Wonderful North Carolina

For the sake of convenience, I've gathered all my offensive comments about North Carolina in one place. Enjoy!

1. This state apparently doesn't learn from its history on the ills of denying the humanity of an entire group of people.

2. Why are "states' rights" used again and again to trump "individuals' rights"?

3. Perhaps the real reason NCers disapprove of gay marriage is the ambiguity; without traditional gender roles, it's impossible to determine which party owns the other.

4. In a country with relatively poor voter turnout, it's good to know people will haul their asses to the polls for the opportunity to express their bigotry.

Enabling block compression in Hive's sequence files

If you're like me, you like Hive, and you like storing some of your data in sequence files. You also like compressing your data, so that your data is snappy and delicious.

If you're like me, you may have taken these recommendations from the Hive wiki for enabling block compression in your sequence files.

Alas, we found that block compression wasn't actually happening. In looking at the Hadoop 0.20.203.0 source, the logic associated with the "io.seqfile.compressiong.type" setting is marked as deprecated.

We found it necessary to use the newer "mapred.output.compression.type" setting instead.

Program Notes for Pinkham's Wedding Cantata: Draft the First

This is the first draft. I expect to need to prune it down. Comments welcome.

Daniel Pinkham's Wedding Cantata, published in 1956 and scored for mixed chorus and piano, celebrates the joy and profundity of love as expressed through biblical texts drawn from the Song of Solomon. By turns exuberant and poignant, the long, leaping lines and sparkling harmonies magnify the spirit of the texts, while clever formal construction and common musical material meld the four movements into a unified whole. Pinkham accomplishes this with his characteristic brevity.

The cantata opens with Solomon verses 2:10-12 ("Rise up, my love, my fair one..."), set to a joyous, dancing 6/4 rhythm. The piano accompaniment features bright, closely voiced harmonies, generally arranged with added seventh or ninth tones; the harmonies sound familiar, but shine with a sparkling, mystical character that pervades much of the piece. The chorus' opening unison melody, in rising by a fourth, then fifth (appropriately given the text), states a powerful melodic theme that appears in various forms throughout the first and third movements. The second section of the opening movement builds upon the earlier melodic material, this time employing mixed meter, to Solomon verses 6:1-3 ("whither is my beloved gone..."). The text continues the common themes of joy in the beloved, with pastoral imagery.

The musical and textual themes of the first movement return in the third movement, to verse 4:16 (“Awake, O north wind...”); while the third movement features canon and generally simpler accompaniment, it shares an unmistakable similarity in melodic shape and rhythmic character, and opens its themes with the same ascending intervals of fourth and fifth. The conclusion of the third movement brings a dramatic resolution to this set of themes, which the first movement denies us.

In contrast, movements two and four draw from verses 8:7 and 8:6, respectively, and meditate on the profundity of love. Both feature thicker choral textures, with a heightened use of counterpoint, and intense legato over steady duple rhythms. Both employ dissonance in a somewhat more traditional way, though Pinkham refrains from the full resolutions we might expect (of particular interest is the ringing dissonance used in movement two between tenor and bass, shortly before the soprano entrance). The homorhythmic chorale setting of number four (“Set me as a seal...”), and the plaintive insistence of number two’s canon theme (“Many waters...”), paint their shared subject with passionate intensity.

While the pairings of odd and even movements stand out, other aspects unify the piece as a whole. The inner movements both employ canonic singing, providing a sense of overall cohesion. In contrast, the outer movements both contain extended sections of homorhythmic chorale singing, and share some striking harmonic passages; the harmonic progression that closes the whole piece first appears in the conclusion of the first section of the first movement. Most strikingly, and appropriately, the celebration of love unifies the whole.

Large Scale Symmetry in Pinkham's Wedding Cantata

The movements can be paired in various ways, giving a general symmetry overall and a sense of formal and stylistic cohesiveness.

The outer movements can be paired for a couple reasons:

• Extended sections of either unison or chorale textures (in the chorus)
• Common harmonic material (as noted earlier, mm. 28-31 of movement one has same harmonic motion as mm. 15-22 of movement four, which concludes the piece); it's a fairly striking harmonic passage.

The inner movements can be paired in that they're both feature canonic singing.

The odd movements are a more obvious pairing in that they have similar themes/imagery in text, some common melodic material, dancing compound meter, syncopation.

The even movements are additionally an obvious pairing in their focus on love's profundity, in their thicker choral textures, in their meditative or even plaintive qualities rather than jubilation. Use of dissonance between voices is somewhat more traditional in these movements, though there are of course occasions in which traditional resolution does not take place.

