quartesixte

God I had forgotten how old this law is. And how consistently it has been delayed for decades. Born of the post 9/11 world and its concerns...

I know a couple of people through my professional network who hold this title and what I've gathered is that delegates have a lot of autonomy and authority. And Boeing does organize the company and even its information systems to practically treat them as FAA regulators.

And, FWIW, the type of person who ends up self-selecting into this kind of work are serious people who deeply care about airline safety. It is a rather thankless job with a lot of onerous, tedious paperwork that is not very sexy.

Ah the Myriad system. Curious how the sinosphere adopted this alongside the Greeks.

These do converge I think at

10^12 = Short Trillion/Long Billion

Which makes for some non-frictionless translating since 10^6 and 10^9 are all in-between words, and 10^12 is not a commonly used number to count anything in everyday life.

A thought just struck me, but I wonder if the difference between the Billionaires of Today and the Monopolists of Yesteryear is that the wealth and power of the Billionaires are tied up in publicly exposed assets (stocks, etc) as well as networked wealth. Make the wrong political move, and people tank your stock into oblivion.

But what are you going to do to Carnegie? Not have steel? Rockerfeller says something antithetical to Elite Beliefs? Good luck getting oil.

Variance can suck out any profit from cash games and can get you deeply stuck for months on end (see: any full time poker youtuber). Tournaments are even higher variance.

And if you switch to doing this full time, you become self-employed, which drastically increases the cost of taxes, healthcare, social security, etc. Medicare tax doubles. Social Security tax doubles. You must buy your own healthcare, which drastically increases in premiums (unless you have a spouse who can add you as a dependent on their W-2 sponsored plan).

This really goes for any self-prop business/freelancing. In exchange for freedom of being your own boss, you pay in stress, variance, and taxes.

To make this work, you'd probably have to make double that per 8 hour session. Which is insanely difficult to do as a poker pro and sustain as a "full time job".

Farming is a low “shots on goal” business too. You only really get 1 harvest per year. In a 30 year career already marked by high variance, losing 1/6 of your lifetime profits to experimenting with methods is a huge ask.

You also can't create actively yourself! TV was definitely a consumer only culture, with all creation heavily gatekept by an entire industry. Compare this to the print culture prior to that.

The Internet definitely has changed this, and now we are back into a creation capable metaphor.

>He's not making a point of "television makes you dumb" (or "dumb people watches television"), but rather he makes the distinction between an "oral"-, "press"- and "television"-based culture. He claims that it's bad when television becomes the main platform that a society centers its communication around.

Or as Postman himself put it, "the medium is the metaphor". And he strongly disliked the metaphor TV was bringing to bear on the Western World.

And everyone should note this is the television of the 1980s. You still don't really have home recording, there are a limited number of channels, and the monoculture truly exists.

You still have to leave the anchors when jumping position to position. And hitting the thumbs right where you need em is hard too.

Good luck to your daughter!

The heavy metal branch of the genre definitely has found ways to reincorporate them again, true.

The synthetically added orchestra hits or background string chords I want to exclude because they are not the mainline voice

Yeah I guess what I was trying to get at is the instrument isn’t “naturally biased” towards a specific key in the same way woodwinds and brass instruments are.

Yup! Rehearsals also help to make sure everyone has a mutual understanding of the general tempo.

But good musicians will quickly fall into the correct tempo when playing with each other.

People really underestimate the difficulty of playing a violin well.

The instrument is held in a quite unnatural position. Beginners must learn to become comfortable with the contortions necessary. You hold the violin up by squeezing it between your collarbones and your chin. Your hands/arms are to NOT provide any support.

You have no frets on the fingerboard with mere centimeters or millimeters of gap between notes. You must be absolutely precise in your placement at all times at all tempos to make sure you are in tune. Due to the nature of most classical music, you are constantly shifting your hands up and down (forward and backward) on the fingerboard, thus eliminating the ability to "anchor" in one place. Only hours of dedicated practice can develop the muscle memory for such precise placement.

These placements must be done very quickly. A full 4/4 measure of sixteenth notes at 120 bpm means you are placing a finger down approximately once every 0.125 seconds.

Now, while all of this is going on with your left hand, your right hand is manipulating the bow to draw the sound out of the violin.

You must, at all times, draw the bow across the string with the exact amount of pressure, speed, and angle to produce a clear sound. If you are playing a full 4/4 measure of sixteenth notes at 120 bpm all separated (so a different stroke for each note), you are also moving your bow every 0.125 seconds. At the exact pressure, speed, angle and position on the violin. Be wrong in any of these and you will not produce the desired sound.

