• “Mastery” (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
• Reasoning with a 3-year-old
• Mimsy Sadofsky on play and talking
• Appreciating your own kids

I’ll probably still blog here on miscellaneous topics on an occasional basis (as always), so feel free to subscribe to both.

He puts forward lack of positive evidence as his principal reason for not believing that God exists. Paraphrasing Bertrand Russell, he says, “there’s no more reason to believe in the Christian God than in the Greek gods.” I think this is a silly assertion. Nobody believes in the Greek gods today. However, many millions of people do believe in the Christian God today. He may not think that’s a good enough reason to believe in God, but it’s a big jump to say there’s “no evidence”. If he’s talking scientific evidence, then I grant him the argument. Scientific evidence is a very narrow sort of evidence, as science is a very narrow sort of inquiry. But the continuing faith of millions over thousands of years does constitute some sort of evidence.

Later in the interview, he admits that people do have a sort of “cosmic loneliness”, or angst. He sees this as an explanation for why people have such a need for believing in God. The belief appears to satisfy their deep need for connection. This is another sort of evidence. You can use it to either explain people’s need to believe despite God’s non-existence, or you can view it as another sort of evidence for God—a being which, when believed in, “satisfies a deep craving in the human soul”, as McGinn puts it.

McGinn is most persuasive, I think, when he brings up the problem of evil. This should be truly challenging to any Christian or anyone who believes in the existence of a good, all-powerful God. Why would a good, all-powerful God let evil things happen in the world? McGinn notes the standard, ultimately unsatisifying explanation offered by theologians: God gave us free will, and we’re the ones that mess it up. Then what about natural disasters? Ultimately, the problem of evil is a real problem for faith. One of my beliefs as a Christian is that whereas God is all-knowing, we are not. And we’re not particularly meant to be. There are things we don’t understand and won’t ever understand in this life. Atrocities such as holocausts happen. There is a profound potential for evil in the human heart. These are things we have to contend with, even if we can’t fully explain them. If you’re going to believe in a religion, make sure it’s one that acknowledges and contends with the reality of suffering in the world and evil in the human heart—even if you were born into a free, wealthy society such as America where we are protected from much of the world’s suffering.

I have friends, family members, and colleagues who are atheists, and I want to better understand their point of view. I also want to find ways to address my doubts and to bolster my own faith in the face of unbelief. Despite my natural affinity for philosophy and philosophical arguments, I don’t put my hope in them as a primary way to grow closer to God (which is a primary goal of mine). They do play a minor role though; they fit in somewhere. Otherwise, I wouldn’t feel compelled to write about this topic. Just know that I haven’t even begun to expound on why I do believe, and I can’t necessarily explain all the reasons why I’m compelled to believe. (For one thing, I believe God had a large role in my choosing to believe and continue to believe, and that’s hopelessly circular from a philosophical perspective.)

This is just one example of a .NET function you can access as an extension function in XSLT 2.0, so a more general-purpose treatment of .NET extension functions might be more useful. (I defer to “Writing extension functions for .NET” for that.) But if you’re like me, you spend most of your coding time within the safe, comfy confines of pure XSLT. And you do very little .NET development. So to ensure your continued comfort, here’s how you can generate a GUID in Saxon.NET (relevant parts highlighted):

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  xmlns:guid="clitype:System.Guid?partialname=mscorlib"
  exclude-result-prefixes="guid">

  <xsl:output indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <guids>
      <guid>
        <xsl:value-of select="guid:NewGuid()"/>
      </guid>
      <guid>
        <xsl:value-of select="guid:NewGuid()"/>
      </guid>
      <guid>
        <xsl:value-of select="guid:NewGuid()"/>
      </guid>
    </guids>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Here’s an example result from applying this stylesheet (to any input document):

<guids>
   <guid>6dbd3a72-ad74-429d-97ca-3056e8940813</guid>
   <guid>cea97da4-9de5-4fb5-a35e-ba04a0dee906</guid>
   <guid>41c89105-6cf7-4fd6-b17a-ed04235a4804</guid>
</guids>

All you do is call the .NET platform’s System.Guid.NewGuid() method as an extension function. The function’s namespace URI identifies for Saxon what assembly and object class you’re interested in (System.Guid in this case).

Thanks to M. David Peterson: I found this usage buried in a code example in his lucidly-titled blog post: if ((OOP + FP + AOP) == XSLT 2.0) then ‘Composable Language’ else ‘Try Again’.

