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Un po’ tondo

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Every Mozart study states that his last Symphony, “Jupiter” (Köchel 551), is one of humankind’s greatest musical achievements. Every description of the symphony indicates that the first movement borrows a theme from a concert aria. Every one that I have read expresses surprise at this self-borrowing and states that the reason for it is a complete mystery. I think I know that reason.

The theme as it appears in the symphony begins like this:

jupiter

Click to listen [1]:

That theme is taken from the development of the short concert aria Un Bacia di Mano (A Handkiss) (K 451):

bacio

Hear it [2]:

The words sung on this theme are only part of the text, but they are the important part, emphasized and several times repeated:

Voi siete un po’ tondo
Mio caro Pompeo
L’usanze del mondo
Andate a studiar

meaning (my translation):

You are a bit of a simpleton,
My dear Pompeo.
Time for you to get out
And learn the ways of the world.

(Note to my Italian friends: yes, the Italian text  says “tondo”, not “tonto”. It may sound strange to you but apparently that’s how they talked in the settecento. The text, by the way, is attributed, although with no certainty, to Lorenzo Da Ponte.)

(Note to my American friends: yes, the current director of the CIA happens to be called “Pompeo”. From what I read in the news he could benefit from the advice. But let us not digress.)

What is this aria? It belongs to the “interpolated aria” genre, in which a composer would reuse the words of an air from an existing opera and set them to new music. Avoids having to ask a librettist for a new text, pleases singers by giving them bravura pieces, and undoubtedly for Mozart offers an excellent way to show the world how much more he could do, with the same words, than your average court composer. The text to Un bacio di mano originally came from an opera by Pasquale Anfossi.  The context of the aria is standard 18/19-th comedy fare: mock advice to an old man wanting to take a young spouse (as in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale).

All the Mozart biographies and analyses sound puzzled. Why in the world would Mozart, in one of his most momentous and majestic works, his last symphony, also the longest, insert a hint to an aria with such a lowbrow, almost silly subject? Here (from countless examples) is the kind of explanation you read:

Why risk interpolating yet another tune into the concatenation of ideas that he’s already given his listeners, and asked his orchestra to dramatize; and a melody, what’s more, that comes from a different expressive world, the low comedy of opera buffa as opposed to high-minded symphonic discussion? Mozart puts the whole structure of this movement on the line, seemingly for the sake of a compositional joke. It’s a piece of postmodernism avant la lettre, and the kind of thing that Beethoven, for all his iconoclasm, hardly risked in the same way in his symphonies.

Nonsense. Mozart liked jokes, but to think of him as some kind of dodecaphonist putting in random inserts is absurd. He would not include a gratuitous joke in a major work. “Postmodernism avant la lettre”, what is that supposed to mean? Some of the other commenters at least have the honesty to admit that they do not have a clue.

The clue is not so hard to find if you look at the words. In the aria already, the four lines cited break out seemingly from nowhere and through their repetition soar on their own, far above the triviality of the rest of the text. Mozart wanted to showcase this theme of urging a naïve man to get out and learn how the world works. And now, just a few weeks later — the aria is from June 1788, the symphony from July or August  — Mozart is broke, he just lost a child, his wife is sick, he has to beg his friend Puchberg for money, his stardom as a boy wonder is long gone, audiences (he thinks) have moved on, no one truly recognizes his genius. Other, more docile composers have decent, stable positions with a prince here or a duke there, and he who wanted to play the proud independent artist can hardly feed his family. He could have been organist at Versailles, and turned down the position [4] as beneath him; which it was, but at least it was a position. Here he is, the greatest genius of musical history, composing a symphony like no one else could even conceive of, and he sits alone in his derelict study with his wife coughing next door. He may not want to admit it, but deep down he feels that he has not long to live. Not one for self-pity, he looks sarcastically at his hungry self: you poor naïve soul, you never wanted to be a mere Anfossi or Salieri, and so you did not condescend to bow and smile humbly and flatter like everyone else did. You were so far above the rest of them that sooner or later the world was going to give you the recognition you deserve. Now this dirty attic. You are a bit of a simpleton, my dear Wolfie. Isn’t it time you got out, and learned the ways of the world?

