I'm a gigging jazz drummer and just cause you mentioned "with the back seats down", I gotta say: I always wish there was a car that was optimized / defaulted to having the back seats down. But in a pinch, on those rare occasions where you actually have more than two people in your car, you could pop some seats up.
Every car I get (currently have an Hyundai Elantra GT), I end up with the back seats down 75% of the time, and it just looks crappy. If the default mode was back-seats-down, with no big seams or gaps or unlevel parts, I'd be in heaven.
The Jazz's seats would fold completely flat, and I just left them like that most of the time. But if you cared about looks it wasn't the car to get anyway.
I think the key here is that you only deliberately practice things that you really, really want. Things that you want so bad that you obsess over them and you wake up realizing you've been dreaming about them. I quit a comfortable software job to take about 9 months off to devote to piano recently. Every free moment I get, I'm throwing myself in the waters. It's really hard to push through the painful points of learning stuff if you're not obsessed.
I deliberately practice a lot of things that I'm not obsessed with, it's really useful when I'm overwhelmed with a new field (e.g. learning a new framework), to isolate a small bit I want to master and try several different ways of doing it, and document my findings.
That allows me to not see what I'm trying to learn as an obstacle to what I'm trying to achieve. It removes a lot of frustration, since that shifts my view of the task from being an obstacle to being the goal itself.
I'm not sure I would say that I focus on deliberately practicing the same few skills as often as the author of the article does, though. Usually, even for the few skills that I have deliberately practiced for a long time, my focus has been on exploring variations or adaptation to new context. That is because I aim for adaptability rather than having muscle memory of a skill.
I think the real key to top performance is to learn to get over the aches of practicing and training yourself to get engrossed in a range of subjects. Piano is good practice but I usually recommend something more dopamine efficient.
This is a bit of a cheat because these courses are not free ($50USD for California residents and around $400 for non-CA residents) but they are so good that I had to mention them.
I am nearing the end of the Level II course and have learned so much stuff. They
force you to do so many things that you otherwise would not do. Basically, ever week you have to post a video demonstrating what you learned from the previous week. And the video is in a public discussion forum with the other students so there is this incentive to do an extra good job. And he gives great feedback on your assignments.
Hey thanks, it is very hands on and focused more on performance than composition. It covers comping, soloing, playing in different substyles, pretty much everything if you take both courses. Sometimes the units fly by too quickly and you need to note to yourself to revisit a topic and apply it in all 12 keys or apply it to a bunch of Real Book tunes.
I knew I'd pay for recommending a paid course but it's really great and the price is a steal given that Berklee Online courses are around $1500 and private lessons w someone of this teacher's calibre might be $100/hr. I'm not affiliated w the teacher/college at all other than being a student.
Just want to share a couple great works by Sakamoto. I'm a big fan. One of my favorite bossa nova albums is A Day In New York by Morelenbaum/Sakamoto. Here's Desafinado from that album:
The guy cowrote Principia Mathematica AND won the Nobel prize in literature. He pretty much destroyed Frege's life's work in a witty little personal letter that could've fit on a napkin. He's one of those rare thinkers that did so much that if he only did a tenth of what he actually did he'd still be considered great.
Here is a the letter from Russel to Jean van Heijenoort in response to the latter's request to print the correspondence between Russell/Frege in "From Frege to Godel" (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell-paradox/).
----
As I think about acts of integrity and grace, I realise that there is nothing in my knowledge to compare with Frege’s dedication to truth. His entire life’s work was on the verge of completion, much of his work had been ignored to the benefit of men infinitely less capable, his second volume was about to be published, and upon finding that his fundamental assumption was in error, he responded with intellectual pleasure clearly submerging any feelings of personal disappointment. It was almost superhuman and a telling indication of that of which men are capable if their dedication is to creative work and knowledge instead of cruder efforts to dominate and be known. (Quoted in van Heijenoort (1967), 127)
Russell's paradox didn't "destroy" Frege's life work any more than it destroyed Russell's own life work, or set theory in general. Of course it was a problem, and everyone came up with their own workaround.