• I’m attending SXSW Interactive very soon. PianoNinja was accepted as a semi-finalist in the ScreenBurn Game Design Competition! If my presentation is selected as a finalist, I’ll get to present a live 5-minute pitch for the judges.
• I’m working on a reference implementation for Inline XBRL. I had responded to their RFP for XSLT style sheet for extracting XBRL 2.1 from HTML documents with embedded Inline XBRL, and they chose my proposal. They’ve been very pleasant to work with, and the work is coming right along.
• I’m also working on a really cool SVG and XSL-FO project, generating SVG-based flow-chart diagrams.
• I’ve started Twittering. This may give me more excuses not to blog. So follow me! Disclaimer: we’ll see how long it lasts.

That’s all for now. See you again in 6 months.

My faith has been on the rocks lately. The basic Christian message in America, and all the cultural context with which I associate it, are divorced from its rich, Jewish heritage. We don’t have religious forefathers. We’re too American for such things. When I compare our religiosity to other areas of the world, I wonder what is distinctive about our collective consciousness. What do we take for granted? I think they’re probably the same things as most Americans: freedom, individualism, a value placed in the “work ethic”, financial success, etc. There’s nothing particularly Christian about these things. American, yes. Christian, no.

Why have I been struggling with my faith? Because when I look at the stories of the Bible, especially those of the Old Testament, they seem so complex and detailed and messy, but the American Christian message is so simple and pristine and Americanized. It doesn’t add up. Are we joking? Maybe we should stop using the Bible in church. Our message would be much easier to convey that way. The Bible just raises too many questions. But more than that, it’s too culturally foreign. It’s way too messy and complex. And arbitrary. Who are these people these stories are about, and why should I care? What do these ancient texts have to do with my life in America? Aren’t they just archaic instruments of power, used over the centuries by the Church to bend people to obedience (and break them if necessary)? Why in the world would I want to associate myself with that heritage?

Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, by N. T. Wright, came on my doorstep just in time, it seems. It starts off quite generically and doesn’t dive into Old Testament stories. Clever, in a way. Draw people in and then pounce with the religious content. But one thing Wright said really struck me. Really, the entire section “The Glorious Complexity of Life” (pp. 48-51) is what struck me. I’ll quote a large chunk from the middle of it:

We should expect the world and our relation to it to be at least as complex as we are. If there is a God, we should expect such a being to be at least as complex again.

I say this because people often grumble as soon as a discussion about the meaning of human life, or the possibility of God, moves away from quite simple ideas and becomes more complicated. Any world in which there are such things as music and sex, laughter and tears, mountains and mathematics, eagles and earthworms, statues and symphonies and snowflakes and sunsets—and in which we humans find ourselves in the middle of it all—is bound to be a world in which the quest for truth, reality, for what we can be sure of, is infinitely more complicated than simple yes-and-no questions will allow. There is appropriate complexity along with appropriate simplicity. The more we learn, the more we discover that we humans are fantastically complicated creatures. Yet, on the other hand, human life is full of moments when we know that things are also very, very simple.

Think about it. The moment of birth; the moment of death; the joy of love; the discovery of vocation; the onset of life-threatening illness; the overwhelming pain and anger that sometimes sweep us off our feet. At such times the multiple complexities of our humanness gather themselves together and form one simple great exclamation mark, or (as it may be) one simple great question mark—a shout of joy or a cry of pain, a burst of laughter or a bursting into tears. Suddenly the rich harmony of our genetic package seems to sing in unison, and say, for good or ill, This is it.

We honor and celebrate our complexity and our simplicity by continually doing five things. We tell stories. We act out rituals. We create beauty. We work in communities. We think out beliefs. No doubt you might think of more, but that’s enough for the moment. In and through all these things run the threads of love and pain, fear and faith, worship and doubt, the quest for justice, the thirst for spirituality, and the promise and problem of human relationship. And if there’s any such thing as “truth,” in some absolute sense, it must relate to, and make sense of, all this and more.

Stories, rituals, beauty, work, belief. I’m not talking just about the novelist, the playwright, the artist, the industrialist, the philosopher. They are the specialists in the different areas. I’m talking about all of us. And I’m not talking just about the special incidents—the story of your life-changing moment, the ritual of a family wedding, and so on. I’m talking about the ordinary moments. You come home from a day’s work. You tell stories about what has happened. You listen to more stories on television or radio. You go through the simple but profound ritual of cooking a meal, laying the table, doing the thousand familiar things that say, This is who we are (or, if you’re alone, This is who I am). This is where we are ourselves. You arrange a bunch of flowers or tidy a room. And from time to time you discuss the meaning of it all.

Take away any of these elements, as frequently happens—take away stories, rituals, beauty, work, or belief—and human life is diminished. In a million ways, small and great, our highly complex lives are made up of the interplay of these things. The multiple elements of life we noted a moment ago tie them all together in an ever-changing kaleidoscopic pattern.

That’s the complex world to which the Christian story is addressed, the world of which it claims to make sense.

