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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.
Ethnicity is a cultural construct. Particularly when people around you can’t tell, just by looking at you, which I assume is the case with you. (Disclosure: as you can tell from the topics, one of OP’s ethnicities is Greek, and I’ve had exchanges on that with him before.)
If you prioritise one ethnic background over another, noone has the right to stop you, go ahead: that’s how you identify. To take a smaller-scale example, I identify with my mother’s region of origin rather than my father’s: I’ve spent four years living in Crete, a month visiting Cyprus; I use Cretan dialect words, with only a very faint Cypriot accent; I’m not going to identify with something I’ve barely experienced.
The catch with identity is that identity involves a community, not just an individual; and the community you identify with may not identify with you. Diasporans routinely get a rude shock when they go back to the home country, and the people in the home country say “Huh? Nah, You American.” I’ve seen that here on Quora from Iranians, Italians, and Greeks; it was visibly default behaviour in Armenia.
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 train tracks, which was the case until a decade ago.
Worst:
- Overcrowding; if you’re in Zone 1, don’t even bother boarding a train between 7:30 and 9.
- Chronic underinvestment. I for one welcome our new Chinese overlords; at least they understand infrastructure. (And they don’t have federalism as a mechanism for everyone to dodge the responsibility of infrastructure.)
- If you’re in exurbia, particularly in the Western Suburbs, you’re shit out of luck: the train network is radial, not tangential. In fact, real estate agents in the Western Suburbs are reportedly told not to even bother showing clients a house, if it’s not 10 mins away from a train station.
The lack of a train connection to the airport is unfortunate, but not the worst thing possible.
Improvements?
- More money. And none of this bullshit federal/state nonsense. Take Tony Abbott out with a projectile tram if he ever comes into power again.
- More longterm thinking. I hope the new central tunnels are part of that.
- More tangential connections. Good that money is being poured into more central connections, I guess, but exurbia is tumbleweeds, and radial connections only get you so much 50 km out.
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 vowels.
- Tabriz is where the Byzantine astronomer Gregory Choniades studied. Which is why half the words in his first textbook on astronomy are untranslated Persian.
- Pegah Esmaili is awesome, and should be given lots of money.
This concludes the list of things I know about Azeris.
Which makes the Anon A2A delightful. Yay, more bulls-eyes on my back.
(Is this the Anon I think it is?)
OK, so how does one objectively work out the question of who is the main and central group is, out of the Baku Azeris and the Tabriz Azeris?
Is it about population? If that was the only criterion, English would have been renamed American a long time ago.
The choice of the group that is deemed the most central in an ethnicity is that group which is the most prestigious vehicle of the ethnicity.
What criteria make a group most prestigious, when it comes to the ethnicity?
- History: if the group claims immediate continuity, genetic or geographic, with the past of the group.
- Culture: if the group has produced the more cherished component of the ethnicity’s cultural heritage.
- Power: if the group, either previously or currently, exercises power over the rest of the ethnic group.
Because I know nothing about Azeris, I have no idea which way the criteria weigh.
There is, of course, a fourth criterion, which is pretty straightforward.
- Having a country with the ethnic group’s name on it.
Even if the History, Culture, Power and Population all weighed towards Tabriz instead of Baku (and I have no idea if they do or not), Azərbaycan Respublikası [Republic of Azerbaijan] sounds more like where the main and central Azeri group hangs out, than Şərqi Azərbaycan ostanı [East Azerbaijan Province].
That’s the outsider’s perspective.
That said, of course Rashad is right. There shouldn’t be a competition about who is more Azeri than the other. That’s counterproductive. Objectively.
It’s almost as clear an objective truth, as the assertion that Pegah Esmaili is awesome, and should be given lots of money.
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 what constituted good Metal.) When I moved to the States, I’d spent late nights at Denny’s, so I wouldn’t be alone in the quiet. Music constantly. TV as a comforting buzz in the background.
In my forties, I’ve turned into McKayla. I feel refreshed if I spend a couple of hours staying back at work, with just stillness and quiet and nothing around me. Background music makes me antsy. I rejoiced at the ongoing buzz of Greektown, till 1 AM, when I moved here; seven years on, I stay the hell away from it. I feel at my most euphoric if I’m walking home late at night, in absolute stillness. I don’t particularly seek out music much any more.
Oddly, my neurological situation these days is probably closer to Jordan’s than McKayla’s (something I’ll post about… maybe later). So I’m not sure what the explanation is. But it really is recent; last 3–4 years.
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.
I haven’t heard them, because, well, ditto. I’ll queue them up in YouTube today.
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 the cities really don’t know enough about those of us in the country—even though our national mythology is all about how the country is where the Real Australians are.
We do know they listen to country music. We know that they wear jeans even more than urban Australians do.
And we know they all wear hats.
You can tell Lee Kernaghan is a Real Australian. He’s a country singer. And he wears a hat. A real Australian Akubra hat.
McLeod’s Daughters all wore hats (some of the time). It was a soap set in the country, with empowered female leads. Who wore hats some of the time. And jeans.
