And yet you didn’t propose it for the book club!
I had already proposed like 3 or 4 books, though.
What happened to the voting for that anyway? Am I crazy, or did it just disappear?
I just bounced it. Looks like 15 people voted and more than half chose Piketty.
So are we doing Piketty then? Or are you going to redo the voting process? Are we scrapping the whole thing? What’s going on with that?
[eta] It just popped back up on my radar! I couldn’t find it for a while! Never mind! 
Does this mean I’m finally reading that tome?
Apparently, we all are. I think this will likely be better for the chapter by chapter mode we employed for the Banks book.
Baby Boomers have that effect on every market.
How they became frightened Fox News viewers still baffles me, however, considering how anti establishment they seemed in the 60s.
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But fox very much pitches itself as antiestablishment. Whether they are or not is quite another story, but Fox claims it’s going against the grain and “speaking truth to power”… And not all kids in the 60s were leftists/progressives antiestablishments. The roots of the modern conservative movement has its roots in the 60s, too.
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Yeah, but … if you just include all music, including the stuff my 3-year-old just banged out on her xylophone, what does that get you, other than a lot of noise (no pun intended)?
Sure there are issues with ‘only’ using the top 100, but at least it has some basis in consistency across the period being studied. Just throwing all the music you can find into the pot and seeing what turns up creates a whole host of problems. For example, ‘You Sexy Thing’ by Hot Chocolate (RIP) was a Top 10 hit in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Using the Top 100 approach, that’s going to throw up some odd echoes, but not nearly as badly as using all available music - imagine how many versions of almost any song you can think of are floating around? The data - especially for actually new genres - would be swamped be re-releases and re-recordings of old music.^
Jon
^ which is something I’m not really convinced that auto-selection algorithms like Amazon’s correct for, and why I like to actually browse for books.
Don’t they get points for at least trying, even if the results aren’t to your liking?
The first iteration of anything tends to be worse than the second, third, and nth iteration. That doesn’t make the first iteration worthless. It just makes it the first.
So … to generalise that, what you’re asserting is there’s no point in trying to identify music trends, because there aren’t any. Do you have any scientific proof of that? 
I thought I gave you one? Look for Howard moon or jazz daleks.
(Too obscure?)
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I’m now imagining someone asserting that all hip-hop performers look like Eminem.
I was totally wrong. I just contacted the band that does this tune so well and it was written by Lise Sinclair ( http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/28/lise-sinclair ) who was not that much older than me. She was from the Shetlands but lived on the Fair Isle, half way between Shetland and the Orkneys.
You know I am both joking and just looking for the excuse to use the phrase ‘jazz dalek’, right?
The problem is that a lot of people are trying to generalize from “by several measures, there have been no major upheavals in musical structure since the early '90s” to “this modern pop music objectively sucks.” The former may be a fact, assuming the methodology is sound, but the latter is most definitely an opinion.
Nice straw man you got there. Shame if something happened to it.
That pun was intended, be honest with yourself ;).
I didn’t quite mean all music. The Hit lists provide some sorting by popularity or sales or whatever (you can read it in the link), so I was suggesting that the first 100 might not be enough to also see the trends in sub populations, but I don’t know how far to go down, I suppose until you run out of resources or interest to process the data. I imagine the classification algorithm could handle your 3-year-old xylophone (my new Kidz Rock cover band) just as well as everything else, and then class them all using cladistics or some other grouping algorithm.
Amazon’s suggestions algorithm is one of my top predictions for a computer program to achieve sentience by the end of this century. Google page rank will probably get there first, though.
I disagree with his quite a bit, at least when it comes to popular alternative rock. There has been an explosion of folky alt-rock (banjos and ukeleles everywhere!) in the twenty-teens. Though perhaps you were referring specifically to pop music referred to as “pop”, which IMO only “all sounds the same” to those who aren’t into it. I’m personally not much of a pop guy, but my kids are, and even there I’ve noticed a bit more of an influx of singer/songwriters lately.
Musically, they’re pretty standard rock guys. Their lyrics, on the other hand, definitely get a bit wacky at times. God, I loves me some D.
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