The King of Pointland

The tragedy of both of these items leaves me forlorn; awash in grief. Well, the second one more than the first, really. How long has a Hz been defined, anyway? Is it near as long as we've had middle A? Was the sound of middle A, and the rest of the notes, for that matter, just a sort of aural tradition (harhar) before then? An ignorant mind wants to know - but not bad enough to do its own research.

Honestly, in all truth, for real though, as a matter of fact, this is actually just frankly more of a sort of "I have read your bjournal" type of comment than anything meaningful. Thank you for creating another wonderful entry in your bjournal. I enjoyed it. Maybe Mo will read this and give me some learnin'. Or maybe you will. I wonder how long of a comment moveable type would let me post. Maybe I'll check that out sometime. Maybe I'll do it right now, on an old, old post or something.

Unlike my co-habitator, I, Maureen, have something of merit to add to the first part of your entry.

A440 is the standard /American/ tuning. For the last 20-30 years, A441 has been standard in Europe. As you get further east, the tunings have traditionally become more sharp. It's a cultural thing, from what I understand. I have no links to back me up currently.

I don't believe I have been trained in the formal syntax you used in LJ to announce this update.

I don't know what the colon in "x: x is an updated bjournal" means. Is this like saying "x, where x is an updated bjournal?"

I know the curly braces are usually placed around sets of things. And the horseshoe pointing to the right is our wacky friend the conditional. So while I think we can all be assured that your expression means something very exact, it looks to me most like it says "If there is a set that contains the King of Pointland, then there is a set containing an updated bjournal." In other words, "It is never the case that there is no updated bjournal in a universe that contains the KoP."

And that would seem to be a false claim, since I have been typing this in for over five minutes now and you have not updated your bjournal.

Yes, the {x: x has property P} notation means the same thing as {x | x has property P}, which means, "The set of all x where x has property P}, like {i | i >= 2}. So my statement was: the (singleton) set containing as its only member The King of Pointland is a subset of the set of all updated bjournals. The "⊂" means "is a subset of". Which is just a complicated way, as you know at this point, of saying "The King of Pointland has been updated." But I'm running out of ways to say that.

But it has not been updated. You have not updated it since 8:57pm this evening. Therefore, your statement is false.

"Neither candidate"? What a tragically myopic world you live in; how could you forget that Lyndon LaRouche, the only man who understands what the government has really been up to all these years, is running, as always, for President?

And of course, like any Presidential candidate worth his salt, he has a plan for tuning. Oh, but it's for A at 432, as Verdi prescribed. This means that middle C is at 256, a number which should appeal to anyone in the computer sciences.

Donut....mmmmmmm....

Cliff: But it has not been updated. It has been updated. It was updated at 8:57 PM last evening. ;-)

Bob: Thanks for bringing that petition to my attention. I still have faith in my world. Regarding "neither," I thought of other candidates, and that somebody would make a comment like yours. In fact, I am always anticipating such comments. For example, I considered the possibility that Andrew would say something like "How could an orgasm not be spiritual?" There is a constant din of hypothetical comments whenever I write the bjournal. Even now I'm hearing Maureen ask, "Is the din at 440 Hz?"

Back to "neither." Yes, I should have said "none of the candidates."

You know, a voice in my head as I read this post said, "Ask David how an orgasm could possibly not be spiritual!"
But then this other voice said, with firmness and finality, "Andrew, don't be a tool. I mean, for crying out loud."

I'm not sure if my second half of my first comment overrode the first, making you think I wasn't serious, or if you just don't know, or what - any idea how old the notion of a HZ is, compared to the notion of a musical note?

Well, a Hz is defined as "cycles per second," so the question then becomes, how long has a second been a second? Then the question is, how long have we divided a day into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds, and how we have defined the length of a day, etc. Of course, now a second is defined in terms of the period of the radiation of a Cesium atom. This might have the answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second.

The question isn't "how long have we defined a second," but "how long have we defined a pitch as x cycles per second" - leading to questions such as "how long have we had concepts like cycles and cycles per second."

Your discussion of the definition of a second illustrates exactly what I'm asking - we've had seconds a lot longer than we've been aware of or measuring such things as radiation of a Cesium atom.

How long have we had pitch? How did we define it prior to conceptualizing a Hz? Was it truly unclear that this is what I meant?

Oh, sorry. The way I understand it, long before we could accurately measure hundreds or thousands of cycles per second, it was understood (Pythagoras) that musical notes were related by ratios, initially as ratios of string lengths. I don't know when notes were first measured in cycles per second, though.

As far as fixing a reference point, I don't know how that was done, either. Presumably as long as all instruments in a group are in tune with eachother (and themselves), you're copacetic.

Here we go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_%28music%29#Historical_pitch_standards

You are without question my hero. You once again have permission to marry my daughter.

She should marry Wikipedia. They're closer in age, too.

It's great when you act all coy. I knew you'd do that, if I called you out in public.

This is not an updated bjournal. You lie.

Now...now KoP is...permanently updated.

This round goes to you, Eisner. But I'll be back.