Because they want to say that China is bad. When, as you say, US is the outlier in inventing strange ways to admit kids to college. I'm from Brazil and the entrance is exam is similar to China, there is a single exam and the note is used to determine which college you can go.
I don’t really find it strange, if anything a slavish obsession to test scores strikes me as strange. School is just an artificial institution like any other, it’s not as if getting good grades is equivalent real-world success or “true” intelligence.
The US also has the best universities in the world, by and large, (even if the regular education system is lacking), so I am pretty skeptical of the idea that raw test scores as the sole criterion would lead to better outcomes.
Raw test scores are a good idea in many countries because it reduces scope for corruption + gives even the poorest kids a chance. Though I would argue there needs to be multiple chances a year and not just 1.
Wow! So advanced! Does the rest of the world do the same with jobs (a single exam to determine if you get hired to any company), or does it invent strange ways to interview and hire applicants well?
That was the original strategy for universities: teaching was the job, and research was the side-product of having some very smart people with free time. Until some "genius" decided that it was better to have professors competing for money to pay directly for their research. This transformed a noble and desirable profession into just another money searching activity.
No. When you order a vanilla ice cream cone and the underpaid server is like “sorry, we’re out of vanilla”, it is NOT a reasonable response to weave a conspiracy theory about billionaires.
There are conspiracies and abuses, for sure. That does not mean that every single annoyance is a sign of a conspiracy.
It doesn't matter how good the intonation at the bridge or nut. There's the mathematical fact that we cannot get pure thirds and even fifths in modern equal temperament system. If you have a good ear you'll feel the subtle difference between notes, and they can never get exactly where you want. It's something you have to live with in modern music.
The thing is, unless you're playing with other instruments, no one is forcing you to tune to equal temperament. E.g., it's very common to tune a violin's A string to an A440 reference, then tune the other strings to 3:2 perfect fifths by ear. It just gets more complicated for fretted instruments like the guitar.
If you tune the strings in a guitar to a perfect 4th, which is the case except the 3rd between strings b-e, the lower e will significantly differ from the high e open string. There's no way to get around it.
Wanting to play in any key and not be locked into a key automatically pushes musicians toward equal temperament, even when playing solo, and even on a violin. Saying no one’s forcing you is technically true but sounds pretty naive, and (forgive the pun) tone deaf to me; there’s no realistic alternative for modern music. Some people do choose to play with other tuning systems on occasion, but there’s a reason why 12 TET is so popular and widespread.
Wanting to change keys freely only pushes fixed-pitch musical instruments toward equal temperament. Since many important instruments are like that, and virtually all instruments that are capable of accurate intonation not relying on ear are like that.
If an ensemble includes instruments that are equal temperament, then the non-fixed-pitched instrumentalists adjust their pitch to sound good with those.
An ensemble consisting only of instruments that can play any interval can change keys by pure intervals.
E.g. switching from the original major key to the relative dominant key can mean changing the root by a pure fifth. In equal temperament, this modulation is done by altering only a single note: sharpening the subdominant. All other notes are from the original scale. If we change key by a pure fifth, that is obviously not so; all notes are detuned off the original scale.
If we change through all the keys along the circle of fifths, perfectly purely, we arrive at the Pythagorean comma: the gap between the destination root and the original.
Another possibility is to progress the roots through the diatonic fifths of the original scale, rather than pure fifths. Like, we start with a pure, just intonated C major, and then change keys through G,D,A,E,B,F#,C#,Ab,Eb,Bb,F back to C using the notes of that pure C major scale, or sharps/flats relative to those. Then we don't run into the Pythagorean comma; but of course all the pure scales we end up using are detuned from C major, and in a different way from following pure fifths.
> It doesn't matter how good the intonation at the bridge or nut.
Yes, it does.
> There's the mathematical fact that we cannot get pure thirds and even fifths in modern equal temperament system.
Those are the pennies that don't matter, if your instrument has dollar problems.
If you don't have good intonation, then you can't even properly get the approximations provided by equal temperament.
With good intonation, compensated on both ends, you have a much better experience making tuning adjustments to get better compromises for the music you are playing.
Actually, it will solve most of it for guitarists, because the tuning problems that most guitarists blame on equal temperament are actually coming from their bad intonation. The fourths and fifths in equal temperament are not nearly as bad as they imagine. The equal temperament fifth is only 1.955 cents sharper than the pure fifth (3/2 ratio). Just under 2 cents.
Guitar intonation that is accurate to 2 cents is very good, I would say above average.
Another way to look at the pitch error in the ET perfect fifth is as a percentage of the pitch, which is about -0.169 %.
Suppose a 1200 Hz tone (quite a high note, somewhere between D6 and D#6) is played together with one that is 0.169 % flat. That flat one will have a frequency of 1198 Hz. The difference is 2 Hz, and so a 2 Hz beat will be heard: two volume swells per second.
Much lower down, at 120 Hz, that will be 0.2 Hz: two volume swells every ten seconds. Basically nothing. It makes no difference to guitar chords played in the first four fret box down by the nut.
The equal temperament error is worse for some other intervals; the ET major third is a percent sharp, or around 13.6 cents, which is a lot. It is pretty jarring, even in lower registers.
That's not what the submitted article is about; tuning in such a way as to fixing the tiny error in the fourths/fifths will not repair the major third.
This was never idealism, it was much more about gaslighting. Billionaire investors have a playbook where they say something to gaslight people into agreeing with them, and then go to the opposite direction. It is already a pattern. For example, most companies would swear they were decided on cutting carbon emissions, just to forget everything when it comes to build data centers. They say some technology is just for the growth of mankind when in fact they're looking for monopoly and destroying jobs. They say they're donating money for "charity" when they're in fact investing in technologies that they have vested financial interest. They say we need to contribute to a not-for-profit institution which will later be used to create another monopoly. It is so predictable that I wonder why anyone can still be fooled by this.
For example, most companies would swear they were decided on cutting carbon emissions, just to forget everything when it comes to build data centers.
This doesn't seem contradictory if you consider that success at AGI will solve the problem of carbon emissions, one way or another. If one data center ultimately replaces a whole medium-sized city of commuters...
> If one data center ultimately replaces a whole medium-sized city of commuters...
Then we find out how long it takes for a medium sized city of commuters to start killing each other, elites and burning down data centers. Once they're hungry enough it'll happen for sure
Data centres should have plenty of good loot. Raw materials like copper or at least aluminium. Maybe even steel, but value proposition there is less likely. I suppose someone will be interested in example fuel too if there is fuel based backup generation.
Thinking about that, a world dominated by data centers will be relatively easy do disrupt, someone just needs to destroy a dozen or so datacenters to bring everything down.
I guess this is what Plato meant when he said that people would have to be dragged out of the cave kicking and screaming, and would then demand to be let back in.
Because the way these companies make money is incentivizing the behavior of gambling addicts. It's just like asking why people will continue taking drugs if it's known to harm them.
I'm not a fan of AI and try to avoid it, but there is a difference from AI output published by someone knowledgeable and any other AI output that you run by yourself. If an expert looked at the result and found it to be ok, then you can have some assurance that it at least makes sense. Your own AI run doesn't mean anything, it could be 100% hallucination and a non-expert will buy it as truth.
Rich people don't buy media companies because this is the best business in the world. Quite the opposite, most media companies are mediocre or lose money. They do this because of the political clout they get with the control of these media properties.
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