This World and Me

Song of the Week #8 is "If My Heart Was a House" by Owl City . This week, I'm excited to be talking about another song from my favorite musician. Seven weeks ago, the very first song of the week was "Cave In" from Owl City's spectacular  Ocean Eyes  album. "If My Heart Was a House" is a somewhat more obscure song – it's track number 6 on disc 2 of the deluxe version of Ocean Eyes  – but that doesn't make it any less powerful. In a music ranking survey conducted on the forum /r/OWLCITY on the website Reddit in 2016, "If My Heart Was a House" was voted the song that forum subscribers would choose to listen to over any other song created by Adam Young, the man behind Owl City. "If My Heart Was a House" is a song about love. If that part is not immediately apparent from the title, it becomes apparent within the first few seconds of the song. You're the sky that I fell through, And I remember the view, Whenever ...

Song of the Week #7 is "The Jedi Steps and Finale" by John Williams . I'm excited to finally share some film soundtrack music as my song of the week! John Williams is, of course, the front runner of film soundtrack music. His scores have ingrained themselves deeply into popular culture across the world. From Star Wars  to Harry Potter  to Jaws  to  Jurassic Park  – chances are high that even if you haven't seen these films, you've heard their main themes before, especially Star Wars' " The Imperial March ". A significant part of why I am a  Star Wars  fan is the music. The music of  Star Wars  has a special kind of magic that extends beyond the films that it accompanies. No other film franchise on Earth truly parallels  Star Wars  in terms of renown, influence, and emotional character. There are a plethora of themes and leitmotifs sprinkled throughout the scores that make listening to them and identifying them like explorin...

Song of the Week #6 is "Halley Came to Jackson" by Mary Chapin Carpenter . This semester I am taking Introduction to General Astronomy (ASTRO C10 / L&S C70U) as a general education course at the University of California, Berkeley. Before each lecture, my professor, Alex Filippenko, usually plays a song that is related to the content we will cover in that lecture. For example, before a lecture that discussed time (among other things), he played  "Time" by Pink Floyd , and before a lecture that discussed the planet Jupiter, he played  "Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity", the fourth movement of Gustav Holst's  The Planets . Before a lecture that discussed comets, my professor played for us "Halley Came to Jackson". The title of the song refers to Halley's Comet , a famous comet that appears in the night sky approximately every 76 years. "Jackson" probably refers to Jackson, Mississippi , the capital of the state of Mississip...

On Monday, I wrote a post about how I wrote a program in Java and later Python that could solve an old game I used to play in my elementary school music class called Great Big House in New Orleans. It was a lengthy post, and you can read the entire thing here . Basically, in the game, all students in the class sat in a circle and passed a stuffed pumpkin around while singing a song. The rules of the game were such that every eighth student gets out (i.e. exits the circle), and the last student to remain in the circle wins. The program that I initially wrote in Java used arrays to simulate an actual game of Great Big House in New Orleans. However, using data of winning positions based on class sizes up to 1000, I was able to identify a pattern in consecutive winning positions that I could use to simplify my program so that it could solve for the winning position without having to simulate a single game with arrays or lists. The code is structured as follows. You are given (by the ...

Note: This post has many errors and omissions. See this 2024 post for an update. When I was a student at Scottish Corners Elementary School, we occasionally played a game in our weekly music class with Miss Bowman called Great Big House in New Orleans. In this game, all of the students in the class sat in a circle. One student – the student at position 1 – held a small stuffed pumpkin. While singing the following song, we passed the pumpkin around the circle. Great big house in New Orleans, Forty stories high, Every room that I've been in, Filled with pumpkin pie. The purpose of this exercise was to teach elementary school students about rhythm. As a rule, the pumpkin has to be passed to the next student on every beat of the song. A student can't ignore the rhythm of the song and pass the ball offbeat (i.e. too quickly or too slowly). The pumpkin has to be passed on the beat. Whoever has the pumpkin when the song reaches the word high  and the word pie  is out of the ...

Song of the Week #5 is  "Ich lass für dich das Licht an" by Revolverheld . When I started this weekly series of posts a few weeks ago (see  the first post  for more information), I wanted to bring as much variety as possible. To achieve this, I attempted until now to avoid using two songs from the same artist. However, I discovered such a heartwarming, beautiful music video for this equally heartwarming and beautiful song that I knew I  had  to share it somehow. The music video is performed by the German band Revolverheld, which also performs the song "Das kann uns keiner nehmen" that I had as my second Song of the Week . Like "Das kann uns keiner nehmen", the song is sung in German, a language which I have studied in school for over four years now. The title, "Ich lass für dich das Licht an", means "I leave the light on for you". In the first couple of minutes of the video, which has English subtitles (on YouTube, you have switch on...