SSS, babe and artifacts

Camille Saint-Saëns

SSS was my school-days secret code for Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3 aka "the organ symphony". As for "Babe" - to my chagrin it was plagiarised as the main theme in that unhappy film. As for artifacts: I was listening to an MP3 recording of the symphony played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra this evening. I am generally very pleased with this performance but there is very obvious dynamic compression in the Finalle. For example the sound stage kind of disappears on cymbal crashes. And there is evidence of what are probably MP3 artifacts in some quieter passages.

The symphony is on a grand scale: majestic themes and a large orchestra with organ and piano. I have mentioned elsewhere my infatuation with the organ which I suppose is contributory to my great love for this work. Wikipedia observes that "the lowest pedal notes of both the Poco Adagio and the Maestoso, played on the organ, are of almost inaudibly low frequency. When experienced live in a concert hall equipped with a large concert organ with 32-foot pedal stops (e.g. the Royal Albert Hall Organ) these notes are very dramatic and give a deeply impressive aural experience." As in my school days so now I would love to have the chance to hear the work live. No recording can do justice to this sort of sound. So much for "high-fidelity" - electronics may have advanced radically on so many fronts but sadly it has not yet done justice to audio reproduction. And people do not seem to care which I find very strange.

MP3, like JPG, is lossy data compression. Typically an MP3 data file is a mere 10% of the size of the original. Quality is arguably lost even when analog audio is digitised but it is certainly lost when it is compressed as MP3. And yet if it were not for MP3 we would not have the present day ease of access to music. Similarly the JPG format has spawned the present day proliferation of digital photography. Compression "artifacts" are the difference between the reconstituted and the original audio (or picture). Most of the time we (we being the average populace) are unaware of these artifacts. I used to be very purist about such things but now-a-days, even more so as my hearing is not as good as it was, I am just happy enough to be able to download and store the music that I want, thanks to MP3.

Windows 8.1

I decided up upgrade my work desktop. The old one was perfectly good, but was running XP. Which meant I was out of date and less able to help my customers who are more up to date. And Microsoft have been running a fear campaign to get people like me to switch. My work colleague, who knows more about computers than I do, advised going for Windows 8.1 so I agreed but only if he did the dirty work of transferring my files and making the upgrade process as painless as possible. He did a great job and installed the 3rd party software that brings back the Start menu which Microsoft carelessly lost when they crafted Windows 8.

In my work I am constantly installing or re-building software. I quickly faced the issue that Windows 8 doesn't allow you to do anything like this unless you sign in as administrator. To save having to do that every day I got my colleague to somehow fix it so I am always "administrator". Which somehow defeats the purpose.

It has now been several weeks since the changeover. After some experimentation and a good deal of frustration I can now do most of what came second nature under XP.

So, how do I like Windows 8? There are little niggles like the change of display style but I can just about cope with that. My main observations are:

(1) Windows 8 has not yet given me ANYTHING that XP did not have. I do not see any improvement whatsoever in features or speed, except that start-up is quicker but that is to be expected with a solid-state disk cache and fresh operating system. In fact my XP machine was lightening fast when I first bought it, and it didn't have such advanced hardware.

(2) Conversely the change to Windows 8 has cost my business several days of effort for both myself and my colleague just to constrain it to do what XP did effortlessly.

XP was a major improvement over Windows 98. So what is the point of Window 8, or 7, or Vista. Frankly I have no idea.  One wonders what Windows 10 will offer?

I liken this process to buying a new car. My old car was fine but it was just getting a bit old.  With the new one I have, after a while reading the manual, figured out how to unlock the door and am sitting down in the driver's seat. The dashboard looks quite pretty but is strangely unfamiliar. I find that I cannot actually start the car without authorization from the garage - and I need this authorization EVERY time I start the car. This, I am told, is a security feature to reduce the possibility of theft. Once started I notice the accelerator is where the handbrake used to be, and the brake has swapped places with the clutch. The dashboard now - instead of a speedometer there is a coloured rectangle which animates first with a sloth, then a tortoise followed by baby, a sheep, a dog, a lion, and a jaguar in that order as one accelerates. Very pretty. There are no levers on the steering column - instead the dashboard is touch-sensitive and you have to find the right button to operate the indicators - but the button is not always in the same place. Oh, and did I say? The steering wheel doesn't actually turn, but is touch sensitive. After a couple of days learning how to manage the differences I am finally out for my first drive. My old car managed 100mph on a fine day but this one cannot do more than about 60mph - another safety feature I am told.  And yet the engine is twice the size of that in my last car, so the mpg is not too good.

