Tag Archives: John Baez

Friday Notes (Jun 7, 2024)

I’ll be dog-sitting my little pal Bentley for a couple of weeks starting Tuesday, so I thought I should get this month’s edition of Friday Notes done early. By the time Bentley leaves, I’ll have only one Friday left in June.

Of course, big news at the end of last month. Guilty on all 34 felony counts. A whole new level of strangeness in politics. Even bigger news comes next month with sentencing. Will a President serve while serving time?

That it’s even a question we need to ask is astonishing.

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Musical Scale Modes

Mathematician and educator John Baez has been putting out an excellent series of posts about music theory on his blog. The most recent, the seventh, is about how you can generate scales by picking out piano notes in intervals of fifths. What’s interesting is that you can generate all seven major scale modes in each of the twelve keys (a total of 84 scales).

It’s very cool (and new to me how this works out), and John asked if any of his readers would be interested in creating a table of all 84 rows. That’s exactly the sort of little project that often catches my eye.

A new and different problem to solve!

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