I heard a tune on a jazz radio station and the uncharitable
thought that crossed my mind right away was, "Wow, I remember
fantasizing about composing stuff like this when I was a teen,
but I outgrew it." A later thought was that it needed to be
a movie soundtrack or something, not because it evoked any
images, but because it was too boring by itself and needed
another sensory channel to turn it into anything. Yuck.
Compare this to how I usually react to what-I-consider-"real"
jazz, which usually includes thoughts along the lines of, "I
wish I understood this enough to play it or compose
it myself, 'cause however it is that one gets here, this is
fascinating." Unless it's certain big-band-era or modern-swing
stuff, in which case my reaction is mostly in the form of
toe-tapping and smiling and not much verbal thought.
This led me to wonder: What is "light jazz" anyhow, jazz
for people who don't like jazz but want to seem too sophisticated
for top-40?
That's probably not fair -- someone will probably come along
and point out the merits of the form and the 10% I'm overlooking
based on Sturgeon's Law[1] -- but hey, this afternoon is about
snap judgements and snarkism. Maybe it's my frustration at yet
another headache with a side order of intermittent dizziness
day.
Last night I caught part of a talk-radio interview with a
representative of some corporate-funded institute (Siemmens?)
that had announced a million-dollar scholarship program, and
the host was making a big deal about how it was unusual for
not benefitting the company at all because it was going to
folks who promised to become science teachers, not to folks the
parent company would recruit after graduation, and the rep made
a point of mentioning that it was a long-range thing because
it had five years of funding.
I caught myself thinking, "Bullshit. It's not that it doesn't
benefit the company; it's that they're (potentially) going to do a
whapping lot of good for others as a side effect. And five years
of funding isn't what makes it long-range planning; it's the fact
that the payoff to the company will be a generation from now."
Not that thinking that far ahead isn't pretty damned impressive
in today's American business culture ... (Hmm. Maybe they're
not thinking that far ahead, don't see what the payoff
to themselves is, and really believe this is an "only out of the
goodness of our corporate heart" thing. But I bet the person
who proposed it in the first place saw the payoff.)
The thing is, we hear occasional news reports about how the
US is falling (or has fallen, depending on whom you read) from
it's position of technical/scientific dominance, and how we're
"producing" fewer engineers[2]. And outsourcing/offshoring is a
big topic these days. Suppose a company decides it's better
off having a native talent pool to hire from so that it doesn't
have to ship trade secrets to other countries to get things
built, or better off having our schools stay sharp and foreigners keep
coming here for an engineering education where American companies
can try to convince them to stay instead of going to school
elsewhere and then working for a company over there which will
eat the American company's lunch ten years from now? (Or just
assume jingoism instead of economic doomsaying, and you get to
most of the same places.) Offerring
scholarships to potential scientists and engineers is a somewhat
useful approach but kind of expensive on a per-engineer basis,
and a million dollars will buy you an early pick in the 2010
scientist draft but isn't enough to solve the (real or imagined) problem
of there being fewer Americans going into science.
On the other hand, if you put that million dollars on the
end of a lever twenty years long, you can multiply the force
of that money significantly. Make sure there are high school
math and science teachers able to communicate what's so cool
about engineering and who really understand what they're
teaching, go around offering free "isn't science amazingly nifty?
(and yes you're smart enough to get it)"
demos to schools to help those teachers out, and maybe, just maybe,
that million dollars can actually move a trend. And a generation
later the company (along with the rest of US industry) has a
larger native talent pool to pick from and our universities
stay sharp to attract foreign whiz-kids here. It's not
selfless, it's just unusually forward thinking.
And frankly, the fact that it'll help the company funding it
doesn't detract at all from how it affects my agenda: improving
science education and showing kids that science is interesting
are Good Things in my book. And as a solution to the "affordable
talent is overseas now" problem, I'm more comfortable with this
than I am with protectionism. (But then, I'm one of those
scary people who doesn't think social engineering is automatically
bad.)
Claiming to know what other people are thinking? Like I warned
y'all, it's "judgemental, snarky, snap judgements day". :-P
The sound of breaking glass, repeated, got me attention.
I went to a front window and looked out, and saw to my relief
that it was just the folks working on the building across
the street knocking out the old windows to replace them with
newer ones. Then I noticed that one of the workers was standing
up in an empty second-story window, doing something to the
moulding. It took a few seconds to register ... I've got the
same windows, and I wouldn't be able to stand up in them.
(I could stand hunched over in a second-story window; he was
upright with space left over his head. My ground floor windows
are much taller, and my third-floor windows are a little shorter.)
I don't think of myself as tall -- and technically, I'm of
normal height, but humans have a kind of wide range for normal:
the chart I've got says that normal for adult male humans is
anywhere from 166 cm to 188 cm (65"-74")) -- so my next reaction
was to be surprised that he fit so handily inside the windowframe.
I dunno whether that fits the theme of the rest of this entry
or not.
Humming "Take Five" to myself helped chase away the objectionable
light-jazz tune, so my brain no longer feels dirty.
[1] Sturgoen's Law, for the maybe one or two of you
who aren't already familiar with it: "90% of everything is
crap".
[2] "Producing" is a perfectly reasonable word here,
but in my current mood it makes me think too much of factories
assembling engineer-bots rather than schools training people,
which makes it feel like a less reasonable word choice than it
really is.
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