What a wonderfully effective frame in which to dive into the history of Israel. Wright’s book attempts to answer the question that has been plaguing me lately: How are the entire range of human experience and of the wonders of the natural world accounted for and explained by Christianity, the faith that I ascribe to? The way he sets the stage above, and indeed in the entire first of the book’s three parts (”Echoes of a Voice”), are at least tentatively scratching the itch I’ve been feeling. As I continue to read, I will be pondering two questions:

1. Does this really make sense?
2. How might Christians in America start embracing and engaging the cultural distinctives and particularities of their faith’s heritage?

Answering not only question #1 but question #2 also is going to be essential for the survival of my own faith. Continuing with the status quo just seems dishonest to me. Incongruent. Unsustainable.

Below are six keyboard coloring schemes. The first three are ways of coloring a chromatic keyboard. The second three are ways of coloring a diatonic keyboard. Here’s a legend for the six variations below:

1. Chromatic keyboard with chromatic coloring
2. Chromatic keyboard with diatonic coloring
3. Same as #2, using opposite colors
4. Diatonic keyboard with diatonic coloring
5. Diatonic keyboard with chromatic coloring
6. Same as #5, using opposite colors

[I'm trying out a new drawing program, so please excuse the big "UNREGISTERED" watermark. If I end up registering it, I'll replace the image, or better yet, break it into six images. Okay, I know. It's ridiculous. But I need to go to bed.]

These were inspired by a photo that Paul Morris posted to the MNMA forum, in which he had physically used black tape and white tape to achieve the coloring in #5 above on his traditional keyboard.

The advantage of the uniform Janko keyboard pattern is mind-boggling:
The Janko keyboard pattern does away with practicing scales, would you believe?! This is the true reason, why so many hobby musicians (like me!) got stuck with playing mostly in C-major & A-minor scales and lost out on a great deal of musical joys and creativity.
With Janko one only needs to learn one major and one minor scale-pattern. From then on one can play all 24 major & minor scales.

As I sat at the piano considering these words, I realized that there are really twice as many scales as that, if you count both hands separately. My left hand is not a copy of my right hand. It’s a mirror image of it. The muscle movements and fingering for playing D-flat major in my right hand are much different than the movements and fingering for playing it in my left hand. So then there are actually 24 different scale patterns to learn (12 for the left hand, and 12 for the right hand), or if you count major and minor scales separately (as Johannes did in his email above), then there are 48 separate scales to learn (24 for the left hand, and 24 for the right hand).

The fact that one hand mirrors the other also reminded me of Vincent Persichetti’s “Mirror Etudes”, a selection of which I played in my junior or senior recital in college (I can’t remember which). One thing I liked about this piece is that all I really had to do was learn the right hand, and then make the same movements in my left hand, taking advantage of the fact that the piano keyboard mirrors itself (pivoting around D and A-flat). Persichetti used this algorithmic device (where one hand’s part is a simple function of the other hand’s part) to very nice effect, perhaps in some ways in spite of the device.

The next thought I had was: “What if each hand had its own keyboard, so that the same movements and fingerings would produce the same notes?” If I traverse the five-finger position from my thumb to my pinky in my right hand, then the pitches go up (get higher). On a regular piano, if I do the same thing in my left hand, they go lower. That’s the mismatch. What if they both went higher, so that playing a given part in the right hand felt exactly like playing that part in the left hand? I then supposed that this would require two different keyboards: one for my left hand and one for my right hand. The right-hand keyboard could be the “normal” one, and the left-hand keyboard would be reversed: moving to the left causes the pitches to rise, and moving to the right causes them to descend. We could then speak, instead of moving left or right, of moving outward or away from the body (ascending in pitch), and inward or toward the body (descending in pitch). With a setup like this, if you act as if you’re playing the Persichetti etudes on a traditional keyboard, you’d now actually be playing both hands in unison (robbing the piece of its character, but that’s not the point).

Google can have a tendency to quash creative thinking. What seems like an original idea turns out to be not so original. Then again, it can also have a validating effect. Regardless, someone has already had this idea (and patented it). There’s also a diagram showing how the left-hand keyboard is re-mapped. Actually, now that I look at the diagram, I see that it’s not quite the same as what I had in mind. I was thinking of just reversing a traditional piano keyboard. The diagram for this patent shows a 6-6 pattern (like Janko) for both keyboards. So in that case I suppose you could truly say that the user would only need to learn 1 single diatonic scale pattern, as opposed to 24. Not bad.

But that’s not all. A pianist named Christopher Seed has actually built a left-handed piano. (Be sure to check out his videos page too, where he shows off his ambidexterity.) Not only that, but his website offers a simple hardware module called The Keyboard Mirror that transforms a MIDI keyboard into a left-handed (reversed) MIDI keyboard! This probably wouldn’t be too difficult to implement in software too. So to try my idea out, all I’d need is two MIDI keyboards, one unmodified and one with the Keyboard Mirror plugged into it. To keep things really interesting, I could try switching them around: not only right/normal, left/reversed; but also left/normal, right/reversed.

