The other day I read a technical article about music, a subject in which I have great interest, but less talent, except for appreciating it. According to the article in the May 2011 issue of Discover, a scientist investigating the structure of music used the technique of lossless compression [“which exploits repetition and redundancies in music to encode audio data in fewer bits without losing content”] to analyze the structure of musical compositions.  He discovered, amazingly, that pop music was far more complex than classical music.

Although no one has yet pointed it out, so far as I can tell, he was wrong.

His rationale was that when he used the lossless compression technique, popular compositions only shrank to sixty to seventy percent of their original volume, while compositions by Beethoven shrank to forty percent of their original volume.  From this, he deduced that, underneath the apparent complexity, classical music must be composed of simpler patterns,

Duhh!

All music is composed of, or built up from, simpler patterns, including pop music and rap.

What he apparently isn’t considering is that classical music pieces are far, far longer than pop pieces, and incorporate a complex structure that contains repetitions of motifs, restatement and re-orchestrations, etc., all of which can be encoded in such a way as to compress the music to a greater percentage than can be done with a simpler and shorter work of music.

By way of analogy, take the statement, “Mary had a little lamb.”  There’s no way to reduce that statement more without losing clarity or meaning.  You might be able to remove the “a,” and get a reduction to 94%.  Then take something like, “Sheep (Ovis aries) are quadrupedal, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Like all ruminants, sheep are members of the order Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates. Although the name “sheep” applies to many species in the genus Ovis, in everyday usage it almost always refers to Ovis aries. Numbering a little over one billion, domestic sheep are also the most numerous species of sheep.”  The second passage can indeed be reduced in volume without losing meaning, possibly by twenty to thirty percent, but because it can be reduced in size more than the first statement does not mean it is simpler.

The scientist is question appears to be drawing the wrong conclusion from correct data, or using accurate but incomplete data.  This is, of course, an age-old human failing, which includes the Ptolemaic astronomers who created elaborate models of the solar system with the earth at the center.  When I was an economic market research analyst I saw this happen more than a few times, where senior executives would look at the data, which was as accurate as we could make it, and then draw unsupportable conclusions, like the senior executive who used reliability findings to support developing a technically superior compoment that no one would buy because the customers didn’t need a component that was reliable for 30 years when the product to which it was attached had a useful life of five years.

In the first case, that of the compression of music, long classical pieces can be compressed more than shorter popular pieces.  That’s a fact, but it’s not because the popular pieces are more unique, but because they’re shorter and simpler, another bit of data not considered by the scientist in question… and a reason why some scientists end up in trouble, because they don’t think beyond the scope of the problem they’ve addressed.

And… most likely, the fettered simplicity of pop music is exactly why it’s popular… because listeners don’t have to work out all the patterns.

They oppose openness in financial transactions, whether consciously or subconsciously, because such openness is the only way to stop financial cheating and the shenanigans that so drastically boosted their income… and still do. A recent article in New Scientist by Mark Buchanan [March 19, 2011] cites several studies on the matter, including one from the Quarterly Journal of Economics that makes the point that every possible regulatory “fix” can be gamed or evaded so long as the details of transactions are kept secret.  In short, the key factor that enabled investment banks to extort over a trillion dollars from the American people and the government and to pay and keep paying multi-million dollar bonuses to thousands of employees was not primarily inadequate regulation but secrecy.

In short, secrecy enables criminality. We all know this, I suspect, in our heart of hearts, because, except for psychopaths, we all behave far better when we’re under observation… or know that we could be.  It’s amazing how traffic slows to the speed limit when a highway patrol cruiser is sighted.

So why do we continue to insist on the details of our lives, particularly the financial details, being kept secret?  How long would discriminatory hiring and salary practices exist if everyone’s salary in a company happened to be public?  Is it any wonder that less wage discrimination tends to occur in the federal government, where salaries are pegged to known scales that are public?

And could all of those strange and discriminatory loans that fueled the last boom and bust have been made to the same extent and degree if the details would have had to have been made public?  I have my doubts.

