There are 12 notes in most Western music. When you double a frequency you go up an octave, but keep the same note.

Music is played in different “keys” though with 7-note scales, with letters assigned A-G. If you play the notes in order starting and ending at the letter for which the scale is named, then do the same for a different scale, the relationship between the notes will sound the same between the 2 scales, but your starting and ending pitch will be different.

Piano keys are arranged with all 12 notes being available, but arranged in the key of C-major or A-minor, where all notes are natural notes (no sharps or flats).

If you play just the white keys starting from C, you’ll be playing a C-major scale : C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. However, to play the F-major scale, you’re going to need to skip one white key and hit a black key: (F, G, A, Bb, C, D, and E). No letter repeats on a scale.

A sharp (#) or flat (b) note is just moving the smallest step you can to the right or left, respectively. For most notes, that’s moving to a black key, but there’s no black key between B and C or E and F sometimes it’s moving to another white key.

Why don’t we just ignore weird notes like Cb? Because every letter needs to be represented on a scale. Ab-minor, for instance has Ab, Bb, Cb, Db, Eb, Fb, and Gb. So even though Cb is the same frequency as B-natural, it serves the same role in the scale as E does in the key of C, and if you didn’t represent it as a flat note, your scale would have 2 "B"s and no “C.”

This gets even more important when you get into different instruments with different natural keys. A Piano, flute, bassoon, and other instruments are what we call “Concert C” instruments, which means they have the same natural key of C. However, other instruments are different.

A standard clarinet is a Bb instrument, meaning its Bb scale matches the C scale of a piano. You also have Eb-clarinets that are a little smaller, meaning that if they play a “C” they’ll be playing a concert Eb, which uses the same fingerings as a Concert Bb from a standard clarinet.

So when an Orchestra is playing something in the key of A-major (A, B, C#, D, E, F#, G#), an Eb-clarinet is playing in F#-major (F#, G#, A#, B, C#, D#, E#).

Worse than that. You bought software licenses specific to that Wii, not to an online account. If it died, you lost all your purchases.

For me it’s been “I see you bought this specific laser engraver. Would you be interested in buying that exact model?”

No. I already bought it, and it’s not a consumable. If I decided I needed a new laser a week into ownership, it wouldn’t be because I was thrilled with that exact model.

Even the last season of Picard seemed to forget that Geordi was the pilot in season 1.

There’s this whole sideplot with family strife because one of his daughters decided to be like their dad and become an engineer, while the other one rebelled against him and wanted to pilot ships. I thought they’d eventually point out that they’re both following in his footsteps, but they never did.

I’m a white Christian man in Texas. I know I’m privileged and that that privilege often comes with ignorance, so I used to be really nervous about offending people inadvertently.

But I eventually learned to just ask if I wasn’t sure.

It did help that one of my best friends in college was a black lesbian who transitioned Jr year. I joked with him that he was my token “X” friend.

Well, he didn’t speak to her again for like 30 years…

I kept thinking they’d go there, and they still haven’t.

The Jedi sense of balance isn’t balanced at all.

What year were you born?

I teach an underwater photography class at a university. We were going to have a night dive one evening and a thunderstorm rolled in and we had to cancel, so we decided to go to a local pub that has great food.

There’s a bouncer at the door, and he’s checking all my student’s IDs super close. He’s bending them, shining a light through them, etc making absolutely sure nobody underage gets through.

I walk up behind my students with my ID out and he just nods and says “you’re good man.”

I never felt so old.

I also love how they have different types of leaders.

Kirk is the Captain you’d love to have as a boss. He gets stuff done, but also has fun with it. He’d inspire loyalty through Charisma.

He’s the captain you want standing by your side in a bar fight.

Picard is the perfectly-distantly, dignified leader. He’s a diplomat and archaeologist who loves exploring not only space, but culture and the nature of life. His love for his crew is shown through his desire to develop them into better officers.

He was the captain who kept you from getting into a fight.

