Monthly Archives: January 2026

Comparing four Beethoven recordings

This entry was posted in Music and tagged music on by

I’ve never been very good at noticing differences in performances of classical pieces and picking a favorite. Occasionally one really jumps out, like the Zurich Tonhalle’s recording of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, but usually the differences are subtle. It takes careful listening even to notice that there are differences. As an exercise, I picked out four recordings of a piece I know well and listened to them repeatedly to compare them. There really are differences.

The piece I picked was Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3. The recordings were:
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Accentuating the positive when opposing ICE

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged Avelo ICE news on by

Recently Avelo Airlines announced it would no longer provide ICE with flights to transport abductees. CEO Andrew Levy wrote: “We moved a portion of our fleet into a government program which promised more financial stability but placed us in the center of a political controversy. … The program provided short-term benefits but ultimately did not deliver enough consistent and predictable revenue to overcome its operational complexity and costs.” Avelo didn’t admit that negative publicity motivated its decision, but businesses never like to say such things.
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Update for subscribers

This entry was posted in Administrative on by

Newsletters are popular these days. To keep up, I’ve changed the settings on this blog to send the full text of each post to email subscribers.

Let me know if this causes any problems.

If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can in the sidebar, under “Get all posts by email.”

Update: A post which appeared this morning is truncated in email. That may be because I scheduled it before changing the settings. (I almost always schedule my posts for early in the morning; it makes my posting more consistent and gives me a chance to think about them.) We’ll see what happens next time. Also, I’ve noticed that links in an emailed post go through WordPress and are uniquely tied to the recipient. If you want more privacy in the links you click on, open the blog in a private window.

Life continues

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged philosophy on by

The first quarter of the 21st century has ended. Statistically, I’m unlikely to see the end of the second quarter. This makes me think about the end of my life. As far as I know, I don’t have any conditions that will kill me in the near term, but I’ve probably got just a couple of decades left at most. How should I look at the unpleasant topic of death?

“When I die, the world ends.” That’s one way to think about it: that nothing matters after you’re dead. It’s bleak but tidy. However, people make out wills, think about how the people they love will get along, and so forth. We think about the future beyond our lifetimes. Science fiction writers and fans think about what the world will be like centuries or even eons in the future and hope it will be a good one. People risk their lives to promote a cause. What happens after we’re dead matters to us.
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