Here's an article citing research published this year that disputes the idea that our large brain was directly a result of access to extra protein from hunting meat:
"They concluded that the evidence for increased carnivory in our ancestors is merely an effect of increased sampling of the archaeological record at certain time intervals starting around two million years ago, meaning that there is no strong relationship between eating more meat and the evolution of larger brains in our ancestors."
The way we used arxiv worked well in physics, though this is 15 years ago now so might have changed since.
arxiv was about distribution. It didn't replace peer review - articles were still submitted to journals and published there too.
If an article was posted to arxiv and not a journal, the odds of a citation went down massively. And the journal it was submitted to was a factor in whether or not we read it. When articles were eventually published, most authors also updated the preprint with the post peer review version.
Basically it meant that
(1) it was easy to keep up to date with what everyone was working on, and pick up interesting new stuff
(2) most citations, post 80s, you saw in whatever paper you were reading, you could look up on arxiv and be reading it in seconds.
Good points. I'd add to this that small hands are actively advantageous for a lot of repertoire.
Bach fugues, say, or fast intricate passages can be a nightmare for long-fingered pianists to get their hands around. The OPs focus on big Liszt or Rachmaninov chords is understandable but there's so much more to piano playing.
He and David Wengrow ask why "the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors"
I think to some extent they're forced to peak young. I don't believe musicians are actually at their best when they are young and I'd claim recordings of classical artists through their lives supports this.
For classical music, competitions and conservatoires will only take young people and if you don't go through their processes there's no chance of getting auditions for pro gigs.
I wonder if the author is one of those who needs a few more years to understand themselves well enough to perform at the highest level, by which time she'll be to old to pursue music professionally
One point regarding whether or not this is unphysical is that in physical systems, conceptually we work in finite systems and at the only very end of our calculations we take the infinite limit while holding physically observable quantities fixed. This is the essence of the thermodynamic limit.
In these paradoxes, infinities are present from the outset and I think it's this that leads to the unphysical outcome. They're not wrong. They are mathematical paradoxes. But it's not a problem they are unphysical (from a physics point of view) because physics uses mechanisms, like the thermodynamic limit, to handle infinite limits sensitively. Then the paradox goes away.
For instance, the 'physics' version of the Hilbert hotel problem would say there are two hotels, one with N rooms and the other with M rooms. Then do all the renumbering you like, the paradoxical situation of filling both hotels and then putting all guests from both hotels into one of them is no longer possible. Finally, if you want to think about hotels with an infinite number of rooms take N and M to inifinity keeping N/M fixed
Edit: add physicified version of Hilbert hotel problem
+1 for Paul Sellers. He's a bunch of content on finishing too and I've just tried his combo of shellac + beeswax to finish pine and it works fantastically and is cheap.
Yes, something like that. As I mentioned elsewhere, I wonder if the result might be affected by the acoustics of the room as well as the physical proximity of the sound sources
Somehow the audience also manages to adjust too, trained or not. The violins and cellos are several metres apart yet I think the audience would agree whether they come off together or not, regardless of where they're sitting in the auditorium
I wonder if actually it's the delays plus reverb we manage to adjust to. I remember playing church organ too, a while back, and I found the delays much easier to get used to than say a 4 or 5 ms delay in a DAW, even though the delay was probably much bigger. It's like it's training + room acoustics that we use to adjust, rather than the raw numbers of the physical delay
But I could play either Jerry Lee Lewis style, arms length from the keyboard with my head back, or Glenn Gould style, hunched over the keyboard and my head moves a metre between the two. So that's around the 3ms threshold where I (and the sound engineer above) claim to be able to detect delays, and yet I don't think I'd notice a delay between those two playing positions
There's something weird here though. I reckon more 4 or 5 ms of latenecy is enough to put me off playing something in time (this is about what you aim for using DAWs to record music) and yet if you just think about playing a piano, the player's ear is about 1m from where the sound is generated. The speed of sound in air is ~300m/s so there's 3 ms of delay right there, even if the hammer mechanism is instantaneous, and I've never heard a pianist complain about delay.
Maybe it's just familiarity but even that feels too simple an explanation
I'm not sure (1) is 'obviously possible'. Supposing there's a finite number of atomic configurations that produce Abraham Lincoln, there's still an infinite number of atomic configurations so you're probability is strictly zero, no? It's not even an 'age of the universe to achieve' type event. And that assumes that your random throwing together of atoms includes the physical preconditions to create an Abraham Lincoln. For instance, if you were sitting in the middle of a black hole randomly assembling atoms I'm pretty sure it's physically impossible to create an Abraham Lincoln.
Also, this https://plus.maths.org/content/andrew-wiles-what-does-if-fee... from Andrew Wiles, when he mentions that maths, the actual doing of it at least, isn't so much the cold hard logic of formal equations, that's just how it's communicated. It's the sitting down and trying to grapple with some mathematical ideas when it becomes more akin to musical experience.
iirc, there's a passage in Godel, Escher, Bach where Hofstadter actually works through a mathematical calculation and compares its cadences with musical experience.
And there's the poems of Rebecca Elson (Theories of Everything, Explaining Relativity) that do the best job, for me, of describing what is actually appealing about maths.
Like this article, they all emphasise the joy of just sitting down and playing with mathematical ideas. That that is where the understanding and fun really is, though difficult to communicate directly. It's not so much the technical bits of learning formulae and grinding results out of them that, at least when I was at school, was all we ever really did.
I'm not sure I quite share your view of what art aims to do. Iris Murdoch had a line that tyrants fear art because art forces them to confront the truth.
If one believes, as Murdoch suggests, that art aims to express a truth as clearly as possible then the qualities of good technical writing and good fiction are entirely compatible. I'd suggest the distinction lies more in the extent to which the sensibilities of the author are present in the writing.
Any book on common practice harmony will help with most pop/rock and classical up to 20th century. I used Harmony by Piston and happily recommend it. For some jazz theory The Jazz Piano Book by Levine was good for me.
I agree with GTP, the author's definition is vague. As GTP alludes to, temperature is defined perfectly clearly in statistical mechanics, through the sensitivity of the entropy to changes in the internal energy of a system (though there are several, equivalent ways to express it). The author really is incorrect to claim temperature is not a clearly understood concept
"They concluded that the evidence for increased carnivory in our ancestors is merely an effect of increased sampling of the archaeological record at certain time intervals starting around two million years ago, meaning that there is no strong relationship between eating more meat and the evolution of larger brains in our ancestors."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/fourt...