source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 16 Mar 1997 21:15:06 -0800 Subject: Sagan, metaphysics and Music From: Gary Morrison Interesting thoughts, John. The idea that we'll have problems advancing science in the future also strikes me as surprising. It's certainly true that most of the problems we're facing are harder than ever before to solve, as the difficulty in funding the Super Collider shows, but there are also some problems that aren't much harder, and much of the technology with which to solve them keeps improving exponentially. I'm also very optimistic about how that technological edge is helping out in the Arts. It's really exciting to think not only that nearly anybody can routinely hear CD-quality sound, but also it's now amazingly easy to produce it ourselves. And we don't even need to press it on a CD either! But probably most important to me is the ability to retune instruments capable of fairly expressive music performance in two seconds. As we Texans are allegedly fond of saying, "Yeeehaaah"! Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 17 Mar 1997 06:19 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA01065; Mon, 17 Mar 1997 06:19:57 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA01062 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id VAA25483; Sun, 16 Mar 1997 21:18:30 -0800 Date: Sun, 16 Mar 1997 21:18:30 -0800 Message-Id: <199703162130_MC2-12B0-6FE3@compuserve.com> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu