Life in Silico

A few weeks ago I began scouting WordPress for interesting blogs. One such blog is The Ivory Tower, where I had a few interesting exchanges with the author regarding some of the Standard Issues - objectivity and meaning. The author decided to honor me with a separate post, where he first paints a caricature of a code hacker as an incompetent, irresponsible script-kiddie, and then pins it on me. Don’t let my boss find out!

Personal jabs aside, let’s examine the author’s logic:

A hacker can make guesses about the program’s behavior without accepting the responsibility of guessing correctly. … The hacker’s belief that he knows what it does and what it’s supposed to do has no supporting evidence, because he doesn’t have the program’s specifications. … But isn’t this exactly like the scientist’s stand in relation to the universe he studies? We don’t have the specifications for the physical and natural laws of the universe. We have to guess at them. … In any philosophy of science, we have to take account of its nature as a hack.

I had a similar discussion (actually, it was more of a monologue) with Yoni recently. I explained that many sociologists like to pose as scientists, adopting rigorous methods and using math, but often they miss the point. We know they do when they present their Ultimate Truth - that science is a social construct, that it is not really true or progressive - and it fails to account for basic history. And when Tom Lehrer pours his scorn on these clearly dubious approaches, some are annoyed, but still fail to address the problem.

The author’s logic is similar, and so are the failings. Science is defined by evidence - no evidence, no science. Greats like Pasteur and Lister knew what they were doing, and took the responsibility for it (contrast with woo-meisters, who notoriously evade responsibility every way they can). Einstein was so good a hacker, he could point out bugs in God’s system. This is simple history - science does not fit the caricature the author paints. He needs a different metaphor - science as reverse-engineering.

The author says:

The car is what it is, and does what it does, and without some additional specification beyond the car itself, it’s impossible to say whether the car’s condition is correct or faulty.

What specifications are there for the human body? Yet it is absurd to say that human bodies don’t have “correct” or “faulty” modes of operation. Even amoebas do. Their operations, intentions and meanings are defined according to the reality they live in. We do not need an outside guide to define us and to inform our lives, neither do we need outside specs to fix the body when it’s broken.

Even within the metaphor of computer programming, it easy to see that the program’s specifications are not the program, they hold no special status. This is why reverse-engineers are often in a better position to evaluate a system than the original designers. I know a person who did just this with CPython. He knows how it works better than some who have contributed to its code-base, but he read neither the source code nor the docs. Despite this, he can point out where implementation deviates from its own documented specification.

The author’s reasoning leads to a grand reductio ad absurdum. If you think that there is no reality and no truth (defined here), or if you believe in any other form of non-realism, I dare you to take responsibility for your words, stick your neck out and demonstrate it. So far no one has succeeded at this (even though many tried), and despite this glaring failure, such ideas are vigorously promoted. Yet people continue to both enjoy reality in practice while simultaneously rejecting it in theory. If science is a hack, why does it work? Why are its guesses much, much better than chance, and the guesses of other disciplines? If reality is a fiction, why is it so persuasive? Can you do better than science? It appears to me that the author simply ignores these questions, and fails to see how his premises lead him to absurd conclusions. In his defense, the vast majority of people seem hold this contradictory duality of thinking (even scientists). That’s hardly a good thing, though.

In any philosophy of science, we have to take account of the fact that it actually works, and that it reveals a world that is ordered and lawful. How and why does it work, and what does it tell us? Good questions, which only the hackers can answer.

Yesterday (Thurday) was Yom Ha’atsma’ut - Israel’s 60th Independence Day - and there was much rejoicing. Unfortunately, such dates get to be very banal. How banal? In the first speech of the celebration night, in the big, official ceremony on Mount Herzl, the Knesset Speaker mentioned Nisim Gini (page in Hebrew), the youngest “soldier” to die in the War of 1948 (defending of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City). She of course praised him and lamented about the conditions under which 10 year olds must take up arms (although it appears his job was to keep look-out - he was killed by a sniper, not during an actual fight), but this is very suspect when the Hagana was itself recruiting 12+ year olds (I bet it wasn’t for combat, but still). Contrast this with Palestinian children being recruited for suicide missions and in general for “resistance” (which involves them being in combat areas, throwing Molotov Cocktails on soldiers and getting killed). True, the magnitudes involved are different, but this sort of “PR” is bad anyway you look at it. We should remember Gini, his courage and his sacrifice, but we should also remember that recruiting children is wrong. It’s wrong today, it was wrong in 1948.

