The Aria from Bachs Goldberg variations

The aria from the Goldberg variations is a beautiful piece of music. Perhaps one of the most beautiful pieces ever written.   When Glenn Gould plays it (video clip above) is of course beautiful, it also sounds very simple.  Like something anyone can play.   Well.  It even feels that way when you play the first few bars, but that's a deception!   When playing this piece I feel like I'm trapped inside (a very beautiful) swiss watch:  There are cogwheels everywhere, and they have to match up exactly or the whole thing just  stops working.  It's not that hard to put the fingers on the right place at almost the right time, but getting it exactly right is surprisingly difficult.  But of course also rewarding.   This is the kind of music it's worth spending time on.  Every little bit of improved skill on my part  pays itself back handsomely in musical experience (for myself, I don't dare let anyone else listen to this until I'm considerably more skilled :-)

What to play when learning to play

So I'm learning to play the piano. It's a joy. It's fun. It's demanding. It's as engaging as playing video games, only better since it's a (somewhat) useful skill I'm learning. But it'a also challenging in many ways. On of the many ways is to chose what to play? I've spent a couple of months dialing in the selection of music and I think I have a mechanism that works now.

The mathematician Hardy said "There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics". That is so, but it's even more so for music. I've looked in a bunch of piano schools and unfortunately a lot of the pieces in them are just boring. The sad fact is that even if I had been able to play them perfectly (which I'm not), they would not sound good, because the pieces are bad. These schools are probably written with the best intentions e.g. being pedagogical or making money for the composer, but that simply doesn't matter. If I had spent time playing this music what I had been practicing most would be to be bored playing boring music that even when perfected would be boring . There is no permanent place in this world for ugly music and in particular there is not even a temporary place for it anywhere near my piano.

So then, what do I play? The answer is: I play the good stuff. Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, Sæverud,..... whatever. But it has to be good music. I've found that for me it's better to play good music one or even several notches above my current skill level and then struggle hard with it until it's (more) within my abilities than to suffer even a minute of something that's probably within my abilities, but intrinsically boring.

Right now I'm working on the second prelude in the well tempered clavier by J.S. Bach. (BVW 847). It's hard. I'm not ready for it. However, It's also fun. I can get some of it to sound good. I can think concretely about how to improve my playing. I can listen to an abundance of recordings of this piece and be inspired by them. I'm getting better every day and all every little improvement is so incredibly rewarding because the payback of even a little progress is immediate: Get those two bars in succession without missing a note and without having to pause between the bars to read the music to figure out where to put my fingers ... and *wham*: New cool "Bachy" progression unlocked, only several hundred more to go ;-) I know that there are at least two or three full layers of mechanical skill and musical interpretation I have to get through before I'm playing this piece with anywhere near the skill it deserves but that's ok :-) I'll happily play this piece for however long it takes and enjoy every second of it, even when I don't play it very well ;)

So that's this blogpost's key insight: Don't play shitty music. It's a waste of time.

I couldn't resist sharing this little gem :-)

A comment found in a piece of software I work on (with others, names have been removed to protect the innocent):

// This class is like Jerry Seinfeldt in the TV series "Seinfeldt".
// It's fairly central, and at the core there is something, but
// almost everything you can see is just mindless maneuvering
// and observation of form in order to avoid utter embarresment,
// not always successful. In our case this is of course a consequence
// of using Java as a medium of expression, in Seinfeldts case
// I'm less sure of the root cause.

*Giggle*

My new piano - some first impressions

I'm an adult. I've got four kids and I haven't played the piano since my early teens, when I quit because it was to boring. Since then I've played various percussion instruments for some decades, but lately I haven't had much time for that either. Kids and work take too much time. About a year ago I visited a friend, and he had a Yamaha digital piano. I sat down and tried to play some of the pieces he had lying around and found I could, kinda, sorta play the piano: Some of the motoric skills were still there and my music-reading skills were much better now than when I quit playing piano. I spent an afternoon playing on his piano, and I was hooked.

I'm a somewhat obsessive and impulsive personality, so to avoid veering away in every direction I usually let my impulses mature until they are irresistible, or as some would say: Obsessive :). In this case I let the impulse to buy a piano mature for almost six months before starting to looking for a piano. I asked friends, looked at reviews, read Graham's booklet and went to the local music shops. Before christmas I had narrowed my search down to two pianos: The Kawai CN-33 and the Yamaha CLP-430. I can't claim that the final decision was wholly rational. Both of these pianos are as far as I can tell really good ones so I guess it came down to the shop offering a much better deal on the CN-33. I ended up getting some 30% off relative to the sticker price and that was pretty much that.

