Author: Laura Conrad

News of the week of October 15, 2013

Meeting Report

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.

We are a little low on people for the dropin format we’ve been
using. It depends on my transcribing something on Tuesday morning
which we can play on Tuesday night. This means I
have to pick a piece with a number of parts that we will be able
to play. Some people even expect a dropin group with a variety of
voices and instruments to play only
pieces with the exact number of parts that there are people
present, so that no part is doubled.

So I would appreciate knowing by Tuesday morning if you’re
planning to come on Tuesday evening. It would also be good if
people could plan to come on time and stay until the end of the meeting.

Water Department Warnings

The EPA requires water departments to send out warnings to
their customers when the required tests show any results that are
outside of the normal range. I get them from Cambridge quite
frequently in the winter, because the reservoir is next to a lot
of roads and parking lots that get salted in icy weather, so the
salt content of the water temporarily goes above the limit.

I was visiting Fall River yesterday, and there was one next to
the toilet about some pollutant I’d never heard of. It was one of
20 testing sites that had showed a slightly higher than allowed
value.

There were “reassuring” sentences after this required
information about how it’s not something you have to worry about
drinking a little of — you might get cancer if you drank that
much for years at a time. I understand a waiting room full of
cancer patients failed to find this reassuring.

What struck me about it, though, was that it was written for a
pretty high reading level — I’m not an expert, but I’d guess at
least seventh grade if not higher. When I get these notices from
Cambridge, they’re translated into three or four languages, with
information in a dozen more about where to go to get it in those
languages.

In Fall River, where half the population speaks Portuguese, and
although many of those also speak English, they haven’t had their
primary education in English, they had a paragraph similar to this
at
the bottom of the English letter:

Este relatório contem informação muito importante sobre sua água potável. Por favor traduza-o ou fale com alguém que-lhe compreende. As cópias deste relatório em Português podem ser obtidas no escritório do Departmento de Água no terceiro andar em Government Center, ou chamando 508-324-2330.

Which is a translation of:

This report contains important information about your drinking water. Please translate it or speak with someone who can, if needed. Copies of this report in Portuguese may be obtained at the Water Department’s Offices on the 3rd floor at One Government Center or by calling 508-324-2330.

I don’t have the actual document to point you to, because it
isn’t on the website. The Portuguese paragraph is from another
document that is on the website, but I’m sure it was similar.

I think if it’s information important enough to mail to all the
customers, it might be important enough to send it out in both
languages. Or at least to put the translated version on the website.

Serpent Stand

Choruses usually practice in a place where
there are chairs so people don’t have to stand all the way through
a long rehearsal, but when the group is going to practice any long stretch
of the music, they will be encouraged to stand up, because
the breathing muscles work better that way.

Bands (non-marching) and orchestras, on the other hand, have a lot of
instruments that are usually played sitting down, like cellos and
tubas, so they just have chairs for everyone who can play sitting
down and the people like the percussion and string bass players
who pretty much have to play standing up stand in the back.

Most of the people who play serpent come from a band
background. There are two ways to hold the serpent, and the one I
learned (French, or vertical style), requires putting the weight
on something underneath the instrument. So I was taught to
balance the weight on my calves, and to play sitting down.

A few years ago, I found that when performing with the Cantabile Renaissance
Band, I was having to switch between singing and playing
recorder and playing serpent, and I prefered doing all of that
standing up instead of switching between standing and sitting, so I bought a tuba
stand so that I could play the serpent standing up.

Last year at the Boston Recorder
Society, we were in a room with terrible chairs that angle
back so that the knees are higher than the hips. These are even
worse than normal chairs for the breathing muscles. One meeting,
the coach suggested that we all try to play standing up (I was
playing cornetto on that piece, so it wasn’t a problem) and we
agreed that it sounded better that way. Only two of the seven of
us kept on doing it, though. After that, I thought about the
previous meeting when I’d been playing serpent on the bass line
and had been completely unable to produce an in-tune low F. It’s
not the easiest note to play with a focused sound, but I don’t
usually have trouble producing the slightly fuzzy sound at the
right pitch. So I started bringing the serpent stand to those
meetings and playing everything standing up.

