Whats the screwiest thing you collect?

From: Philip.Belben_at_pgen.com <(Philip.Belben_at_pgen.com)>
Date: Fri Dec 3 05:18:43 1999

>>Like, in Jakarta, I bought a gong. 28 inches in diameter, and
>>weighing, um, I was going to say nearly 100lb but I think it's a bit less.
> I'll
>>have to weigh it. I wish I'd known how expensive excess baggage charges
> are ---
>>it cost me $700 US just to ship the damned thing home...
>
> And that gamelan gong has a connection to computers, too: Gamelan
> music (playing in the background of shadow puppet plays) often
> has its cycles of rhythms at powers of two, so a large gong
> like that marks off time at, say, every 256 beats.

Hey, I'd not spotted that. Yes, gamelan music is very binary: although the very
slowest pulse (marked by the gong ageng) may not be a binary multiple of the
next one up (gong suwukan, which is what I think I have), all the others are
indeed binary subdivisions. One characteristic of gamelan music is that it
tends to subdivide so far, and slow down so much, that I lose track of the tune
in irama wilet or anything slower (I can't remember the names of half of these,
it's so long ago)

Something I never managed on either trip to Jakarta was to watch a wayang show.
Oh well.

> This cracked me up when I learned that in gamelan class, much like
> the moment when aspects of the Japanese language reminded me of
> stack-based computer languages.

I don't know any Japanese so I can't comment. But German has a tendency to a
verb on the stack, rather than say it, and leave it there until you've what the
sentence is about forgotten, put :-)

Philip. (Who back in 1988 wanted to call the student-designed college network
"gamma-LAN")




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Received on Fri Dec 03 1999 - 05:18:43 GMT