Apart from those small gripes I am really pleased with my new car!

By the way, the current statistics show that there are still more XP users than Win 8 and 8.1 combined!

Intoxication

So... whilst visiting a friend I picked up a book Sober Saints by Keith Malcomson and started reading. Basically the plot is that "wine" in the Bible, when condoned, was actually unfermented grape juice. This is not a new idea. I admit that I have not read the whole book - one reason being that, like so many sermons, there is a good deal of padding to make it "book-sized" and thus, I suppose, more saleable. What I did read makes sense and I do not disagree with some of his points - like that wine is a mocker - I know some people who have problems with alcohol and it is not nice.

But my hackles rose a bit when he has a go at C. S. Lewis - he refers to the scene in Prince Caspian where Bacchus and Silenus turns up and asserts that:

"Lewis denied many fundamental evangelical doctrines, smoked, drank, wrote books in bars and strongly promoted social drinking... I'm afraid Mr. Lewis was out of step with the written Scriptures, but strongly influenced by the ideas, ideologies and habits of Bacchus. Hidden beneath the veneer of this 'Christian Classic' and presented by the wise, sophisticated, intelligent and profoundly balanced pen of Lewis, is the practice of social drinking, supported by the fable of the one-wine theory..."

Personally I don't do social drinking, I don't smoke either, but I would not be adverse to a glass of wine or cider with a meal. But that's not my point. Based on my having met Keith briefly and knowing Lewis through his books, at this moment I would rather put my trust in Lewis because he comes across as a man with substance, someone I can identify with. A similar argument is expressed by the apostle James who noted that "Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are" or Barnabas and Paul who explained that "We also are men of like passions with you" or Jesus who "was in all points tempted like as we are".

Not that I am condoning Lewis's stance or his lifestyle - I do not necessarily always agree with him, but that does not stop me receiving from and being blessed by him. To agree wholly with him I would have to become a high-church man, a veritable English scholar and a lot besides!

Jonathan Rogers is worth reading on the subject - of the Bacchus scene he observes that:

"Aslan is here, and all that wildness and freedom is an expression of the enlivening, joy-giving, creative energies of Aslan himself. What Lewis says of the God of the Bible is true of Aslan:

It is He who sends the rain into the furrows till the valleys stand so thick with corn that they laugh and sing. The trees of the wood rejoice before Him and His voice causes the wild deer to bring forth their young. His is the God of wheat and wine and oil. In that respect He is constantly doing all the things that Nature-Gods do: His is Bacchus, Venus, Ceres all rolled into one.

This is not polytheism that is breaking out in Narnia. The little nature gods of Narnia do not set themselves up as rivals to Aslan. They are his servants, just as Trufflehunter and the Pevensies, and now Trumpkin are his servants."

God makes the rules. It was He who forbade certain foods in the Old Testament but then presents Peter with these unclean foods and tells him "What God has made clean, you do not call common."

The catch is being able to discern whether it is God - of all people the Pharisees were well versed in the scriptures so knew all the prophecies pointing the the Messiah - but they couldn't see wood for trees when He appeared before their very eyes. I fear lest I might fall into a similar trap. Keith is right when he says alcohol is dangerous but I wonder if he has missed the point by concluding that we must necessarily be teetotal.

Bible pixellation

Pixellation example

Take any digital photograph and zoom in and there will come a point where you can see the individual pixels. Put another way, a digital photograph has a certain resolution - you cannot go on usefully magnifying it as one supposes one can with real life. Unlike the maps in Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader in which

"though the towns and mountains looked at first just as they would on an ordinary map, when the Magician lent them a magnifying glass you saw that they were perfect little pictures of the real things, so that you could see the very castle and slave market and streets in Narrowhaven, all very clear though very distant, like things seen through the wrong end of a telescope."

Example of film grain

It is much the same for an "analogue" photograph on film - only, instead of rectangular pixels, useful magnification is limited by the more random individual grains that make up the photographic emulsion.

Actually, even in real life it seems like you cannot go on magnifying. Light itself has dimensions and these limit the amount of optical magnification that is possible - but there are other ways of "seeing" things that are smaller than the wavelength of light. Eventually we get to elementary particles like quarks and these seem to answer to pixels in limiting how far you can keep zooming in.  In short that the world is quantised. Mike Adams sees this as evidence that reality is in fact a grand computer simulation, possibly created by God. A little bit like the arena in Hunger Games.