The general theme I find annoying in ceremonies such as these is the idealization and the symbolism, which drowns reality and history. A pretty lie is still a lie; a sympathetic half-truth is still not the whole truth; a morality distorted ad hoc is still wrong. But real people lived and died at the time. Surely their memory deserves more than the banal, rehashed, regurgitated speeches we keep hearing over and over. Surely our own history is not composed of a few stock characters in a predictable fairy tale of David and Goliath!

Now, to the good stuff. The ceremonies were two days ago in the evening, and the next day - yesterday - there were parades of the navy, the air forces and paratroopers, which I attended in Tel Aviv. Five (I think) cruisers and a submarine (our navy is small) made their way from Haifa to Ashkelon, followed by a more impressive air parade, beginning with helicopter triplets, followed by cargo and fuel planes, unmanned aircraft, and then the fighter planes. There were four planes who made impressive coordinated maneuvers with paint trails following, and a lone fighter plane who did cool stunts (such as flying parallel to the sea, and suddenly steering straight upwards into the sky). Finally there were simulated paratrooper landings into the sea, and their for-show rescue. Unfortunately, it didn’t go without incidents - due to strong winds, one of the paratroopers made a rough landing on some of the viewers, severely injuring two.

Later we went to the exhibit of Israel’s military intelligence community - the military handles SIGINT and VISINT mostly. This was even more impressive. The whole deal is very hush-hush, of course, but still we got to see the SIGINIT-on-a-plane system, map-making satellites (Israel is going strong in the satellite business), unmanned aircraft with cameras, propaganda articles of Palestinians, Iranians, etc., caricatures, captured weapons, a simulated underground tunnel of the sort the Palestinians build for weapon transfer below the Egyptian border, recreations of Hizbullah’s rocket-firing positions and so on. The importance of Israeli intelligence cannot be overstated - Israel, being a small country with limited resources, needs to know how to allocate those resources, when and whereto direct its firepower.

Riding the surge of patriotic feeling, I have to comment on how much was done here. Criticisms taken into account, Israel still comes out ahead of many more peaceful, more mature, more resource-rich nations, against many odds. Consider similar nations from the “batch” that got their independence from some colonial power around that time, such as Jordan, India, South and North Korea, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. Of them, only India and South Korea are comparable.

The reason for Israel’s success in the face of the odds, I think, lays in the “life-dinner” principle, taken from evolutionary biology. Consider a fox chasing a rabbit. From the fox’s point of view, catching the rabbit is important, but not crucial - there are other rabbits around, also rats, moles, hares. The fox is running for its dinner. From the rabbit’s point of view, escaping is crucial - if it’s caught, that’s the end of the road. The rabbit is running for its life.

Israel is far from a herbivorous rabbit, but the analysis of the cost-benefit is similar. The Jewish settlers had created new lives in Erets Israel, they had nothing to return to after World War II, and those who were born here knew no other homeland and spoke Hebrew as their mother tongue. Defeat for the settlers in 1948 meant an end to this life - either by physical death, expulsion, or subjugation to the Arab power that be. Defeat for the Arabs meant a lot - a piece of land captured by an essentially foreign force, the colonialists they worked hard to overthrow back in power through the back door of Zionism. But it wasn’t their lives at stake - the piece of land was small, the local Arabs didn’t even have to fight, and many chose to stay. (You can judge for yourself how well-off are Israeli Arabs today.)

Consider the War of Attrition was initiated by Egypt following the defeat at 1967. Nasser couldn’t beat Israel in a decisive battle, so he would take it man by man. As Mohamed Hassanein Heikal explained:

If the enemy succeeds in inflicting three-thousand casualties in this campaign, we can go on fighting nevertheless, because we have manpower reserves. If we succeed in inflicting ten-thousand casualties, he will unavoidably find himself compelled to stop fighting, because he has no manpower reserves.