Much of the piece uses a common harmonic language, with traditional tertian harmonies expanded with added sevenths, sixths, ninths, etc. Such extended chords are often spelled in a way that adds a crystalline or spiky quality to the sound (as one often observes in Ravel, Satie, or even Stravinsky). In contrast, some harmonic passages utilize standard triads, but moving in unconventional ways; motion by thirds between major triads (requiring chromatic movement in one voice) is especially prominent.

ETHAN: The use of canon in mvt. 2 helps to paint the text. "Many waters cannot quench love." The text conveys an idea of a feverish, burning love that cannot be tamed, a fervent passion that cannot be calmed. The music reflects that idea by cycling through the main melody in canon, each voice pursuing the others, not stopping for rest, endlessly alight with motion. The final, forte unison D at the end represents the coming together of hearts and souls into unity.

Text sources for Pinkham's Wedding Cantata.

I. Rise up, my love

King James Bible, Cambridge Ed.; Song of Solomon 2:10-2:12

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the eart; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

Song of Solomon 6:1-6:3

Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women? whither is thy beloved turned aside? That we may seek him with thee.

My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lillies.

I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine; he feedeth among the lillies.

II. Many waters

Song of Solomon 8:7

Many waters cannot quench love; neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

III. Awake, O north wind

Song of Solomon 4:16

Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden; that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruit.

IV. Epilogue: Set me as a seal

Song of Solomon 8:6

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.

Observations

Solomon 2:10-13, and 8:6-7, appear to be pretty popular biblical readings for weddings. Solomon 4:16 may be less common, but has obvious symmetry with the themes of 2:10-2:13.

The music appropriately focuses on the differing characters of these sections; the wind/spice-related settings of movements one and three share a dancing, jubilant rhythmic character, and seem to revel in the joy of love and the wedding occasion. In contrast, the text of 8:6-7 focuses on the profundity of love, and as such the settings of movements two and four reflect that profundity, using thicker choral textures, with lines suggesting reverence, in contrast to the dancing joy of the others.

Prep notes on Pinkham's Wedding Cantata

First obvious formal thing: the clear relationship between first and third movements. Both have a primary theme in a fast 6/8, with similar piano accompaniment at opening (repeated chord patterns with prominent parallel fourths). Both themes open with the same melodic figure (both in terms of intervals and rhythm). The melodies differ in their particulars but have a similar overall shape. And the text are clearly related, with the first having the male wondering what his beloved's up to in the garden, and the third having the female asking the wind to blow the spice fragrance to the man that he'll be inclined to come to the garden and eat his pleasant fruit.

What husband doesn't enjoy him some pleasant fruit?

The harmonic sequence at the end of the first section of the first movement is the same as the final of the piece.

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Regarding Difficulty

As mammals with linguistic tools handy for the structuring of thought, we are by nature inclined to analyze and categorize and tokenize, so that we might apply labels to things and speak about those things in a rough group consensus of shared meaning/experience.

Modern culture owes a great deal to this tendency, as it allows us to accumulate knowledge across generations, in volumes far surpassing the capacity of an oral transmission medium.

It seems when we're learning, however, that the tendency may get in the way. Consider the case of the word "hard":

"I am learning this new thing, and it is hard."

People who dabble in creative activities, particularly temporal arts like music or dance, would find this statement familiar. Certainly as a software engineer the statement seems like an archetypal expression of experiences encountered every few months.

What does it actually mean? The word "hard" provides a rough label encompassing all sorts of situations.

• "I am working with a distributed database that employs eventual consistency to allow for improved availability and scalability; it is difficult to adapt my thinking to an eventually consistent model."
• "I am learning a new piece of music that freely mixes meter and does not use functional harmony; it is challenging to get the details right because they do not move in ways I can predict."
• "I am trying to understand how collateralized debt obligations wreaked such havoc in our financial system, and I can't make heads or tails of it because everything I read is in such financial insider speak."
• "I am learning a new piece of music that has a lot of melismatic passages and awkward phrasing; it's difficult to keep my tone consistent and to find spaces to breathe without disrupting the line."
• "I trying to make some configuration changes in my distributed software system and it's challenging because there are so many performance-impacting details to consider."

Of the list above, I think only the last two are truly aligned with our original statement ("I am learning this new thing, and it is hard"). These last two are not about familiarity with the problem space; they are about actual details of the problems themselves. The others are better summarized:

"I am learning this new thing and it falls outside my realm of experience."

