This has been done many times before. Composers who explicitly based their rhythms on the Fibonacci sequence include Per Nørgård and Sofia Gubaidulina. (While Bartók is sometimes said to have done so, evidence is lacking.) Brian Ferneyhough makes use of prime numbers in one scene from his opera Shadowtime.
In the popular-music world, BT wrote a Fibonacci-sequence tune that was a club hit in 1999.
I would say the main part of the audio file is the seeming regularity of the prime numbers. I just added the Fibonacci numbers to have a "leading" base line.
The reason people like flashcard apps is not simply because they don't want to write with pen and paper, it is 1) they like spaced-repetition algorithms and 2) if you have a set consisting of many hundreds of cards (common in language learning) it much more convenient to carry one phone around than that pocket-bursting stack of cardstock.
The act of writing the cards is part of the learning process. Every time I make a stack, I end up knowing half of it before I even start 'using' it. With software cards, this doesn't work so well. And you can always put the stack into your purse or backpack if your pockets are small. I'm sure soldiers have somewhere they can put a stack of cards.
Again, you don’t understand the value some people find in spaced-repetition algorithms. For example, in language-learning decks involving hundreds of cards, writing the cards may lead you to remember the word on a short-term basis, but you are likely to soon forget it. A flashcard app using spaced repetition will ensure that you see that card at the right intervals so that you can retain it until you definitively internalize the word from seeing it used in context in texts.
Understanding an argument and agreeing with it are not the same thing. I understand the premise and argument for spaced-repetition algorithms, but I do not agree that these algorithms provide a meaningful advantage over paper cards when you consider that paper cards must be written. The act of handwriting cards is an advantage paper cards have over software cards, which I believe more than offsets any algorithmic advantage the software cards have.
i use electronic SRS flashcard stuff, and i hand write the material onto scrap paper when i first encounter it. i don't have to worry about keeping it neat/legible, i still get the physical connection, and it doesn't take up any space after i've written it.
I wouldn't assume that masks will remain socially acceptable. I’m traveling at the moment in a touristic region of my country, and in spite of masks still being legally required in shops and (before your food is served) restaurants, almost no one is actually wearing them any more. I did wear a mask as I walked into a hotel reception tonight, but the proprietor outright said I was silly to do so, and she pointed to everyone else around. It was very clear that I had committed a faux pas.
My expectation is that by years end, in Europe and North America at least, mask-wearers will be gently mocked everywhere outside of some large metropolitan areas (which have their own epidemiological concerns), and there won’t be any kind of long-term impact on facial expressions.
At first while reading the comment I thought of figurative mask, the one that wears of the fake smile. It was making sense. Only at the end of the comment I realized it was about blue masks.
The reason for the severe facial expressions and the lack of smiles in 19th-century photographs was the extremely long exposure times that the technology required back then. It was hard to hold a smile still enough that the film could capture it without blur. You can't assume from those portraits that people rarely smiled compared to now.
>The reason for the severe facial expressions and the lack of smiles in 19th-century photographs was the extremely long exposure times that the technology required back then.
That's one theory, another one I've seen is people had bad teeth, but everyone had bad teeth so I don't see how that would be an issue. I like the theory that they thought constant smiling was for simpletons.
With regard to people of a third country seeing one astronaut as the capitalist and the other as the communist, that goes way back. Consider these lines from Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (shot in summer 1965). As a man and woman look up at the moon, the man says about the Man in the Moon:
"He's fed up. He was glad to see Leonov land. Someone to talk to after an eternity alone! But Leonov tried to stuff
his head full of Lenin. So when the American landed,
the guy fled to his camp. But the American right away
crammed a Coke down his throat, after making him say thank you first."
It wasn’t known that beets could be exploited for sugar until the 16th century. Sugar cane was not known in Europe (outside Muslim-ruled areas of Spain) until post-Colombian times. In antiquity, the sole common means of sweetening food in Europe was honey, and later dulce de leche.
While Joseph Campbell (who was not an actual “expert in the field” for most of what he wrote about) has a big reputation among the public because he wrote books directed towards a popular audience, and e.g. George Lucas's praise of his work for Star Wars guaranteed him renown, he is not taken very seriously by actual specialists on folklore and anthropology. IMO, citing him does more harm than good.
My understanding from my readings in the field of mythology is that the parent post is precisely correct: Campbell was an enthusiastic amateur who did a whole bunch of cherry-picking to suit his passionate holding-forth on the topics, but without systematic study.
If he was alive today, he (still) wouldn't be a PhD, but he'd have a YT channel, a vigorously active twitter page, and maybe have penned a couple of D&D modules.
The difficulty with folklore is that it’s so intensely regional and period-specific, and that no real “canon” exists for most regions and times, especially when you’re reaching back into pre-christianity folklore.
This is the mistake that Campbell made. He thought you could unify folklore with some psychological frameworks. But you can’t, unless you’re employing gratuitous selection bias, which he did.
So it depends what you’re interested in! I’ve personally found it most fun to find some culture I’m incidentally connected to, with a long literary history, and try to find the earliest transcriptions and translations of stories that I can.
If you’re interested in some region and time in particular, somebody here can probably help get you started.
While Kalmyk Buddhism is geographically in Europe, it is in a very peripheral part of the continent with virtually no impact on European culture in general. So, it is still reasonable to claim that Buddhism is something foreign to Europe. After all, Buddhism only began to have a real impact culturally in the 19th century with translated literature coming from India and East Asia, not Kalmykia.
With regard to Islam in geographical Europe, yes there is Tatarstan (and bits of adjacent regions), but Muscovy conquered that Muslim power in the mid 16th century and subsequently made it very clear that while Islam exists there, it is only at the mercy of Christian rulers. Historically, during the tsarist era Muslims were forbidden from trying to convert the Christian population.
Perhaps a better example of "Muslims have been in Europe for a long time" (excepting Ottoman converts, as they are seen as forced conversions/uninvited guests/traitors by nationalist demagogues) would be those Tatars (same name as the Kazan Tatars but not closely related) who settled in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but again their impact on the surrounding culture was minuscule, and ultimately they assimilated into the Slavic-speaking Christian population.
It is oversimplistic to say the Islamic Revolution was a response to that, because the Shah was already gone when Khomeini returned from exile. Rather, the general Iranian Revolution (with its heavy involvement of Communists and other secular movements) was a response to the Shah's dictatorship, and then the subsequent Islamic Revolution was a taking advantage of the resultant power vacuum.
In the popular-music world, BT wrote a Fibonacci-sequence tune that was a club hit in 1999.