The same rationale works with time and territory. The Arabs can lose all the wars they want, Israel cannot afford to lose even one. And this incentive is relevant even today, most notably with Ahmedinejad’s prophecies of Israel’s impeding doom, which remind of similar statements made by past greats such as Nasser. And just like the War of Attrition, or any other war, we have no choice but to face up to a nuclear Iran. Happy 60th birthday, Israel.

Two days ago was Yom Hashoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. This year I didn’t witness any ceremonies - I was at another base, which had a strictly-business attitude, and considered a simple line-up before the sirens sound at 10 AM as quite enough, thank you very much. Five days from now will be Yom Hazikaron, the memorial day for Israel’s fallen soldiers, the Yishuv’s fallen fighters and victims of terror attacks (yes, it’s a long description). And the following day is Yom Ha’atsma’ut, independence day. The dates for the first two days were set with an eye on the last day - a theme of “from holocaust to resurrection” which permeates Zionist thinking.

The attitudes to the remembrance day vary, and I guess it’s the same in other countries with their own memorial days - from seriousness to apathy to dislike (consider - shouldn’t their memory be with us all the time? Aren’t we forgetting by the very act of deferring the memory to a single day?). Although it’d be interesting to see just how attitudes vary as a function of elapsed time and other parameters.

More curious are the takes on foreign Holocaust memorial days, laws banning Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi groups, and so on. There are basically two camps (besides the apathy camp) - those who think Germany and other states should remember the horrors done to Jews, and those who think that the sons should not pay for the sins of their fathers. Somewhere in the background is the idea that Israel is trying to “milk” the Holocaust for what it’s worth to its own end.

I’ll take the cynical approach and not entirely disagree, yet I think that the real Holocaust, like so much else, has been substituted with its own symbolism. It is thought of in terms of martyrs and heroes, victims and executioners, monsters and saints. It is taken as some super-special event, which befell only the Jews and which lacks any historical context. (Curiously, this trend is being reversed in Israeli education, possibly because those who are left to speak up are not those who fought (who all died, save the partisans), but those who somehow survived, forcing a more sober look at life back then.)

But not just Jews suffered in the Holocaust, but also Roma, Russian prisoners of war, Poles, even Germans and many others from whom the Nazis didn’t allocate any living space. It was the result of Hitler’s policies, the same policies that led Germany’s military expansion. But that didn’t work, and the result was a shattered Europe, and with it a shattered Germany. It is clearly in the interest of Europeans that such a thing will never happen again. The remembrance of the Holocaust is a part of their own history, important to Europeans in itself, not something enforced from outside by the Elders of Zion. For the same reasons, we should remember our own history, with atrocities such as the Kafr Qasim massacare.

But a more global issue is also at stake. Alongside the Holocaust you may also want to consider the Nanking Massacare, Unit 100 and Unit 731, the Great Purge and the Gulag. Going back in history, we have the Inquisition, the pogroms, the conquest on the New World, and even the fictional but gruesome stories of the conquest of the land of Israel, where God commanded mass murder left and right. Back to modernity, there was the Rwandan genocide, today there is the Darfur genocide, and many others of which I don’t know because the news (or historical accounts) didn’t reach me (there’s a list here, though). The Holocaust is a special case, but it illustrates a much more horrible generality.

This is a grim picture of humanity, and I wonder what have we learned from history. Not what we say we learned, but what we actually do about it. Recently, the Israeli i government enacted a policy of refusing entrance to Darfur refugees. Many experiments, for example Milgram’s obedience experiments and Zimbardo’s prison experiment cast dark shadows on behavior of otherwise completely normal people. You should ask yourself what you would do in such a situation.

I think that this is a case of nature vs. nurture. Ultimately all such behavior - obedience, cruelty, compassion, whom we protect and whom we fight - has roots in our evolution, our genes. Overriding them is not easy. But simply remembering the past is not enough. Modification of actual behavior requires strong conditioning. Where is the incentive for government to teach and practice such morality in actions rather than words? Remembrance is just the first step. Who is willing to take the second?