Or better yet:

"I am learning this new thing and it is not yet familiar to me."

If a thing is outside one's experience, then one cannot authoritatively say whether that thing is intrinsically "hard" or not. Here's an accurate statement about what is hard:

"I am learning and it is hard."

Isn't that more to the point? In learning, we program ourselves. We force ourselves think differently (in the literal sense, as opposed to the Apple marketing sense). We tackle problems that we previously avoided, ignored, or were entirely ignorant of. We experience the world from a broader place. In short, we change ourselves, and that is very hard work indeed.

Take something you tackled some time in the past. A piece of music, for instance. When you first looked at it, perhaps you thought it looked hard. Perhaps those notes just wouldn't come to your ear. Perhaps you just couldn't get those rhythms. Whatever.

After you transcended the challenges of the piece, did it still feel hard to do? Did you even stop and consider it? Or did you integrate the piece into your experience, so it stopped being about hard versus easy and simply became about doing it well every time?

I cannot think of an instance in my musician life or engineer life in which classifying an unlearned thing as "hard" was useful, except as a means of identifying things that would require more effort than usual. For any given learning challenge, there's a pile of stuff you don't know well, but there's a pile of stuff you do know. In most situations, the pile of stuff you do know is larger than the other. Is it fair, then, to classify an unlearned thing as "hard" if in fact you are intimately familiar with the bulk of its parts?

It's more helpful, in my opinion, to think and speak accurately about the problem:

• "The technical challenges of this piece are difficult and require practice."
• "There are a lot of variables in this system and finding the optimal configuration will require careful benchmarking and analysis."
• "I am unfamiliar with the harmonic language of this piece and need to spend more time than usual getting the harmonies in my ear."
• "I am unfamiliar with the problem space of distributed databases and need to read some of the seminal literature on the subject to better understand the implications of this system's design."
• "I have trouble following the metric switches throughout this piece; I need to be better about counting and pay more attention to the word stresses."

That is, shed the vague notion of "hard", isolate the real problem(s), and identify concrete solutions to each. Then the notion of difficulty changes:

• I have not achieved familiarity with the harmonic language of this piece yet.
• I do not have the necessary background knowledge to work effectively with this system yet.
• I am not able to consistently execute these melismatic passages yet.

But I will. That's what's fun about challenges.

Thanksgiving Prayer

On that day, God created Carbon;

He created Carbon, and sprinkled it both within and without the face of the Earth;

and He created Gravity, because it is not Just a Theory, to hold the Carbon and the Oxygen and the gases of the Firmament about the Earth;

and He gave Man dominion over every living creature on the face of the Earth;

and He said unto Man: "Go forth and multiply, and create Markets, and let not ye regulate the Markets".

And Man created Markets, and Man incorporated, and called it Man, and Man gave Man dominion over every Carbon on the face of the Earth.

On that November the ninth of 2011, God saw the Markets, and the way of Man with the Carbon, and the Earth that looked like the Earth of September the fifteenth, and God said it was Good.

On Normalcy

My children are not normal. Not surprising; their parents aren't, either.

Normalcy never struck me as an especially desirable state for a human being, within a certain range of tolerance. The "normal" of standard decorum -- excrete in the allotted area, speak at an appropriate volume for your environment, wear pants to work, take turns speaking when engaged in conversation, etc. -- makes sense and provides a reasonable framework for productive discourse. But the "normal" of social interaction with one's peers, taking the foundational stuff as a given, is another thing entirely. That "normal" feels biased towards a relatively narrow range of interests and behaviors, none of which appear to offer any unique merit apart from their popularity. The former gives us rules for the mechanics of conversation, the latter for the content. I happen to think the mechanics are fine and the content basically sucks.

So I don't offer the assessment of my daughters' standing in this respect with woe or despair. More like amusement at best, and pride at worst.

We recently enjoyed a hurricane-filled weekend with my parents, elder brother, and his family. He observed during the visit that while his son sings occasionally throughout the day, my girls seem to sing pretty much continuously between the two of them.

And well they should: their parents both sing pretty seriously for pleasure and to a lesser degree work. Both work on so-called classical singing on a regular basis. Their mother sings kiddie tunes at various pre-school events. Their father sings damn near constantly, while working at the computer, driving to the grocery store, walking through the grocery store, cooking dinner, taking a shower, or excreting in the allotted area. For these girls, singing is normal.

