First, a couple of Electron corrections: In my previous entry, I wrote:
"It seems that while us "serious" artists were sleeping in the comfortable darkness of abstract modernism…"
that should be "while WE "serious" artists were sleeping…"

And when I wrote, regarding the new "retro" art and its compliance with my somewhat sarcastic "rules for Seriousness,"
"All of the pieces fit part 2: they appeal to just about everyone, there's nothing baffling or difficult about them.…"
I meant to say that NONE of the art pieces fit part 2, because they are not "difficult" and anti-popular, but are meant to appeal to the public, rather than an elite.

Sines of spring

Here in MidAtlantica we've had an unusually cold, wet, and blustery Spring so far, which has dampened spirits and caused us to yearn for the balmy days that usually begin around this time. The spent flowers are flying off the cherry and plum trees in the wind, causing more Pseudo-Japanery on my part:

Cold day in spring;
A white flurry
of petals in the air.

I turned to Barron's TRIGONOMETRY THE DIFFICULT WAY again to learn about trigonometric graphing, hoping that our little fantasy characters in their Ruritanian world would have something I could work with. But once again I was bewildered by them. The Schaum's book was equally cryptic. So I returned to the very helpful Website which I mentioned in my previous post, : Sharon Walker's math site. The sine curve pages in her "beginning math" tutorial (they're somewhere in the "Math 170" course pages) were more helpful to me than either of my trig books. She explained clearly and with good mnemonic anchoring just how the coefficients in a sine curve equation determine how high the curve is (amplitude) how stretched-out or squished a sine curve is (period) and how shifted it is to left or right (phase).

As I remember from my electronic music days, each of these variables changed the sine wave sound on the oscillator. I wish I had that dusty old oscillator again! I could turn these sine curves into noise. Remember "The Outer Limits" with the sine tone on the TV screen. "We will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical."

I'll be returning to Ms. Walker's math site often. She has just what I need, including review tests. Yes, just what I wanted, a way to re-live the pressure and horror of high school math exams!

Posted at 2:52 am | link