The Wonderful World of Greg Karber

OK—some days even bloggers get a gift. Mostly it’s uphill, you know—not every day has a British prince hitting baseballs with a bunch of blacks kids in Harlem, or a Venezuelan dude becoming director of the LA Phil.

So how likely was it that I’d strike it rich three times in a row? Because that’s what happened, when a gentleman who has now gone viral, Greg Karber, dropped into my day with his brilliant idea: give Abercrombie& Fitch clothing to the homeless.

Damn, why are everybody else’s ideas better than mine? No wonder he goes viral; it was an idea someone just had to think of. A & F, as you may remember, has decided that they only want cool people in their store, and in their clothes as well. So they don’t donate defective merchandise to people who might need it, they burn the clothes.

Douchebags, is what Karber calls them, and it’s an assessment that’s pretty hard to challenge. What’s wonderful, however, is the sheer ingenuity of Karber’s scheme, as well as its interesting twist: doing well by doing good.

Doing well because his video has gotten 1, 263, 997 hits on YouTube. Oh, and it was uploaded on May 13, 2013. So it will be interesting to see—writing a post usually takes an hour or so; how many hits will he have had by the time I finish this thing?

Well, it has to be said, Karber needs no help from this blogger—he’s made it! Yup, he’s doing the 15 minutes of fame. Take a look at this clip, and tell me he’s not wonderful….. 
  

Right, so what else has the guy done? Well, you can check out his website, which with breathtaking logic is called http://www.gregkarber.com .

Do it and you’ll see a guy who’s clearly done his work. Take a look at the clip below, which has been taken from his Greg Carber Video Show.

Nor is this enough for the imaginatively fecund Karber / Carber. Here he goes into the tantalizing world of the Ouija board…

The supernatural seems to be a common theme in—oh, what the hell, let's call it the—oeuvre of Karber. Take a look at the clip below....



Of course, every guy has a serious side, so that's why Karber had to do the koan of the day....



Lastly, there's this fascinating clip of the number pi.



Right, and here's what Karber says about it....

1. What is This?

225 Digits of π is a mathematic auralizer, a system by which the digits of π are converted to music. The piece was conceived and created by Amin Osman and Greg Karber.
You can purchase it on iTunes.

2. The Structure of 225 Digits of π.

The digits 0-9 were mapped to two octaves of a pentatonic scale.
We chose the pentatonic scale for three reasons. Firstly, each octave contains five notes, so the digits may be mapped evenly onto two octaves. Secondly, since the pentatonic scale lacks semitones and tritones, its pitches can be played in almost any arrangement without creating dissonance.
Thirdly, as this wonderful performance by Bobby McFerrin illustrates, the pentatonic scale seems hardwired into our brains. A fundamental scale for a fundamental number.
We chose the key of A and assigned the digits as follows:

0 = A2
1 = B2
2 = C#3
3 = E3
4 = F#3
5 = A3
6 = B3
7 = C#4
8 = E4
9 = F#4

However, while using the pentatonic scale removes dissonance, it also eliminates tension. As such, we added a bassline which followed a simple chord progression:

F#m F#m
D D
F#m F#m
D D
A A
F#m F#m
E A

This contextualized π's melody and gave it a dynamism which did not exist on its own.
We additionally mapped the a spectrum of colors to each of the digits, as follows:

0 = 
1 = 
2 = 
3 = 
4 = 
5 = 
6 = 
7 = 
8 = 
9 = 

A pastel spectrum was chosen for the same reason as the pentatonic scale: we felt it would produce less dissonance and be more pleasing to the senses.

3. Why π Fascinates Us.

π is, of course, most well known for expressing the relationship between the diameter and the circumference of a circle.

C = πd

However, this is not the only occurence of π. It recurs in several fields of mathematics, from statistics to number theory, often in situations where the connection to circles is difficult to fathom.
The most striking of these, perhaps, is this version of the Leibniz series:

This series sums so slowly it takes 300 terms before it is accurate for the first two digits of π. To calculate 10 correct decimal points of π would require five billion terms.
So get out your calculator.
Early mathematicians believed π to be rational, meaning they thought it could be represented by one whole number divided by another. Sometimes these mathematicians claimed that π equaled 22/7. It doesn't, but 22/7 is accurate for the first two digits, and that's close enough for almost all ancient uses.
You only need about 40 decimal places of π to calculate the circumference of the known universe to within a margin of error of about half the diameter of a proton.
The digits of π are thought to be random. However, no proof of such randomness exists. (If you could prove it, you could get a lot of attention and probably a number of new Twitter followers.)
If π is random, then its infinite length means that every finite pattern that could possibly exist exists within it. This has some mindblowing consequences. For example, let's say that we assigned each letter of the alphabet to a two-digit number:

A = 01
B = 02
C = 03
...
X = 24
Y = 25
Z = 26 

Assuming randomness, every single possible string of letters would be represented somewhere within π. This would include the Declaration of Independence, the lyrics to Gungnam Style, and the complete works of Shakespeare.