Yet, for all this, I have no doubts that most people would cringe, if not do worse, if more openness were required by law – at least openness for them.  I recently mentioned the action of the Utah state legislature to effectively gut the Utah open records law, and I can now report, for those who have not followed this, that the public outcry was so great that the legislature repealed the very law they had passed the month before, a law which would have, in practical terms, exempted all electronic communications from the provisions of the open records law, among other things.  So it was very clear that the public believes that legislators should be publicly accountable.  Yet if such provisions were suggested for individuals, or for corporations, the howling would deafen everyone. 

Currently, the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a wage-discrimination case filed against WalMart, as a class action suit on behalf of female employees.  The suit alleges that WalMart systematically paid women less than men in exactly the same jobs with the same duties.  In their questions at the hearing, a number of justices raised the question about how difficult implementing any decision would be, suggesting that even the Supreme Court doesn’t want to get involved in making such records public, let alone making a ruling that could indeed lead to more openness for all corporations.

So often we talk about not wanting everyone to know our business, our income, etc., but the problem with this is that while our neighbors and our friends may not know… the government already knows, as do most corporations.

Perhaps it’s time that we know the same about them.

Is it my imagination, or are there more and more movies and books, not to mention television series, dealing with what I’d call either disasterism or grandiose triumphalism?  What I mean by disasterism is obvious – great and awful cataclysms, either natural or man-made, that threaten nations or the entire world or what the world is like in the wake of such disasters. Grandiose triumphalism – those are the stories whereby the single hero or the small band of heroes saves the world or the nation from evil aliens, or “bad guys” or cosmic disasters.

If you go back thirty years or longer, such movies were far fewer in number, and they generally were relegated to Saturday serials or grade B or below low-budget films. Now… they’re everywhere.

One possibility is, of course, that the incredible improvement in special effects and computer generated graphics allows film to capture/create events that simply couldn’t be filmed before, and that the appeal of such epics was always there, but could never be exploited because the industry lacked the ability to portray them in any even semi-realistic fashion.

Another possibility is that the audience has changed.  Certainly, immediately after WWII many Americans, indeed many across the world, had just experienced the greatest single global conflict the world had ever seen… and it just could be that they really didn’t want to see another, even in futuristic cinema, whereas today a comparatively small percentage of movie-goers in the western world has ever personally experienced that sort of disaster, and a cinematic disaster doesn’t recall past personal experiences. 

A third possibility is that the growth of disaster books and movies and their popularity in the U.S. is occurring because we don’t want to face the disasters we’ve already created – the ones that will take years and years of discipline and drudgery – and rather than consider them, we escape into the vast and unreal disasters and challenges, in essence saying, “What we’re facing isn’t as bad as what’s in this movie.”

But… for whatever reason, doesn’t the growth of all the disaster flicks and one man/one group against the aliens/world/nature/galaxy seem just a little creepy?

 There are times when I’d like to torture every geek product developer who has a great idea for “enhancing” an existing product, particularly if the enhancement consists of cramming more features into an existing product to the point where any errant keystroke or movement results in some form of disaster.

Over the past year, I’d been vaguely amused when my wife complained that documents that she’d typed on her office system vanished, leaving her with a blank page.  Surely, she had been exaggerating.  Still… there was a nagging feeling there… because she doesn’t invent things like that.

Last week, I was trying to write a story on my laptop, which features the latest [at least it was the latest when I bought the laptop some five months ago] version of Word.  I was happily typing along, occasionally swearing under my breath when somehow I brushed some key when I was typing an “h” or some such and found myself with a “search and replace” screen.  That was merely annoying, but I really got angry when… suddenly… I discovered that the entire story had vanished and I had somehow “saved” a blank page with exactly the same file name, effectively erasing many hours work.  After several minutes, I did find a previous “autosaved” version, minus the several hundred words I’d written in the past half hour.  I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what combination of keystroke shortcuts had created that disaster, but couldn’t.  So I went back to work on the story. But… the same replacement/erasure problem occurred twice more… and twice more I lost work and time.  I also suffered an extreme rise in blood pressure and a reinforcement of my existing prejudice against product developers who have adopted the “churn and burn” tactics of sleazy stockbrokers and investment bankers by coming out with newer and newer versions of basic software that only gets more expensive and more costly with few real improvements.

