Big shoes to fill. Why not Jon Irabagon, perhaps the greatest saxophonist of his generation. He'd shake things up a little. But Jon, maybe lose that bow-tie.
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Monday, October 8, 2018
SFJAZZ Collective, 2018-19
We caught their season opener in San Jose (of all places!) last night, featuring arrangements of Jobim. As usual, the musicianship was jaw-dropping, the compositions were clever and complex, and the fan could only wish they would cut loose a lot more than they do. This being their first performance of these compositions, some tentativeness was to be expected. For me, Miguel Zenon's crazy arrangement of "One Note Samba" was the highlight of the evening... he will be missed after this, his final season with the group. Warren Wolf was, as expected, un-humanly virtuosic on vibes. Etienne Charles on trumpet is a welcome addition. The show was too short, because all the tunes were "radio-length." Will the solos lengthen and become woolier as the season progresses? I sure hope so.
Climate change economics
Climate change economics is back in the news, because of both the release of a new and dire IPCC report and the awarding of a Nobel in economics to William Nordhaus, perhaps the best known of economists studying climate change.
Nordhaus's work on the costs of climate change is based on integrated assessment models (IAMs), which integrate climate modeling with economics. IAMs provide a veneer of scientific objectivity to the study of optimal climate policy, but some healthy skepticism is in order. A recent article by Robert Pindyck does a good job laying out the limitations of IAMs as guidance for policy. In particular, the policy implications can be enormously sensitive to assumptions about key parameters that are simply unknown, controversial, or reflective of value judgements rather than objective measurement. A great example is the choice of discount rate, the "interest rate" at which future damages are weighed off against present costs. Whether a model implies drastic action against climate change, or rather complacency, hinges on the discount rate more than anything else. Pindyck:
Nordhaus's work on the costs of climate change is based on integrated assessment models (IAMs), which integrate climate modeling with economics. IAMs provide a veneer of scientific objectivity to the study of optimal climate policy, but some healthy skepticism is in order. A recent article by Robert Pindyck does a good job laying out the limitations of IAMs as guidance for policy. In particular, the policy implications can be enormously sensitive to assumptions about key parameters that are simply unknown, controversial, or reflective of value judgements rather than objective measurement. A great example is the choice of discount rate, the "interest rate" at which future damages are weighed off against present costs. Whether a model implies drastic action against climate change, or rather complacency, hinges on the discount rate more than anything else. Pindyck:
Put simply, it is much too easy to use a model to generate, and thus seemingly validate, the results one wants. Take any one of the three IAMs that were used by the U.S. Interagency Working Group (2010, 2013) to estimate the SCC. With a judicious choice of parameter values (varying the discount rate is probably sufficient), these models will yield an SCC estimate as low as a few dollars per ton, as high as several hundred dollars per ton, or anything in between. Thus a modeler whose prior beliefs are that a stringent abatement policy is (or is not) needed, can choose a low (or high) discount rate or choose other inputs that will yield the desired results. If there were a clear consensus on the correct values of key parameters, this would not be much of a problem. But (putting it mildly) there is no such consensus.
The Interagency Working Group did not try to determine the “correct” values for the discount rate. Instead, it used middle-of-the-road assumptions about the discount rate (setting it at 3 percent) as well as other parameters and arrived at an estimate of around 33 dollars per ton for the SCC (recently updated to 39 dollars per ton). But other well-known studies have not used these middle-of-the-road assumptions and have arrived at very different estimates of the SCC. For example, using a version of his DICE model (one of the three models used by the Interagency Working Group), Nordhaus (2011) obtained an estimate for the SCC of 11 dollars per ton. On the other hand, using the PAGE model, Stern (2007) found an extremely stringent abatement to be optimal, a result that is consistent with an SCC of more than 200 dollars per ton. Although the models differed in a variety of ways (e.g., the degree of disaggregation and the choice of damage function), the main reason for their wildly different SCC estimates is that Nordhaus used a relatively high discount rate, while Stern used a relatively low discount rate.
Sunday, October 7, 2018
Hamiet Bluiett, RIP
On the baritone sax: “It’s like being in the water. The baritone is not a catfish [or any of those] small fish. It’s more like a dolphin or a whale. And it needs to travel in a whole lot of water. We can’t work in no swimming pools.” .... “The other horns will get a chance to join us. They’ve just got to change where they’re coming from and genuflect to us—instead of us to them.”