Last week I had a rehearsal with a flute player who has decided
she plays better standing up, so we all tried standing up, and it
really did help. I had warmed up the serpent very badly, and I
was having problems making some of the leaps the repertoire
demanded, but the notes I got were in tune in spite of the bad
warmup.

So I decided to play both
performances last weekend with the serpent stand. It involves
carying more stuff, but the convenient bag to pack the serpent
stand in is a duffle bag, which ends up weighing fairly close to
what the serpent case with serpent in it weighs, so although I’m
carrying more weight, I feel better balanced with the stand than
with just the serpent case and my other stuff in my backpack.

I was still badly warmed up on Friday. I’m getting more
comfortable playing the bass lines on the serpent, and we did have
one tune where I managed to do something with the melody, so it
wasn’t a total loss as a serpent performance, and several people
said they enjoyed it, but I felt better about the recorder
playing.

On Sunday, however, I had practiced both serpent and cornetto
quite intensely in the morning, so the serpent was really ready.
One of the visiting directors from England went out of her way to
tell me how good I was sounding. The bassoon line I played wasn’t
embarrassing at all. So I think I’ll keep on using the stand.


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Monarch Butterflies

Those of us who read Flight
Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver were interested in Verlyn
Kinkenborg’s column
this morning about the monarch butterflies.

The novel is about a family in Apalachia who find a remote area
of their farm covered in butterflies one Spring morning. It’s
because of a fictional change to the pattern of monarch
butterfly migration.

The column is about what we now know about the real reasons for
the decline in the monarch butterfly population. He writes:

One recent study suggests that the long-term survival of the species may be in doubt. A few weeks ago, one of the scientists devoted to studying monarchs, Ernest Williams at Hamilton College, summarized for me the threats that have been reported in recent studies.

Nearly every link in the monarchs’ chain of being, he said, is at risk. Illegal logging in Mexico has reduced their winter habitat — an already vanishingly small area, which is itself being altered by the warming climate. Ecotourists who come to witness the congregation of so many butterflies disturb the creatures they have come to see. But perhaps most damaging is the demise of milkweed.

Monarchs have the misfortune to rely exclusively on a plant that farmers all across the Midwest and Northeast consider a weed. There is a direct parallel between the demise of milkweeds — killed by the herbicide glyphosate, which is sprayed by the millions of gallons on fields where genetically modified crops are growing — and the steady drop in monarch numbers.

To anyone who has grown up in the Midwest, the result seems very strange. After decades of trying to eradicate milkweed, gardeners are being encouraged to plant it in their gardens, and townships and counties are being asked to let it thrive in the roadside ditches. What looks like agricultural success, purging bean and corn fields of milkweed (among other weeds), turns out to be butterfly disaster.


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A why not to use Microsoft Word link

One of the most popular posts on this blog is Why not to
use AOL, which explains in detail why you don’t want to use
AOL to deliver your email. The answer is that they don’t actually
care whether they deliver your email or not.

Before posting that, I did an extensive google search and
couldn’t find anything that explained the issue on that level of
detail, although there was of course an assumption in the
technically literate community that using AOL was a bad idea.

There are a lot of people in the technically literate
publishing community who assume something similar, but they seem
not to have actually managed to carry their point of view, because
lots of publishing opportunities which might otherwise be useful
(smashwords for
instance) require or encourage putting your material into Word format.

So I was glad to see a post by a good
writer entitled Why
Microsoft Word must Die. (I don’t actually like much of what
I’ve read by Charlie Stross, but he’s certainly an effective
writer, and lots of people do like what he wants to write.)

His post is a bit long, but does make a number of the right
arguments very cogently.