I should say that I don't agree with the OP's opinion that Russell is "not great", but there's no need to exaggerate Russell's importance in order to prove it.
Not to mention that the Nobel Prize in literature isn't awarded for philosophical achievement, so that's largely irrelevant.
For anyone that plays Wordle on NYT Games site, there is another anagramming game called Spelling Bee in which the notion of a pangram is featured prominently. Basically, you get a set of letters from which to build anagrams (one privileged letter must appear in all your anagrams). Pangrams are considered to be any anagram which makes use of all the given letters and it will flash the word 'Pangram' on the screen when you get them, to give you a minor nerdy dopamine hit.
I am addicted to the game and get pissed at myself if I don't get to the top scoring tier every day.
I play that every day. I do my best and once I've given up by the evening time (it resets at midnight Pacific), I go to this site and see how much better I can do with the prefixes. You can tweak the checkboxes to show you more or less, all the way up to revealing the answers. Great site.
Thanks! I love it so much. The one thing that annoys me is that it rejects anything that it considers to be domain knowledge or some such criteria. For example, today you'd think you could use 'potto', which is a cool animal in the loris family. But nope, Spelling Bee seemingly rejects it because it considers it to be specialized zoological knowledge or something. BS.
When you get them all, it's "Queen Bee." I've only ever gotten it once -- for whatever reason, the puzzle just clicked that day -- but it was extremely satisfying.
One bit of complexity that lots of tools like this seem to always punt on is the fact that most chords (at least in jazz) are typically played rootless and inverted and with lots of 'upper extensions'. It would be nice if a tool really did a deep dive in actual chord voicings that one would play in the real world (i.e. in a context where the bass player is covering the root and therefore it is best left out of the chord).
As an example of something that is very systematic (easy to put in an app), a rootless C maj 7 is equivalent to an E min 7. A rootless C min 7 is equivalent to an Eb maj 7. etc.
It is a pretty tough leap to learn rootless jazz piano comping when almost everything out there (except for the old-school dead tree books) only ever shows rooted voicings.
Anyway, there'a quite a lot of stuff on this site apart from this cheat sheet page: the chord page does indeed include inversions, e.g.: https://muted.io/c-major-chord/
Jazz sheets often write 7 assuming it may be played as 9, if not 11/13 even. A triad in the left hand being a bit too pedestrian, a rootless “Cmaj7” is virtually always played as a rootless Cmaj9 (EGBD), or more commonly a rootless C69 (EGAD) especially if the tonic. Inversions may include the root instead of a 9th, e.g. BCEG.
Entering the Kingdom
by Mary Oliver
The crows see me.
They stretch their glossy necks
In the tallest branches
Of green trees. I am
Possibly dangerous, I am
Entering the kingdom.
The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees–
To learn something by being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention.
But the crows puff their feathers and cry
Between me and the sun,
And I should go now.
They know me for what I am.
No dreamer,
No eater of leaves.
Though not a move into a completely different product area, it's been interesting to see them step up their digital piano game. For a long time it seemed like Casio had a reputation for not making serious keyboards that you could gig on. But they have been churning out really nice keyboards recently - most notably, the Privia line. The ones I've played have a really nice feeling action, pro-level sounds and they're visually quite slick.
I am always attracted to the design of Casio keyboards when I see one at a store somewhere. Then I play them, and realize that many of them (the low end models) still often lack velocity sensing. Both the best and the worst thing about Casio is that they’re stuck in the 90s.
I was shopping around for a digital piano and the Privia does look really nice. I haven't experienced one in person yet and I am a bit scared to buy any keyboard or digital piano without trying the action.
I like the action on the Privias (and the similar CDP360s, which I played recently). My only complaint about the action is that if you're playing at low/practice volumes, you tend to hear a lot of mechanical plastic sound as the keys spring back up. I'm a big fan of Roland's actions. I'd check out the FP30. I also used to practice on a Yamaha P125B and they are great.
Every car I get (currently have an Hyundai Elantra GT), I end up with the back seats down 75% of the time, and it just looks crappy. If the default mode was back-seats-down, with no big seams or gaps or unlevel parts, I'd be in heaven.