Sunday, December 14, 2014

Music and Scientific Progress

I’ve discovered that I prefer take-at-school finals to take home finals. I’d rather have the compressed stress of a few hours of testing with a definite start and end time than the elongated discomfort of an all day (or three day) take-home exam.

I had my first regularly scheduled final exam this week. After a Monday of studying Business Associations, I spent four hours on Tuesday morning writing as much about partnership law, fiduciary duties, and corporate law as I could come up with. I don’t think the end result was very good; I just hope it was enough. While I enjoyed the class and felt like I understood the legal reasoning, I don’t think I did very well on applying the law to the facts given in the final.

But at least it only lasted four hours.

Tuesday night was much more enjoyable. I was invited to join a friend for some respite from school and studying at a Tallis Scholars concert in Newport News. The Tallis Scholars sing Renaissance choral music – no instruments or microphones, just ten people singing on stage and absolutely filling the concert hall with pitch perfect music. It was beautiful.

Though I feel such music should, as a general rule, be heard in a concert hall or a church, YouTube works in a pinch. Click here to listen to Vigilate, by William Byrd.

I spent the rest of the week researching for my supervising professor. He asked me to research organ (as in kidneys and hearts, not musical instruments) donation  and alternative reproduction technologies (such as in vitro fertilization). This led me on a nice tangent into 3D printing, which has expanded to the realm of printing human tissue. One of the major companies working on organic 3D printing uses “Bioink”, an substance made out of living cells and support material (if I remember correctly). That term made me smile; to paraphrase a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, “Scientific progress goes Bioink.”

On Saturday I was treated to another concert, this time at the Williamsburg Community Chapel . Their Christmas concert was performed with a lot of heart and enthusiasm. It struck me as halfway between the Lawrence Welk show and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Not something I’d go to every year, but a nice evening out after a week of staring at my computer.

The week ended on another musical note: the ward choir Christmas program. Our performance made me realize how quickly this semester has gone by. We started practicing Christmas songs in August; now all of a sudden the program is done and the semester is nearly over.

In fact, there are three school days left: one for six more hours of research, one for studying Trusts & Estates, and one for taking my last exam – which will happily only last three hours.


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