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Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news
Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like click to cancel, conferences and bicycles. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was fussed.
But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!
Three-armed robot conductor makes debut in Dresden
The Guardian – Deborah Cole – 13th October 2024
LOL! Right, for science.
???? then there aren't any human beings PLAYING the piece is there? What even is the point of a live performance if that's the case.
Human conductors typically conduct more than one musician at a time, so it may well be more than possible for the musicians to play a piece that, for one reason or another, requires three arms throughout on the part of the conductor, which would of course be impossible for a single human to conduct. I'm not exactly aware of such pieces, but it's not theoretically impossible for one to be written, at least.
I've been in a concert band, and the conductor isn't the music -- we have the music sheets in front of us. The conductor might tell the crew which section of the band/orchestra /choir needs to be louder or softer or come in super hard or need to tighten up etc. That can all be done with just a look or an elbow or a tap, or a half beat point with the baton, a jump a silent shout etc etc, because these are all visual reminders of things we had already previously discussed and practiced and agreed upon during rehearsals. It's about human communication that's so much more than a metronome on a click track. This invention makes me sad.
I've also performed with a conductor (though as a singer), and I agree that for anything we did, something like this obviously wouldn't be necessary. The conductor is indeed far more than just a metronome. But I don't think that means there isn't something really large and experimental that something like this could theoretically be capable of conducting when a single human couldn't. I have no idea what it would look/sound like, and it would almost definitely be very weird and unconventional. But I can believe it's at least theoretically possible for something like that to exist.
Not necessarily offbeat but currently in the USA, we are in the thick-of-it when it comes to politics, voting etc., I started researching other places and found this nugget from our friends down under. As it turns out, fines are given out for not voting! Australia, if wild life don't get you, Aussie government will! As my Chicago friends will tell you, "Vote early and Often and not necessarily in that order!" Hope you enjoy levity for Friday.
Its wild to me having lived under this system that its offbeat for you. Ive been fined before for not voting in local elections when i was younger.
Thesedays, either you vote early by mail or at literally any election booth you can find, or if you must on the weekend it's held - wander down to the local school, perhaps line up for a few minutes, vote, then grab a democracy sausage.
Yep! Its a bit of a pain if you're inclined to forget that its voting day (like me), but on the other hand, compulsory voting does mean that everyone gets a say (whether they want to or not).
Plenty of people think it isn't right, but on the other hand, it always seems to me that polling that doesn't include the vast majority of people in the country seems a bit less valid than otherwise. But I don't know if making it compulsory solves more problems than it creates (e.g. donkey votes).