In my original post, I said that the idea that God is beyond proof is a popular fashion, but a false one. Eliezer Yudkowsky says much the same thing here, calling it a Big Lie to cover up religion’s inability to stay relevant in our world:

Back in the old days, saying the local religion “could not be proven” would have gotten you burned at the stake.  One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, “Yeah, it’s all true.”  From a Bayesian perspective that’s some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity.  (Albeit it doesn’t prove that the entity is God per se, or that the entity is benevolent - it could be alien teenagers.)  The vast majority of religions in human history - excepting only those invented extremely recently - tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they’d actually happened.  The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept.  The people who wrote the original scriptures didn’t even know the difference. …

Not only did religion used to make claims about factual and scientific matters, religion used to make claims about everything. Religion laid down a code of law - before legislative bodies; religion laid down history - before historians and archaeologists; religion laid down the sexual morals - before Women’s Lib; religion described the forms of government - before constitutions; and religion answered scientific questions from biological taxonomy to the formation of stars.  The Old Testament doesn’t talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe - it was busy laying down the death penalty for women who wore men’s clothing, which was solid and satisfying religious content of that era.  The modern concept of religion as purely ethical derives from every other area having been taken over by better institutions.  Ethics is what’s left.

Or rather, people think ethics is what’s left.  Take a culture dump from 2,500 years ago.  Over time, humanity will progress immensely, and pieces of the ancient culture dump will become ever more glaringly obsolete.  Ethics has not been immune to human progress - for example, we now frown upon such Bible-approved practices as keeping slaves.  Why do people think that ethics is still fair game?

Intrinsically, there’s nothing small about the ethical problem with slaughtering thousands of innocent first-born male children to convince an unelected Pharaoh to release slaves who logically could have been teleported out of the country.  It should be more glaring than the comparatively trivial scientific error of saying that grasshoppers have four legs.  And yet, if you say the Earth is flat, people will look at you like you’re crazy.  But if you say the Bible is your source of ethics, women will not slap you.  Most people’s concept of rationality is determined by what they think they can get away with; they think they can get away with endorsing Bible ethics; and so it only requires a manageable effort of self-deception for them to overlook the Bible’s moral problems.  Everyone has agreed not to notice the elephant in the living room, and this state of affairs can sustain itself for a time. …

The idea that religion is a separate magisterium which cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie - a lie which is repeated over and over again, so that people will say it without thinking; yet which is, on critical examination, simply false.  It is a wild distortion of how religion happened historically, of how all scriptures present their beliefs, of what children are told to persuade them, and of what the majority of religious people on Earth still believe.

“Hello,” you say as you enter the room.

“Hello, sir!” The technician, a young corporal, was already seated and setting up the machine.

You step onto the pad, casually looking around you. A small teleportation chamber, with a telepad and a terminal for a human operator. This ship must be ancient, human operators became obsolete quite a while ago. But ships are expensive while men are cheap. And if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.

You wonder why the Colonel called you personally. You have already analyzed the project to death, and all the reports have been submitted and accepted. He won’t be able to pry any new information from you even if he personally scanned every neuron in your brain - everything you know was uploaded. Damn that old geezer. And just when you were about to celebrate your anniversary…

“Err,” the technician looks up apologetically.

“What is it?”

“Well, the scans are alright and the data was transmitted, but the protocol wasn’t finished for some reason.”

Protocol wasn’t finished was an euphemism for your body wasn’t vaporized into atoms and recycled. You’ve never heard it before, except in briefings. It wasn’t supposed to happen, and it never did, not to you, not to your friends.

“I should be able to fix it in a few minutes, please bear with me.”

“Do you have break-downs often?” A garbage can, not a ship…

“Very seldom, but this looks manageable. Please remain on the pad, sir.”

“Yes, I know the protocol.” There were to be no duplicate personnel, no matter what. If a malfunction ever happened - although it never happened to you before, or to any of your friends - you were to remain in the chamber, on the pad, and await the completion of the protocol. Everybody knew this, why did he remind you?

You find yourself losing patience. Silly, considering your data was already sent. Whether he fixes it five minutes or in five hours doesn’t matter - soon enough the data will reach the base, and you’ll be there, on your way to meet the Colonel, regardless of what happens here. Still, it’s a malfunction, which annoys you now just as the apparent malfunction in the Colonel’s brain, when he decided to yank you away from your official vacation into this stupid meeting. Amanda was not pleased, and neither were you. You didn’t ask to be reassigned to a desk job for nothing. Ugh… what’s taking him so long?…

—

A man in military clothing materialized out of thin air. He blinked a few times and shook his head - he never quite got used to the instant transformation of surroundings following a teleport.

