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Month: October 2016
How is Melbourne today different from in the past?
Melbourne in the 80s, when I was in high school: Very Suburban. High density living did not happen: the Great Australian Dream was a large suburban home with a garden, and only the indigent lived in apartment blocks. Seeing apartments spring up everywhere remains a shock to me. Renting happened, but was something to get […]
Can someone identify as just one of their ethnic backgrounds, though they have multiple ones?
Identity, and indeed ethnicity, are not about blood or DNA or ancestry. Yes, skin colour, as a “visible minority”, is different, particularly in the States; but that’s not the scenario your question puts forward. And even in that case, identity is not about blood. It’s about what your society makes of what you look like. […]
What are the best and worst things about public transit in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia? How could it be improved?
This is a subject of acute interest to many a Melburnian. Best: Overall, reliable. Yes, when it falls over, it falls over horridly; but considering how much of the infrastructure is 150 years old, it is bearing the load remarkably well. Reasonable coverage, given it’s 150 years old. So long as urban development followed the […]
Regarding the fact that Iranian Azeris are much more than Azeris of Azerbaijan, which group should be considered as the main and central Azeri group?
I will preface this by saying that I am speaking from a position of profound ignorance. As full disclosure, I will now say everything that I know about Azeris. Azerbaijan and Armenia seem to have been on the edge of going to war, for a while now. Azeri sounds to me like Turkish with Persian […]
Do you prefer silence or noise? Why?
In my twenties, I was like Jordan. Silence unnerved me. I sought noise. I made noise. I was loud. Sunday nights, when it was deadly quiet as I was working on my PhD, I would put on the community radio Metal show, because I couldn’t deal without noise. (And not because I had any idea […]
Some consider Shostakovich very uneven in the quality of his output. What pieces are considered of poor quality, and why?
Opprobrium is usually directed at the made-to-order Stalinist cantatas and film music. See for example Putting the Stalin in Shostakovich: pro-Soviet cantatas cause outrage. They are regarded as insincere, bombastic, and forced on him. People in the West know that they weren’t the kind of thing he took pride in, and prefer to ignore them. […]
How do rural people dress/look like in your country?
If you’d asked this question 100 years ago, Pegah, I could give you an interesting answer. Then again, if you’d asked this question 100 years ago, you would have been my sworn enemy, and there’d have been no Quora to ask me this through anyway. Australia: Australia is absurdly urbanised, and those of us in […]
Can musicians be replaced by computers which can read musical scores (with emotional connotations) and play back the tune with emotion?
Hello Curtis Lindsay. I’ve been upvoting you for a little while. In fact, because of you, I’m about to force myself to listen to *shudder* Chopin. (Michael Masiello will be pleased.) It’s about time I disagreed with you about something. I think OP’s dystopian scenario is not impossible. The thing about machine learning is, it […]
Who is Heather Kent Dubrow?
Heather Dubrow – Wikipedia Heather Paige Dubrow (née Kent; born January 5, 1969) is an American actress and television personality. She portrayed Lydia DeLucca in the television series That’s Life in 2000, and has starred on the reality television series The Real Housewives of Orange County since its seventh season in 2012. Heather Dubrow is […]
Which is your favourite symphony by Beethoven?
Yeah, the Ninth for me too. Not just for the finale: the first three movements are wonderful, and there’s sublimity in the Adagio. It’s hard to do favourites, and I love all the odd-numbered symphonies (apart from the 1st, which is still Mozart on Red Bull, as JM Cortese put it). The 5th and 7th […]