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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2026-187
Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Gaza:
SoAm:
Tech / Science:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Iran) thread …
james at 41:
My father was there during WW2. I was ‘there’ on Thursday evening, after I came home from a trek for groceries in Santa Fe, the very day of the feast this year, 28th August, 2026, as you can see from the link. From the text of this feast, which was the feast for which my small church in Santa Fe was named, here is the concluding hymn or exapostilarion:
O ye apostles, assembled here from the ends of the earth,
bury my body in Gethsemane;
and Thou O my son and God, receive my spirit.
The site even gave the sermon of the Patriarch of Jerusalem (given this year!) thusly:
“Inspire us with the grace of the Spirit, O Word of God, that we also may, albeit faintly, proclaim in some measure the greatness of Thy most beloved Mother. For she, chosen from generations of old according to the foreordained counsel and good pleasure of God and Father, Who begot Thee timelessly, without flux and without passion, conceived in the latter times Thee, Who art propitiation and salvation, righteousness and redemption; Thee, the Life from Life, and the Light from Light, true God from true God, incarnate of her. Her childbearing was wondrous, her birth-giving beyond nature and understanding and salvific for the world; while her Dormition was glorious, truly sacred and all-praised,” Saint John of Damascus proclaims, praising the Ever-Virgin Theotokos and Mother of God.
Beloved brethren in Christ,
Pious Christians and pilgrims,
The grace of the Holy Spirit has gathered us all from the ends of the earth at this most venerable Tomb of the Mother of God, the place of the glorious Dormition of the Most Blessed Theotokos Mary in the village of Gethsemane, that with boldness we may celebrate this great and wondrous miracle, namely her sacred and all-praised Dormition.
Truly, the Dormition of the all-praised Theotokos is a wondrous miracle. Therefore, the hymnographer, marvelling at this mystery, cries aloud, saying: “In thy Birth-giving was conception without seed; in thy Dormition, death without corruption; a twofold miracle joined in one miracle, O Theotokos. For how dost thou, who knewest not a man, nurse an infant while preserving thy purity? And how dost thou, who art the Mother of God, bear the dead and yet exhale fragrance?”
Cosmas the hymnographer resolves this perplexity, crying aloud and saying: “O Pure One, thou didst receive victorious prizes over nature by conceiving God; yet, in imitation of thy Creator and Son, thou dost submit beyond nature to the laws of nature. Therefore, though thou diest, thou dost rise with thy Son unto everlasting life.”
In other words, if the Word of God, Christ, Who was incarnate and became man from the pure blood of the Virgin Mary, the Maiden of God, underwent incorruptibly the death that belongs to corruptible human nature, being perfect God and perfect Man, how much more was it fitting for her all-radiant soul to submit to the laws of created nature, she who was translated into the immaculate hands of her Son and God? This is also affirmed by the hymnographer: “She who is of the seed of David, through whom we were deified, is gloriously and beyond understanding translated into the hands of her own Son and Master.” And again: “If her incomprehensible Fruit, through Whom Heaven came to be, voluntarily underwent burial as a mortal, how should she who conceived without knowing wedlock refuse the tomb?”
We call the Theotokos blessed, for, on the one hand, Christ our God, Whom nothing can contain, was pleased to be contained within her; and, on the other hand, her death became a ladder and a passage from earth unto Heaven, as Saint John of Damascus melodiously and most clearly declares: “Thy death, O Pure One, became for thee a passage unto a life eternal and better, translating thee from this transitory life unto one truly divine and incorruptible, O immaculate one, that in gladness thou mightest behold thy Son and Lord.”
We call the Theotokos blessed because she was revealed as the Mother of Life and of the Light of the world, that is to say, of Christ, Who said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), and: “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life” .
Behold, therefore, my beloved brethren, this truth is preached, proclaimed and witnessed by the miraculous empty Tomb before our very eyes in this place of Gethsemane, where today we celebrated the Bloodless Sacrifice, namely the mystery of the Divine Eucharist. Therefore, the Holy Church of Jerusalem cries aloud, saying: “Come, ye faithful, let us draw near to the Tomb of the Mother of God and embrace it, sincerely applying thereto the lips of our hearts, our eyes and our foreheads, and let us draw forth abundant gifts of healing, ever-flowing from an unfailing fountain.”
