#sputnik #corona #vaccine
Not that I care too much, but this is interesting.

1. few weeks ago (in a desperate PR action) the govt of Slovakia bought 2Mio doses of Sputnik V vaccine.
2. instead of directly distributing it, the govt asked the national testing institute for medicines (or whatever is the name) to approve it
3. the institute finally delivered a report stating that a) the docs to the vaccine is severely incomplete, b) the Russian producer refuses to answer further questions both from the institute and from EMA and c) they noticed that the vaccine batches across countries significantly differ in what they are and how they are handled. Most importantly d) the batch used for Lancet study of efficacy is different than the one Slovakia bought so it’s unclear what are the real performance properties of this stuff. In turn, the institute recommended to use the vaccine only at significant risk as they are not equipped to evaluate this more thoroughly (only EMA is).
4. in turn, the Russian producer (after speaking to the now ex-PM of Slovakia) alleged this as fake news and
5. requested return of the whole delivery on the ridiculous ground that in a breach of sales contract the vaccine was put to test by a 3rd party lab.

Source of the latest points: https://twitter.com/sputnikvaccine/status/1380158709985329155

Well. Personally, I totally agree with the view that the conditions and scrutiny for admitting this vaccine shall be the same as for other producers, but Russian producer thinks otherwise and thereby withholds important information. They obviously try to force other countries to use this on the basis of plain belief that it works as marketed. And these antics about requesting it to be sent back, well… If they fully refund it too, I guess it should be OK. We learned something new about vaccine politics here though.

Branches.

Morning light.

Fresh morning.

Attachment project

https://www.attachmentproject.com/

A project aiming at tackling the attachment disturbances in people. I think this is indeed very valuable and important.

Let’s end the pain and suffering caused by attachment disorders

When we heal our own pain, we can heal the next generation after us. > Pain from an attachment disorder is passed on through the family line > until someone is ready to heal it.

Issues are intergenerational, and can often be shared across several > generations of families.

My own thoughts over the last months are indeed along these lines. Most suffering in relationships is caused by people being messed up from their childhood by their family circumstances, typically by the messed up psychology of their parents. This leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of suffering in relationships. People don’t even know what it is, on their own, they just think it’s that everybody is screwed up. They are not. It’s each of us who needs some healing. Sometimes. The thing is, these are perfectly fixable issues. One just needs to be open to listening to this stuff, identify what’s the issue, understand what’s at stake and fix themselves. It’s easier to say than do.

Love and hate are not opposites.
The opposite of loving something is being indifferent to it.
Because loving and hating implies that you care about it. In one direction or another.
– Shawn Crowder

In a video by Adam Neely on The Music You Hate.

I have a saying: I reject your reality and assert my own.”
– Wesley Snipes/https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/02/wesley-snipes-on-art-excellence-and-life-after-prison-i-hope-i-came-out-a-better-person

https://electricliterature.com/whats-keeping-stephen-king-up-at-night/

“We live in a society where many believe that libraries and other cultural endeavours… are of minor importance. As if learning to think is a thing that just happens naturally, like learning to walk. Believe me, it’s not. Learning to think is the result of hard work and steady effort.”
– Stephen King/from a speech Stephen King at 2016 National Book Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRD7JJLPeIM. He says it at 34:00+

What is the tempo of minuet?

I am learning to play Leopold Mozart’s Minuet in D-minor. Examples of the music can be found here:

• https://soundcloud.com/hudson-shires/minuet-in-d-minor-by-leopold
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na4f9ltv2Fk

Regardless of the recordings, the question I have is how fast should one play a minuet?

Clearly, this is a baroque dance music. So the answer to the question will be the same as the answer to “how fast is minuet dance?”

It turns out, it’s quite fast: about 112 metronome beats per minute.

Sources:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPYCuzcJioU - an excerpt of a BBC documentary where a historic dances historian counts to demonstrate the dance steps. It’s rather fast. Matching that speed to the metronome of my piano turns out at arounf 110 bpm.
• http://www.janvanbiezen.nl/frenchbarok.html Jan van Biezen’s analysis of historical literature shows that minuet tempo is about 106-112 bpm. The article is generally a solid source for tempos for French baroque dances. Useful for future reference.

Seriously: you want to train me to fight, to do all this stuff, but my guardian angel should be Bambi?
…
I can do rather more than that. My hiding place is an old Resolution-class submarine, 425 feet long.
…
these boats were part of United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent programme armed with sixteen UGM-27 Polaris A3 nuclear missiles.
From here, I can burn cities. Let’s see Bambi do that.
– Nick Harkaway/Gnomon

This guy’s writing is really good.

@kattascha Thanks a lot for a very good interview at https://dennikn.sk/2332154/konspiracie-mozu-rozdelit-rodiny-a-znicit-priatelstva-potrebujeme-podporne-organizacie-vravi-autorka-knihy-falsovana-pravda/. Made a good job to attract me to check out your book. Good luck there!

