[David Herrick]

Recent data for the public livestream:

For January 15th, V = 14823 and C = 789. For January 16th, V = 6788 and C = 361. For January 17th, V = 4756 and C = 253. For January 18th, V = 2719 and C = 145. And for January 19th, V = 2845 and C = 151.

[David Herrick]

Averaged over the past week, Kansas City is at V = 990 and C = 2.46.

[David Herrick]

Kentucky doesn’t get nearly as much snow as the upper midwest, but my town had virtually no snow-removing equipment, so as a kid I also spent many winter weekdays at 6:30 AM listening to the radio while eating Count Chocula (if we were lucky), waiting to find out whether school was closed. A side benefit was hearing and learning some contemporary hit songs. My mom hated the music, but it just so happened that the most frequent school closing reports were broadcast on a top-40 station.

Anyone remember the big blizzard of January 1978? We got 15 inches (38 cm) where I was, and school was closed for an entire month straight! (I blame all shortcomings in my educational achievement on that time lost from my seventh-grade classes.) It was after that that my town started investing in road salt and snow plows.

[David Herrick]

Hi, Jacki, and a belated happy birthday!

I’m not arguing that anyone would want to listen to these song versions for enjoyment. I just think it’s fascinating that they can be generated in the first place in a manner that guarantees they won’t be discordant.

[David Herrick]

I wouldn’t even call this art, Juergen. It’s just painting by the numbers: completely deterministic and without creativity. It would sound the same no matter who did it.

[David Herrick]

I agree that it has a S&G feel, Daryl. The same guy also posted a negative harmony version of Sound of Silence, but it still sounds like a S&G song and not a Beatles song!

[David Herrick]

I won’t stop until you open the pod bay doors, Hal.

[David Herrick]

Hey, Mike.

I really don’t even think of them as covers, but rather as alternate universe realizations. Sort of like the audio equivalent of photonegatives.

[David Herrick]

Thanks, Jung. Yeah, I’m endlessly amazed by the fact that a collection of musical notes can elicit an emotional response: happy chords and sad chords, etc. So it really blows my mind that you can “calculate” a new mood for a song this way.

I just listened to a negative harmony version of the menacing “imperial march” from Star Wars. Several commenters said that it sounded like circus music!

[David Herrick]

I love stuff like this! But I thought the Austrian and Swiss ladies should have switched places so that their arrangement better matched that of their countries on the map.

One thing that really surprised me is that the German woman said “mein Name ist” and the Swiss woman said “ich heisse”. In my high school class, which I’m sure was supposed to be German German, we were taught exclusively “ich heisse” from day one.

[David Herrick]

I understand how you feel, Phil. I just think it’s cool that you can generate a whole new song mathematically from an old one. I wonder, if you changed the lyrics and the durations of the notes, how many people would even be able to deduce what the original song was.

[David Herrick]

Those are great, Juergen! I actually have a T-shirt that depicts the realist perspective of the glass.

I have to say that nihilism gets a bad rap. Just because you don’t believe that life has an inherent purpose doesn’t mean that you can’t create and embrace your own purpose. One of the most contagiously enthusiastic people I’ve ever seen on YouTube — a guy who, when asked how he’s doing, typically responds with “I’ve never had a bad day in my life” — admits (very cheerfully, of course) that he’s a nihilist.

[David Herrick]

Thanks, David. My spreadsheet skills are pretty rudimentary too, but if you have your data arranged in an Excel file I could probably do some basic calculations and charts with them.

I had been wondering why there tends to be a plateau in views for videos on days five through seven that defies the general downward trend. Then it occurred to me that MLT releases most of their videos on Sundays (day zero), so the plateau corresponds to the weekend.

[David Herrick]

That’s a very apt metaphor, Jung. You can really tell that a lot of Lennon/McCartney songs were written by two very different minds trying to put out a unified message, which makes them lyrically rich.

And it reminds me of a couple of humorous variations on the glass-half-empty trope that I’ve heard. 1) The optimist says the glass is half full. The pessimist says the glass is half empty. The engineer says the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. 2) If you see the glass as half full, you’re an optimist. If you see the glass through lenses that you prescribed for yourself, you’re an optometrist.

[David Herrick]

Your memory is very accurate, Mike. Wikipedia says “Muskegon, Michigan had up to 33.8 inches of snow in four days due to heavy lake-effect snow squalls after the blizzard began. Winds gusting up to 111 miles per hour (179 km/h) caused drifts that nearly buried some homes.” Apparently Muskegon had the highest measured accumulation anywhere in the system.

Actually, as I was looking this up, I discovered that my blizzard and your blizzard were different events, separated by about nine days. Mine came first, but we picked up a few more inches of snow from yours. And an even bigger one hit the northeast less than two weeks later!