After that, the matters have been mostly practical, so I'll run down how the first few days as a piano owner has been:

• Transport: The piano weights 53 Kg, the box it came in weighs in at 20Kg, so the whole thing weighs 73 Kgs. It's 150cm x 65 cm x something, and fits nicely in a station wagon, but you do need to be two fairly strong individuals to transport it safely.
• Unpacking: No instructions for assembling the piano was included. At least none that Icould find. There was a small sheet of paper on the top of the stack of pieces saying thatassembly instructions could be found in the owner's manual. Well, first of all the owner's manual was at the bottom, under 53 kilos of piano pieces wrapped in plastic, and I didn't find that until after the entire piano was assembled. Secondly the owner's manual didn't say much of interest except the pretty much obvious things about not pooring liquids into an electrical piano etc. In particular, no assembly instructions could be found.
• Assembly: Luckily assembly wasn't that hard: There are sixteen screws in a small bag. The four shiny ones are used to fasten the pedalboard to the sideboards. The four long black ones are used to fasten the back-panel to the side-panels. The four shorter black ones are used to fasten the back-panel to the pedalboard, and the four machine-screws are used to fasten the piano to the stand. Plug in the wire coming out of the pedals into the hole labeled "pedals", and the power cable into the hole saying "power", and you're done. The whole thing took about an hour and some thinking. It wasn't hard, it was just that in a situation like this you really really don't want to do something wrong, so I had to stop and think a lot to make sure I didn't make any mistakes, and I think I didn't.
• Using it: It is wonderful. It sounds ridiculously good. Really. It's unnatural :-) The CN-33 easily sounds better than any piano I've ever played on myself and most pianos I've heard other people play. Also It's just so much fun to play. Playing on the simulated ebony keyboard is just a sensuous experience. I won't compare it to touching human skin, since someone might take it the wrong way and be offended, but that's almost what it feels like. My kids have clicked on all the buttons and played with the piano for several days. They find it great fun. Myself, I've just used the piano sounds (no organs, no bass, no midi, no usb, no weirdness) and the recording feature. The recording feature and the metronome is actually extremely useful. The metronome for keeping pulse (as a percussionist I've played more duets with metronomes than anything and anyone else :-), and the recorder for immediately reviewing something, sometimes a full tune, sometimes just a few bars. I haven't done that with any instrument before, but I've found it extremely useful.
  

So that's that. So far I'm a happy CN-33 owner. Let's just hope I also one day can become a somewhat proficient pianist, but as of today I'm a happy one, and that that's also something ;-)

Ho ho ho, now I have a microscope

Santa Claus had a short pit-stop here today and dropped off a high powered microscope from Amscope :-) Unfortunately the 10 MP camera doesn't seem to work very well, which is a bummer and something I will have to fix. However, I'm still full of excitement about this :-)

Update: The camera isn't dead on arrival. It seems to be alive and kicking when plugged into an old XP machine. My OSX box didn't recognize the camera at all. Amscope advertise that this camera should be useful both for windows and OSX, but either that information is incorrect or something is missing.

My cellar office is definitely getting a "mad scientist" flavor now: That microscope is huge and it stands right in the middle of my desk where I previously had a big flatscreen monitor so it's kind of hard to miss :-) Now I need to kick the tires a bit to get the imager up and running, set up some processing pipelines from the cellar office (where the XP box is located) up to the interclouds where the images will be stored. Also I now need to aquire some kit to make interesting preparates to look at. So far i've just looked at paper, which is interesting enough for an evening, but it gets a bit tiresome after a while even at 2000 times magnification :-)

Update on the update: A quick email to amscope cleared things up a bit. The camera as shipped from amscope doesn't contain software for OSX, but they have software available for download here: http://www.amscope.com/download-ma. I haven't tested it yet so I don't know how good or bad it is, but this is progress :-)

Update^3: I've now tested the osx software and basically, it sucks, but not so badly that it's unusable. The software from amscope is an application that seems to be reading directly from the USB connection and then allow images to be captured either as single frames or as movies. That's not so bad, but what's just stupid is that they haven't bothered to make an OSX driver for the camera, which means that all other imaging software for OSX is probably useless. That is stupid. It is possible to work around this, but it would have been much better not to.