Lots of parents, and lots of children, sing. The near ubiquity of it in our home, and the primary stylistic focus, are probably outside the norm, but gently so. A little eccentric, perhaps, but an eccentricity that people can appreciate.

Eccentricity: when we listen to "Music Together" albums in the car, my daughters' parents frequently improvise harmonies. Not all that unusual. Except that daddy improvises chromatic counterpoint, or turns every harmony into a seventh, ninth, or sharp eleventh.

Eccentricity: the father's endless singing often eschews identifiable "songs", instead playing out a part in some new piece in his head that will never be written down, never heard by anyone else. It might be the Coltranesque improvisatory horn line, the jazz/funk bass line to the latest James Brown noncreation, or a chant melody on nonsense syllables sounding two parts DuFay and one part Hindustani raga.

(The mother's loving acceptance of the father's oddities in this respect teach us the meaning of grace.)

For my daughters, singing is a constant companion, rather than a mere activity. You don't fit it into your schedule like gymnastics classes and play dates; you carry it with you everywhere you go. Sometimes you go to the grocery store.

Young children naturally emulate the adults around them, before learning the hipness of rejection. The ways in which the described parental behaviors manifest in the children are easy to see. But the degree to which this shifts the girls' sense of normalcy is only recently coming out.

The two year-old now sings around the house with a frequency rivaling that of the almost-five year-old. While she colors, looks at books, etc. The almost-five year-old breaks into song in the aisles of the grocery store, mid-conversation, after dinner at Stone Heath Pizza, whenever and wherever. She looks you in the eye, as if she regards this as a standard part of discourse.

Additionally, after asking her mother about her parents' disdain for Ariel's singing in "The Little Mermaid," and their appreciation of Aurora's singing in "Sleeping Beauty", the almost-five year-old will consciously shift between her regular voice and an affected nasal style. We didn't tell her that one is better than the other, and she continues to enjoy stuff that we pretty much despise. As she should. She simply integrated the information into her awareness and takes note of the different approaches as she hears them.

Every little kid has his or her developmental points of interest. I don't pretend that the girls' behavior is in some way exceptional (in the overloaded sense of exceptional that conflates "highly unusual" with "excellent"). Nor do I maintain lofty aspirations for them or a desire to push them towards a living in music. The degree to which music matters to me, and the place it occupies in my interior life, falls outside the range of normal. My only hope for the kids in this regard is that they might have something occupying a similar position in their lives. It gives tremendous satisfaction to see that they already do. We didn't need to teach them or give lessons. We needed only to let them see us being our own weird selves.

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Extremely Important Thoughts on George R. R. Martin and J. K. Rowling

I enjoyed HBO's "Game of Thrones" quite a lot, which naturally got me interested in the books by George R. R. Martin. One does not need to spend much time reading the writing about the writing -- the information on wikipedia, various critical pullquotes, etc. -- before running headlong into the Thrones-versus-Potter drama.

Given the publishing timelines of the books, and the overwhelming popularity and general cultural sensation of Harry Potter and the Miserable Adolescence, it is perhaps inevitable that comparisons come up. And of course, J.K. Rowling won the coveted Big Dork scifi book prize over Martin, which only serves to increase the likelihood that readers and pundits draw comparisons between the two series.

And given that near inevitability, it is all the more nearly inevitable that I will weigh in with great wisdom and insight.

First, let's start with the 2001 Hugo award. "Eat your heart out, Rowling. Maybe you have billions of dollars and my Hugo, but you don't have readers like these." Readers like what, sir? Twelve year olds? I'm pretty sure Rowling's got twelve year olds. Older? Younger? She's got 'em. Pathologically concerned with the outcome of the series? Got 'em. So readers like what, exactly?

At least one of the Martin books has a pull-quote in the leading fluff pages of critical babbling that explicitly says the series is "better than Harry Potter." This is obviously a stupid thing to say without defining the terms: better at what?

Both are multi-generational sweeping epics. Martin's is considerably vaster in scope and considerably more complex in terms of parallel narratives, questions of morality, etc. Rowling's is more complex on an emotional level as it focuses so consistently and deeply on the trials, suffering, and development of one primary character.

Is Martin's writing "better"? It's more elevated in tone and more structurally sophisticated than that of Rowling, to be sure. There are moments of laugh-out-loud humor, of poignant loss. There are moments of sheer tedium, when we're told of the outfits the character deemed appropriate for wearing to court, or the history of some local non-existent figure of legend, or the lyrics to some moronic song that a traveling bard offers up.

