notes on texts for notes
As I did for our last concert, I've put together some rambling notes on the texts for my choir's next concert, in the hope that they'll be useful to other choir members. I'm putting a link here in case anyone else is interested.
Update, 2007-10-11: actually, not everything there is in our next concert; in particular, we aren't doing the Bach until December.
Other random remarks:
Robin Hanson has enough faith in markets' ability to make accurate predictions that he thinks they could form the basis for an effective form of government; he also believes that by paying a few hundred dollars per year to Alcor (to freeze his brain when he dies) he's "buying a >5% change of living for thousands of (subjective) years". Unless he really thinks that a few hundred dollars per year is comparable in value to a 5% chance of living for thousands of years (which seems to me like it requires a very steep discount rate indeed), or that Alcor is run by extreme altruists, something's wrong with this picture.
I thought Jim Macdonald's detailed analysis of Betty and Barney Hill's story of alien abduction (from back in 1961), over on Making Light, was rather excellent.