… This *is* safe to show in Iran, isn’t it? 🙂
I haven’t seen many hats in country Victoria. But I don’t think country Victoria is where the Real Australians are. It’s more the fine food and wine provedore for Melbourne, where urban Australians go to eat nice things. (And it’s a provedore, because that’s the kind of snobs we are.)
The hats seem to be more a NSW/Queensland thing. With sheep stations. And a Wide Brown Land. And Country Music.
The agrarian populist politician Bob Katter is from Queensland. He always wears a hat:
Alas, I am an effete urban Australian. The closest I’ve ever come to wearing a Real Australian hat was when I was in Texas:
Howdy pardner.
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 doesn’t need to understand its input in terms of rules and emotional state; you don’t need a good notation to do it. It just needs the input to be quantifiable; which music performances are. If you feed a music composition system lots of Bach, it will spin out more Bach (and that’s been possible for the last twenty years). Maybe not divinely inspired Bach, but certainly competent Bach: there are, after all, rules and regularities recoverable from Bach’s music.
Well, same with what we impute as emotion in music. Rubato may be ineffable in effect on humans, but it’s not ineffable in execution. Neither is articulation, nor dynamics. I think they can be learned.
The thing is that, as Curtis said, we have had player pianos for a century, and they were much more accurate than humans. Conlon Nancarrow relied on that for his pieces. But they didn’t put pianists out of business.
The reason is that, even if technically—or even emotionally—a machine does replicate a good musician, that’s not why we go to concerts. Live gigs have in fact taken a downturn in attendance, and performers will tell you they’re already losing out in competition to digitised sound; except the digitised sound is recordings of Billy Holliday or Miles Davis or AC/DC or Yitzak Perlman.
If people would rather show up to your live gig than listen to Horowitz at home, it’s not because they expect you’ll do a “better” job than Horowitz. It’s because the live performance is the point, and they want to see humans, imperfections and all, grappling with the piece.
But that means that live performances will be more a niche thing: they’ll be competing with computer performances, as well as YouTube and CDs and DVDs. They’re already a niche thing though, and they’ve been a niche thing for decades.
Who is Heather Kent Dubrow?
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 deeply awesome, cool, and wonderful, for several reasons, not restricted to the following:
- Being the only sane person ever to have featured on Real Housewives of Orange County.
- Being actually well-educated, not just by Real Housewives standards, and not afraid to use three-syllable words.
- Inspiring one of the better Real Housewives impersonations by Amy Phillips:
- Casting Google’s Inbofox in Greek into utter confusion.
- /ˈhɛðəɹ dʊbˈɹow/ has somehow ended up as /ˈxiθer ˈdabrou/. Then again, the original Polish surname (e.g. Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow) would surely have been /dubrof/, wouldn’t it?
- And who knew Real Housewives was rendered in Greek as True Housewives In Despair. (They’ve picked up on Desperate Housewives, and titled the franchise Real Desperate Housewives.)
- Yes, I watch Real Housewives. What do you want me to do, POP A VEIN?
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 are both extremely tight constructions. But I’m too jaded now for their optimism to work on me like it used to.
What are the messages behind Mahler’s last three symphonies?
OP clarified in comments that he meant {7, 8, 9}; but of course this could be any of {8, 9, 10}, or {8, Lied von der Erde, 9}, or {Lied von der Erde, 9, 10}. Any of those are legit.
The real grouping of symphonies that go together is {Lied von der Erde, 9, 10}. But I still don’t grok the 10th (which really does jump into the unknown with its tonality). And the Lied… yes, yes, the Abschied is sublime, and I actually like Li Po/Li Bai’s poems independently, but the rest of it doesn’t really work for me either.
So I’m going to choose to answer {7, 8, 9} after all.
- 7th
- 1st movt: The hero struggles against fate. (Yes, again. It’s a recurring theme for a reason.)
- 2nd: Wistful, distant horn calls, a little bit of grotesquerie in the background.
- 3rd: The night is dark and full of terrors.
- 4th: The night is urbane and fun.
- 5th: We will all. Have. Fun. With a Straussian rondo. Fun. That is what we will have.
- 8th
- 1st movt: Big cosmic Mass. Not really about Christianity at all (the mention of Christ in the hymn is rushed through), but certainly about awe and mystery and might.
- 2nd movt: It’s about what the ending of Goethe’s Faust is about. Redemption and the Eternal Feminine. Scene-painting, and (mostly) awe.
- 9th
- 1st movt: Farewell. Struggle. Exhaustion. Lamentation. Reconciliation. Transfiguration.
- 2nd: Dance as a dialectic of the world: the simple, plodding, but contented Ländler vs the sophisticated, vital, but self-destructive Waltz. With the Trio doing more wistful farewell, and the whole thing ending in a “My God, Why hast thou forsaken me”.
- 3rd: Anger, counterpoint tearing itself apart. With a flashforward to the redemption in the 4th movement.
- 4th: Death, as a slowly sinking, soulful hymn, with a countertheme of one last struggle back. Dying away, very slowly and heart-breakingly.