“Welcome, Captain. The Colonel is currently attending an urgent meeting. You’re welcome to wait in any of our recreational facilities,” a voice said. He never got quite used to that, either - just a voice, no human being. And what was keeping up the Colonel, what urgent business could he possibly attend to in this peaceful, boring-to-death solar system? The Captain walked in the direction of the mess hall, agitated. A few hours wouldn’t make a difference - he missed his anniversary by a few weeks, thanks for the Colonel’s call - but still. He would be demanding these vacation days back. He was missing Amanda badly.

—

“Excuse me, it’s been twenty minutes already. What’s taking up so much time?”

“Terribly sorry, sir, never can be quite sure with these things. But I’ve almost nailed it, just five more minutes.”

Cheap, backward Space Force. Maybe you should retire. This nonsense doesn’t happen on civilian ships.

You should be on your way to the Colonel already. In fact, you are - the base is only ten light-minutes away. The technician has been working twenty minutes on the problem, so you should be already on your way navigating the maze that is the Colonel’s headquarters. Right about now you should be thinking about kicking the architect where it hurt.

Only… you aren’t. You are here. Waiting. So who is there? Somebody else? Whoever is there is completely unaware of this annoying screw-up. He’s walking to the Colonel’s office. You wonder if this will even be recorded. The technician said such a thing happened already, but then, it’s not like anyone would be around to tell. You too will be vaporized very soon.

These thoughts never occurred to you. Teleports just worked. But then, if they didn’t, nobody could tell about it, since the original is always destroyed, and your duplicate wouldn’t know. Original? Duplicate? In all the briefings you were just teleported, not reassembled or vaporized or anything. It’s just like walking - now you’re in your room, then in the corridor, then in class. Right?…

And what would happen when you’d get vaporized? Would you suddenly transport to the base? But you’re already there - or somebody is. He’s not you - you’re here! - but who else could it be?

What the hell is wrong with the dumb machine? You’re sweating now, tapping some frantic beat with your foot on the pad.

I’m going to die.

How stupid, you tell yourself, you’ve done this hundreds of times before. Standard procedure. You’ve remained yourself. You can remember everything that happened. Your childhood, The Academy, the war, Amanda, and now here you are. Think about previous teleportations, what happened then? All was normal. Everything is going to be OK now, too. This hold-up doesn’t mean anything.

Amanda… who’s going to go back to her? Not me… I’m going to die…

You suddenly feel hot. You have the urge to run away. Idiot, you scold yourself. You’ve seen real danger. You’ve nearly really lost your life quite a few times, and you’re afraid of this?! You see yourself running from the room. What are they going to do, hunt you down? Sounds logical, they can’t just let you go. You can see yourself falling, struck in the back by one of those phasers.

You look at the technician, hunched over the terminal, mumbling something franticly and manipulating something on the screen with swift motions. You take deep breaths, then your leg begins to move its own, you open your mouth to shout…

—

The technician looked up into thin air. He thought he heard the Captain say something, but he was too engrossed with fixing the malfunction. He was so anxious he executed the final command without even a glance at the Captain. Oh well. Doesn’t matter. Wouldn’t have changed anything anyway.

“Computer, file a report on the malfunction of teleportation chamber number three…”

Damn the stupid thing. His shift was over, he was tired and wanted to sleep, but now he had to do the report.

—

The Captain was not pleased. The Colonel called him for entirely political reasons, to gossip about those involved in the project. Why can’t he keep it professional? It’s not even a big project. It’s not even in his own damn solar system. What does he really want?

He reached the teleport pad, which did not have a human operator on this end. He stepped on it and stared angrily into the space in front of him. At least he was going back to Amanda now. He sighed, and vanished.

While you’re celebrating the freedom of the Israelites, try not to think too hard about all the innocent Egyptians who died only because God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. But even if you do and feel bad about it, you can console yourself with the fact that the Exodus didn’t happen (at least not nearly as dramatically as depicted).

