Fixed it.
I have a wonderful resource for you: The Harvard Dictionary of Music.
It’s more like an encyclopedia with many scholarly articles, well-written and comprehensive. It’s rather expensive, but you could probably find a used copy. Maybe your library has it.
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That’s a nice response, thank you.
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Any time!
I will try to dig up my copy and make sure there is a discussion on overtones, etc.
It does occasionally appear in singable tunes. Two example:
- Secular: West Side Story: “Mar-i[-a]”, which is 1->aug4[->5].
- Sacred: Graham Kendrick’s "The Servant King: chorus: “[daily offer-]ing of [worship]…”
Some interesting discussions here. Since I raised this question, I thought I’d share a little bit about one of the things that I’m working on.
It’s actually something that came out of my discussions about creation and evolution, and the research that I did for my analysis of Answers in Genesis’s “ten best evidences for a young earth.” One question that I’ve been considering right from the outset has been what standards scientific evidence has to meet. Accurate and honest weights and measures are one example; peer review and reproducibility are another. But there are also all sorts of interesting disciplines and habits that scientists develop that are well worth discussing.
One such example is keeping laboratory notes. This is something that leapt out at me when I was reading Kevin Henke’s review on Talk Origins of the RATE project’s claims about helium diffusion in zircons. He said this:
If Dr. Humphreys and R. V. Gentry did not have R. V. Gentry’s original calculations or laboratory notes, how do they know after more than 20 years that typographic errors had been made in Gentry et al. (1982a)? Was R. V. Gentry simply admitting to the possibility of “typographic errors” to help his friend, Dr. Humphreys, and the RATE project? Also, why were the Q values affected by the “typographic errors”, but not the associated Q/Q0 values? How is this mathematically possible? Correcting errors in previous manuscripts is certainly honorable. However, authors should not agree to any “corrections” unless they can first review their original laboratory notes and confirm that copying, analytical or other errors were indeed made. In other words, scientists should not admit to making mistakes before seeing the evidence.
…
Finally, the lack of documentation from Dr. Humphreys to justify changes in the published data of Gentry et al. (1982a) would never be tolerated in authentic scientific journals. Any editor or peer-reviewer of a legitimate scientific journal would demand a thorough and complete explanation of why these changes are justified before any revisions would be allowed to appear in their journals. Competent editors and reviewers would also insist that if the original laboratory notes had been lost that the results be discarded and the analyses redone.
(Emphasis mine.)
When I read these two paragraphs, my first thought was, why am I not doing that in my own job? Keeping lab notes is a discipline that is second nature to every professional scientist, but that is rare in the software development world. Many programmers view the Agile Manifesto almost as a religion, and the Agile Manifesto tells us that we should favour “working software over comprehensive documentation.” But there have been numerous times throughout my career when I’ve looked at some code and wondered why it was written the way it was, only to find that the person who wrote it has long since left the company, and the only thing to explain it is a comment in source control saying something meaningless such as “A bit more refactoring.” Sometimes, the person making such an idle comment has been none other than myself.
Ever since then I’ve been keeping pretty comprehensive lab notes about the code that I write. When I first started, I wrote a couple of blog posts about the practice:
When I first started up this discipline, I used Microsoft Word for it, but for the past two years or so I’ve been using Confluence. More recently, I’ve been asking the question: what would an electronic lab notebook look like if it were designed by software engineers, for software engineers? About three weeks ago, I started up a side project in my spare time to explore this idea and to see what I could come up with. It’s still very much “me-ware” and only in the very early stages, so I don’t have much to show for it yet, but I do have a few interesting ideas knocking around in the back of my mind, and it will be interesting to see where it ends up.
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True, but that doesn’t change what I said.
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I’ve noticed over the years that science is almost entirely absent from gathered Sunday worship. There are hymns and songs about pretty things in nature, but very little that touches on real, modern science.