[End of sermon]
Posted by: juliania | Aug 31 2026 6:22 utc | 104
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… What Plato does there is clearly a thought experiment. The temporarily mad friend of the autocratic ruler can and should be compared to enabling institutions which support a tyranny against the people, such as police forces and the judiciary, or an expeditionary military. In that sense both Prof. Hudson and the critics have their points standing.
Posted by: persiflo | Sep 1 2026 17:35 utc | 183
Thank you, persiflo! You have carried my thought forward, which I didn’t feel I should where I posted it, since that site is devoted to mainly economic subjects. Prof. Hudson does us all a great service in his interpretations, which are perfectly valid on that level. But that is not Plato’s aim, and I was left wondering whether much of our seeming inability to escape what I will describe as ‘war fever’ is due to having lost sight of the importance of what you call a ‘thought experiment’ with respect to Plato’s dialogue, The Republic.
Isn’t it intriguing that Plato begins the entire dialogue in conversation with the aged Cephalus, in that old man’s home, concluding with such a seemingly innocent question ? The subject is what it means to be a wealthy man, which Cephalus is. ( And as Prof. Hudson pointed out, the entire dialogue takes place there, in Cephalus’s home.) Here is how that beginning unfolds in the context of Cephalus’s final speech, as translated from the Greek by Alan Bloom:
Cephalus: ” … when a man comes face to face with the realization that he will be making an end, fear and care enter him for things to which he gave no thought before. The tales told about what is in Hades — that the one who has done unjust deeds here must pay the penalty there — at which he laughed up to then, now make his soul twist and turn because he fears they might be true … To the man who is conscious in himself of no unjust deed, sweet and good hope is ever beside him … The possession of money contributes a great deal to not having to cheat or lie to any man against one’s will …”
Socrates: ” … But as to this very thing, justice, shall we so simply assert that it is the truth and giving back what a man has taken from another, or is to do these very things sometimes just and sometimes unjust? Take this case as an example of what I mean; everyone would surely say that if a man takes weapons from a friend when the latter is of sound mind, and the friend demands them back when he is mad, one shouldn’t give back such things, and the man who gave them back would not be just, and moreover one should not be willing to tell someone in this state the whole truth.”
Cephalus: “What you say is right.”
Socrates: “Then this isn’t the definition of justice, speaking the truth and giving back what one takes.”
[I had to leave off the prior discussion between the two, in which Socrates remarks that Cephalus seems not overly fond of money, to which Cephalus replies somewhat evasively that he has made ‘a little bit more’ than what he inherited from his father. It’s an interesting prelude to the conversation above and is why, I think, Socrates’s final statement about justice includes ‘speaking the truth’. Cephalus has just conceded that Socrates himself has spoken the truth in saying that money makers are twice as fond of money as inheritors , and thus hard to be with ‘because they are willing to praise nothing but wealth’. Cephalus then, unfortunately, proceeds to do exactly that. He had already gone previously to propitiate the gods; it seems he must go again, so off he goes … 😉 ]
Posted by: juliania | Sep 1 2026 20:25 utc | 188
My neighbors invited me for dinner. The lovely couple of artists who reside above, who regularly vacate the space for several days or sometimes weeks at a time. An air of bewildered curiosity surrounded the conversation, but they were very polite to let me pick the controversial topics first. We agreed that during turnover of one of the studio spaces here to the next tenant will be an ideal moment to throw a party; a profoundly ethical idea, of course, to which I did not fail to lend my support as trance-dj niko. They asked if it would be a problem to bring the speakers upstairs for the occasion.
I said no, but that was a lie. Here is what I am going to do instead. [A nerdy long-form post on audio technology follows, readers beware. Please skip if uninterested]
Another neighbor has a pair of active monitor cabinets, the kind of speakers which have become a bit trendy outside of their original use case in recording/mixing/mastering, where they are meant to provide a full-range picture of the signal on which to work on. His are quite powerful and should be able to serve the situation well. But I will have to deal with their intricacies, including a narrow field of “view” together with an outsized low end everywhere else, which can and does carry to a distance. It’s for this design characteristic that I don’t recommend them for home listening purposes.
