You Got To Walk That Lonesome Valley

Spike Driver Blues

Candy Man Blues

Video above is incomplete. Can’t seem to find another video of Mississipi John Hurt playing the same tune. Check out the audio here.

Narciso Yepes is a ten string demon. In my uneducated opinion, he is a consummate musician of the highest order. When he plays, you can hear his amazing and absolute control over the music and his instrument in terms of technique, expression and the the wide tonal palette at his disposal. His playing is austere, sober and dignified, never lapsing into self-indulgent sentimentality or sensuousness, never giving more or less feeling than is necessary to convey the emotional content of the piece.

My favourite video is the first, where Yepes plays Recuerdos de la Alhambra, a piece by Tarrega that I loved immediately when I first heard my good friend Hunter play it more than 10 years ago. I’ve also included Romance, a piece that became popular in the 1950s.

Recuerdos de la Alhambra

Chaconne by J.S. Bach

Prelude – Lute Suite No.1 BWV 996 in E Minor by J.S. Bach

Romance

“In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide. The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God’s messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity.”

Via Clifford Pickover’s Reality Carnival.

Once in a while I discover music that catches me immediately when I hear it. The music of Egberto Gismonti is an example.

Egberto Gismonti was born on 5 Dec 1947. He trained as pianist and composer for 15 years with Nadia Bouglanger and Jean Barlaque in Paris. With Baden Powell as a decisive influence, Gismonti studied the guitar in 1967 so that he could play choros.

Information taken from “Masters of Jazz Guitar: The Story of the Players and Their Music” by Charles Alexander.

Magico

Dança das Cabeças

This was composed after he spent time with the Xingui Indians in the Amazon rain forest in the interior of Brazil in 1976 and played with a multi-string (12 string?) classical guitar.

In the videos below, he plays the piano.

7 Anéis

Palhaço

Frevo

Silence

On Philosophy

Forbes article on Selling your philosophy degree. Excerpt:

“You come equipped with a great set of mental muscles,” Byrne said.

“You come equipped with the ability to learn in new and unfamiliar areas. Typically, you come with the ability to express yourself well, to write well and to think deeply about problems and to sort of get outside the box of where everybody else is.”

On Meditation

The first few links are reports of the same study.

Kindness can be learnt through meditation. Excerpt:

Kindness can be learnt in the same way as playing a musical instrument, scientists claimed yesterday.

A new study involving Tibetan monks shows that studying meditation, even for a short time, can help people become more compassionate.

Researchers found that when people meditated, responses in the part of their brains which processed other’s emotions became stronger.

Study: Meditation can lead to greater compassion

Neuroscience may explain the Dalai Lama. Excerpt:

“Meditation may increase a person’s ability to feel empathy and benevolence for others, according to a study published March 26 in the journal PLoS ONE.

Scientists asked subjects — both expert meditators and novices — to practice compassion meditation while inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (MRI). The participants heard sounds designed to provoke an empathetic response, such as a distressed woman calling out, as well as positive sounds (a baby laughing) and neutral sounds (background noise at a restaurant).

... When subjects heard the sounds, both groups experienced more brain activity in areas associated with empathy and emotions while meditating than while not meditating. The distressed sounds elicited stronger empathetic responses than the positive and neutral noises, and the brain activity in these regions was much stronger in the seasoned meditators. “

A praying dog. Dog apes master who is a Buddhist monk, who is now trying to teach the dog how to meditate.

Negative emotions as paths to purification. I like the author’s Rumi quote (I’ve quote Rumi here before too!):

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Martin Gardner, the grand old man of recreational mathematics and puzzles, once wrote that Raymond Smullyan “is a unique set of personalities that includes a philosopher, logician, mathematician, musician, magician, humorist, writer, and maker of marvelous puzzles.”

In this delightful video, you can hear Smullyan playing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Beethoven Sonatas, Scarlatti Sonatas and Schubert’s Moments Musicauxand. Smullyan tosses out logic puzzles, musical anecdotes and near the end of the video, he also reads out passages from his books “This Book Needs No Title” and “The Tao is Silent”. Be warned though, this video is almost an hour long!

Although the eminent pianist Gunnar Johansen once expected Smullyan to ” become one of our important artists”, Smullyan developed tendonitis and could not go on to become a professional pianist.

I shall use this post to quote a passage from his book “Some Interesting Memories: A Paradoxical Life” that made me laugh:

...a man …was in search of immortality and read all sorts of alchemy books, but could not find anything practical in them. Then, he heard of a great sage in the East who was a specialist in this area, and so he went on a pilgrimage to find him. After twelve years, he found the sage and asked him, “Is it really possible for one to live forever?”

The sage replied, “Oh, quite easily, providing he does two things.”

“And what are those two things?” the man asked eagerly.

“The first thing is to always tell the truth, never make any false statement. That’s a small price to pay for immortality, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” replied the man, “and what is the second thing?”

“The second thing,” replied the sage, “is to say ‘I will repeat this sentence tomorrow.’ If you do those two things, I guarantee that you will live forever!”