First, two stories - a sad one and a funny one (found via here and here, respectively). To summarize, the sad one involves a girl dieing of treatable diabetes because her parents preferred praying over seeing a doctor, and the funny one involves a prominent “black magician” proving his incompetence on live television to hundreds of millions of viewers in India.

The usual take on the issue is that religion is bad and stupid, leading to effects both malicious and comical. Richard Dawkins and others have gone as far as to argue that religion is child abuse. Critics point out that religion has many positive benefits, but as Weinberg said, “with or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

But that doesn’t sound quite right. If religion can make good people into bad, why not the opposite? Even if it scares kids to death, can’t we at least use that to make sure they don’t do anything wrong? And isn’t there some real moral sentiment among the world’s religions?

All that may be true, but it doesn’t address the fundamental issue. Religion is neither inherently good nor bad - rather, it is arbitrary. Many crazy, nonsensical and conflicting ideas both about the world and appropriate behavior have been and still are preached and practiced by the world’s religions. Their evolution through time is also pretty arbitrary. They may morph into something better or worse, without any actual direction or method. The constraints seem to be (1) historical context, and (2) cognitive bias. #1 is pretty chaotic in itself, but #2 has been better studied. Pascal Boyer did a great job of explaining religion in light of our evolution (”religious concepts and norms can be explained as a by-product of standard cognitive architecture”), and you can see here and here for more orthodox psychology.

Coupled with the necessary authoritarianism of religion, you get behavior which is divorced from reality. Even if you pound every scientific equation, every righteous moral into a person using religion, you’ll get a semi-random drift that’ll widen with time towards a disconnect as reported above, because there is no method to weed out the right from the wrong.

Religion is like Russian Roulette. You push the trigger once - nothing, twice - still nothing, but eventually it’s gonna fire, and people are going to die, as they have for millennia, as they still are, for nothing much.

Peter Watts tells it like it is in Earth Hour - Because the World Isn’t Worth a Whole Day. For it was said, we head for hell and we do it well.

Music, like language, appears to be a human universal. I wonder if there’s even one culture in which music doesn’t play a role, or even a single individual who doesn’t like any kind of music at all. And while different cultures may evolve different kinds of music, they are all essentially recognizable as music to any human being. But while everybody can appreciate music, not everybody can make it, and fewer still are really good at it. But even those geniuses who were made immortal by their music had no idea what music actually is.

This may sound strange, but really it is a question which should be a benchmark for cognitive studies, like memory, language, morality, intelligence and consciousness itself. Do you know how they work? Thought so.

Back to music - why should a sequence of sound and silence conforming to some seemingly arbitrary set of rules by itself evoke emotion in a way no other auditory experience (well, save speech) can? What’s so magical about 440 Hz? Something in our heads is tuned for music, just like something is tuned for language and walking upright. But why?

Before we resort to blissful ignorance, it should be pointed out that no one knows what science doesn’t know, and neither did I, until I made a few searches. I have not covered even a tiny fraction of literature on the subject, but so far it appears that there is some serious research and attempts at an answer, but no ultimate theory of music that would make you rich (an ultimate theory would be predictive to the point of having a music composition algorithm).

On the evolutionary front, asking a biologist led me to a paper, which proposes sexual selection as the mechanism behind the evolution of music (this is not a new approach - Darwin himself suggested this). It sounds only partially plausible (at least to me), and as the author notes himself, empirical data on the subject is very scarce.

On the cognitive front, there is the question of how music is received in the brain, and what mechanisms facilitated it in the first place for natural selection to act upon. I now have two books in my wishlist on this subject - This is Your Brain on Music and What is Music?: Solving a Scientific Mystery. It is the second book I find most interesting, for it offers a (nearly) comprehensive theory of music, on which I will let the author himself elaborate.

So no, you won’t get an actual answer from me, at least not yet. I reported only the preliminary findings of a few hours’ worth of search. But we live in interesting times indeed, when such questions can and are being taken seriously. I wonder what the answer is.

I’ve always wanted to be a pianist. Back in Moscow, my grandma had a piano in her apartment, and I used to play on it like only a 5 year old without any musical training can. After we immigrated to Israel, various attempts at learning the piano didn’t work - we couldn’t get an instrument, couldn’t find a teacher, or whatever happened back then. Studying guitar for a year during Middle School didn’t help either. What’s a guitar next to a piano, right?