4. An Unfinishable Symphony...

While π never ends, "225 Digits of Pi" does. (Obviously, it ends after 225 digits.) However, this does not necessarily have to be so.
Through procedural generation, the digits of π could be determined on-the-fly by a computer, which could assign the digits to tones automatically (eliminating the very tedious project of individually entering notes). Then, the bassline, beat, and other assorted instruments could be cued to enter and leave based on a few simple rules.
If the rules were clever enough, they could retain musical dynamism indefinitely, so that the piece could -- thereotically -- go on forever...

What a guy—hunh? He does all this cool stuff, and he's funny too. Damn, and guess what?

Abercrombie & Fitch is at 1, 488, 103....

Royalty on Several Levels

OK—two guys. One grows up in a very poor town in Venezuela, gets introduced to the violin as a child, and goes into an amazing program, El sistema. He goes on to do well, becoming the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which recently extended his contract. But he doesn’t forget his roots: he’s also the director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra.

If you know classical music, you know Gustavo Dudamel; if you don’t, you won’t. But the other guy in the clips below you will know: Prince Henry of Wales. Now, as you can see below, given a baseball jersey / t-shirt and crowned Prince Harry of Harlem.

Well, the world needs heroes, and it may be that we need them more than ever. So Harry, along with his brother and sister-in-law, decided to create something called Coach Core, just before the Olympics in London last year. The three turned to an organization called Greenhouse, which works in London’s poorest communities, and which runs programs…well, wait. It’s easier just to copy / paste what they say about themselves…..

Greenhouse puts inspirational coaches into schools and community clubs to work with 8 to 18 year-olds across 10 areas; Football, basketball, table tennis, volleyball, judo, swimming, drama, multi-sports for young people with special educational needs, tennis and athletics.

Great idea, hunh? So now, the Coach Core program has its first  group of coaches: 23 college age kids who are working with Greenhouse Master Coaches to learn the arts and skills of coaching, as well as the fundamentals of child development and how to instill core values. Oh, and also something else—fundraising.

Well, that’s a tremendous story. But watching the clip below, I noticed the banner behind the speakers’ rostrum—Harlem RBI, it said. Right—time to check that out.

And what a find! It all started in 1991, when some volunteers got together and created two baseball diamonds in an abandoned lot. The next year, there was a year-round youth mentoring program for kids at risk, a newsletter, and a summer literacy program.

Important, because kids of middle class or upper class families do all right during the long summer vacations. They either progress academically or at least maintain what they’ve got. But kids in Harlem have nothing to do, and when they hit the classroom in September, they’re one or two reading levels behind. So here’s the deal: the 700 kids in the program read during the morning, and play baseball during the afternoon, for 6 weeks during the summer. It’s first come, first served—and importantly, it’s free.

But it’s not just about the summer program—the organization established a charter public school in 2008, and its kids are doing great. Here are the results:

•   Our fourth graders increased their proficiency in Math by 91%

•   Our fourth graders increased their proficiency in English Language Arts (ELA) by 154%

•   Our fourth graders made the second biggest jump (out of 90 NYC charter schools) in improvement in ELA, and sixth biggest jump in improvement in Math. That's big progress!

•   Our third graders made an incredible showing in their first year of testing, outperforming last year's third grade cohort by double digits.

In both English and Math, DREAM fourth graders outperformed the school district average and the New York City average.

Because the summer program is old enough, the first graduates are coming back and telling the kids: “I was where you were. I buckled down and studied and graduated from high school and now I’m in college and nobody has ever done that before. Not in my family, at least….”

Oh, and how are they doing? Well, as you can hear in the clip below, 100% of the kids in the program graduate from high school, and 97% go on to college. That’s in a community where 50% of kids drop out of high school.

It makes a difference, you know, to see a guy from the ‘hood come back and tell his story. And yes, it’s cool when a British prince comes through the neighborhood, but it might be totally cool when Mark Teixeira comes onto the field. Look, the guy signed a $180 million dollar contract with the New York Yankees, and he’s got a World Series ring (don’t know what that is, but I assume it’s important).

Well, for a lot of kids, it’s baseball that teaches you team building, discipline, getting back up to the plate after you’ve struck out. For me, it was the cello, the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra, and several inspiring men and women—all important.

Something similar happened to Gustavo Dudamel. Here’s his story, taken directly from his website:

Named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2009, Gustavo Dudamel hails from humble beginnings in the small town of Barquisimeto, Venezuela. Born in 1981, he began violin lessons as a child with José Luis Jiménez at the Jacinto Lara Conservatory. He continued his violin studies with José Francisco del Castillo at the Latin American Academy of Violin. His conducting studies began in 1996 with Rodolfo Saglimbeni and, the same year, he was given his first conducting position, Music Director of the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra.  In 1999, he was appointed Music Director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra and began conducting studies with the orchestra’s founder, Dr. Abreu; a few years later in 2004, Dudamel was brought to international attention by winning the inaugural Bamberger Symphoniker Gustav Mahler Competition. These early musical and mentoring experiences molded his commitment to music as an engine for social change – a lifelong passion.

You know, guys like Dudamel and Teixeira are my heroes, much more than a prince. Oh, but sorry—I’ve forgotten the real heroes, those two teachers in the clip below, who walk into a classroom every day, take attendance, call Billy out for screwing around, give permission for Ginny to go to the bathroom, and then start teaching.

Nobody else in our society is more important.