Often times, due to the rhythm of the piece, you will be moving your bow hand in a pattern very different from the left hand. So you are effectively doing two very different things at the same time. For example, if in that 4/4 measure described above, every group of 3 notes were to be played by a single stroke before changing directions, you are now taking an action every 0.125 seconds on the left hand and an action every 0.375 seconds + one extra 0.125 second stroke at the end.

Now do this while reading sheet music, listening to your fellow ensemble mates to balance sound, watching a conductor to match tempo, express emotionally the intent of the piece.

So then, one must commit enough practice to make all the necessary motions to produce good sound an act of muscle memory. So that there is no conscious thought put into expressing anything the music needs. Thousands upon thousands of hours of drills so the cognitive focus can be on musical expression. To make it as effortless as speaking.

Only then can one sing with the violin. Child prodigies aside, it seems like it takes approximately 3 - 5 years of consistent training before one plays at a level considered "adequate". Elite orchestral players require nearly over a decade of training just to be basic orchestra members. Virtuosos and stars report practicing every day for 4+ hours and will note that any extended break will result in rapid degradation of sound quality and motor skills.

It is a very difficult instrument with an incredibly high skill ceiling and a very long tradition of virtuosity.

It's pretty difficult to play any classical instrument at the level required for elite philharmonic/symphony orchestras. It's why musicians all have to min-max on that instrument from an early age and go through many years of coaching and practice.

Playing the violin at an elite level seems to require a much earlier starting point, so I think that signals a higher level of difficulty. The range of possible sounds while being an incredibly unforgiving instrument in terms of sound quality add to this.

But I believe its stardom comes from its versatility and timbre.

Versatility: It can play any key naturally. Its relatively small size allows for fast passages to be played relatively easily. It can play two notes at a time, and even three or four in quick succession to simulate a chord. It is expressive in a way a tuba isn't.

Timbre/Expression: The Western classical tradition valued the Soprano voice as the "main" voice for melodies. The violin was more or less designed to emulate this voice and the characteristic agility, lightness, and clarity that defined any melody line given to it. So, composers would reach for the violin and make it the star of their compositions. As time went on, the tradition stuck, the virtuosity increased, and the ensembles grew ever larger and larger so the violin sections grew larger and larger.

For whatever reason, the Western Classical Tradition doesn't quite like the sound of, say, a French Horn, dominating the melody line the same way violins do.

What leads me to believe this is all the musical traditions that started off with violins and then quickly ditched them once an instrument that provided the needed versatility and timbre the tradition demanded. Here, I'm mostly thinking of Jazz. Jazz violin was common during the early days of the genre, but quickly fell out of favor in comparison to the guitar, the trumpet, the saxophone, and the piano. For many of the same reasons the violin became the star of the Classical world.

It's also why violins don't really go with rock music. The guitar has the versatility required and the vocal expressiveness that suits the genre.

>What you described above is more like kindergarten

You ever try organizing and managing the work of multiple skilled tradesmen that feed into a single integrated product on tight deadlines? Do you know what works really well in that kind of environment?

Telling people what to do and then checking in on them to see if they’re doing well.

Is this kindergarten? I don’t remember being a skilled tradesmen working on building components for complex assemblies on tight deadlines in Kindergarten.

I concede that I am unfamiliar with what a normal “scrum” session looks like outside of what is said in the Agile manifesto and the many anecdotes floating around. I do know that Scrum took a lot of cues from TPS/Lean of the 80s and tried to feed it to Software.

And as far as I can see, it’s not working because the profession and the products do not fit this factory model.

What everyone seems to yearn for seems to match more closely to the model followed by magazines and other such publications. Product Management the profession mirrors more the Editor than the Production Manager, SWEs mirror writers/editors-at-large, etc.

Self respecting writers in any newsroom would balk at being subjected to daily scrums that take away from precious research/writing time. And to put some kind of regular pace on progress, metrics, etc. to what really is very bursty, deep focus work is also ridiculous. Whether it takes you 5 hours or 5 days to write the piece, so long as it is of quality and meets the deadline what does it matter. And even if you miss the deadline, you could alway be slotted into the next issue unless the piece was a cornerstone piece to the issue, in which case a good editor would have assigned it with ample time or given it to the best writer on the roster.

Hell I like this analogy. Might spend more time thinking about it and talking to SWE friends about it. Feel free to expand. Maybe this will free everyone from the shackles of Scrum.