by stolzyblog

Rumanikos Duet

This 3-minute musical snippet is an improvisation from about eight years ago. Entirely spur-of-the-moment, in the living room, and thus the recording is absolutely low tech. Two musicians, both amateurs. Mon amie is playing a hang, a Swiss innovation, which uses the sides and tips of the fingers to sound resonating metallic ringing tones. I’m playing a digital keyboard which had been set to emulate a zither. What unites these two instruments, an uncommon duo, is the scale they are tuned to. More on that after having a listen…

► (Listen to hang/zither duet)

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by stolzyblog

How Not To Envision Space Aliens

It’s become less than surprising news of late when some intellectual luminary gives a warning about the perils of AI (artificial intelligence), and I count myself among those skeptical of it’s merits. But an unexpected new sci-fi-esque controversy has arisen recently. Figures no less celebrated than astrophysicist Stephen Hawking have sounded the alarm about our collective complacency concerning aliens. As in extra-terrestrials.

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by stolzyblog

Christmas Intonation

These words began insinuating themselves into my mind around 5AM on Christmas morning, accompanying me towards waking. Unable to control the torrent, I trundled down to the laptop and completed the ideas. I like these occasions best, when it seems writing is 10% creativity and 90% receptivity. When I feel myself a vehicle for friendly but insistent communication.

It is the question you cannot ask which matters
The axiom you must never scutinize

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by stolzyblog

Some Colorful Speech

Close your eyes, figuratively. If I ask you to picture the word green, do you imagine this or perhaps this, or something closer to this? How does your typical green image differ from mine or that of your daughter or a business colleague who lives in Costa Rica? Assuming we could develop a statistical norm for what speakers of American English generally mean by the word (and some studies have tackled this question), it only opens the door to further more interesting psycholinguistic puzzles. For example: has the concept ‘green’ changed subtly since the days of Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, or William the Conqueror? Do children conceive ‘green’ differently than senior citizens (perhaps even the same individual at different ages)? How does this compare with a Brazilian person who is thinking of verde? Or a Mongolian pondering ногоон?

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by stolzyblog

Antje’s Anniversary Present

Stuart was the first philosopher I’d ever met. At least he saw things that way. He was actually studying it in university, in South Africa I think, and could hold forth about Nietzsche’s opinions on this or that matter while as a 19-year-old hitchhiking through Europe in the early 70’s, all I could muster was a general awareness that the guy was cool for our generation because he said God was dead and dug the concept of superman…

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