The ideal is still a broadband stereo pair with a wide view and no additional subwoofer. The low end you’ll get has a natural cutoff frequency determined by the wall-to-wall distance of your listening space, according to W=1/F*Vs. As with the strings on a guitar, a longer wave that doesn’t fit in cannot sound out, though the mystery described by the science of Psycho-Acoustics informs us that our sense of hearing will fill in the missing lower harmonics even if they are not present in the signal; which is why tiny headphone speakers still make an impression. The low end built into studio monitor type cabinets serves another purpose, it’s job is to make sure that no information from the deep end is lost to the engineer.
The rest is essentially geometry, albeit with many variables in play and best garnished with a touch of magic if available. The guiding principle is that it’s best to keep a stereo pair as wide apart as possible, and have it arranged in a triangle centered on your favorite listening position, with the speakers at ear height and same distance. Have them sit off the walls a little, especially in corners, to reduce reflections which may (and will) resonate, much like a trumpet body would.
The less boxy a given room is, the better. If all three directions of space are wide enough to accommodate the HiFi standard 20Hz low end, and the walls are perfectly non-reflective, then the situation is ideal. Anything else forces a compromise, which has to be found. The less you need to worry about unwanted reflection, the better; a living room with book shelves and a sofa sounds better than a blank concrete cube of the same size. A venue filled with people shows the same effect when compared with the empty space.
Speakers all have their own field of view, and it’s frequency-dependent too. Again, what you get is a complex problem of geometry – the sound is essentially different everywhere. As a Dj I would always make sure to step out into the room to get the actual listener’s perspective; with practice comes the skill to just gauge the audio field out there from time to time, and then accommodate the sound settings at the master desk accordingly from memory.
A room that’s not suited to a proper stereo triangle for most listeners often benefits from switching to mono. Routing a stereo signal into two separate channels of a mixing console allows to use the panning knobs to essentially blend a pure stereo view with a mono picture. Note that this is all about navigating the natural obstacles one is given to deal with.
For most applications, the resonant frequencies of the room will be the most important problem to handle once the basic geometry is figured out. A resonant frequency is sharply associated with room size; a topic left to the reader to explore if unfamiliar with (I’ve written on this here before, so forgive me for referring to the literature). Let me instead explore the even more intricate aspects of speaker setup now.
The point here is how to deal practically with all this when working as a Dj. – Just use a chinese-made automatic notch filtering device is what the future probably looks like, but the old style craft had you always listen for the resonant modes, which are getting triggered differently as per the sound that you play; always control that, and avoid “mumphing” as best as you can. Remember that no space is perfect, so build compromises, such as setting up the studio monitors in a way that gives the whole room a mostly linear picture, perhaps with a louder zone somewhere in the speaker focus, and a less loud zone aside from there, so people can choose where they want to hang out. This basic decision will of course force me to calibrate overall spectrum neutrality through the available filters (“band equalizers”) as best as I can; which I use to do dynamically anyway: it is necessary to put various recordings next to each other which sound very differently to begin with, some thinner and some bigger, so to speak.
Aligning the phase of the system is a first-order effect on the resultant acoustic field, with any reflections coming in already dampened. Either you don’t care because the music you like to listen to isn’t that precise on the time scale, or you’ll want to get that right. This means the +/- polarity of the wires between power amplifier and speakers, but also the circuitry upstream of the power amp: there are two ways to put a plug into a socket, and this corresponds to the phase induced by the 220V A/C power, cascading and interfering throughout the whole system. The issue is best avoided by putting all related gear into the same socket; but that’s not always possible, as in the case of active monitor speakers spread around in a fairly large room.
One final tip I have is to run the power amp on fairly high output, and reduce volume on the predecessing input stage, without getting loud static hiss of course. This will allow the moving speakers to draw on a ready supply of power for work, enabling their quick movement; which is another influence on the precision of the acoustic signal that goes often underestimated.
Posted by: persiflo | Sep 2 2026 0:22 utc | 191
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