Archives for April 2016

I was recently at a show in Branson, Missouri where a juggler was performing as the pre-show. As part of his act, he called a kid up from the audience to supposedly teach him how to juggle. The kid struggled at first, but eventually got three balls going through a single cycle and caught them without dropping any. Then the music started, the kid threw the balls in the air and started doing amazing juggling tricks. The original juggler told everyone that the kid was actually his son. He explained that when his son was 8 or 9, all he wanted to do was watch television. The father couldn't get him to do anything else. Finally he made a rule: For every hour you spend juggling, you can watch … [Read more...] about Juggling or Television

The two things I've spent the most time studying are software engineering and music composition. While they seem to be very different fields of study, large-scale works in either area rely on one very important common skill: the ability to manage complexity. In software, you know that your complexity is out of control when it becomes harder and harder to make changes as the size of the code base grows. In music, complexity is out of control when your piece becomes less and less coherent as it grows in length and instrumentation. It wouldn't surprise me if other fields are similar. Once you get the basic skills and semantics out of the way, the biggest thing that determines whether or … [Read more...] about Dealing with Complexity