Some books and some videos have fairly obvious layers of meaning. Like the Matrix or Lewis's Narnia chronicles. We are used to this sort of thing but we do not expect hidden layers below layers and so on ad infinitum. After all the authors are mortal aren't they?

The same sort of analysis can be applied to the Bible. Most Christians would be happy enough that the Bible has layers of meaning - after all a parable is just that - a story with a hidden meaning. We might baulk at ideas like the Bible Code that purport that there are messages hidden in the fabric of the text of the Bible that, frankly, would have required a supernatural intelligence to plant there. But what about spiritualising the Bible? The idea here is that the obvious or literal meaning is rarely the real meaning and that the real meaning is tied up in types and shadows. The church I go to is heavily into this idea which I am not wholly against, just that sometimes it seems rather arbitrary whether or not one should spiritualise and, if one does, how to do it and to what extent to bother about the context of the particular phrase in question. Doubtless it is the Holy Spirit who reveals the truth to us, but some then add that for this to happen one has to cross certain t's and dot certain i's and blame a person's inability to discern such "truth" on their lack of purity. Which doubtless has some truth in it but I find curiously unhelpful.

Interestingly this site applies the idea of spatial quantisation (pixellation) and time quantisation (strobe lights) to Biblical prophecy - though I confess I got a bit lost in the detail.

Here's a passage from the Bible, by way of example:

And King David was old, going on in days. And they covered him with clothes, but he got no heat. And his servants said to him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin. And let her stand before the king, and let her nurse him, and let her lie in your bosom, so that my lord the king may get heat. And they sought out a beautiful girl throughout all the borders of Israel, and found Abishag, a Shunammite. And they brought her to the king. And the girl was very beautiful. And she nursed the king and served him. But the king did not know her.

Bearing in mind that the Bible is inspired by God, why was this passage included in the Holy writ? Was it just to give us a more complete account of the history of King David? Or does it also have some deeper significance? I'd go for the latter if, for no other reason, I see layers of meaning in everything that God has created. But what meaning? Frankly I haven't got a clue. Should I be bothered? Well, I want to be one of those who "diligently seek Him" and, in this particular case I am curious, but also I don't want to fall foul of forcing an interpretation that isn't valid. So I'd rather wait. Doubtless if God exists and if He is interested in me and if He wants to bring some truth home to me through this passage, doubtless He is able without me having to go through mental gymnastics.

For those of us who tend to analyse the Bible at ever increasing depths it seems to me to be of vital importance to know how valid this process is - can one keep magnifying ad infinitum and expect to see new vistas of meaning? Frankly I have heard enough whacky and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the Bible to make me rather wary of this approach.

Lewis sums up the idea well in his Till we have faces where the narrator Orual is asking the priest Arnom exactly who the god Ungit is and observes:

"If that's all they mean, why do they wrap it up in so strange a fashion?" 

"Doubtless," said Arnom (and I could tell that he was yawning inside the mask, being worn out with his vigil), "doubtless to hide it from the vulgar." 

I would torment him no more, but I said to myself, "It's very strange that our fathers should first think it worth telling us that rain falls out of the sky, and then, for fear such a notable secret should get out (why not hold their tongues?) wrap it up in a filthy tale so that no one could understand the telling." 

What brought all this to the surface was a recent sermon in which the preacher was saying some things that didn't sound right and, afterwards, this was explained away by saying that he didn't actually mean what he said. My comment was similar to Orual's - if this was the case then why on earth did he not say what he meant instead of something that, frankly, was very different?

Convention

Convention: (n) a meeting or assembly of people who share a common interest.

Every year we have one of these and invite guests for the duration and have guest speakers to preach. This is hardly the place to discuss what they talk about but suffice it to say that our usual numbers swell. People = noise.  More people = considerably more noise (it is not a linear progression) and my ears do not cope well with excessive noise. On Tuesdays at lunch time I habitually take the dog for a run, but yesterday I was feeling a bit cold-y so thought I might skip the run - until I saw and heard the masses clamouring around the lunch table. I don't do small talk well. I have little patience for queuing. I have to admit that something in me broke and I literally ran away. With the dog. Barefoot (both of us). So peaceful. Time to think. I do not think that time was wasted.

I came back, of course, but by that time the clamour had died down to manageable proportions.

Blessed benefactor!

