Author: opoudjis

What can I do with a humanities PhD?

By: | Post date: August 15, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Academia

What do all those physics PhDs end up doing? A whole lot of running computer systems. An incidental skill they picked up during their apprenticeships. What incidental skill have you picked up during your apprenticeship? Critical thinking. Analysis and synthesis of disparate information. Communication skills. Research skills. Project management. Where can you apply those skills, […]

Is Bach’s music predictable?

By: | Post date: August 15, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Music

There are underlying harmonic patterns that keep recurring in Bach, and that are his convention for moving music forward. The Circle of fifths is particularly prominent in Bach. It’s the kind of thing that writers, to be more complimentary about it, call “inevitable”. (And of course, recurring harmonic patterns make it predictable, at least for […]

What is it about the Lydian Mode that suggests “magic” or “uncanniness”?

By: | Post date: August 14, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4T4vdAV5Vk&list=PLbb22k7us7Y-74-CI7wrIMF6lhpPJ1riN&index=7 Agree with Patrick Alan Burke. I’ll add that the Lydian sounds more strange to Western ears because it not only changes a pitch in the exclusive Major and Minor modes of Common Practice: it changes one of the core pitches of the scale, IV♯, which is disorienting for Western ears. (It makes me smug […]

What do you think of the Census fail In Australia?

By: | Post date: August 11, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Australia

https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-reason-for-the-Australian-census-breakdown-on-August-9-2016 Hilarity abounds about #censusfail, the crash of the online census on August 9 2016: Census in Australia. And I will admit that, like millions of Australians that were under the impression we had to complete the census on that night (so the whole country hit the same server at 8 PM), I had a […]

Dimitra drives to the Acheron

By: | Post date: August 10, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Quora

The Acheron river was reputed in antiquity to be the gateway to Hades. Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer to Are there any Greek towns built along the Acheron river in Greece? recounted driving through the drained Acherusian lake, and getting lost in the middle of the night, after a village festival. https://www.quora.com/Are-there-… On the 15th of August, […]

Do Australians like being Australian citizens?

By: | Post date: August 10, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Australia

Take everything that Tracey Bryan said as read. Even if she does live in Brissie. Why, yes. I like being an Australian citizen. Let me count the whys. I like that I get to be an Australian citizen, and not a British subject. I am happy that my country finally cut itself from the apron […]

If you could go back time to 500 years ago, with your current skill and career training, what kind of job would you do? List your current job or your major in college. Feel free to disregard gender or social status factor.

By: | Post date: August 6, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Personal

Well, Lyonel Perabo mon vieux, this is going to be an unimaginative answer, but thanks for asking. University education: Bachelor of Electrical Engineering Well, no electricity, so that’s irrelevant. Good, I hated engineering. University education: Bachelor of Computer Science … No computers either. And too much damn competition from all the other time travelling geeks. […]

Alas I’m forty

By: | Post date: August 3, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Greece, Personal

I’m turning 45 in a month, actually; but this Cretan song I heard in my youth has been haunting me since I turned forty. I even had the first verse of it as my Skype mood message for a fair while. Άχι και σαραντάρισα, δεν κάνω μπλιο γι’ αγάπεςκαι μου ’ρχεται να τροζαθώ και να […]

What are some of the funniest results of censoring song lyrics?

By: | Post date: August 3, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Music

Not a hip hop lyric, but then the OP didn’t put that in the question. When I was a young lad, I lived in Crete, and I explored Cretan folk music, because that’s what you hear in Crete. One of the greats of Cretan folk music was Kostas Mountakis. Nikos Xilouris was greater and more […]

If the Tanach (Jewish Bible) doesn’t mention heaven or hell, where did the Christians get this idea from?

By: | Post date: August 3, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture

There’s more to Judaism than the Tanach. As discussed in Bosom of Abraham and Paradise, the notion of heaven as a place where the righteous dead go, rather than Sheol for everyone, is a notion that was kicking around in late Judaism, including Jewish papyri and apocrypha such as 4 Maccabees. That understanding of heaven […]

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