First swim for this year

The opening of the kibbutz swimming pool was delayed this year because of Covid-19, but it is now open (it might have been open since last week). Today I had the opportunity of making my first swim of the year. It was very similar to the first swim of last year: my left arm starting hurting after a few lengths but the pain disappeared as I carried on. My right ear hurt - this is something new. I couldn't get my swimming headphones to work, even though I supposedly charged them the day before. As the day was hot (the temperature reached 37°C in the afternoon) and the water was cool, the difference between the two (which is what we feel) was great: I felt like I was swimming through ice for the first length. 

Oh yes: I swam 16 lengths, which seems to be my distance for my first swim; I wonder how far I'll swim next week. Then I came home and after showering and drinking tea, I fell asleep for an hour.

[Edit from a few days later] I didn't charge the mp3 player at all. I mistakenly tried to plug the usb adapter directly into a computer, forgetting that I had a special cable for this. Today I found the cable, and connected everything, after which the player began showing a red light: presumably a sign of charging.

The background behind another song that is used for Israeli folk dancing

The story that I told in a blog a few days ago reminded me of a similar story. Every weekday for at least 40 years, the Army radio broadcasts at 4 pm a programme normally composed of 'classic' Israeli songs. Sometimes these songs are well known but frequently they are lesser known (at least, to me). I don't listen to this program frequently - I would only hear it when I had spent a day in Tel Aviv and was returning home with a colleague in his car.

One day a song was played that I recognised as it is used as the tune for another Israeli folk dance (which also I learnt in the early 80s), 'Nahal Naaran'. Hearing the song in the relative quiet of a car (as opposed to the distorted version played when dancing) enabled me to listen to it properly and I was most appreciative of it.

Once at home, I found the song on You Tube (as referenced above) and started to read about its background, primarily who sung. I could identify the man who seemed to be the lead singer but I was also mildly interested to discover who the others were. To my great surprise, I discovered that the female singer in the song is a member of my kibbutz!

Of course I had to write a gushing message that evoked an interesting response. Since then, the singer (who is probably now approaching the age of 80 and not someone with whom I have much contact) has become a friend of mine.

Is it OK to have a PhD thesis with shortcomings and inaccuracies?

I'll have to define this blog entry as a 'guest posting' as I have written almost nothing of what appears below. What is not mine will appear in italics and in black.

A few days ago, someone asked the question "Is it OK to have a PhD thesis with shortcomings and inaccuracies?" on the Academia Stack Exchange, beginning with the statement "I recently defended my PhD thesis and was awarded a pass with some minor corrections. I am due to submit the final version of my thesis very soon." Hopefully I will soon be in the same position (the latest news is that the external examiner has suggested a few dates in July).

The best answer was The thesis is a "good" one if you have passed and will be awarded your degree. Don't overthink it. You have learned something from producing it that you can leverage into future work. That is, in lots of ways, a big advantage. If your advisor is also happy and wants to work with you on any future extension, you have a positive outcome, if not a perfect one. On the basis of this answer, someone commented People forget that a PhD is a 'learning degree'. Too often, completion is treated as the end, when really it is only just the beginning. If you learned something and can express that you know how or why errors occurred and what they mean for your work, then you have proved you justify being awarded your PhD. A PhD is about the process, not the end result.

Back to me: there is a huge difference between the academic and lay understandings of a doctoral degree. A lay person believes that a doctorate shows how clever a person is, and that the doctorate discovered new knowledge (that might have been true once). The academic understanding is that the degree is an apprenticeship in performing research; it is unlikely in these days that anything startling new will arise from a doctoral thesis, but it is a good base from which to start further research.

A musical day

A starting point for today's story could equally be yesterday evening, a week ago, two years ago or even 42 years ago... I think I'll start from there. In the 1970s and 80s, kibbutzim used to have a weekly evening of Israeli folk dancing. When I emigrated in September 1978, there weren't enough people on my kibbutz who were interested in folk dancing so we used to combine with a neighbouring kibbutz and a neighbouring moshav. There was a new dance (to me) which I learnt fairly quickly: it had lots of bouncing around and was very fast, and dancing it produced a great deal of endorphins. I never managed to catch the name of the song, but it was a girl and boy singing alternate verses.

Over the years, I've enjoyed dancing this dance but still have never managed to learn the name of the tune. The recording to which we used to dance probably wasn't too clear and anywhere I was too busy bouncing around and trying not to collide with any one to catch the name of the song.  It was played the other week at the harvest festival (itself a strange event because of Covid-19), although I wasn't fast enough to record it on my mobile phone.

Yesterday evening I decided to make a brief recording of me playing the tune on the piano; I thought that I would send it to someone more versed than I in Israeli music during the period 1948-78, while it still had a charm of its own and was less western European in its attitude. This morning I sent my recording to a colleague and she replied within ten minutes. Here is the song which I know, and here is someone teaching the dance to a different version of the song, which is called 'The flower seller'.

Once I was finished with this song, I watched part of a documentary about the Tamla Motown label ('Hitsville') which was very interesting. Tamla was part of my childhood but it was not something which I ever grew close to, instead admiring it from afar.

Part of this inspired me to write some lyrics. At the beginning I worked out the music to a new song, whose arrangement I've been working on ever since. Unfortunately I've never been able to write any words for it, apart from an incomplete verse which I wrote at the beginning. Today I went back to the song, and within about ten minutes (literally - the writing went incredibly quickly) I wrote another two verses and a middle section, including rhymes and proper scansion. It makes me wonder how I can be barren for so long and suddenly the whole thing pops out.

After a rest, I thought I'd try my hand (or my voice) at recording the vocal. Instead of getting out the mike stand and microphone, I thought that I'd try the headset which I use for Team/Zoom meetings. This worked out very well - at least, after I turned off the air conditioner which was affecting the microphone badly. One take and I was done. Listening to the playback, I realised that the tune for the middle section was almost exactly the same as another of my songs, so I had to sing this part again with a different tune. This went quickly and I was also able to slot the new verse into the time line without ruining anything else.