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You refer to perfect pitch and absolute pitch like they're different things -- do you realize that they're the same thing?

My brother and I are both musicians with perfect pitch, and we've found it useful in a variety of circumstances. To name a couple, it really helps if you're jamming and want to pick up a progression quickly, or if you're DJing and want to key match. I will concede that Traktor recently got key detection, which is nice, but especially when playing live I find that key segues will pop into my head without having to search for the next song in the right key.

Even the best relative pitch cannot help you exactly memorize a melody -- if you are unable to remember what note it actually starts on, you haven't remembered it fully.

Does it seem like cultural commentary has also improved in the last 50 years? I am young enough to not remember what it may have been like when Asimov wrote originally, but it strikes me that Vice is a relatively contemporary sort of a thing.

I would be interested in similar pieces from 50 years ago, looking back on 1914's view of 1964. So much has changed since then, though, and it seems like more has changed since 1964 than changed from 1914 to 1964. In particular, the 60s happened, but even after that, the Internet seems to have effected a fairly massive and seemingly permanent cultural shift. It might be too early to tell, but even the fact that someone posted this commentary, we all read it instantly, and then now we're discussing it here only hours later seems worlds away from the climate of 1964.

> Think of me as an MSR guy publishing a paper, it’s just on my blog instead appearing in PLDI proceedings. I’m simply not talented enough to get such papers accepted.

I wonder if someone at MSR would be interested in taking up the cause and publishing with Joe. It does seem like this work might contain the makings of a great PLDI paper.

Ah, yes. Somehow I was fortunate enough to skip over that. My first couple of Macs that I remember getting second- or third-hand as a kid were a Performa 640CD DOS Compatible which was actually not bad at all, and had the interesting property of containing within it a 486 on a daughtercard, and then later a Power Mac 7200, which wasn't great, though at least had PCI and managed to avoid the Road Apple designation from LowEndMac.

We got into Feed The Beast, a curated collection of modpacks for Minecraft, this year. Played a whole lot of that.

I've been playing the Hearthstone beta with a few friends for a couple months now and it is absurdly fun. Also played a bunch of StarCraft II and Diablo III as usual.

Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas have held up well. Papers, Please was just fantastic. I had fun playing CounterStrike: GO with friends.

I played SimCity and liked it, though in the midst of the fallout and server issues, I found Tropico 4 and Anno 2070 to be fantastic alternatives.

On Black Friday I picked up a PS3 and have finally been getting into The Last of Us, which is stunning, and Red Dead Redemption, which I think will take longer to get into.

I want to lastly point out that we've had a lot of fun doing LANs with some classics that we've been playing for years now: CS: Source, Rise of Nations, Age of Empires II.

I wonder what the really ancient Mac he links to was. The link is broken since Apple has since drastically redesigned their support site at least once.