The dimise of my city's orchestra

[Bones]

I don't know anything about good professional sports teams... I live in the Washington, DC area.

[barfle]

Bones, I share your concern!<P>Do you realize when the Raiders and Rams left Los Angeles, they were left with only two professional football teams, the Bruins and the Trojans!

[priya978]

Who said that I haven't tried sports. I was on my city's southside baseball team. I played basketball for many years, too. And I'm glad you have a band, but unfortunately here, where I live, our band is in danger of being somewhat abolished, so I've heard. I'm just saying that if people would encourage music as much as they do music the world would be a MUCH more magical, musical, wonderful place, then it ever shall be.

[monkeymd2b]

While I agree that some research appears stupid and wastes money from the standpoint of the human population in general, there is a point to some of it. I read that article provided up above and it made a point that is relevant to humans about habitat fragmentation and genetic isolation - both occur in human populations just not in your personal community (think Amish populations, inbreeding in royal families to protect the line, etc). You have to remember that unless you're reading the actual research paper in journals like New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, etc, you're only reading, for lack of a better term, the dumbed down version and so of course it will sound less impressive or important. In many ways, the results of these seemingly useless research projects work in the way that the 6 degrees to Kevin Bacon game works. You gotta make the connections for it to make sense and be useful to your particular interest/field of study. <BR>As for Eugene's point about if the same emphasis/money was put into music as sports, I agree that would make the world very musical and fun but that will happen the day hell freezes over. Ah, I can just imagine the controversy over the latest rankings in the BCS of orchestral ensembles...