Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 18, 2012

hah cute

“Lettered Bubbles”??? Don’t get it. All I can think of is either a test in comic book form or a well-educated stripper.

Just like a week has 7 days and not 8 (monday to monday) a scale can be said to have 7 notes: a h (really b) c d e f g and then back to a, which we won’t count as it is a, only an octave higher.

Fill in with a #2 pencil.

@Ewaldoh, @Tubbycat: actually there is a good case for saying an octave is eight notes, not seven. It’s because the relationship of sound frequency to notes is a logarithmic progression, not an arithmetic one. In an arithmetic progression like counting, it makes sense to say a decade is 0-9, and the next decade is 10-19, etc. But in a logarithmic progression, each octave represents an exact doubling of frequency, so one octave would be, for instance, A (440HZ) to A(880 Hz), and the next octave would be A(880Hz) to A(1760 Hz) and so on. Yes, this makes it a bit weird when you realize you’ll be singing fifteen notes (not sixteen) when rising two octaves, but that’s the way it works for logarithmic progressions.

Music has what we computing types call a “fencepost problem”. (If you want a fence 50 metres long with a post every 2 metres, how many fenceposts do you need?) Thus, for example, a third plus a third yields a fifth.

Reminds me of the old Kudor Vocational Inventory test, hundreds of ‘Would you rather dance in front of people or rope cattle’, ‘would you rather pilot a fighter plane or serve dinner’ type questions. .About 20-30 pages of that. A classmate changed his occupational preference on each page so they made him take it over again. He’s a very successful lawyer today. Oh, we ALL felt it was a total waste.

standardized test are useless. now, we are teaching kids not education, but study for the test. and, it doesn’t really mean anything for next level of education. i knew a girl who got a perfect on sat, full ride at mit. but, she quit after 1 year, so she can get married, and no more full ride.

Not to dredge up THIS tired, old debate again, but taking a test sideways like that, just for the fun of it, seems like something a young Calvin would do, too. Sans music, of course.

And we’ve seen Caulfield using the bubbles to make pointillist art.