[seqfan] Re: Arabic Poetry Sequences

[Antti Karttunen]

Ali,

"Rhythms that come from the circle” remind me of Euclidean rhythms, see e.g.:

https://cdm.link/2011/03/circles-and-euclidian-rhythms-off-the-grid-a-few-music-makers-that-go-round-and-round/

and

Godfried T. Toussaint's book "The Geometry of Musical Rhythm".
There should be also many papers about the subject written in various journals.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_rhythm


The rest are my comments to Brad's posting:

On 9/2/19, bradklee at gmail.com <bradklee at gmail.com> wrote:
> Neil,
>
> Granted, I could be mistaken.
>
> There is an issue about whether A000045 should be named
> Fibonacci Or Hemachandra numbers, and how do we decide?

I think A000045 is the best, and then, as the main language of OEIS is
English, use the most established name in the English language,
"Fibonacci numbers". Then in comments we should mention the other
names, especially if they originate from prior discoveries. Compare to
case of A007318, which has even more names, like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartaglia's_triangle

>
> But actually, I was really thinking about demographics, and guessing
> that a census of OEIS would be heavily weighted toward Europe
> and USA, with very few members from China, India, Korea, Taiwan,
> Thai Land, Sri Lanka, Japan, etc. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, turkey, etc.
> And I also don’t think OEIS has many people from Africa.
>
> A pro-scientific bias sounds desireable, but could be problematic.
>
> The other day I was reading a butterfly article by Japanese authors.
> It was published by Springer, and sounded to have been written by
> Germans. The article fell short culturally, and I much preferred
> another that included a discussion of endangerment to satoyama.
> The author also included one paragraph on personal, childhood
> recollections, of studying insects in satoyama before westernization
> changed the landscape. This was a powerful rhetorical technique.

Is that really "westernization" or "modernization"? It seems that
these words are almost synonyms nowadays, with the former used when
the writer wants to show a clear pro- or contra-attitude towards the
subject ("western human rights", "western consumer culture").
I myself could claim that "westernization" has spoiled many things
here in Finland, although I guess it is even worse in the USA. Like
there is no there in the shopping malls.

But for the disappearance of satoyama, Wikipedia gives more concrete reasons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoyama#Causalities_of_disappearance


>
> So I think there is a demonstrated, pro-western bias to OEIS, but
> will listen if you have a rebuttal, especially regarding demographics.

The first meaning given in
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bias#English
is "Inclination towards something; predisposition, partiality,
prejudice, preference, predilection."
that is, something that is considered quite negative in current zeitgeist.

However, the problem with the b-word is that it is increasingly
blurred with "weighted distribution", like the latter itself would
imply an underlying prejudice, i.e., bad faith.

That the current demographics of OEIS is quite heavily Western
(although I see that we have many great contributors from other parts
of world also), can be explained quite well with the history of
Internet penetration, and the economic state of each country. That is,
where people have (or do not have) time to spend with activity that is
not very remunerative, not even for one's academic career.

But things change, e.g., for Internet penetration:
https://www.brownpundits.com/2019/08/20/the-masses-hitting-the-internet/

Of course the early-comers of OEIS have now picked most of the
low-hanging fruits in the sequence space, BUT... as this space is
quite vast, I think we have barely scratched the surface of what are
interesting kinds of sequences. That is, what kinds of interesting
algorithmic phenomena (i.e., anything generated by some kind of
"rule") we can encode in Z^N space? Like, e.g., musical or poetic
rhythms.


Best regards,

Antti