For instance, here’s how he explains the problems the
planned obsolescence model causes even for people who never use
Word themselves:

But as Word’s domination became established, Microsoft changed the file format repeatedly — with Word 95, Word 97, in 2000, and again in 2003 and more recently. Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program. If you had to exchange documents with anyone else, you could try to get them to send and receive RTF — but for the most part casual business users never really got the hang of different file formats in the “Save As …” dialog, and so if you needed to work with others you had to pay the Microsoft Danegeld on a regular basis, even if none of the new features were any use to you.

I don’t have much hope for the people who have no idea
how to use the “Save As…” dialog, but maybe the people who are
establishing publishing businesses will read this article and
think about their system.

Come hear me play this weekend

[Laura and Frank with serpent and dulcian]
Laura Conrad with serpent and Frank Jones with dulcian at NEFFA, 2005

English Country Dance in Harvard Square

The Harvard
Square English Country Dance is tonight at 7:30 at Harvard-Epworth Church. It’s open band, so you can play some and
dance some or just dance or just play.

I will have both the serpent and some recorders, so it’s a
chance to hear the serpent.

West Gallery Quire

The West Gallery
Quire is meeting this weekend, with guest leaders from
England, and four new tunes.

One of the new tunes is scored for two bassoons, so if you play
bassoon you would be especially welcome. We have two dulcian
(ancestor of the bassoon) players who come from time to time, but
at least one of them will be out of town this weekend.

So it’s likely that we will simulate the bassoons on serpent
and trombone. This is quite authentic — the original West
Gallery musicians just played whatever instrument they had on
whatever part they wanted to. There are complaints from congregation
members about bands where the cello played the tune and the
clarinet played the bass one or two octaves too high.

In any case, this is actually the best way to hear the serpent
— I’m a better West Gallery musician than I am a country dance
bass line player, and the serpent was invented for singing with,
and you’ll be able to sing with it.

Coffee and Tea Service

I was having a bunch of people over last night and had promised
to make them coffee and tea. This isn’t my usual mode of
entertaining — I usually put a mixed six pack of beer and a
bottle opener on the coffee table and everyone gets the glass they
want from the glass cabinet and if they prefer water they get it
from the filtered water pitcher.

I decided to leave the the get your own mug or glas from the
cabinet mode, but of course I didn’t want to be fussing with
brewing coffee and tea after the guests arrived, so I decided the
right answer was to boil a large pot of water and brew coffee,
decaf coffee and two kinds of herb tea all at once just before the
arrival time.

I decided to use my 10 gallon brewing pot with the spigot for
boiling the water. This was a mistake. Since I boiled less than
two gallons of water, most of it was below the level of the
spigot. So it worked fine for filling the one and a half litre
french press coffee pot with the decaf coffee in it, but after
that, I had to tilt it to get the water out of the spigot.
Eventually I worked out a way to do this with oven mits on both
hands, but I did get a minor burn on my wrist before I figured
that out.

But eventually, the decaf coffee was brewed in the french
press, the coffee was brewed in the one liter thermos with a drip
filter on top, and my two large teapots had chamomile and something
called “rote grütze” (which I labeled as “fruit and spice”) in them.

Actually, everyone had wine with the food and decaf coffee
afterwards. The decaf would have benefitted from a thermos, and I
had ground it on the same setting I do the drip coffee on, so the
bottom was a little dreggy. So I’m thinking about getting a
larger thermos for decaf and just doing tea or caffeinated coffee
on demand. I’m drinking the herb tea instead of making coffee
this morning. I had my co-hostess take the caffeinated coffee
home with her, since I don’t drink it.

I should have pictures of some of this, but I’m still not used
to just whipping out my phone when I’m in the middle of
something.

