oftentimes those sorts of bias-rating sites also report clearly left-leaning outlets as more centrist than they are, and I wouldn't be surprised if outlets like the NYT get far higher ratings for factuality than they deserve.
You really can't. They aren't laws of nature, but they are based on observation: "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character. Unless I want that effect, I should avoid that." "When I frustrate a leading tone, it makes the harmonic effect less clear."
Schoenberg's system starts with the arbitrary: pick a tone row and use it! But there are rules based on observation there, too: if you use tonal constructions in atonal music, it frustrates the listener's expectations, so don't do that. The ear can recognize the rows when transposed, reversed, and altered by other techniques, so those are good. Serialism is less fully-developed and lacks the deep cultural background of tonal music, but it's not entirely arbitrary either.