As a songwriter and hymnwiter, I have occasionally made passing reference to modern science in psalm and scripture paraphrases. And I’ve written one hymn/song which is specifically deeply grounded simultaneously in both scripture and modern science. But there really isn’t much that simply refers to modern science without falling into the trap of getting cheesy or preachy about it!
I’m trying to prepare a resource list of items I have encountered.
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I wasn’t trying to change what you said!
Here’s one for you:
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Some churches are science-friendly.
From the Eucharistic prayer C in the Book of Common Prayer:
“God of all power, Ruler of the Universe,
you are worthy of glory and praise.
Glory to you for ever and ever.
At your command all things came to be:
the vast expanse of interstellar space,
galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses,
and this fragile earth, our island home.
By your will they were created and have their being.”
The BCP also has a prayer for those who travel in space.
“For those who travel on land, on water, or in the air, or through outer space, let us pray to the Lord.”
We have scientists, doctors, and nurses in our stained glass windows. And probably in our wood carvings also. And the Washington National Cathedral has a Space Window that actually has a piece of moon rock in it! How cool is that?
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Two examples that I am familiar with (and have sung) are in The Pirates of Penzance, fly’s-foot [fall would be distinctly heard] and in Iolanthe, once in each “verse” of Love Unrequited or The Nightmare Song a set of three notes on the same pitch, then down an A4th, three notes there, then back up an A4th.
Well I’m glad they are having a hard time. I use almost zero chemicals in anything I do gardening related. The plants were based off the plants they mentioned in their comments though.
But if someone is looking for good edible perennials I suggest looking up native edibles in your area. Obviously fruit trees are the typical go to ones. But I think they were trying to make a vegetable garden.
The perennials I use here are probably very different from the ones they will use there. Plus if your yard is already landscaped a lot of people like blending in edible annuals or “tender perennials”. Tomato plants are often perennial. I’ve seen some bushes that were a good 6x6 feet with hundreds of cherry or blueberry sized tomatoes on it. Starting next month, I’ll begin collecting wild ground cherries. I often a pound or two a week. More if I find a large cluster of then in the dunes. You can also save seeds from heirlooms and not have to keep buying them again and again
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Hope I did not derail the conversation too much by trying to make gardening sciency, but indeed every season is a new experiment, and the search for varieties adapted to your area, the variables of weather and nutrients, as well as other factors are of interest to a gardener with a scientific bent.
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To the extent that I can get away from being department chair, in addition to the Waccamaw project Timothy has discussed, I am working on DNA sequence-based phylogeny of several mollusk groups and a few random other organisms (e.g., the parasites in the freshwater snails on campus; local crayfish), some fossils from a rock unit of somewhat uncertain age, an idea on the geomorphological causes of high diversity in southeastern North American freshwater animals, etc.
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Tomato vines are perennial. In places with a mild winter such as Texas they will come up year after year. But where I live they die in the winter. That may change with global warming.
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Well, in climates that are more tropical, they grow through the years, but once they freeze, they are dead, and do not come back from the roots once the vegetative growth is killed.
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One reason may be our mind reasons, the spirit compels. Neither love or anger care about a reason.
Similarly, there is little love found in chemical weapons and explosives. If it wasn’t for loving our neighbor, science may have caused our extinction by now.
I love science. Just highlighting a difference between the two and why there may not be a big focus on science Sundays as the focus is on our spirit.
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James, I found this in our hymnal as a kid and always thought it was the greatest oddity. I think I plunked out the melody once just to see what it was like, but don’t remember it. One guy at church who likes to gain attention by means of contentious behavior requested it by number at a hymn sing. When everyone turned to it, we all just groaned. No one knew it. “Next!”
Have you ever sung it?
What I’ve been working on is tracking down a bunch of native aquatic plants in my area. Hardest part is access. Sometimes i have to park
3-5’miles away and hike to a overpass and crawl down make my way to the particular river I’m trying to get too. Especially the smaller woodland creeks. All access is limited for obscured spots be sure of private property.
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