Absent-mindedness in the choir

[choir sleeping]
Illustration by Charles Green for “Absent-Mindedness in a Parish Choir”,
pub. in Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex Folk” (subsequently renamed “A Few Crusted Characters”)
in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Vol. 81 (May 1891)
Image scanned by Philip V. Allingham for the Victorian Web

A friend drew my attention to the Thomas Hardy short story Absent-mindedness
in a parish choir. It’s one of the surviving depictions of a
West Gallery choir at the end of
the era.

If I left my serpent like that one (the cello bow is even
worse), I wouldn’t have one long.

Phatic Hiatus

One of the great phrases from C.S. Lewis. The Scotsman who uses
it pronounces hiatus so that the second syllable has the same
vowel as the first syllable of phatic. Communications gap
is a more common idiom.

The people at the Carlone campaign were quite impressed by the
party
invitation I put together for my meet and
greet. (If you haven’t seen it, it prints on letter paper, and
folds in quarters.) So they asked if they could have the source so they
could use it for another get-together.

I sent them a zip file of the LaTeX, .eps graphics, and
Makefile, and said that if they didn’t have anyone who liked
playing with that kind of software (and already had LaTeX and pdf
utilities on their computer), I’d be happy to spend 10 minutes
fiddling with the text and send them a PDF file.

So they sent me the details with the phone number missing and
the room number wrong, and copied the host of the party, who
supplied the phone number and corrected the room number, so I
sent a second version, and he sent me this:

Half of this is upside-down, which will look funny when I tape it to
the wall.

When this is corrected, I can print it out and put it up next to our
mailboxes and a couple of other places.

Obviously, he hadn’t been who saw my original and thought it
was cute.

So I wrote him back:

The idea is that you fold it in quarters and put it in people’s
mailboxes (or in your pocket, and hand it to them). I could do a flyer
you could tape on the wall, but that would be a new design, not a
10-minute change to what I did for my party.

Why women drop out of science

The New York Times Magazine has an interesting article.
The headline writer calls it an article about why so few women go
into science, but it isn’t the dry statistical kind of article —
it’s about some women’s real experiences of being physics majors.

I was a physics major who didn’t go on to become a professional
physicist. I think a lot of both men and women who left school in
the 70’s found it easier to become computer programmers than to
get graduate education in science or math and then compete for a
diminishing number of jobs.

The story I’ve always told about why I didn’t go to graduate
school is that by the time I was a junior and senior, I and
a lot of my friends were dating graduate students, and most of the
ones I knew were pretty miserable. The exceptions were the ones
who had done something else for a while and decided that research
in a particular field was what they really wanted to do with their
lives.

Then after I was out of schoool for the first time in sixteen
years, I was so deliriously happy not to be in school I never
really considered doing anything that would require going
back.

The two reasons for women dropping out that the article (as I
remember it from two days ago) goes into in detail are harrassment
or actual discouragement in and out of the classroom, and lack of
encouragement by faculty of further study of even the most
successful female students.

I don’t think either of those reasons applied to me. I
remember one remark by a professor that I found a bit sexist. Of
course in 1971 none of us had really had our consciousnesses
raised very hign. But this is pretty mild by the standards of
other women’s harrassment stories. We were doing a lab experiment
about radiation, and the preliminary discussion had emphasized how
careful we should all be about the hazards, and then the moment
came when someone had to press a button that would actually
release some radiation. The class hung back, until I (the only
female) volunteered, and the professor said something about all
the men being willing to let a woman take the risk for them.

I wasn’t a particularly brilliant physics student, so it isn’t
surprising that none of the professors encouraged me to go on,
although one of them gave me a surprisingly good reference for a
job a couple of years after I graduated. (It turned out to be a
terrible job.) But I did have a math professor who was very
disappointed when I told him I wasn’t applying for graduate
school.

I”m sure the stories people tell actually heppen, and I’m sure
that science would be better off if there were more diversity of
people doing it. I’m just saying that just eliminating the horror
stories or even raising the consciousness of the power structure
isn’t going to do it.