Here's the WSQ in its original and best configuration with Bluiett, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and David Murray. Starting around 43:20 you get a full dose of Mr. B. deconstructing "Sophisticated Lady"... a sound so fat you could slice it.
Here's the WSQ in its original and best configuration with Bluiett, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and David Murray. Starting around 43:20 you get a full dose of Mr. B. deconstructing "Sophisticated Lady"... a sound so fat you could slice it.
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Not Russian meddling, not Kavanaugh...
... but the steady gutting of federal government capacity by way of corruption, disinterest, incompetence, and ideological hostility... perhaps in that order, from what I heard of Michael Lewis's interview on Fresh Air. The scariest and most dangerous thing happening under the Trump regime.
Sunday, September 23, 2018
The War of the Worlds
I'm a sucker for alien invasion stories, but I had not until now read this one, the mother of them all. It's a fine novel: well written and plotted, providing plenty of food for thought without beating you over the head with it.
It is indeed a book about a war, and there are vivid battle scenes, especially in the first half, but it is really more an exodus story, describing in gripping detail the chaos and cruelty as people are driven forward by the oncoming Martian death machines. And as the story moves into its final third, it becomes a journey through a post-apocalyptic hell, with our unnamed protagonist and narrator wondering whether he might not be the last man on Earth.
The scientific elements of the book are remarkably good, given that it was published in 1897. Wells was a committed Darwinian; his Martians have managed to develop capacities well beyond those of humans thanks to a longer period of evolution and the selective pressures of the more challenging conditions on their native planet. Yet smart as they are, the Martians fail to anticipate the problem posed by terrestrial pathogens, which proves to be their undoing. Our narrator speculates that back on Mars, they had long ago solved the problem of disease. But surely they cannot have eliminated all microorganisms! It was fortuitous for humans that they did not bring with them their own killing germs along with their guns and steel.
The Martians are also post-sexual and reproduce by budding, allowing them to avoid the inefficiencies and emotional baggage that plague our own sexed-up method. How they managed to continue to evolve without the genetic randomization provided by sexual reproduction is not explained. Most likely an intelligent, advanced species like theirs would have been using CRISPR and gene drives to engineer themselves. Wells, writing pre-double helix, could hardly be expected to have come up with that kind of outlandish scenario.
The book is quite fair-minded about the Martians. To them, we humans are a handy food source on what seems to be a pretty darn livable planet. "The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us," observes the narrator, "but at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit." Indeed, one of the narrator's interlocutors, the artilleryman, figures that the Martians intend to domesticate and raise the humans like sheep, and that the average sheep-like human might not find such an existence all that disagreeable.
Upon finishing the book, I re-watched the Spielberg movie, starring Tom Cruise and a bug-eyed, high-pitched Dakota Fanning. The film is quite true to the novel in most respects, right down to the protagonist's fight with the curate, although the tone is more action film than philosophical drama. Of course, it being Spielberg, there's also a broken family to be fixed.
Spielberg's Martians, whose big heads and long, knobby fingers suggest some common ancestry with ET, are more agile than Wells's gravity-bound, sluggish creatures. Although Wells provides descriptions of the Martians themselves, it's clear that he is much more taken with their various machines and devices. It's hardly surprising. Darwin was in the air by the 1890s, but it was the machine age, and it must have been logical to think of future progress in terms of more powerful, capable devices and the means of building them. Those spindly, three-legged killing machines, with their dextrous tentacles and deadly ray-beams and poison gas, are the archetype for sci-fi killing machines and nasty robots up to the present day.
The book hints that the Martians may have sent another crew to Venus, no doubt a much less hospitable joint, which raises the possibility of more trouble ahead for us earthlings. One difference between then and now is that nowadays this prospect would be a clear signal of a sequel, but Wells refrained from writing it. Too bad for us.
It is indeed a book about a war, and there are vivid battle scenes, especially in the first half, but it is really more an exodus story, describing in gripping detail the chaos and cruelty as people are driven forward by the oncoming Martian death machines. And as the story moves into its final third, it becomes a journey through a post-apocalyptic hell, with our unnamed protagonist and narrator wondering whether he might not be the last man on Earth.
