So many examples of bad definitions: German[1] electron charge[2] music notation[3]! But in the end, I think we have to largely give up the struggle against bad notation, of which spelling is just a part. If it really bothers us we can create our own notations and methods to translate between the old and new, but then you get splitting and fracturing. You can't play together. But if you invent such a notation, and make something beautiful with it, well, then you have a chance at fixing something.
1 - Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them.
2 - Why is electron charge negative? How many unnecessary minus signs has this poor choice caused?
3 - Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with frequency still increasing to the right in both forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and don't get into music at all simply because their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane music notation?
Definitions don't require explanations because they already have the immense power of consensus.
Consensus is rare and precious and if you try to optimize the object, you must fight the entire consensus battle again, and for only marginal gains. Some weirdos (I use this term warmly) get pretty far though, like with tau and 2*pi.
> Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with frequency still increasing to the right in both forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and don't get into music at all simply because their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane music notation?
While I am not a experienced musician, there seems to be a clear trade-off here. The mapping to any single instrument's interface isn't immediately obvious, but it allows me to read music written for piano and play some of it on my cello without having to know how piano keys are arranged. Compatibility between music notation across instruments is IMO a really cool feature.
Edit:
>Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them.
Even as a native German speaker, I agree that German grammar is ridiculous. At least Germany reformed their spelling though and made it more consistent. It was quite controversial, but allowed me to get decent spelling grades back in school. Till the reform, I always lost points in exams that weren't even about spelling because I made so many mistakes.
Music notation is pretty much the archetypal example of something designed by power users for power users. As someone who has done some orchestra conducting and composing, it's incredibly powerful and expressive, and the fact that you can usefully conduct an orchestra on an unknown piece with nothing but a score (no recordings) is amazing. Music notation hits a very powerful level of abstraction, and is so information-dense that all the information required to recreate a symphony fits in a small book.
When I was a child trying to learn music reading for piano, it was incredibly arcane and difficult, but it was learnable with a lot of practice. The equivalent of "phonics" lasts well into college for composers and conductors, though, who have a lot more to learn to build a mental model of a score.
I should also add that young pianists and organists have the hardest job here - most instruments otherwise require you to read at most 4 notes at a time from one "staff" (a staff is like a line of text). Even professionals on other instruments can have trouble reading piano music, which can involve 10 or more simultaneous notes spread across 2 staves (or 3 for organ music).
I'm a part time jazz bassist. I play in a so called "big band," so most of what we play is scored like orchestral music, albeit with improvisational portions.
I think "designed by power users for power users" nails it. Another way of putting it, is that there's a symbiosis between writers and players, if both are skilled in the same notation system, whatever it is. If you can read, you can find work. If you can write in standard notation, you can find people to play it. This creates a huge dis-incentive to explore new notations, except as an academic exercise.
> 1 - Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations.
Just FYI, pretty much all Indo-European languages have gender-based noun declension. This is not special to German, it’s English that’s one of the few special ones that have lost it, no other European Indo-European language had.
German, if anything, has rather simple scheme, where only the preposition declenses. Compare it with eg. Polish, which has 7 cases (compared to 4 in German), and declension is done on the suffix of the noun itself, which is itself pretty irregular, partly due to the fact that even within a gender, different noun types declense differently, eg. there are masculine personal, masculine animate and masculine inanimate nouns, and these three can be seen as subgenders. I simply don’t have an idea how any non-native speaker can have any hope to learn all of this other than through many years of practice.
Western music notation originated in religious vocal scores, at a time when church music was largely homophonic (just one melody). As melody is linear through time, using the horizontal axis to denote time makes a lot of sense - just like we do with the written word.
Of course Gradually tastes changed and Church music became polyphonic - adding a second (and third, fourth, fifth, etc) vocal line was a natural adaptation. Instrumentalists took it up outside of the Church, and the rest is history. We standardized on this notation because, even though it was originally for the human voice, it is convenient and good enough that everyone could make use of it.
I remember some of seeing some of those scores. Fascinating notation systems, but they required a great deal of front matter to comprehend the intent of the notation.
2 - Why is electron charge negative? How many unnecessary minus signs has this poor choice caused?
Because the person who decided the sign didn't have a way of knowing a priori whether the stuff that was moving from rod to fur and from rod to silk was numerically a particular kind of charge carrier flowing in a particular kind of direction. At the point you're rubbing a piece of silk on a glass rod, you know some transfer is happening to make the silk attract the fur, but you don't know whether you're rubbing something off of the rod or onto the rod.
1 - Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them.
2 - Why is electron charge negative? How many unnecessary minus signs has this poor choice caused?
3 - Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with frequency still increasing to the right in both forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and don't get into music at all simply because their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane music notation?
Definitions don't require explanations because they already have the immense power of consensus. Consensus is rare and precious and if you try to optimize the object, you must fight the entire consensus battle again, and for only marginal gains. Some weirdos (I use this term warmly) get pretty far though, like with tau and 2*pi.