Over the last few years I’ve read several books on music with the aim of learning to create captivating electronic music myself. In this practical endeavor, Curtis Roads’s Composing Electronic Music (2015) must be seen an been invaluable resource. It’s a cornucopia of technical information, a precise and motivational description of how this kind of […]
Among the most famous lines in philosophy is Descartes’s claim that he had proven his own existence because he thinks: Je pense, donc je suis. It is referred to as the cogito because we remember it best from a later publication, in Latin. The English translation reads–surprise!–I think, therefore I am. But does it matter […]
Leaked Email Message From Elon Musk’s Chief Spiritual Executive You won the bet. I admit it. I owe you three start-ups of your choosing. May they serve humankind and the animals well. It is indeed the case that women born and raised on the colony develop two separate menstrual cycles with time, one for Deimos, […]
Dreams of Reason Then There’s a famous phrase in a painting by Goya–“El sueño de la razón produce monstruos“– which might mean “the sleep of reason produces monsters,” or “the dream of reason produce monsters[!]” The charm of the line lies in its polysemy, since the Spanish word sueño means both sleep and dream. These […]
Categories
On Memory and Memorizing
Memory, Where Art Thou? There’s a book I fondly remember–or fondly have forgotten, since its actual contents form but a haze in my psyche. It’s the autobiography of one fine Russian writer, whose title as we know it reads: Speak, Memory! Though the contents of the book I’ve mostly forgotten, an anecdote in the introduction […]