Playing piano with body weight and martial arts

Yesterday my piano teacher showed me how to play piano with body weight. The idea is that to achieve a full and colourful tone, one should not play just with arms and fingers, but rather with the full body weight as if leaning with the upper body on one’s fingertips resting relaxed on the piano keyboard. I do not fully internalised the concept, nor can I perform the technique (that’s exactly the point of learning, right?), but I do understand what it means.

Weight transfer in piano play & exercises

Later in the evening I looked some articles and YouTube videos explaining the concept. There’s plenty of materials explaining what it’s all about: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=piano+play+with+body+weight

The take-away is that this is called weight transfer and there are many exercises to train it. The idea is to create a suspense bridge (feeling) between the upper torso and fingertip, use free-fall drop to play keys and effectively learn to transfer weight between fingers, instead of using force of finger muscles or arms.

This will of course take (probably long) time to develop.

But the concept is not unfamiliar, actually it very much resembles the use of body core to enact movement in Japanese martial arts.

Using your body efficiently in Japanese martial arts & sports

I am only familiar with some (beginner level) swordsmanship-related techniques from Iaido, Kendo, Aikido and Bojutsu. I also know that what I am going to say applies to Karate too. One of the things they teach, is that to deliver a really powerful, controlled and effective strike (be it with hand, or sword), you should use your hara, that is, the power of the hips, the body core. Simple interpretation without all the esoteric garbage is that it is the hips which generate body powerful rotations and thus generally provide momentum in body movements (hara-centric methods). My subjective understanding of this is that the rest is the question of transferring that momentum into useful energy delivered by another body part, typically limbs (strikes using arms, kicks using legs, or throws using the upper torso).

Similar techniques can be found at the core of many sports/moving body experiences. Another thing I am familiar with is running: again the proper technique is all about body core and hips as the engine providing the momentum, legs are to deliver it to the ground. The rest is structural, or dynamic support. Or take gymnastics and especially aerobatic gymnastics. Use of body core and hips everywhere. And so on…

Putting it together

So if I know (to an extent) the experience of using body core for martial arts, how can I transfer that same feeling into piano play?

And in turns out, I am of course not the first one to figure out the connection between weight-based piano play/weight transfer and martial arts. There is this marvelous site , where the author makes the same point in <https://pianodao.com/2015/10/31/piano-technique-weight-in-motion-boxing-taichichuan-and-the-cherry-tomato/>. Specifically:

maximum efficiency with minimum effort.
– Kanō Jigorōi about judo/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kan%C5%8D_Jigor%C5%8D

• the slow/fast judo throw video shows very well (if you are attentive) the use of hips during the throw.

The role of the muscles is to help the body maintain an efficient structure – so we can use and apply body-weight-in-motion.

This will need more elaboration till I get this right…

Ha! And a lovely first comment at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26644423

https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/1376985854229504007

Open and very useful twitter thread on how a guy built a product (a to-do app) and then lost competition with a well funded VC-backed competitor (who told them in advance).

The crux of the story is perhaps: “to start something is one thing, the difficult part is to know/determine when to stop”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUGsLoZYXb4

Pure joy to watch!

#music #dance #rockandroll

Over the last weeks, I came back to the idea of fox vs. hedgehog by Isaiah Berlin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox): “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”. In the past I thought my thinking is more of the hedgehog type (rather axiomatic, tree like structure with a deep root). The thing with such assessments is the problem of meta-self-cognition: what you are vs. what you think you are vs. what you like yourself to be.

Over the past year I started to write notes, at times even an intermittent diary for a couple of days, sometimes weeks. I discovered that my mind perhaps is not behaving like a hedgehog type after all. In retrospect, my notes are scattered pieced of memories, loose tidbits, quips, quotes, metaphors I come up with, or I read. The thing is, however, that I seem to be quite good in connecting those independent dots. Disconnected thoughts and scraps of stuff collected at around the same time tend to take a shape of a connected network of thoughts which then mold and over time grow into a interconnected network of bigger thoughts. All that, however, happens mostly intuitively, not as a directed effort - although at times that too, when I focus on studying some topic of actual interest of mine.

So what is it? It seems like what a fox would do: many loosely connected things which over time seem to take a shape of a deeper rooted tree. It seems after all, my mind seems to meander and bounce between the two sides as it sees actually fit. A fox which desires to become a hedgehog one day?

It helps to have a story, but it is not always possible to control what that story is.
– NIck Harkaway, Gnomon

Attachment avoidance/emotion dismissing attitude is like driving 150km/h on an Autobahn with closed eyes. What the heck you think will happen?

On dogs and hierarchy.

– Nick Harkaway, Gnomon.

The character Konstantin Kyriakos in that book is like a walking library of quips. The writer apparently had a collection of witty pieces and he then wrote a character around them 🙂 .