Sisko is the most militaristic of the Captains. We first meet him in a battle, and he doesn’t back down from many fights. When Picard was annoyed by Q he complained. When Sisko met Q he punched him. But Sisko was a great tactician who also had to be a diplomat in charge of a station inhabited mostly by people outside his command structure.

He was the captain who punch someone in the throat if he thought there would be a fight.

Janeway was a scientist and diplomat. She could be hard as iron, but she was absolutely devoted to her people and would do anything for them. Her loyalty would cause her to occasionally cross the line, however. More than any of the captains, she wanted to develop her crew into leaders. They had limited options for advancement, but she tried to give them all opportunities to grow. She also didn’t see any sense in playing fair if she was in the right.

She was the captain that would bring a gun to a knife fight.

I work for a municipal government where we all receive a phone stipend because of 2FA.

If we use our personal phones for city business, they become searchable in Open Records Requests.

There’s so much NIMBY about landfills they’re rare and very far apart, so they can get away with charging 4x what’s fair.

For big times like furniture, engines, toilets, construction debris, etc it’s to save money. You can’t throw those things in a dumpster, and a trip to my local dump costs $160.

And installing Linux and axe-murdering anyone with a car.

Absolutely. I work in the planning department of a municipality that’s a tiny enclave for the super-wealthy. The average new home here is over 10 times the price of the regional average. I recently issued a permit for a 5,000 square-foot guest house with a tennis pavillion on the roof.

Our residents don’t want neighbors. They don’t want a sense of cummunity. They want their special enclave with a police force that exists to keep out the homeless people from the major city that surrounds us.

I don’t live here of course. I have to drive 90 minutes every morning because my annual salary won’t cover a week’s mortgage for some of these houses.

Do you think we don’t have offices, schools, and C-stores in the suburbs?

We also have sidewalks, bike lanes, walkable shopping districts, etc, but in Texas they don’t get used because it’s 110° for months at a time and you don’t want to have to take a shower every time you change locations.

But the problem is those C-stores and small offices don’t bring the jobs required to support the suburbs. Most people have to work in the city, so they have to commute, and getting from their house to the office is what creates traffic.

People can’t travel 30 miles from their home to the office entirely using public transit. Walkable cities and light rail are Last-mile. Heck - throw in high-speed for the majority of the transit and you still have a huge first-mile problem, which is by far the hardest to solve.

The reasons modern cities are designed around cars is because cars are flexible. Add a street for a new row of houses and every single one of those points is connected to every end point in a single step. No new scheduling, routing, or transit lines required. Problem solved with a little asphalt.

It’s an easy solution, and backing out of it is very, very difficult because it must be replaced with a complicated, expensive solution that’s less-convenient for most users.

I’m not anti-transit at all, but people around here seem to believe that a city can be fixed with the power of wishes and fairy dust just because another city that covers 1/10th the area and was developed hundreds of years before auto-centric decelopment ago managed to do it.

What’s a concrete, real way to fix these cities that doesn’t require millions of people to give up their homes to move into more-expensive apartments they don’t own, addresses the fact that being outside for more than a few minutes simply isn’t safe for a significant portion of the population for almost half the year, and doesn’t significantly add to commute times?

There’s also inherrent difficulty when the city is so spread out (The Grand Parkway outer loop has a 60-mile diameter, compared to Paris’s 15), and walking outside is a health hazard 3-4 months out of the year.

Okay. Great. Downtown is now walkable.

How do people get downtown?

The thing about auto-centric design is that it covers transportation from end to end. Other methods require a much more complicated network of fist and last-mile solutions that aren’t easily adapted.

“Just use park and rides” doesn’t solve the problem. It just moves the traffic to the transit stations. And now it’s more expensive and slower than the existing system.

Houston put in a light rail system that costs 1% of every dollar spent in the city, costs a ton to ride, adds 45 minutes to a trip downtown, and drastically increases the odds of your car getting broken into at the park-and-ride. So yeah - there’s pushback against expanding it.