And I mean that literally. I don’t seem to have much good illness-reading lying around, so I’ve been watching movies and tooling around the internets.
- Via MR, a post on measuring whether a classical composer is over- or undervalued. That’s a bit of a contentious way to word it, but check out the lists.
10 most under-valued composers
Adrian Willaert
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Anton Webern
Guillaume de Machaut
Guillaume Dufay
Arnold Schoenberg
Josquin des Prez
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Orlande de Lassus10 most over-valued composers
Johannes Brahms
Camille Saint-Saens
Charles Gounod
Giuseppe Verdi
Edvard Grieg
Antonio Vivaldi
Antonin Dvorak
Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Georges Bizet
Giacomo PucciniThis is based on a measure of how often the composer is discussed in encyclopedias, via a score from Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment, compared with how many works are available via Amazon. The comments to the post point out some issues with the methodology, which I’m not necessarily endorsing, but what’s interesting here (also noted in the comments, but it jumped out at me right away) is that the undervalued composers lean so heavily pre-classical, even pre-baroque. Those guys are all over the encyclopedias because they laid the groundwork for what would come, but, in the words of Steve Sailer, “It’s like if you were writing a scholarly history of the Beatles, you’d have to write about the skiffle groups of Liverpool in the 1950s that John and Paul listened to as adolescents, but the public doesn’t want to listen to them, it wants to listen to the Beatles.”
Sort of interesting in itself though. If I had that Charles Murray book I’d be tempted to run the experiment on writers. Or maybe specifically on novelists. Who would be the “undervalued”/less-read foundation layers?
- Last week, or was it the week before, I decided to take the plunge and finally join Netflix. It is possible, just possible, that I am now reading somewhat less on that account and here I publicly apologize. One of the reasons I’d been attracted to it was its well-known recommendation system, supposed to be one of the best. On actual recommendation grounds, I do like it. I think it is probably generally better than Amazon. But what’s really great is the way it phrases the things it thinks you will like. For example, on my personalized homepage it tells me I like “visually-striking cerebral independent movies.” Don’t worry, I’m only half-pretentious: one of my other “taste preferences” is for “goofy movies starring Dan Aykroyd.”
Pandora does something similar that I’ve always thought was cool. If you ask why it’s playing something, it will tell you something like that it “features a romantic-era style, a symphony orchestra, tonal harmony, minor key tonality and an exaggerated, dramatic aesthetic.” That’s all stuff from their “music genome,” I suppose. I don’t know why I’m attracted to phrasing like this so much more than “because you rated The Queue,” but I am. (I’m sure it says something negative about my personality.)
So what would my taste preferences be in books? “Quirky, understated Japanese fiction with unnamed narrators”? “Linguistically striking epic stories about incest”?
- Via Overlawyered, the FTC proposes rules on blogger product endorsements.
In the new proposed rules, The Federal Trade Commission also addressed advertising in new media (Web 2.0). Essentially, if an advertiser pays a blogger to write a review endorsing a product or service, the advertiser and the blogger must disclose the financial relationship. In addition, both blogger and advertiser both will be liable for any false or unsubstantiated claims regarding results of products or services.
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The Commission may not adopt all of the rules, but considering the explosion of new media, regulation is inevitable.I wish I could disagree with that last but…blah.
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