Frontispiece

This morning an interesting looking packet arrived in the post. Inside, carefully wrapped in brown paper, was a copy of This is my England and other poems by Vivian de Sola Pinto that I had mentioned in a previous post, together with some pamphlets by the same author who was evidently a friend of the original owner.

To some this will no doubt be dismissed as romantic slush, but I am a bit of a romantic at heart and anyway this book, even just the outer cover, reminds me so much of my childhood. And my childhood, though distant and not so well remembered as I would like, is still a treasure to me and I don't mind what preacher would teach otherwise about forgetting the past, etc.

That he would dedicate the anthology to his sons says something about the man that I might elaborate on in a future post.

Here are the first two poems. I don't have time just now to post any more so, suffice it to say, many thanks to whoever sent me this gift.

Unresolved

I'm a practical guy. I like things to get resolved. I find something broke - I like to fix it and tick it off the list. No matter the size, I like to complete a project and be done with it. So what happens when circumstances in my life do not resolve. Like relationships that sour. Or health that deteriorates? Or expectations that are not fulfilled? Or a faith in God that still lingers in the "help Thou my unbelief"? Or, simply, a life that is getting older with more aches and pains and increasing numbers of issues to deal with.

Sometimes I wonder if I am experiencing the male equivalent of "the change of life" - sometimes feeling almost overpowering floods of what I suppose is emotion (not being a particularly emotional guy) and that for no particular reason apart from a general feeling of not being in control and a lack of resolution.  Like bobbing along powerless in a vast expanse of sea with no land in sight.

I could go into preaching mode quoting Hebrews 11 "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off...  And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect." These (patriarchs) experienced unrequited faith, so shouldn't I be able to? And Jesus' words "And shall not God avenge His own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though He bear long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man comes, shall He find faith on the earth?" Shall he indeed? It is this expectation on the part of God (or, if God is a myth, on the part of those people who fabricated all these cunningly devised fables) that we should hang on, keep believing, when there is nothing of substance given in return whereby we can be sure that our trust is well founded. Although, for those who are stubborn enough, "neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead" whereas the centurion's faith was enough to heal his beloved servant, from which I conclude that evidence one person regards as substantial another may find ephemeral.

It seems like we should not expect every matter to be resolved, at least not in this life. In "The Healing of Harms" - not the Christian pop album but the last chapter in The Silver Chair - Lewis expresses the sentiment that everything will turn out right in the end. Or mother Julian's "All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well." Or Disney's "and they all lived happily ever after". All very well from a God perspective or when I am able to look back, but not easy to believe before it happens!

That last quote was a bit below-the-belt and probably cannot be attributed to Disney either. But it sums up my molly grubby feelings. But hang on a mo... compared with possibly the vast majority of mortals on this planet Earth I am so very blessed. I have good health for my age, I have a loving wife, four wonderful children who actually care for me, a home to live in, work which I enjoy on the whole and for which I actually get paid (mostly), and friends. So why the molly grubs? Am I alone in feeling as I do?

Because...

I want to break through,
I want to break through;
To know as I'm known, to know You alone,
I want to break through.
To where no sin may stand in the way,
Let me enter in with boldness, I pray,
Show me Thy glory, show me Thy way,
I want to break through.

©1984 Dan Ricciardelli

Piano or Forte?

The piano, or more properly "pianoforte" which translates as "soft-loud", was the first keyboard instrument whose intensity could be controlled by touch over a large range. This variation is called the dynamic range and by it the musician can evoke emotion. You will probably never experience the awe inspiring 70dB dynamic range of an orchestra unless you attend a live concert. Sadly, when recorded the dynamic range is artificially compressed to make it easier to listen to in today's noisy environments. Popular music is generally designed to have inherently limited dynamic range for the same reason. Such is the demise of hi-fi.

The young woman who usually plays piano in our church - let's call her Rachel - took lessons when younger but more recently has been self-taught. With our style of worship playing by ear and improvisation are necessary skills and the piano is often the lead instrument. Rachel reads music well but knowing what harmony to play has not come naturally to her. And yet she has persevered and as a result her ability in this respect has improved remarkably over the years.

The piano is classed as a percussion instrument and Rachel makes good use of it in this way which suits our worship - our voices provide the melodic line. One thing that Rachel does particularly well is to use the full dynamic range of the piano - she can sensitively accompany the quietest nervous soloist or make the piano roar during high praise. So much so that I have often stopped singing myself to listen in awe to the sound she produces. And for this I bless her!