tuesdAY | february 18, 2020

MDM

P11

My classmate in college, the current Ifugao Rep. Solomon Chungalao, must be in a celebratory mood these days.

This is the same legislator who first proposed in 2009 the legalization of marijuana production for medical purposes when then-Prospero Nograles was House Speaker.

Last week, the Ifugao legislator got a measure of satisfaction when the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB) approved in principle a resolution that would allow the use of cannabidiol (CBD) for alleviating severe forms of epilepsy.

Now CBD is considered one of two components of marijuana that is known to produce psychoactive effects. The other is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

The DDB, the government’s policy-making body on the prevention and control of drug abuse, apparently is influenced by a

World Health Organization (WHO) report backing the use of CBD. The WHO report said: “In humans, CBD exhibits no effects indicative of any abuse or dependence potential … To date, there is no evidence of public health-related problems associated with the use of pure CBD.”

The report added that scientific proof showed that CBD alleviates seizures in people with epilepsy.

In sponsoring the bill then, Chungalao also advocated for safeguards to prevent use of “medical marijuana” from getting out of hand.

“It is one way of licensing people who will plant marijuana for medical and scientific purposes,” he said.

For precedence, Chungalao cited the legalization of marijuana use by the US state of Colorado which allowed the sale of the substance for recreational

His successor-brother, Rep. Antonio Albano, filed House Bill No. 279 in August 2019 that sought to provide access to medical cannabis as compassionate means of medical treatment. The bill also sought to expand research on the medicinal properties of marijuana.

“It’s important for us to make sure that the medical aspect gets passed first before we deal with the recreational,” Albano explained. He clarified that the recreational purposes of marijuana remain the stumbling block against medical cannabis.

With Chungalao back at the House of Representatives, Albano’s bill gets another stalwart. And with the Dangerous Drugs Board’s decision as an anchor, a determined push to pass the bill into law in the current Congress is not far fetched.

***The Indian yogi and

author Jaggi Vasudev a.k.a. Sadhuguru raised an interesting point when asked about his opinion on the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak in China.

He said it was an unfortunate reality “but that it has happened very often.”

“In 2013 there was SARS, in 2012 there was MAREs, different names from coming from the same sources,” he said.

He said the people of China must look at why it is happening time and again.

He ended by saying that while the Chinese government is in a war footing in handling the situation, “it cannot be able to contain it because people will move.”

At the same time, he clarified that there is no discrimination against the Chinese people because of the virus outbreak, only isolation, which is not the same.

Math and music

Medical marijuana getting somewhere

I was perhaps among the few who detested math and related sciences when I was in college. My argument, always, was that it was enough for me to know basic arithmetic – addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I always believed that I did not need to extensively know Physics, Geometry, Algebra, and other mathematical specializations.

But boy, I was dead wrong.As I progressed in music,

I came to realize that even the simplest form of songs had mathematical value in them.

For example, there is mathematical chemistry even in Bahay Kubo, a Filipino folk song that all of us probably memorized before setting foot in school. While the song consists of just the eight notes of the musical scale – do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do – these were

note so that these would still fit in the bar.

That’s how basic arithmetic is used in music. But what about physics?

bars and used just one note, turning it into a whole note, the value of which now becomes one whole beat, but it did not affect the harmony even if the Piano was tackling a different sequence.

Division was also very evident in the next example.

purposes to state residents aged 21 and older.

Medical marijuana is also poised for legalization in 40 states in the US of A by the end of 2020.

Following up from where Chungalao left, Isabela Rep. Rodilo Albano in 2016 filed

House Bill 6517, also known as Philippine Compassionate Medical Cannabis Act.

The proposed legislation sought to provide compassion and better quality of life to patients suffering from seizures and multiple sclerosis.

In physics, we are taught about velocity and speed, mechanics, etc.

Taking physics into the song in example, the time signature of ¾ guides us as to the motion or how the song should be played. This is also called the mechanics. But above the staff, there is a number which showed us that a note should be played slow, at 80 beats per minute or 80 bpm. That is speed. It shows us that the song should be played in a slow rate.

The intensity or velocity of how each section should also be played can be shown in Figure 1, where the 5th bar of both the voice and the violin received the notation symbol mf or mezzoforte. This would

tell the musicians handling each part that the section should be played somewhat loudly.

Algebra you said? Yes,

it is also important in music. “A song is a sequence of notes, arranged together into pleasing patterns. And algebra is the study of patterns, like the ones in music.” It is a series of numbers (each note is represented by the numbers 1-7. Some songs even use the Fibonacci sequence, such as Lady Gaga’s Perfect Illusion. The song’s sequence is made up of numbers that are each the sum of the previous two numbers.

Lastly, why would geometry be important to music? Because each musician is expected to know the shape and relative arrangement of their instruments to be able to play their parts.

arranged in a sequence to form the melody that we now have. Their composition, structure, properties, behavior, and the changes they undergo during a

reaction with other notes had been painstakingly taken into consideration.

Using Bahay Kubo as our example from henceforth, we can also see that basic math is at work.

Notice that the score sheet of the intro shown here for the song showed several instruments. The violin part used addition (notes that are not in the melody were added to produce a different harmony). Addition was also used in the piano rhythm so that all three notes would produce a chord.

Explaining addition further, it can either be done to sum up three notes to produce a simple chord, or to produce a different melody that does not run contrary to the harmony.

There is also subtraction in the first figure shown. If you

take a closer look at the score sheet, the violin song had just one note in the 5th bar. The particular bar eliminated three notes in the preceding

In Figure 2, The voice part divided the bar into two notes while the piano part divided it into three notes. The number of notes inserted into the

bar still added to one whole beat. More importantly, the division of the notes by other instruments did not affect the whole of the song, instead, it provided contrast that just made it more beautiful.

In figure 3, the use of multiplication can be clearly

shown by the violin section’s use of six notes in the 7th bar. While the song used ¾ as beat, the violin section multiplied or doubled the speed of each