Jace

“We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.”

Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.

Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory.

Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school. As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules:

“Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”

In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t completely memorized his circle of fifth.

“I’ll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply won’t apply himself to his music homework. He says it’s boring. He just sits there staring out the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs.”

In the higher grades the pressure is really on. After all, the students must be prepared for the standardized tests and college admissions exams. Students must take courses in Scales and Modes, Meter, Harmony, and Counterpoint.

“It’s a lot for them to learn, but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high school.”

Of course, not many students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent. Nevertheless, it is important that every member of society be able to recognize a modulation or a fugal passage, regardless of the fact that they will never hear one.

“To tell you the truth, most students just aren’t very good at music. They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. Most of them couldn’t care less about how important music is in today’s world; they just want to take the minimum number of music courses and be done with it. I guess there are just music people and non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were impeccable— every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful. She’s going to make one hell of a musician someday.”

Waking up in a cold sweat, the musician realizes, gratefully, that it was all just a crazy dream. “Of course!” he reassures himself, “No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!”

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a painter has just awakened from a similar nightmare...

I was surprised to find myself in a regular school classroom— no easels, no tubes of paint.

“Oh we don’t actually apply paint until high school,” I was told by the students. “In seventh grade we mostly study colors and applicators.” They showed me a worksheet. On one side were swatches of color with blank spaces next to them. They were told to write in the names. “I like painting,” one of them remarked, “they tell me what to do and I do it. It’s easy!”

After class I spoke with the teacher. “So your students don’t actually do any painting?” I asked.

“Well, next year they take Pre-Paint-by-Numbers. That prepares them for the main Paint-by-Numbers sequence in high school. So they’ll get to use what they’ve learned here and apply it to real-life painting situations— dipping the brush into paint, wiping it off, stuff like that. Of course we track our students by ability. The really excellent painters— the ones who know their colors and brushes backwards and forwards— they get to the actual painting a little sooner, and some of them even take the Advanced Placement classes for college credit. But mostly we’re just trying to give these kids a good foundation in what painting is all about, so when they get out there in the real world and paint their kitchen they don’t make a total mess of it.”

“Um, these high school classes you mentioned...”

“You mean Paint-by-Numbers? We’re seeing much higher enrollments lately. I think it’s mostly coming from parents wanting to make sure their kid gets into a good college. Nothing looks better than Advanced Paint-by-Numbers on a high school transcript.”

“Why do colleges care if you can fill in numbered regions with the corresponding color?”

“Oh, well, you know, it shows clear-headed logical thinking. And of course if a student is planning to major in one of the visual sciences, like fashion or interior decorating, then it’s really a good idea to get your painting requirements out of the way in high school.”

“I see. And when do students get to paint freely, on a blank canvas?”

“You sound like one of my professors! They were always going on about expressing yourself and your feelings and things like that—really way-out-there abstract stuff. I’ve got a degree in Painting myself, but I’ve never really worked much with blank canvasses. I just use the Paint-by-Numbers kits supplied by the school board.”

Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul- crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.” The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong.

The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right.

—Introduction to "A Mathematician's Lament" by mathematics educator Paul Lockhart. Full essay here:

so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise

apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time

then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years

“She loves to PLAY with (not eat) cherries 🍒”

Kenney is already threatening a trade war with the USA over this.

To date, it has returned just under $40B in royalty payments.

Meanwhile, oil operators like CNRL gave shareholders $500M in dividends just in Q2 2020 alone, and Suncor, $320M.

Last year the Alberta government got more revenue from university tuition payments than oil royalties.

The current cost of climate change to Canada is $5B/year and estimated to rise to $43B/year on the projection of an optimistic 2°C temperature rise.

Whatever money we are getting from the oil sands will not offset the damage caused by burning the oil.

And let’s not forget that we burn one billion cubic feet of natural gas per day to generate the steam used to separate bitumen from the sand - estimates range from 0.55 to 2.14 gigajoules of heat energy are required to get one barrel of crude oil.

In energy equivalents, that means for every barrel of oil extracted, we’re burning about 1/3 of a barrel of fuel oil, or 52 litres of gasoline, or 554 kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is insane.

It’s going to be hard but the sensible thing to do is stop digging ourselves into this hole - both financial and climate.

Eat the cost; pay out money, buy it out. Convert the industry into petrochemicals, plastics etc, or shut it down entirely and switch the workforce to remediate the land and retool the grid for wind and solar.