(In that sense, George R. R. truly is the "American Tolkein"; he may not describe the generations of Proudfeet, nor every succulent detail of Bilbo's parting breakfast smorgasbord, but he doesn't hold back with the utterly irrelevant, pardon-me-while-I-skim-this-horsecrap detail. I don't hold it against him; some of Bach's de capo arias have this quality as well, but Bach's accomplishments remain nevertheless staggering.)

Martin presents a world perhaps more like the one humans actually inhabit, apart from the dragons and the like. People act out of self-interest, nobility is a crutch, and the only honest, loyal people are the broken ones. The world is gritty and unforgiving and, above all, perilous. There's something beautiful and dazzling about the interweaving narrative threads, about the sheer scope of it all. Characters like Tyrion, Jaime, and Arya are quite a lot of fun, as well. And anybody can be taken from you, at any time. It's stark. Refreshingly so.

Yet, Rowling's world, while simpler and more fanciful, is not without grit. Rowling waits a long while before she takes somebody from us that we really care about, so when it happens, it hurts all the more. Martin focuses on the bleakness, the fickleness of fate. Rowling focuses on the loss and its consequences. Which is more interesting?

So, to return to the original question ("better at what?"): Martin excels at scope, grandeur, concurrency, weaving, twisting, turning. Yet his characters all feel a little too simple, too straightforward. Rowling, on the other other, develops a few characters with great care and great patience, and the development of tween years through adolescence feels, to me, familiar and fundamentally true. As much as I enjoy Martin's work (thus far), I find it impossible to care about any of the characters to the extent that I cared about Harry and co.

Which is your preference? Both will suck you in. They're both quite good and quite enjoyable, and both have plenty of flaws. So what do you want from a book series? They are both good enough at what they do that one can almost forget that they're fantasies. The fanciful aspects are just facts of the world the characters inhabit, but the choices and development of the characters are what matter.

For my money, I'll take Rowling. I am a human, and Rowling writes about humans and their pains. But it's understandable that one could conclude differently.

Now, all that said, let's consider one fatal flaw in Martin's writing: the sex.

The sex scenes peppering Martin's books are unfortunate. Truly unfortunate. They read like Penthouse Forum letters. They read like what a hormone-addled, pimply, thirteen year-old boy would imagine sex to be. The epic nature of them, the female submission to the man's sheer man-ness, all of it: embarrassingly ridiculous. That they focus purely on the animal act, utterly devoid of love, could arguably be said to fit with the bleak nature of the series. Whatever the case, as flaws go, the sex flaw is tragic: Martin directs this vast array of characters and narratives with virtuosic ability, but repeatedly exposes the weakest elements of his writing in these superfluous scenes that could be better expressed through implication.

(Arguably one such scene is not superfluous: that of Khal Drogo and Dany in their yes/no dialog. Yet that scene is one of the most absurd and poorly conceived in the entire series. I can believe in his dragons, his wights, his Others, his Lord of Light. I cannot believe in his concept of sexual intercourse.)

It is possible that my reaction reflects some latent puritanical impulse of which I've been thus far unaware. It is possible that my own concept of these topics is shriveled and puny, that these sexual scenarios I find comical are to most people utterly pedestrian. It is possible that Martin is the greatest lover in the history of the universe. All these and more are possible, but the books would still be better without these scenes. These things are better left unsaid. To make them concrete is to make them ridiculous, disappointing, cheap, useless. Don't you know that, George?

Rowling had the good sense to avoid this topic. (Can you imagine the parental outcry if she hadn't? That would've been fun to see.) She touched on some adolescent physical stuff, but only just. She wisely focused on the more relevant aspect of romance (though Martin's sexcapades could hardly be described thus) through the obsessive lens of adolescence. Her characters desire each other with crippling hormonal longing, and it drives them crazy, but they long to be loved rather than to merely possess or grapple. This aspect of the great sex game is actually worth reading about, because it's actually, you know, interesting. It's the great mystery that occupies so much of our time (until suddenly it doesn't). It can't be solved with simple measures. The aspects with which Martin concerns himself can be solved with a good wank.

In conclusion: I admire Martin's accomplishment, and I admire Rowling's. Both are great fun, particularly if you approach them first and foremost as such; that way, you can be pleasantly surprised at the emotional depth as the series carry on. Yet Rowling's is the more meaningful achievement, in my view. Rowling wrote for twelve year-olds, but achieved something moving and significant. Martin strives for something significant, but unfortunately at times writes like a twelve year-old.

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