Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

Aristotle

Is there a thread somewhere where I can gauge interest in a meetup in my area? I'm from Winnipeg, a medium-sized city in Canada, and I would be interested in starting a meetup group, but I honestly don't know if there's anyone in the city who reads LW other than me (we're not even on this list, for example). I think this is probably a concern for everyone outside major metropolitan areas--we don't want to put the effort in until we're at least sure that like-minded people actually exist in our vicinity.

Is there anyone who's had success with meetups in areas of similar size who would be willing to offer advice?

The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.

--George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

--Ursula K. Le Guin {Lord Estraven}, The Left Hand of Darkness

Surely a man who possesses even a little erectioris ingenii [of the higher way of thinking] has not become entirely a cold and clammy mollusk, and when he approaches what is great it can never escape his mind that from the creation of the world it has been customary for the result to come last, and that, if one would truly learn anything from great actions, one must pay attention precisely to the beginning. In case he who should act were to judge himself according to the result, he would never get to the point of beginning. Even though the result may give joy to the whole world, it cannot help the hero, for he would get to know the result only when the whole thing was over, and it was not by this he became a hero, but he was such for the fact that he began.

--Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

They often do [scramble the reels] at art houses, and it would seem that the more sophisticated the audience, the less likely that the error will be discovered.

--Pauline Kael, Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?

Related

Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.

--Bruce Lee

Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.

--Paul Graham, How to Do Philosophy

[surprisingly not a duplicate]

Complete traversals of a set of whole-tone-related keys are incredibly rare in music this early; I don't know of another example and would not be that surprised if one doesn't exist. You're right that such a piece seems easy in principle, but that's from a current viewpoint. So I think that Hofstadter may in part be implicitly relying on some knowledge of the early-eighteenth-century context when he stresses how unusual the piece is.

(There is actually also a technical reason why this loop is so strange -- it has to do with what music theorists call "crossing the enharmonic seam" -- but Hofstadter doesn't appear to be referring to that.)

Forgive my ignorance, not having read GEB, but I can't help being underwhelmed by the Bach example. This Youtube video plays the Bach canon in question. The canon begins in C minor and modulates up in whole tones until it arrives at C minor again an octave higher (the Youtube recording returns to the same octave, but it does so using trickery--notice that in Bb minor, the sixth time through, it ends on a D notated a ninth above the next C but sounding only a step above it).

Unless I'm missing something, this is rather like saying that if you walk for ten hundred-metre lengths, you'll end up a kilometre from where you started. Yes, you will, but so what?