That is the logical and human explanation. Do not ask for historical proof; it is a conjecture. But listen to the music, think of Wolfgang Amadeus in his mansard, read the words, and it will dawn on you too that this was what he meant when quoting his own looney tune.

Notes and references

[1] From Mackerras (Scottish Chamber Orchestra) performance here (first movement only). More performances (complete symphony) here.

[2] From the Bryn Terfel performance here. See more performances here. One is by José van Dam, of whom I am generally a great fan, but here I find the tempo too slow; same for the Thomas Hampson version. The Fischer-Dieskau recording is not what one would expect. Note that the aria is originally for a bass but most of these performances are by barytones (which is fine too). The Jardin des Voix (William Christie) video is fun.

[3] Symphony guide: Mozart’s 41st , see here.

[4] See e.g. here from Mozart, by Robert Gutman. Think of the effect on the later history of French music if he had been of a different mind!

Emerald wishes

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On display in the exhibition mentioned in the previous article is a citation, from Urmanche’s writings, of an aphorism by Qol Ghali (who, as I did not know, was a medieval Muslim Volga poet). It reads [1]:

Emerald is a stone
But not every stone is an emerald
And not everyone can distinguish emerald from stone

This sounds like an excellent way to extend my new-year greetings and wishes to the esteemed readers of this blog. May you, throughout 2018, have the wisdom to distinguish emeralds [2] from stones.

Notes

[1] Изумруд — камень. Но не каждый камень изумруд. И не каждый человек может отличить изумруд от камня. (Already a translation, since the original must be in some ancient Turkic language.)

[2] Not that (mentioning this to avoid any confusion) I am specifically wishing you any Ruby.

In pursuit and in flight

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There is currently in Kazan an exhibition of the works of the Tatar painter Baki Urmanche (1897-1990). One of his early drawings is entitled “The painter, the muse, and death” [1]:

The painter, the muse and death

It makes a good point. Not just about painters.

Note

[1] Художник, муза и смерть. The first word means “artist” but also, more specifically, “painter”, which Urmanche was (although he occasionally dabbled in other arts), so either translation is possible.

Before I start screaming once again…

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… at my would-be coauthors, would someone please tell them, and every non-native-English-speaker-but-aspiring-English-author, to read this? Please, please, please, please, please.

In English the verb “allow” cannot take an infinitive as a complement. Ever. You may not write “my method allows to improve productivity” (even if it’s true, which it probably isn’t, but never mind). Ever. You may write the equivalent in French, German, Russian, Italian and whatever, but not in English. Ever. In English you do not “allow to” do something. Ever. You allow someone or something to do something. Maybe, or maybe not, your method allows its users to improve productivity. That’s correct English. It is also OK to use a gerund [1]: your method allows improving productivity. Actually that sounds clumsy but at least it is grammatically correct.

The reason the gerund does not sound quite right here is that  in situations where foreign speakers instinctively think “allow to…” in their mother tongues and transport it directly to English, the native English speaker instinctively comes up with  something  different. Typically, one of:

  • Allow someone to, using a specific word instead of “someone”. The English language has a concrete slant and favors expressing all details, including some that in other languages remain implicit.
  • Make it possible to:  a bit wordy, but common and convenient, and definitely correct when followed by an infinitive (“my method makes it possible to improve productivity”). We politely leave it unsaid what the “it” is that is being made possible. This turn of phrase is the easiest if you want to remain as close to the original “allow to…” in your native language. Consider “make it possible to” as a mechanical translation of “allow to”. It works.
  • Support something. Remember this word. It is used more widely in English than its typical translations in other languages. Often it fits just where you initially would come up with “allow to”. Your method may support policies for improving productivity.
  • The gerund. It will sound less clumsy if what you are “allowing” is truly a process, and you are using “allow” in its direct sense of giving permission [2], rather than in the more general and weaker sense of supporting. The rules of tennis allow playing in either singles or doubles.
  • Generalizing the gerund, a plain noun (substantive). You can, in fact, allow something. Your methodology allows productivity improvements. Like the gerund, it does not sound as good as the other forms (“support” is better unless there truly is a notion of permission), but it is correct.
  • Or… nothing at all. Paraphrased from a text seen recently: “some techniques only allow to model internal properties, others allow to model external properties too”. So much better (in any language): some techniques only model internal properties, others also cover external ones. Whoever wrote the first variant should not, in the next three years, be allowed anywhere near the word “allow”.

