> The longer something has existed, the longer it is likely to continue existing.

aka the (postulated) Lindy Effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Just a different way of looking at survivorship bias (“all of these old buildings were built really well!”).

I have long suspected that the aliens will recognize Go (the game), but (obviously) not Chess (the other game).

I suspect they will even recognize Go's 19x19 board (b/c it has properties other board sizes would not have).

But would they recognize 12 tones scales?

> But would they recognize 12 tones scales?

It's possible that they might, but if they have any kind of musical discernment they might find it objectionable unless they're as lazy as we are.

12-tone equal temperament works more-or-less because it gives good-enough approximations of almost all the small-number ratios that a musician making relatively straightforward music would care about. However, thirds and sixths are pretty out-of-tune and frequency ratios with sevens in them like 7:6 and 7:4 don't have any reasonable approximation.

On the other hand, 41-tone equal temperament is a much better system in just about any way you might care about, except that it makes building physical instruments more complicated because there's more notes to worry about. 53 is also really good, but that's even more notes.

And then there's pure just intonation, which is a great option if you don't really care about being able to transpose freely to/from any key, but you want each note pitch to be dead-on exact.

In other words, 12-TET is a kind of local optimum that we're stuck in for historical reasons and because the barriers to change are high. You might as well ask if an alien civilization would recognize the concept of daylight-savings-time, or the QWERTY keyboard, or the electoral college.

> But would they recognize 12 tones scales?

Assuming they have musical instruments and don't have far more digits (fingers or other dextrous appendages) than us, they probably would, and even if they did have more digits, it'd seem like a fairly obvious choice for a species with our anatomy. Especially for equal temperament, but also for just intonation, a 12-tone scale provides exceptionally good approximations or numerous instances of the simplest possible frequency ratios, so any creature that has to limit the number of tones on their instruments for practical considerations will have a high likelihood of stumbling on a 12-tone scale even before developing an understanding of why it actually works so well and/or find it a very compelling option given a more in-depth analysis.

> But would they recognize 12 tones scales?

Relatively? More likely. "Oh yeah, we get that. At a number of levels which we call honktaves, incidentally."

Absolutely? As in, we have that set of frequencies bolted on to our culture too? Seems less likely.

I've studied math books this way. Never a whole book, but certainly sections or chapters here and there. I found it gave me a much improved appreciation for the high level structure of the material (or at least of it's presentation).

"I don't know shit about fuck."

> I wish it was easier to create "snapshots" of a particular set of environment variables in order to use them later as run environments.

docker gives you this (but only as part of a whole ecosystem, which for various reasons you might not want to hitch your horse to).

I think of your area (compilers) not as outside the front-end/back-end dichotomy, but (to your point) outside the the world of web-apps, etc.

The front-end/back-end lens can be applied to compilers -- just the "front-end" (invocation options, error/status messages, maybe IDE integrations) is very thin, compared to the "back-end" (i.e., everything else).

> "front-end" (invocation options, error/status messages, maybe IDE integrations) is very thin

I thought the front end of a compiler was the parser and the associated code analysis steps (such as type checking), not "error messages".