Online education
Sep. 7th, 2020 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebI like to check out Facebook regularly to get updates on my friends, but I also get news and I also get an education. Here are just three examples of what I learned today:
Music theory as normally taught in schools is racist.
My comments: "Wow. One might expect that there would be classes on Western classical music theory and then also classes on comparative music theory. So finding out that there's just the former, and it's called "music theory" was bad enough. But then we have to find out it was popularized basically for Nazi purposes and so it's yet another horrifying dark shadow we live under. (How open-minded that Schenker included both a Pole and an Italian in his top twelve!)
My favorite part is where he shows that some people think that something without melody can't be music, and some people think that something that's not danceable can't be music.
I also liked when he asked what was the difference between two groups of musicians he had shown pictures of: some were American and some were German."
Then I learned that a Tibetan altitude gene also exists in a recently discovered extinct human species.
My friend's comment: "It's pretty cool if you can say the reason you can breathe in higher altitudes is because some of your ancestors were a completely different species of human."
I also learned that A handful of recent discoveries have shattered anthropologists' picture of where humans came from, and when.
My comment: "There have been a lot of discoveries since my World History class in the late 1970s. Humans were around at least 300,000 years ago (not the 200,000 I learned), now the first-known fossils are from Morocco (not Ethiopia), at least some humans migrated from Africa at least 200,000 years ago (not just the big migration 60,000 years ago), and rather than outcompeting Neanderthals (and newly discovered Denisovans), they may have just intermarried."
And that's why I'm on the computer way too long.
Music theory as normally taught in schools is racist.
My comments: "Wow. One might expect that there would be classes on Western classical music theory and then also classes on comparative music theory. So finding out that there's just the former, and it's called "music theory" was bad enough. But then we have to find out it was popularized basically for Nazi purposes and so it's yet another horrifying dark shadow we live under. (How open-minded that Schenker included both a Pole and an Italian in his top twelve!)
My favorite part is where he shows that some people think that something without melody can't be music, and some people think that something that's not danceable can't be music.
I also liked when he asked what was the difference between two groups of musicians he had shown pictures of: some were American and some were German."
Then I learned that a Tibetan altitude gene also exists in a recently discovered extinct human species.
My friend's comment: "It's pretty cool if you can say the reason you can breathe in higher altitudes is because some of your ancestors were a completely different species of human."
I also learned that A handful of recent discoveries have shattered anthropologists' picture of where humans came from, and when.
My comment: "There have been a lot of discoveries since my World History class in the late 1970s. Humans were around at least 300,000 years ago (not the 200,000 I learned), now the first-known fossils are from Morocco (not Ethiopia), at least some humans migrated from Africa at least 200,000 years ago (not just the big migration 60,000 years ago), and rather than outcompeting Neanderthals (and newly discovered Denisovans), they may have just intermarried."
And that's why I'm on the computer way too long.