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sir_quirky_k (

sir_quirky_k) wrote,
@ 2008-05-10 20:54:00

Current music:

Vangelis - Anthem 2002

Things must be bad
Picked up an essay mark from Politics this week. It was a 75, equating to an unequivocal first.

I nearly tore the feedback form up and treated it as untrustworthy.

Meanwhile, I still continue to struggle in Economics, and continue to assume that because this course is based in objective reality (with right and wrong), and Politics isn't, the former represents my true ability, the marks in the latter are merely acts of charity that will not go unresented.

Which leads me on to my next point. The musical is in early planning stages, very definitely on, and, well, if I get nothing more than three songs that work out of context then I'll not be massively disappointed and I'll try again in the 2010s. I'm planning out characters and their ranges at this point, deliberately ensuring that they are both relatively manageable (I'm taking Elphaba's two octaves + a major second as an upper bound) and spread out, rather than having nothing but tenors and high baritones amongst the male voices.

Two public performances of my creative work in successive weekends to come - the play next Friday and Saturday, the song for the choral concert on Eurovision night - might ease my Lyndsay-directed jealousy a little. Only a little. Until then, there's tomorrow's choral rehearsal (note-to-self: earlier time, 1800), my first chance to see Lyndsay since Wednesday night. The use of male voices will be mentioned in a conversation with her, and I shall save any blog post on the issue until I have heard Lyndsay's contribution, for it is certain to be worthwhile.

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One, two, buckle my shoe

daweaver
2008-05-12 06:16 pm UTC (link)

Picked up an essay mark from Politics this week. It was a 75, equating to an unequivocal first. I nearly tore the feedback form up and treated it as untrustworthy.

If it moves like a duck, looks like a duck, and speaks fluent Quackeçois, then it would be unusual to rule out the prospect that it might, just possibly, be a bird in the Anatida family.

I still continue to struggle in Economics, and continue to assume that because this course is based in objective reality (with right and wrong), and Politics isn't

Hmmmmmmmmmm. (scratches chin).

Consider, if you will, a spectrum of university topics. Put wholly evidence-based disciplines (physics, chemistry) at +10, and faith-based studies (art, literature) at -10. I suggest that economics falls somewhere around +4 - it attempts to predict the behaviour of people, and follows the basic tenets of the scientific method as advocated by Popper et al, but its theories have notoriously poor predictive value. Politics is perhaps around +2; though it doesn't talk the formal language of science, it implicitly proposes theories with some reasonable predictive value, albeit ones that are so woolly as to be difficult to prove wrong.

(I leave the position of mathematics on this scale as an exercise for the interested reader. And an exercise about the interested reader.)

rather than having nothing but tenors and high baritones amongst the male voices.

Good grief, he's going to write a part for a bass. Brian Blessed will be happy, even if the rest of us are reaching for the earplugs.

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Re: One, two, buckle my shoe

sir_quirky_k
2008-05-12 10:01 pm UTC (link)

If it moves like a duck, looks like a duck, and speaks fluent Quackeçois, then it would be unusual to rule out the prospect that it might, just possibly, be a bird in the Anatida family.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

economics falls somewhere around +4 - it attempts to predict the behaviour of people, and follows the basic tenets of the scientific method as advocated by Popper et al, but its theories have notoriously poor predictive value. Politics is perhaps around +2; though it doesn't talk the formal language of science, it implicitly proposes theories with some reasonable predictive value, albeit ones that are so woolly as to be difficult to prove wrong.

In short it could be almost argued Economics is an artistic subject using the scientific method, and Politics is a scientific subject using the artistic method (perhaps the Moronicans, in referring to 'Political Science', might for once be onto something). Dare I suggest that the latter is a better fit for my mindset and skill set?

Good grief, he's going to write a part for a bass. Brian Blessed will be happy, even if the rest of us are reaching for the earplugs.

It's unlikely to be especially low, although in the context of musical theatre it might seem it; as mentioned, I'm taking a little over two octaves as an upper bound. My range is not quite two octaves (posts passim). Put two and two together, and you have ~~a problem that would tax Love Island contestants, as you said at the time~~the solution of four.

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Re: One, two, buckle my shoe

daweaver
2008-05-13 05:35 pm UTC (link)

It could be almost argued Economics is an artistic subject using the scientific method, and Politics is a scientific subject using the artistic method.

Wouldn't disagree with this tremendously; though Economics certainly has aspirations to be treated as a proper science, it's not there yet, and isn't going to get there in the forseeable future.

Dare I suggest that the latter is a better fit for my mindset and skill set?

Suggest away; this blogger's point of view is that pure mathematics could be placed anywhere from -5 to +10, with applied maths (particularly Newtonian mechanics) tending to the large plusses. Probably explains why I flunked that bit of the course: anything beyond about +7 leaves me reeling.

Hmm, might expand on this elsewhere...

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Re: One, two, buckle my shoe

sir_quirky_k
2008-05-17 03:26 am UTC (link)

though Economics certainly has aspirations to be treated as a proper science, it's not there yet, and isn't going to get there in the forseeable future.

And it is precisely the methods it uses for those aspirations which leave me very uncomfortable with studying the subject at this level.

I'm an analyst at heart. Not one that handles abstract concepts terribly well, unless I can make them more concrete; certainly one who can snatch upon clearly expressed 'knowns' and interpret them effectively, be it the probabilities on GAMBLING PARTY or the arguments of various political theorists.

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Re: One, two, buckle my shoe

gizensha
2008-06-14 01:59 am UTC (link)

Bah, have you seen how mathematicians treat the concept that they might possibly be wrong about stuff, and that relatively new fields (Although they wouldn't have been had Buddha written just a little more maths ;)) are superior to classical mathematics at resolving the problems with mathematics, such as the paradox of "Is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves a member of itself?" and which looks at the classic "If you take a grain of sand from a sand heap, the sand heap is still a sand heap. If you take another grain of sand from a sand heap, the sand heap is still a sand heap, and so on and so forth until logic tries to tell you that you can have a sand heap with a single grain of sand in it." problem and responds '...What problem?' I don't see how fields which reject basic scientific method can be considered to be towards the positive end of the scale.

Needless to say, there are reasons why the Japanese are better at producing AI systems than the western world. They have a culture which is more philosophically inclined towards Fuzzy Logic than the rounding-obsessed Western culture which insists that the glass has to be either full or empty even if it's 50% filled with water courtesy of Aristotle's insistence of X xor Not X, never X and Not X. (Just to illustrate how superior Fuzzy Logic is to traditional AI systems - By 1994, the Japanese [Well. A Fuzzy Logic Theorist had come up with a system and tested it on a... 1/4 scale model iirc] had a system which could stabilise a helicopter which had lost it's rotor blade. At the time, this was something that no mathematical model (we just don't know enough maths) or human pilot could do. The system took about 1000 fuzzy rules, apparently.)

...Of course, when you have critics calling a field the cocaine of science, it's debatable if the field actually needs proponents...

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