One weird fact about me is that I can't physically play piano very well (I am uncoordinated and mess up a lot), but I can write piano music, and I can transcribe any song I hear, even if it isn't meant for the piano. My housemate who plays well but can't do that appreciates this
Here's a song I wrote in 2010 for example, but I kept messing up when I tried to play it, so eventually I just took the sheet music I wrote and used it to generate a midi file, which is what is on my SoundCloud: m.soundcloud.com/talia-ringer/t…
Here's the sheet music PDF, if anyone who is actually coordinated wants to play a song I wrote in 2010: drive.google.com/file/d/0B7TVz-…
When I was 10 I had this piano teacher I loved who let me play with writing and faking, and I liked it a lot. We even recorded a song I wrote at age 10 (it wasn't very good)
My piano teacher after that was much more traditional, but I was really impatient playing other people's songs. I knew I'd mess up, and it felt like too much pressure at a recital to get everything right. So eventually she caved and let me write music and perform that instead
This was really fun. At recitals, when it was my turn, they'd pass around the sheet music and note that I wrote it. Because of that, there was no pressure to get everything right. People didn't care that it was perfect, they cared that it was mine
I love it and still like to write music, but it does take me about a month to write a song, and I don't always have the patience anymore to actually finish writing the song
A lot of people when I tell them this are curious what it's like to write music. Usually I hear something in my head, and it feels like the song is already there. So I try to play it on the piano, but I often mess up. Messing up is actually good, though
Each permutation from each mistake changes the song a bit, and then the song I have in my head adapts to that. I let myself play around, usually, and just record myself playing around, and bits and pieces will be good to integrate into the song
After that I usually wait a day, then listen again, and if there are parts I really love, I write them down as sheet music (pencil and paper). This is slow, and this is the point at which I start to care about details
Then I build on that by just doing what feels right, and keep adding to the song until it feels done ✔
Transcribing I think is a necessary or at least very useful skill to writing, because otherwise it's hard to concretize ideas in your head as sheet music. So if you want to write music, I think it's good to start by transcribing songs you like
For this I sit with a computer or my phone, and listen to the song over and over again in small parts, decomposing what it sounds like, and trying to replicate it on the piano. When I replicate a measure successfully, I write it down
Eventually you get good enough at this that you can sometimes do this from memory, and that's a cute party trick, to ask people to tell you a song and then you just play it
I keep telling myself to blog about the job search process last year, in service of those of you applying next year, but I rarely have the motivation to blog. So I'm going to try to put together a quick Tweet thread and add to it as ideas come to me.🧵
I was applying only for research-focused tenure-track positions. I started thinking about the job search really, really early in grad school, way earlier than most people do, like maybe third year or so. So I felt ready.
And then a pandemic happened.
I guess that's life for you? In any case, the economy collapsed, and that was really terrifying. Schools started to enact hiring freezes. I remember crying to my parents over the summer and saying there would be no more jobs. I felt extra pressure to get my POPL paper in.
I know starting late and delaying the start of the tenure clock is a bit of a hack, but there's something really amazing to be said for actually having time to settle into a new place and very slowly get started without feeling like you're being judged
Also being able to take random days off and explore without missing classes, and being able to have my parents visit without missing classes
Usually the downside of not teaching right away is that you don't get exposed to as many students who are good fits for working with you, but I think I have enough of a social media presence that this hasn't been an issue at all---I have three or four exciting projects going
I think a lot of times I see people trying to wait out a conflict and let it "blow over." I think this is often a mistake. Apologizing and talking it out and repairing damage done if applicable works extremely well in most situations, and it's efficient.
Furthermore, if you wait it out, sometimes the other person gets angrier or moves on by deciding not to forgive you no matter what. Time heals, but only at an individual level. Healing the relationship between two people takes active work.
Getting angrier at the absence of an apology and repair makes sense to me for very large conflicts. Because choosing not to apologize and repair damage often comes across as a signal of bad faith, disinterest, apathy, self-interest, or too much pride.
Software engineering: you have 5 things to do, and they're all possible
Grad school: you have 20 things to do, and you'll probably mess up half of them
Faculty life: you have 100 things to do, but nobody actually expects you to remember to do any of them
You'll forget to do 90 of them, but it's OK, because for 20, your students will email you, and for 60, you can forward it on very confused to your admin, though like 10 you'll genuinely need to remember
But that's OK because you have faculty meetings, and you can take time to organize the things you forgot you had to do during those meetings
Got to actually think about some type theory today
Also some boba
After diving so deep into machine learning for proof assistants recently, I'm extremely grateful to have a type theory student to keep me grounded on the problems that are still fundamentally hard