Telenor Management - a view into my crystal ball

I was thinking a bit about the future of the top management in Telenor the other day, and here are what I found. Mind you, I have no (absolutely no!) access to information that is private or confidential about these matters. Everything I say is based on a combination of open sources and wild guesses. Caveat reader. With these preliminaries out of the way, let's look at some cherry-picked facts listed in no particular order.

• Jan Edvard Thygesen jumps ship from Telenor to Vimpelcom. Thygesen has been one of the most influential directors in Telenor during the last almost twenty years. He has been instrumental in particular with respect to the eastern european investments. As such, it is natural that he now joins Vimpelcom, one of the companies Telenor has had a considerable investment in. However, it also indicates another thing: He believes he has better opportunities in Vimpelcom than in Telenor.
• The previous CEO of Telenor, Thormod Hermansen was CEO from 1991 to 2002. That is 11 years.
• Before Hermansen Kjell Holler was CEO from 1980 to 1991, 11 years.
  
• This year the current CEO, Jon Fredrik Baksås has been CEO for ten years. If history is any guide, he will step down next year. Nothing has been announced yet but that just makes it more interesting when we are playing the game: "Who's the next CEO of Telenor?"
• Actually there is an obvious candidate: Kristin Skogen Lund. Let me name the ways in which she is qualified: She's bright. She's an MBA (INSEAD) , she already works within Telenor (the Digital Services division, formerly chief of the Nordic division). Also she's the president of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise which in practice means she's got considerable political clout, something which is mandatory for any Telenor CEO, since it's a government owned company. Finally, she's a she. Of course it's not obvious that she'll be elected, but it wouldn't be at all surprising if she is.
  

So what do i see in my crystal ball? I see a CEO change sometime next year. I see Kristin Skogen Lund being the next CEO, and I see a significant portion of the current top management team coming the same conclusion as Thygesen; that their remaining years are better spent elsewhere than in Telenor. As a consequence of this there will be a considerable influx of new people in Telenor's top management. Some will be internal, and some will be external, and I couldn't possibly comment on who I think any of these people will be :-)

Something to bite in ;-)

Even though the machine learning homework was really simple, it was still fun to do. I clearly needed a refresher on Octave, and Professor Ng's Octave intro was very useful: Exactly the right mix of speed and clarity. Ng is a really impressive character. He is obviously an extremely good teacher: At first glance that's not so obvious since it seems like the things he explains are just so simple that anyone could have done as well as him. That's actually the hallmark of a good teacher: The lessons just seems obvious. It's only after a while, usually after struggling a bit, one recognizes that the lessons are not that obvious and the teacher is actually brilliant :-) A risk with teachers like that however is that one believes that the lessons is all one needs, that exercises are not needed. Luckily I've learned that particular lesson previously and I've got no need to repeat it.

Another little but impressive detail is the octave code used to submit the exercises. Yes, you read that right: Octave itself does the upload. The submit script has its own SHA-1 implementation, talks with the ml-class server over the wire and handles the submit for you. Very elegant.

I managed to get the main part of the exercises done on monday but the extra credit parts will have to wait a bit.

The AI course seems a bit more clunky. Still worth the time but not the same level of style as machine learning. So far It's been a refresher course for me, but obviously one I need. Today's lecture was about probabilities and I discovered I had to think for several seconds (ok, even a few minutes) before I got the quiz questions right. That's surprising, after all I know this stuff, right? This is a reminder that you don't really know something if you don't actually do it on a regular basis. This is true for maths, but it's also true for programming and probably most other tasks requiring some skill.

Yet one pleasant surprise has been the discussion forum for the ai class and ml course on reddit. It's nice. People are polite, ask relevant questions, get good answers and are on topic and discuss academically interesting issues. It's a bit like being back on the internet before 1993 :-)

For some reason I've managed to lose my notes for the first two modules. Sigh. Another sigh is the LaTeX preview in AquaEmacs: It's just not working on my laptop. It is working on another machine at work so I'll try a bit of "differential debugging" to see what's the cause of the malfunction. That kind of thing just freaks me out when it happens. I have to breathe slowly several times :-)

However, all in all, it's good fun. I think I could benefit from explaining the stuff I'm learning to someone else; that's a really good way to enforce learning. I'll see if I can concoct some situation at work where it is appropriate to lecture on gradient descent, linear regression, bayesian networks or normal equations :-) Colleagues beware!