The scientific elements of the book are remarkably good, given that it was published in 1897. Wells was a committed Darwinian; his Martians have managed to develop capacities well beyond those of humans thanks to a longer period of evolution and the selective pressures of the more challenging conditions on their native planet. Yet smart as they are, the Martians fail to anticipate the problem posed by terrestrial pathogens, which proves to be their undoing. Our narrator speculates that back on Mars, they had long ago solved the problem of disease. But surely they cannot have eliminated all microorganisms! It was fortuitous for humans that they did not bring with them their own killing germs along with their guns and steel.
The Martians are also post-sexual and reproduce by budding, allowing them to avoid the inefficiencies and emotional baggage that plague our own sexed-up method. How they managed to continue to evolve without the genetic randomization provided by sexual reproduction is not explained. Most likely an intelligent, advanced species like theirs would have been using CRISPR and gene drives to engineer themselves. Wells, writing pre-double helix, could hardly be expected to have come up with that kind of outlandish scenario.
The book is quite fair-minded about the Martians. To them, we humans are a handy food source on what seems to be a pretty darn livable planet. "The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us," observes the narrator, "but at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit." Indeed, one of the narrator's interlocutors, the artilleryman, figures that the Martians intend to domesticate and raise the humans like sheep, and that the average sheep-like human might not find such an existence all that disagreeable.
Upon finishing the book, I re-watched the Spielberg movie, starring Tom Cruise and a bug-eyed, high-pitched Dakota Fanning. The film is quite true to the novel in most respects, right down to the protagonist's fight with the curate, although the tone is more action film than philosophical drama. Of course, it being Spielberg, there's also a broken family to be fixed.
Spielberg's Martians, whose big heads and long, knobby fingers suggest some common ancestry with ET, are more agile than Wells's gravity-bound, sluggish creatures. Although Wells provides descriptions of the Martians themselves, it's clear that he is much more taken with their various machines and devices. It's hardly surprising. Darwin was in the air by the 1890s, but it was the machine age, and it must have been logical to think of future progress in terms of more powerful, capable devices and the means of building them. Those spindly, three-legged killing machines, with their dextrous tentacles and deadly ray-beams and poison gas, are the archetype for sci-fi killing machines and nasty robots up to the present day.
The book hints that the Martians may have sent another crew to Venus, no doubt a much less hospitable joint, which raises the possibility of more trouble ahead for us earthlings. One difference between then and now is that nowadays this prospect would be a clear signal of a sequel, but Wells refrained from writing it. Too bad for us.
Friday, September 14, 2018
Buffy, again
Watching Season 1 from scratch. Within four episodes you know the main characters as if they were your best friends in high school too. You know they live on the hell mouth. You know that upon first laying eyes on each other, Buffy and Angel have fallen for each other hard, eternally, like the Juliet and Romeo they are. You know that Buffy loves and respects her mom, and vice versa, no matter how bad it's been... and it's been bad. You know that Willow and Xander would willingly go to hell and back and even transcend their stereotypical teenage selves for their new best friend Buffy... and not just because– in spite of being so much cooler and beautiful than they are– she treats them like human beings, but because, yeah, she is the Chosen One, and that's, like, really really important. You know that Giles is smart, lonely, and (mostly) platonically smitten with this strange creature he is nominally in charge of. Most of all, you get Buffy, TV's single greatest creation.
Meanwhile, as a bonus, you also get ridiculously clever plots, and even more ridiculously clever dialogue. This is the TV show that loves our crazy English language more than any other.
Our old DVDs are a bit fuzzy on our ridiculously large screen. And apparently the HD versions are insultingly badly rendered. Mr. Whedon, this is your claim to immortality, so why don't you spend a few of your well-earned dollars and give us the definitive version that we, and you, deserve?
Meanwhile, as a bonus, you also get ridiculously clever plots, and even more ridiculously clever dialogue. This is the TV show that loves our crazy English language more than any other.
Our old DVDs are a bit fuzzy on our ridiculously large screen. And apparently the HD versions are insultingly badly rendered. Mr. Whedon, this is your claim to immortality, so why don't you spend a few of your well-earned dollars and give us the definitive version that we, and you, deserve?
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