This was the real “correct” answer on a real mandatory quiz for Facebook moderators. It’s an article from 2017, but it explains a lot:

After mass protests, the President of Pakistan was forced to resign, along with many other members of the ruling party.

Worldwide, hundreds of people – many rich and powerful – were arrested.

Billions in stolen assets were returned to the people.

And 82 countries changed their laws to crack down on the wealth hoarding the papers revealed.

(Source here)

To say the Panama Papers accomplished nothing is an insult to Daphne Galizia’s memory. Her work, and the work of the hundreds of other journalists who contributed to the Papers, changed the world.

Disinformation like this is designed to discourage you, to make you feel you’re powerless against the monsters of the world. They want you to feel that way, because they are terrified of your power to make change.

Amy Cooper lost her dog and possibly her job. Christian Cooper, the Black man she called the cops on, could have lost his life

Amy Cooper knew exactly what she was doing. That’s the wildest and most insidious part of all this ― the part we haven’t been talking about enough.

On Monday evening, yet another video of a white woman calling the cops on a Black person out of spite went viral. This time, the woman in question was Amy Cooper, a dog owner who had unleashed her cocker spaniel, Henry, in a section of Central Park called the Ramble where, legally, dogs must be on a leash at all times.

Christian Cooper, a Black man, had reportedly asked the woman to put a leash on her dog. She didn’t appreciate his request and what transpired was captured in a video by Christian Cooper, in which the woman, unhappy with being recorded, threatened to call the police.

“I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” Amy Cooper says in the one-minute clip.

Hey all, a little Social Media PSA if you have the Facebook App on your phone. 

With the last update, Facebook began tracking something called ‘off-Facebook Activity’ which keeps up with all apps and browsing you do off of Facebook and collects that information with the purpose of targeting ads… which means they’re selling it to ad agencies. This includes access to any banking apps on your phone and your spending habits. 

 Not only is this a major breech of privacy that Facebook didn’t have to tell us about when they updated the app, it’s, of course, automatically turned on. 

From Facebook, go to the Menu by clicking on the three horizontal lines on the top right of the screen.

Scroll down to the bottom and select the Settings & Privacy drop-down menu.

Then select Settings (the first option under the drop-down).

This will take you to a screen showing multiple headers with lists of links under them

Scroll down to Your Facebook Information and select Off-Facebook Activity.

The next page has a short explanation of Off-Facebook Activity. Click Manage Your Off-Facebook Activity after the What You Can Do header.

This will take you to a screen with an option to Clear History (which I recommend). To actually turn off this feature, you will have to click the three dots at the top right of the screen and select the Manage Future Activity option that pops up.

This will take you to a page explaining in more detail what they’re doing. Select the Manage Future Activity at the bottom of the page.

THEN you can finally select the toggle to turn off Future Off-Facebook Activity. 

Healthy people who are reasonably sure they have not been exposed to the virus should be social distancing. They can leave their house, but should limit trips out to essentials, avoid busy places, keep their distance, etc.

People showing symptoms but who have not been diagnosed, or people who have left the country or have been exposed to someone who has left the country, shown symptoms or who has been diagnosed, or anyone in a high risk group (the elderly, immunocompromised, etc), should self-isolate for 14 days (or longer, depending on the reason for self-isolation.) If you think you have been exposed to it and don’t develop symptoms after 14 days, you can probably return to social distancing.

People who have tested positive are put under quarantine. These people are not choosing to self-isolate; it’s not optional. Even people who have not tested positive but likely have it can be placed under quarantine. At least one person in Quebec has already been charged for leaving her home after being placed in quarantine.

cfa (VIC firefighters) 

rfs (NSW firefighters)*

rfbaq (QLD firefighters) 

cfs (SA firefighters) 

red cross*

WWF NSW bushfire crisis*

WWF koala crisis* (both WWF links are in aud so use a currency converter if you’re outside aus)

st vincents NSW (partnership with channel 9)

st vincents SA 

RSPCA NSW 

here is a list from the abc (but maybe don’t donate to the salvos bc they suck) (x)

WIRES (x)

port macquarrie koala hospital* (if that link doesn’t work there’s a gofundme* / you can buy something here)

gippsland emergency relief fund 

bendigo bank bushfire disaster appeal (partnered with the salvos though)

mallacoota fires support fund gofundme*

cudgewa gofundme*

you can find emergency accommodation or can offer your house on the NSW / VIC airbnb website