fdintino

"The distinction between tonality and noise is mathematical form" doesn't have the same ring to it, I suppose.

My favorite study of tonal harmony is "Theory of Harmony" by Arnold Schoenberg (sounds ironic; here's a preview on google books: <http://books.google.com/books?id=5Y5MyjbU87oC&lpg=PR3...). It was the first theory textbook that attempted to teach composition of harmony without value judgments about what is "correct" or "natural," instead taking pains at every step to justify itself on first principles. He wrote the book because he believed his students needed to understand conventional harmony before they could transcend it. In my mind Schoenberg falls into that class of visionaries whose legacies are more about their failed predictions than of their analyses and contributions (Marx shared a similar fate, his own fault of course). Schoenberg was partially right — nobody in their right mind argues that ninth chords can't be processed by our feeble minds (jazz is western canon at this point), or that the tritone will summon demons (well, maybe some people in Norway still believe that) — but classical harmony hasn't been completely replaced.

The scientific stuff in Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony is mostly garbage though. If you're interested in reading more about the modern understanding of the physical properties of music I'd recommend "Musimathics: The Mathematical Foundations of Music," and Benson's "Music: A Mathematical Offering." For an attempt to look at musical structure in terms of its cognition, I enjoyed "The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures" by David Temperley. It's a bit speculative, but that's the current state of the field if you're trying to go beyond the simplest aspects of music.

Isn't this sentiment self-fulfilling, if shared by enough people? (full disclosure: although I don't work in politics, I live in DC and my SO works in congress).

When Lamar Smith held hearings on the bill, Google was the only anti-SOPA tech company invited to speak. Truth is, Google was a cynical choice for the token opposition, since they aren't very popular in congress right now — because of anti-trust, among other things — and they're terribly disorganized when it comes to politics. So there was no real tech input in crafting or modifying this legislation (I don't count GoDaddy). If this response is genuine in its request for legislation crafted by both sides of the issue, it will not be an amended version of any of the current bills. Anyway, I'm told that it's extremely unlikely SOPA will make it out of committee — non-judiciary members who don't have a stake in the issue are inclined to vote no after being flooded by constituent calls, and leadership doesn't like to introduce bills on the floor of the house that won't pass.

If you're offered a seat at the table, isn't it better to try to influence the process? Sure, if you get steam-rolled and ignored you have every right to complain and be angry, but why not do so when and if that happens, not before?

The timing of this post is funny, as I just got finished reworking our fork of django-cache-machine. As the post points out, the limitation of Cache Machine as it is currently built is that only objects which are already within a queryset can invalidate that queryset. This is fine for selects on primary keys, but beyond that the invalidation logic is incomplete.

My changes ( https://github.com/theatlantic/django-cache-machine/ ) inspect the ORDER BY clauses (if there's a limit or offset) and WHERE constraints in the query and saves the list of "model-invaliding columns" (i.e., columns which, when changed, should broadly invalidate queries on the model) in a key in the cache. It also associates these queries with a model-flush list. Then, in a pre_save signal, it checks whether any of those columns have changed and marks the instance to invalidate the associated model flush list when it gets passed into the post_save signal. We have these changes up on a few of our sites and, if all goes well, we're looking to move the invalidation at the column level to make the cache-hit ratio even higher.