The Paper Trail

Joel on Twitter, Flickr, the web

Oct 21

Via All Manner of Thing: “It’s a visualization of a two-part canon from Bach’s Musical Offering.  The canon in question exhibits both retrogression and inversion — that is, the theme harmonizes with an upside-down and backwards version of itself.”

The Musical Offering has a very interesting history. From Gene Veith: ‘King Frederick, who enjoyed humiliating his guests, had composed a long melody line full of chromatic scales that was impossible to turn into a multi-voiced canon…and told Bach to turn it into a fugue. Whereupon Bach, on the spot, sat down at one of the new piano fortes and turned it into a three-part fugue. The flummoxed King said, in effect, OK, turn it into a 6-part fugue. A few days later, Bach sent him a 6-part fugue and more than a fugue, “A Musical Offering” that rebuked Frederick and all of his Enlightenment notions with the Christian faith.’


Sep 28

Sep 8

Aug 3
“I never understand people who give up because a relationship is long distance. If you give up because of the distance, then you’re not admitting to yourself how you really feel. Because when you *love someone* (oh that paltry phrase)…you will do anything. You will interrupt your life, your job, your house, your car, whatever…to make it work.” Lara, Sept 2008

Jul 30
“Asking people to imagine a Dan Brown where he got his fact straight is closer to asking people to imagine what an Agatha Christie novel would read like if set in a postapocalyptic future where giant mutant weasels fight off vampire dogs aided by elves from a parallel universe, in a metaphor for the fifth century Roman Empire and the collapse of the Catholic church.
“Performed as a play written in iambic pentameter, and directed by Spike Lee.”
- DavidTC on Slashdot

“Asking people to imagine a Dan Brown where he got his fact straight is closer to asking people to imagine what an Agatha Christie novel would read like if set in a postapocalyptic future where giant mutant weasels fight off vampire dogs aided by elves from a parallel universe, in a metaphor for the fifth century Roman Empire and the collapse of the Catholic church.

“Performed as a play written in iambic pentameter, and directed by Spike Lee.”

- DavidTC on Slashdot


Jul 29
Please - please - vote for this design to be reprinted.

Please - please - vote for this design to be reprinted.


Jul 8

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been sitting in front of my laptop and wished I had a chainsaw handy.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been sitting in front of my laptop and wished I had a chainsaw handy.


Jul 7
“Your insistence that Christians must equate ‘the literal word of God’ with ‘infallible transcriptions, every single time a book of the Bible is copied’ is just plain wrong. That’s not what most Christians believe. They believe that the method God used to preserve the text was to have it copied quickly and widely before any single organization could control the process and make ‘secret’ alterations to the Scripture.” G Adams on Slashdot.

Jul 2

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