As I’ve noted in previous blogs, enhancements aren’t “enhancements” when they create more problems than they solve.  I shouldn’t have to be an absolutely perfect touch typist in order to avoid having such “handy enhancements” distracting me and destroying my work.  This sort of thing is exactly what happens when the perceived “need” for more “features” overwhelms functionality.  It’s also why I do my writing on older and more functional word processing platforms – when I can.

I’m certain some geek expert can probably explain why such features are good or even how I can disable them.  BUT… I shouldn’t have to disable features that can create such havoc.  Nor should I have to dig through autosaved files to reclaim something that vanished because an idiot developer wanted to add another enhancement to an already over-enhanced product.

Enough is enough… but that’s another old maxim that seems to have been forgotten or ignored in the social/cultural rush for “more” and “more.”

The other day I received an inquiry from a reader who wanted to know why all of the protagonists of my series had “special” talents.  The immediate answer that came to mind was a question: Aren’t all protagonists special in some way or another?  Then… I got to thinking about that question… and came to a different realization… which I’ll get to in a moment.

But… first, and no, this won’t be a bad commercial, there’s a related development occurring across the Atlantic where Stephen Hunt, the author of The Court of the Air and other books, is taking on the venerable BBC for slighting fantasy and science fiction, because the BBC refused even to mention it in a special on genre fiction – after already suggesting by example that it wasn’t literary fiction, either. 

What does this have to do with characters with special talents?  Everything.  The question my reader raised underlies a basic difference, in general terms, between what is called “genre” fiction and “literary” fiction. Certainly in every “genre” I’ve read, the protagonists, and usually the villains, have some skill or skills superior to the average person.  Holmes, as an obvious example, has superior deductive skills, and in virtually every mystery novel, the mystery gets solved.  In the vast majority of thrillers, the good guys triumph, usually through superior skills. 

In most fantasy, the protagonists also have superior skills or talents, whether it’s the ability with magic, weapons, tactics, foresight, etc.  In my own writing, I don’t make a distinction between magical talents and other skills, nor do any of my protagonists have skills that others in their worlds do not have.  I will grant that some of my protagonists have honed their skills to a greater degree than most others, but that’s true of every skill in every world.  There’s always someone who’s better than the others, and whoever that someone may be, that person is usually the one who’s worked the hardest at it. Of course, in everyday life, the best don’t always win, for various reasons, but, as writer, I prefer not to write, generally, about the skilled “good guys” who are overcome by the greater number of idiots [although I have].

Several years ago, there was a heated discussion about whether Michael Crichton wrote science fiction, and one writer [I don’t remember who] made the observation that Crichton didn’t, because in SF science can be used for good or evil, and Crichton only posits its use in his books as evil or destructive.  And that is predominantly the case in a high percentage of so-called literary or “mainstream” [which is anything but, if sales numbers are considered] fiction.  In fact, so-called literary fiction has a high percentage of novels about people who are not skilled and who fail in some ways, if not spectacularly in many ways. 

While F&SF does have novels like that, and I’m certain a number of them are good, the majority of F&SF still offers characters with special skills or talents and at least a crumb or two of hope.  As an author, I certainly fall into that category, since I’d rather offer my characters – and readers – the hope of success through hard work, trials, and skill.  More to the point of the question my reader raised, so do most F&SF writers, and from what I’ve read in other genres, so do the majority of “genre” fiction authors.  There’s no question that this aspect of genre fiction could be called “unrealistic,” at least by the numbers, because in real life there are far more “failures” than successes, but what the “literary realists” seem to overlook is that often those numerous small failures are the basis for longer-term great success.  Even if they aren’t, exactly what is the point of focusing on and dissecting failure time and time again?  People generally don’t learn from other people’s failures, and most people, again given the sales figures, prefer more optimistic entertainment.

The more optimistic outlook might be one of the biggest differences between “mainstream/literary” fiction and genre fiction… and why genre fiction outsells so-called literary fiction by a considerable amount… except for the literary fiction that wins prizes, but most of those sales come because of the prize and not because of the fiction.