My daydreams of grandeur were replaced by the realization that I wasn’t getting any younger, and that I had a perfectly good guitar lying around the house since my Middle School years. Still, the impetus behind my real interest in the instrument came only about half a year ago, when my mom dragged me to a tiny concert where my now-teacher performed. Perhaps it was a time when any live performance would do. Still, his effortless playing which suited so well the classical guitar - ethnic music, including flamenco - got me hooked.

Now, classical guitar is something people usually play before they get their US$10,000 Ibanez or Gibson to keep the neighbors from sleeping, not something you perform with. Nerds don’t play it, either - they play the violin, flute, or whatever. It’s an instrument that in the popular imagination is reserved for teaching or campfires, being neither cool nor particularly artistic (or at least boringly generic). If this is true for you, I hope it changes after the following video showcase.

To start, imagine a Slavic grandpa, with glasses, red shirt, black trousers and black vest, always smiling, telling stories to little kids while they sit on his lap playing with his gray beard. A bit like Farther Frost (keep your stinking Santa Claus to yourselves, Western imperialists…). Oh, and he’s a god on the guitar:

There are a bunch of videos of Stepan Rak’s compositions on youtube, but only one other video of him performing. Another piece is called “The Mountain”, performed by Dimitris Kotronakis. Besides being a virtuoso, he plays the first minute and a half with only one hand on the fretboard. How’s that for pull-offs and hammer-ons?

Another grandpa, this time a Spaniard. Carlos Montoya did a lot to popularize the solo flamenco guitar, as opposed to just part of an ensemble or an accompaniment to flamenco dancers and singers.

And Paco de Lucia, of whom you probably heard, possibly through his collaboration on Mediterranean Sundance (he even gave a concert in Israel!):

Classical, but still Spanish music. The following piece is called Leyenda (”Legend”, although owing to an historical accident it is now best known as Asturias) and was originally written for the piano by Isaac Albéniz in the end of the 19th century. His contemporary, guitar virtuoso Francisco Tárrega, transcribed it to guitar and it is said that Albéniz liked the transcription better than the original. Played by John Williams, the English (well, he was born in Australia, but resides in England) god of classical guitar (Shai suggested another interpretation, of Ana Vidovic, but being a chauvinistic pig I won’t embed it):

One of my favorite pieces, La Catedral by Agustín Barrios. This performance is by a Turkish student, and even though there are videos of more professional guitarists playing this piece, I liked his interpretation best:

A more energetic piece, Zapateado, written by Joaquín Rodrigo and performed by Jerome Ducharme, a Canadian guitarist who won the Guitar Foundation of America’s Competition, not hard to see why:

Back to contemporary land, first, a piece by American composer Andrew York (thanks, Shai!) It clocks 5:14 minutes, but for some reason the video jumps to bits of other, unrelated performances. Go figure…

And a curious composition by Nikita Koshkin, with some strange guitar effects I didn’t even think possible:

Wrapping up, two performances by Japanese guitarist Kazuhito Yamashita. First, a rant: I think that if there’s any nation that is justified in being racist it’s the Japanese. They have the frightening ability of taking pieces of another culture and remaking it into something different, at times bizarre and screwed up, and at times much better. Mr. Yamashita is a case in point. He is a virtuoso and a genius, although many would say that his talent is misapplied. He can retune his guitar while playing - and some of the things he plays actually demand he do that. He transcribed orchestra pieces for solo guitar - Dvorak’s New World Symphony and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, for example (The Infernal Dance of Kastchei the Immortal is great, it just oozes Slavic evil). And that goes to prove my point about the Japanese.

The following video is Yamashita’s transcription of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, written for the piano. More specifically, it’s the last two movements,The Hut of Baba Yaga (first minute) and The Bahatyr Gate of Kiev. These are actually shortened versions: on his CD, The Hut is 3 minutes, and The Bahatyr Gate is 7 minutes. Still, you see him playing, and it’s… it’s talent, that’s what it is. How many guitarists, classical or not, can play like that?

And that’s classical guitar for you, folks. Hope you enjoyed it.