The man thought for a moment and said: “Oh, of course, if I do those two things I will live forever, because if I truthfully say that sentence today, then I will indeed repeat it tomorrow…and so forth. But your solution is not a practical one! How can I be sure of truthfully saying that I will repeat this sentence tomorrow if I can’t be sure of being alive tomorrow! Your solution is not a practical one!”

“Oh,” replied the sage, “you wanted a practical solution! No, I don’t deal with practice; I deal only with theory.”

Here’s more funny and philosophical stuff from Smullyan: a dialogue between a mortal and God on freewill.

See also this unofficial myspace page created by a fan of Smullyan.

Philosophical discussion in Cambridge – Part 1

In video above, Wittgenstein lectures on the thought behind a word or a sentence like “This is a very pleasant pineapple.

Philosophical discussion in Cambridge – Part 2

In video above, a dialogue takes place between Wittgenstein, Russell and his wife (played by Tilda Swinton) about whether Wittgenstein should commit suicide because of a V-sign that has no philosophical meaning and apparently destroys Wittgenstein’s language theory.

This, for some reason reminded me of this passage from Raymond Smullyan’s Some Interesting Memories: A Paradoxical Life:

...a philosopher…went into a closet for 25 years to contemplate what life really was. After emerging, he met an old colleague in the street who asked him: “Good heavens, where have you been all these years?”

“In a closet.”
“Why?”
“To find out what life really is.”
“And did you find an answer?”
“Yes.”
“What answer did you find?”
“Well, it can be best expressed by saying that life is like a bridge.”
“That’s very interesting,” replied the colleague, “but can you be a little more explicit? Can you tell me just how life is like a bridge?”
“Uh,” replied the philosopher, “maybe you are right. Maybe life is not like a bridge.”

Philosophical discussion in Cambridge – Part 3

In the video above, Wittgenstein explains his philosophical development from the ‘Tractatus’ to the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, in response to a question by J.M. Keynes, the famous british economist.

The Ph.D/MA Program in Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center hosted a two day celebration of the work of Distinguished Professor Saul Kripke, entitled “Saul Kripke: Philosophy, Language and Logic”, on the occasion of his sixty fifth birthday, on January 25-26, 2006.

More commentaries on Toshi case from:

See interesting discussion of death penalty in light of the recent Tochi case.

Regarding the questions “Should it be mandatory for judges and juries in capital cases to have watched an execution (or video thereof), before being eligible to mete out the death penalty? Should the selfsame judge and jury have to watch the execution of each and every person they have condemned to death?”, I would say “Yes” to all the questions . A judge should have a first hand account of the impact of his decisions and not be sheltered from it behind the administrative and bureaucratic processes leading up to the execution.

A “shorter distance” from the decision to execute and the act of execution is created when a judge witnesses the execution he has ordered. This is important because a “longer distance” can easily create a false sense and weakened sense of the grave moral responsibility a judge is entrusted with and undermine the natural sense of humanity inherent in all of us, including judges. What I mean can be further seen in this extract of an article on pyschological distance being a factor enabling and facilitating violence towards others (surely execution is a form of violence towards another):

Milgram manipulated psychological distance in later studies based on the same premise. When the victim’s cries could be heard through an open door, more subjects were likely to discontinue the experiment compared to the original results. Rather than being out of sight the subject was seated next to the learner (confederate) and was asked to physically press the victim’s hand upon the shock electrode and required to hold it down while the victim was shocked. In this situation, disobedience was at 70%. If the urging of the experimenter was given through a telephone (in the original experiment, the experimenter was physically present), the subjects were less likely to be obedient. Hence, psychological distance or the degree to which the victim is dehumanized had varied results on the outcome.

One of Milgram’s subjects explained: “You really begin to forget that there is a guy out there, even though you can hear him. For a long time I just concentrated on pressing the switches and reading the words” (cited in Gleitman 1986:401). The dehumanization of the victim by use of language is a common theme of war. War terminology in the World War II included such terms as “final solution” (the mass murder of six million people) and “special treatment” (death by gassing). The Gulf war in 1991 included such terms as “smart bombs” (good targets that still kill people) and “new world order”. The televised version displayed an inanimate computer game and this distanced our minds from the people that died. The war in Afghanistan dehumanized human casualties with terms such as “price of war” or “collateral damage” (loss of human life whether or not the bombs reached their target).

Nonetheless, the initial effects of witnessing an execution would be diluted after initial exposure.

The main motivation of my view is my sympathy for the unlucky innocent who has been executed. But this is not to say that I object to the death penalty. I have not thought through this issue and have no fixed position.

I allow the possibility that it is desirable to have a death sentence and if so, we would also want judges to be able to make effective decisions without having to suffer any unnecessary guilty from watching executions arising from their decisions. Intuitively, retributive punishment in the form of death penalty seems justified in circumstances of mass murder and unnecessary, senseless and extreme cruelty. But no death penalty system is perfect and there will be innocents executed and I find the idea of sacrificing one innocent for the good of many more emotionally and morally repugnant even though it seems rationally and objectively appealing to me.

A bunch of inconsistencies I am. Heart and head in disharmony.