DSD

All Things Con­sid­ered, the daily after­noon news pro­gram on National Pub­lic Radio, has a well-known musi­cal theme; when played after the news, it’s called a “trixie:”

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The theme started out in 1976 as elec­tronic music, was set for brass orches­tra in 1983, and was later rein­ter­preted and recorded for NPR by jazz musi­cian Wycliffe Gor­don in 1995. Mean­while, lots of musi­cians have writ­ten and per­formed vari­a­tions, some of which get played on air. The most “well-known” ver­sion (accord­ing to NPR) was per­formed and arranged by the Wash­ing­ton Sax­o­phone Quar­tet.

Quire Cleve­land record­ing a trixie. (That’s me on the left of the chorus.)

In the theme’s his­tory, brass set­tings are the norm. How­ever, my Dad recently got invited to com­pose some trix­ies in an early music style. He came up with some fun stuff and recorded it with Quire Cleve­land, and some fel­low fac­ulty at CWRU. You can hear them all at the Quire Cleve­land web­site — or just lis­ten to All Things Con­sid­ered!

Here are a cou­ple of my favorites: Con­tinue reading…

Intro­duc­ing Stats­Feed, a Word­Press plu­gin that pro­vides an RSS feed of your blog stats, so you don’t have to keep log­ging in and check­ing your Dash­board (which, before writ­ing this plu­gin, I did obsessively).

Down­load the Lat­est Version

Instal­la­tion:

• Down­load statsfeed.zip, and either use WordPress’s Add New Plu­gin browser, or unzip statsfeed.zip and upload the stats­feed folder to your plu­g­ins direc­tory /wp-content/plugins/
• Make sure you have the WordPress.com Stats plu­gin already installed.
• Acti­vate Stats­Feed. Con­fig­u­ra­tion is not nec­es­sary, but you may choose an update sched­ule (other than every 20 min­utes, the default) in Set­tings, under StatsFeed.
• Sub­scribe to your Stats­Feed at

  <your blog url>/wp-content/plugins/statsfeed/index.xml

Con­tinue reading…

My sis­ter Selena had her on-air debut on NPR Morn­ing Edi­tion yes­ter­day, as the trans­la­tor voice of a Chi­nese woman whose fam­ily recently sought asy­lum in the United States. Lis­ten in at about 0:55.

Where did she get that excep­tional radio voice? It couldn’t have been here. Or here. Hmm… It must have been here:

This is Canine Pub­lic Radio Morn­ing Edi­tion, I’m Tasha. Grrr… Ruff. Achoo! That’s my bone!

Con­grat­u­la­tions, Selena! You’re fol­low­ing in Tasha’s foot­steps. And you’ll pull ahead as soon as she stops to sniff something.

Tonight I had the amaz­ing expe­ri­ence of singing a con­cert with Blue Heron, one of the pre­mier early music choirs in the country.

I had an unusual week, attend­ing lec­tures on topo­log­i­cal field the­ory and writ­ing about neu­tri­nos by day, get­ting into the 1430’s groove in rehearsals by night. And the music wasn’t easy. Many of the pieces were thick with cross-relations, rhyth­mi­cally com­pli­cated, and gen­er­ally funky. I’ve had a few night­mares where I stop con­cen­trat­ing, and either I sing an incor­rect B-flat, or the see­saw mech­a­nism stops work­ing. Con­tinue reading…

Wired Mag­a­zine has an inter­est­ing arti­cle about redesign­ing North Amer­i­can flight paths to improve effi­ciency. (via Rachel Mad­dow)

It’s sort of what you’d expect: flight pat­terns were orig­i­nally drawn up decades ago, and have been added to hap­haz­ardly and chaot­i­cally since then, like the streets in Boston.

The redesign cre­ates a kind of air­borne sub­ur­bia, paving the skies far out into what was the coun­try­side. The idea is that the con­trollers can get planes off the inter­city high­ways sooner, keep­ing them clear for through-traffic.

Con­tinue reading…

I’m often frus­trated by not hav­ing a canon­i­cal place to write things down, but what really pushed me over the edge is the sub­ject of the sec­ond post here. It’s nerdy. It’s kind of hilar­i­ous. I know peo­ple who will def­i­nitely appre­ci­ate it. So this blog exists for that.

How­ever, I don’t expect to be writ­ing those kinds of posts very often. I’d also like to write some notes on high energy physics sub­jects that are widely mis­un­der­stood (at least among us grad stu­dents), or not often spo­ken about, but actu­ally impor­tant. Half my life these days is fig­ur­ing out such things. I guess this blog could save some peo­ple the same trou­ble. But it’s just as much for me, since my mem­ory isn’t great, and I’d like to be able to look up answers instead of fig­ur­ing them out all over again.

Visu­als

The cur­rent theme for this blog is a slightly hor­ri­ble mash-together of my old web­site and the default word­press theme. Web design is one of my hob­bies, so expect that I’ll find some time to fix things up around here.