I just had a funny thought: playing Persichetti’s Mirror Etudes on a left-handed piano would be almost exactly like playing them on a traditional piano! (Except that when you try to voice the upper parts, you’d start wondering why the bass part is getting louder!)

Now, for a real mind-bending exercise, try playing the Mirror Etudes using a left-handed (reversed) keyboard for the left hand and a traditional (not reversed) keyboard for the right hand. Of course, that seems about as sensible as using Vim with a Dvorak keyboard.

Update: When I wrote that last paragraph earlier tonight, I hadn’t realized that playing the actual Mirror Etudes using symmetrical manuals would be “as if” you were playing both hands in unison on a traditional keyboard. The simplicity of this two-way function (reverseHalf mirrored = unison; reverseHalf unison = mirrored) obviously hasn’t sunken in yet, since it’s still all just up in my head. Yes, I’ve gotta try this out!

The above example contains all 12 major triads (with doubled roots), traversing over them in two sequences that correspond to the two whole-tone scales. As you can see, there are just two keyboard patterns to learn. (With a Janko keyboard that has more than just two rows of keys, then there’s really just one keyboard pattern to learn. To move up a half step, you’d just shift from the first and second rows to the second and third rows, keeping your hand in the same position.) A comparison with the Klavarskribo equivalent for the traditional piano keyboard shows just how irregular the traditional keyboard is, and how many patterns you have to learn within those same 12 keys (for chords, scales, etc.).

Below are the first six chords (in regular Klavarskribo notation), corresponding to the whole-tone scale starting on C. One thing that was apparently not made explicit in the Klavar-Nieuws article was which key is indicated by the thicker vertical lines in the 6-6 notation above. In my transcription to regular Klavarskribo, I just chose a mapping: B for the thicker lines so that C lands just to the right of each thicker vertical line in the 6-6 notation. Thus, the first sequence would then start with the C-Major chord:

And here’s the second sequence, traversing the whole-tone scale starting on D-flat:

As you can see, there’s nothing in these sequences that approaches the regularity of the 6-6 keyboard patterns. There’s a lot to discuss in comparing the two keyboard layouts—enough to leave for another blog post.

The message in the MNMA forum that described the 6-6 Klavar notation contained lots of fascinating insights, along with quotes relating to the 6-6 keyboard from a letter written by Pot. I wish I could link to it directly. The problem is that the MNMA forum messages are currently only accessible to members (although anyone can join). That may (hopefully) change in the near future and in fact is being discussed on the list right now.

But tonight I am tired, preoccupied with rodent problems, upcoming business trips, vacuum cleaner shopping, etc. So I’m not going to try and eek out any Klavarskribo-related wisdom, for example.

At some point, I’d like to figure out what my blogging philosophy is, as I still haven’t been able to figure it out. That’s the main reason I’ve posted so infrequently. Who I am I writing for? Myself? Other people? Which people? Especially when getting started, it seems like no one is really out there, and so I feel like I’m just writing to myself. On the other hand, anyone in the world could be reading this, so I’m simultaneously crafting my online identity for the whole world to see. Which aspects of my life or work or interests do I want to share? I’ve never really decided, so I just put my name as the title of this blog, to keep things open. But then again, to what extent should my blog be about my identity anyway? Having my name at the top seemed like a good way to keep things open-ended, but now I’m thinking it too much implies that *I* will be the primary topic or focus of the blog.

Maybe having separate blogs, each with a more narrowly defined focus, is the answer. My attitude when writing a book is to serve and provide value to my readers in the best way I know how. Why should blogging be any different? I may decide to nix the whole artificial quota idea too (once per day), which can have a tendency to result in aimless posts like this one. But I guess that’s why it’s called a 30-day trial.

The new mission statement from the website is as follows:

The Music Notation Project seeks to raise awareness of the disadvantages of traditional music notation, to explore alternative music notation systems, and to provide resources for the wider consideration and use of these alternatives. We hope our efforts will help make reading, writing, and playing music more enjoyable and easier to learn.

Today’s letter detailing the announcement hints at what some of the practical differences will be:

While we are still interested in research that evaluates different [notation] systems, we believe we can best further such comparative work through the development of software that can rapidly convert a lot of music into a wide variety of systems.

I think this makes a lot of sense. New notation efforts should take new technology into consideration and benefit from it.

The other practical difference, apart from having a new, nicely designed website, is the name change. “The Music Notation Project” rolls of the tongue much more nicely than “Music Notation Modernization Association”. I was just joking today that the name is a bit “shun”-heavy. Well, they fixed that now.