That’s interesting about the expressiveness of music notation. I’m really looking forward to being able to read it. I’m currently just reading and playing five notes on the treble clef (A – G) and three on the base clef (G, A & B), so I have a long way to go. But Sandy is already pretty impressed that I’ve come this far in just a few weeks of learning from an iPad app. That said, I think she’s about had it with listening to me practice songs like Yankee Doodle Dandy over and over. 😉

@Jason, please let us know if/when you start the non-profit, that’s definitely a cause I want to support. My wife and I would like to have a kid soon, and I’m hoping that the program takes off across the country before my kid gets old enough to participate.

Also, I wanted to comment on your music discussion — I was classically trained on the piano for 8 years of my childhood, and I can say that music notation contains a HUGE amount of granularity. In addition to the notes, rests and time signatures, there are tempo signatures, dynamics indicators (varying levels of intensity, plus gradients — crescendos and diminuendos), and various forms of accent marks (staccato, tenuto, fermata, grace notes, etc). So while each pianist always has some unique expressiveness, music notation (especially for classical music) contains everything you need for a pretty accurate reproduction of the music as the composer intended it.

Some musicians take a very mathematical approach to music, like this guy Pat Martino (Jazz guitarist). He basically takes core notes from a chord and by creating operations like multiplications he generates tons of chords (that actually exist) out of one single chord. He even made diagrams to explain this. He has a course called Linear Expressions where he explains how he comes up with these formulas.

I’ve seen people do matrix operations like organizing scales in the form of an Identity Matrix and transform them to create new scales. It’s crazy.

And of course many will say that music relates to math in terms of oscillations and vibration etc, but to me operations with notes sounds more interesting.

I was in the middle of writing a note about how musical notation is encoding or compressing the data when Justin mentioned compression, so now I don’t have much else to say. 🙂

@Justin, interesting to hear about the pivot for Nugget, as it seems rather natural given how you were previously describing what you wanted to accomplish (such as the customizable checklists, reading material, next steps, and gamification of the system). Of course, you’ll always need to balance that against your customers actually becoming successful, such as the customer that latched onto an idea and you helped with the logo…if they succeed, they won’t need the service any more, or the service won’t deliver the same value. You may need to consider expanding into post-launch services. A space station will always need new supplies and on going maintenance.

@Jason, Amazing to hear how Math Academy has progressed. I liked how you talked about learning from the teaching of the kids and tweaking as you go along. I’m sure that there are things that had you been trained in how to be a teacher that some things would have come earlier, perhaps a bit like how some people learn how to play an instrument, but not how to read music, or know music theory from an academic perspective. Perhaps you would have thought earlier about what foundational topics weren’t being properly addressed, or perhaps you would have been too worried about getting everything covered well that you wouldn’t have made it as far as you did.

Sounds like Jason is getting back into the gym. I found this youtube channel to be pretty good. The guy seems very knowledgeable

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe0TLA0EsQbE-MjuHXevj2A