Off On A Tangent

Little Jaime’s has lost his newborn hair. Well, almost all his hair. If you think the Samurai style hairdo photo is funny, it is much more amuzing in person. He had long hair on the back of his head since he was born. That is, he ha a pseudo mullet. Now all that is left is this cute patch.

Many years ago, while listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, it seemed to me a shame that such great classical music had been allowed to fall into disuse. Pieces like Capriccio are clearly of interest to today’s youth and rock culture, but just need a re-interpretation by some good musicians with a populist sensibility and modern instruments. Last night, I got to see my idea live on-stage.

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra brings classical music alive with electric guitars and drums and bass - Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Pachelbel, with distored guitars, throaty vocals, and colored flames, sparks and lazers. So, my vision came to be, right? Well, not exactly.

The show was a Christmas show - a Christmas Story told by a narratator and punctuated with rousing renditions of traditional Christmas songs and classical pieces, sometimes with lyrics written for them. Even putting aside the amateurish writing (of lyrics and narration) and the frequently comical juxtaposition of suggestively dressed females singers with the Christams themes, the music was not what I envisioned. Although they played a variety of Tchaikovsky and Mozart and Beethoven pieces, they managed to make them all sound alike. A little keyboard intro leading into a wall of guitar/bass sound. With 2 keyboardists, a drummer, bassist, 8 cello/viola/violin musicians, and 2 guitarists, they pretty much managed to fill every slot in the harmonic territory, leaving no gaps for the listener to enjoy himself. The Tchaikovsky pieces were especially out-of-place as they missed entirely the lightness of the pieces.

But there were moments of very good music, thankfully. Their rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon in D was done in markedly different style to good effect, and even the lyrics added to the piece were inspiring. Another piece I didn’t recognize, also done in a change of style away from the wall-of-rock-sound was excellent - mostly due to the excellent vocalist Jay Pierce and the gospel-bluesy guitar work of Alex Skolnick. Later, the thudding of the electric guitars plus bass worked well for the Beethoven inspired finale, featuring variations on the 9th’s second movement and the 5th’s first movement. One can easily imagine a deaf Beethoven appreciating being able to feel his music in his very bones. Mozart played in the same style, while fun and amusing, just didn’t work as well.

The light show was very entertaining though, and the whole production very impressive. I just wish more rock groups, especially the older ones like Kansas and the like, would allow themselves to move on and see themselves as a band, not a group - the difference being the a band plays music live from any composer (not just their own pieces), reinterpreting it for a live audience. Bringing up-to-date the pieces that have made music history. But it needs a little more musical sensibility that what TSO brought last night.

Wolverine is a Marvel comic hero (anti-hero?) whose bones are laced with the made up steel “adamantium”. Adamantium is the material of convenience for unimaginative writers needing a crutch - due to it’s complete indestructibility. Such things are needed in a comic universe whenever one needs something even The Hulk can’t smash. So Wolverine has a bone structure that can’t be beat, so to speak.

In an earlier blog, I made an offhand remark about wanting carbone nanotubes incorporated into my bones. Apparently my remark wasn’t exactly prescient, as scientists have already started on it. What especially kills me about this article is the line The nanotubes were chemically treated to attract calcium ions and produce the growth of hydroxyapatite crystals on their surfaces. Of course, it seems carbon nanotubes can be chemically modified to do nearly anything.

Maybe someday we’ll all be able to leap tall buildings.

Our little one now responds to us with smiles and lovely baby sounds. He is also very funny, but I am not sure why. He makes me laugh with such joy, a feeling so genuine I have not experienced in a long while. It is amazing how a new life can bring such raw emotions back into our hearts. He reminds me everyday that life is worth living and that I should lighten up a bit (a lot Mike would say). I am so lucky to have such an amazing kid (baby) as my son.

In an interesting article on TSS (Spring 2.0 vs. the Anemic Domain Model), a lot of software developers fought over what makes a cake a cake. It sounds silly, but it’s something OO purists fight a lot about - what belongs in their classes and what does not. Specifically, in this case, the question became, “does persistence logic have any place in the domain object classes?” In other words, should your Cake.class have “save()”, “delete()”, and “update()” methods?

OO programming makes us all Platonists. We stare at the shadows on the wall and try to decipher the true form of Cakeness. Does a cake bake itself, or does the oven bake the cake? Or does the oven just heat stuff, and the cake batter reacts to heat by forming a cake? The shadow silhouettes on the cave wall are less than clear, but we try our best to make our Cake class mimic the true Platonic ideal of Cake. And so we argue and fight about cakeness.

But Platonic forms are problematic. Where you draw the boundaries around your objects and categories is always an arbitrary decision. But more importantly - does it even make sense to consider anything in our system as representative of a Platonic ideal? As programmers, we usually treat our classes as definitive - the ideal form, if you will. The web page where users edit objects is the cave where the shadows play. Understanding the Java ideal from the web page is impossible - it is a mere shadow of the ideal Java class.

But, we could easily take a more database-centric view and consider the data in the rows and columns to represent the true Cake object. The Java class now becomes the shadow puppet, and the web page a description of the shadow play to a blind man. In all this, there is the unstated assumption that something in our system represents the ideal Cake form.

But consider - at any future date, a new client app could come along with a different implementation of Cake. It could read the same data from the database, but present completely different behavior and a different web page or other GUI to its users - effectively changing completely what it is to be a cake. It would make the data its slave rather than vice-versa. So is the Cake in the database or anywhere in our code? Or is it still in our heads? Maybe there is no ideal Cake form - maybe we programmers can learn something philosophy figured out hundreds of years ago - there are no forms, only our concrete implementations.

The upshot would be that software design decisions and arguments wouldn’t be concerned with creating a pure and correct ontology - they would concern themselves with the pragmatics of programming - clarity, performance, flexibility, modularily, etc. If “cake.bake()” and “cake.save()” make sense from the vantage of such practical design concerns, then declaring “cakes don’t bake themselves” is meaningless. We should let the wisdom of philosophy inform our programming: there is no ideal cake, there is only what we bake.

And maybe programming can inform our philosophy as well: the shadows on the cave wall aren’t “mere” silhouettes of their ideal counterparts. The shadows enhance the static ideals, and the description to the blind man improves with every retelling.