1. Headphones, problems solved.

In all fairness though, your scenario suffers from an continunity problem. Did the neighbor pop out of nowhere? I'll go on that possibility because there's a severe continunity problem if not. I'll mention one continunity issue is that the neighbor doens't have to deal only with your music - there's plenty of other things they'd need to avoid. Washing the dishes? Taking a shower? Playing their own music? There's simply too many things that produce a strong enough sound that your music would be equal if not lower than what they can perceive.

Also, ome people here said that you'll be cooperating. I say you're being defecated on. Because their situation simply isn't really going anywhere - everyone MUST go down or else.. wahh, my ears.

Least convinient possible world, where my aforementioned continuty problem is not a problem, I'd say that they still need to cover for themselves - it's still their issue. They certainly need to solve it themselves, fair's fair. That doesn't allow you to be a dick, but I see no reason you should bend down while not getting anything in return.

All true, just not relevant. I do think there is a serious problem of having too thin skins today and it is not directly relevant to compassion. As late as in the 1960's, in the hippie age, people were listening to Zen Buddhist masters and similar gurus, like Osho, who would telling them you are not helpless with your feelings.

Osho's right hand did run the biggest bioattack on the US at the time. I don't want to live in a world where when someone doesn't like how an election is going to go they try to poison a significant portion of the electorate to keep them at home.

With increased technological capacities, this gets more dangerous.

Todays 25 years old seem to literally think other people control their emotions, other people can make them angry or sad, and from this grave mistake they make their whole system of ethics, they say making others sad or angry is wrong, that it is basically the responsibility of person A how he made person B feel and not person B's responsibility to police his own emotions and so on.

There are certainly people who hold that position but I'm not one of them.

If we look at:

(1) Becoming a success is a matter of hard work; luck has little or nothing to do with it. (2) Getting a good job mainly depends on being in the right place at the right time.

I don't think this is about birth advantages such as country of origin, high class parents and high IQ.

I think of science fiction as of sampling from futures-space; so it doesn't have to be the most probable scenario, just somewhat plausible.

A - I can transpose at sight, but not very quickly. Like grouchymusicologist, I do it using the concept of scale degrees.

B - I suppose it is plausible. But I can't think of any real-life examples. Learning good posture isn't going to hurt any athletic skill you try to develop. Having studied linguistics is only going to help you when you start to learn <random obscure language>.

C - I've never heard of such. Natural systems tend to be pretty intuitive.

D - Artists are the people who understand that what's on the page isn't music. It's just instructions on how to play the music. Theorists are the people who develop the notation, and they have a lot in common with scientists. (Many musicians are both.) Yes, some aspects of music notation and theory are counterintuitive. So are some aspects of mathematics. Plenty of people can do both with a high degree of skill.

Other than that, I don't really know what to tell you - except to use your highly trained mind to come up with ways to practice doing the things that you have problems doing, until you can do them well enough to please yourself.

I have read that blog some, and have tried the cold-showers thing. It's great - in the summertime. Winter came around and I kind of fell off the wagon.

In other applications, hormesis is probably why I don't have issues with stage fright anymore.

Are you referring to the "Mozart Effect" studies? That's what I found in the book (or at least the parts of the preview that were accessible), but Mozart is actually classical, not baroque. The effect seems to be small and specific to one particular type of task, according to this Nature meta-analysis:

Rauscher et al. 1 reported that listening to ten minutes of Mozart's music increased the abstract reasoning ability of college students, as measured by IQ scores, by 8 or 9 points compared with listening to relaxation instructions or silence, respectively1. This startling finding became known as the 'Mozart effect', and has since been explored by several research groups. Here I use a meta-analysis to demonstrate that any cognitive enhancement is small and does not reflect any change in IQ or reasoning ability in general, but instead derives entirely from performance on one specific type of cognitive task and has a simple neuropsychological explanation.

As a side note, if you're going to cite studies it would be great to continue Romeo's trend of actually linking to the relevant studies, since there's not enough info in your comment to find the ones you're referring to and I don't own Wiseman. I don't really trust Wiseman (or pop-sci books in general) to interpret findings with anything remotely resembling rigor.

Not "when the sun becomes a red giant", because red giants are variable on a much too short time scale, but, as others mentioned, we can probably keep the earth in a habitable zone for another 5 billion years or so. We have more than enough hydrogen on earth to provide the necessary potential energy increase with fusion-based propulsion, though building something like a 100 petaWatt engine is problematic at this point, (for comparison, it is a significant fraction of the total solar radiation hitting the earth).

EDIT: I suspect that terraforming Mars (and/or cooling down the Earth more efficiently when the Sun gets brighter) would require less energy than moving the Earth to the Mars orbit. My calculations could be off, though, hopefully someone can do them independently.

"Those who find this confusing may find it helpful to study mathematical logic, which trains one to make very sharp distinctions between the proposition P, a proof of P, and a proof that P is provable"

This is a bit of a side question, but wouldn't a proof that P is provable be a proof of P? In fact, it sounds like a particularly elegant form of proof.