Some people go around the issue by using “allow for doing something”. That usage is acceptable in American English (less so in British English), but by default “allow for” means something else: tolerating some possible variation in an estimate, as in “plan two hours for your drive, allowing for traffic”. As a substitute for “allowing to” this phrase has no advantage over the solutions listed above.

On last count, I had corrected “allow to” in drafts from coworkers, using one of these solutions, approximately 5,843,944,027 times (allowing for a few cases that I might have forgotten). Enough! Please, please, please, please, please, please, please. Make a note of this. It will allow me to live better, it will allow you to avoid my wrath, it  will make it possible for us to work together again, it will support a better understanding among the people in the world, it will allow faster refereeing and a better peer review process, it covers all needs, and it still allows for human imperfection.

Notes

[1] Or gerundive, or present participle: a word form resulting from addition of the suffix “-ing” to a verb radical.

[2] Note that beyond “allow” this discussion also applies to the verb “permit”. You permit someone to do something.

[3] Post-publication, Oscar Nierstrasz mentioned on Facebook that he has a Web page addressing the same point.

Small and big pleasures

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(Reproduced from my CACM blog.)

One of the small pleasures of life is to win a technical argument with a graduate student. You feel good, as well you should. It is only human to be want to be right. Besides, if you ended up being wrong all or most of the time, you should start questioning your sanity: why are they the students and you the supervisor, rather than the other way around?

One of the big pleasures of life is to lose an argument with a graduate student. Then you have learned something.

In English this time: a Marseillaise for our age

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Sometimes it is better not to know French. You will never quite get what Voltaire, Molière, Beauvoir, Zola, Hugo and Proust really mean and what Carmen and Faust really sing. But at least you will not find out what the Marseillaise really says. It is France’s national anthem and, according to a site dedicated to it, marseillaise.org, “believed by many to be the most stirring of all anthems“. Stirring, sure. Until you pay attention to the words.

I wrote an article on this blog, in French, proposing to shed the Marseillaise from its worst parts. A few people asked me to provide an English version; here it is. A rendition rather than a translation.

July the 14th, “Bastille day”, was France’s national holiday, and the opportunity for singing the Marseillaise. Politicians in towns large and small make a point of intoning it, in tune or (more often) out of it. One assumes — rather, one hopes — that occasionally they feel some embarrassment. You see, they understand French. The rest of the world hears the music, apparently good enough to have led such diverse composers as Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Schumann and Beethoven to cite it in their own works, and has the luxury of ignoring the words. Better so. Here are some of the gems (in my almost literal translation, all those I found on the Web are awful):

It’s us versus tyranny
We have raised our blood-stained flag

and

Do you hear, in the countryside,
The howling of these ferocious soldiers?
They come to snatch our sons and wives from our arms
And slit their throats

and the triumphal part of the chorus:

Let’s march, let’s march!
Let an impure blood
Soak the grooves of our fields!

So kind and welcoming.

What makes someone’s blood so impure that every patriot must take as his sacred duty to spill floods of it?

As a matter of fact, it happened, three quarters of a century ago. Hundreds of thousands of French people learned that their blood was now officially non-conformant. There are a few more episodes of that kind in the country’s history. They are not, to put it politely, the most glorious, and not the most appropriate to recall for celebration in the national anthem.

In the days before the festivities, hearing a 7-year old sing (in tune) the impure blood that must soak the grooves, I wondered what kind of thoughts such slogans can evoke among schoolchildren, who are instructed to memorize them and sing along. What about the blood-stained flag? What about the tyrants (Matteo Renzi? Mario Draghi?) who unleash on us their ferocious soldiers, not only to howl, but to snatch, from our arms, our sons and our wives, and slit their throats?

It is time to reform this racist and hateful song.

We need not quarrel about history. The song had a role. The revolution faced enemies, it was defending itself. When we commemorate that revolution today, we think not of Robespierre and the murder of Lavoisier (the creator of modern chemistry, whose executors famously explained that “the republic has no use for scientists“); we think of its message of liberty and fraternity. Enough blood, battles, ferocity. Sing what unites us today.

A national anthem should not, of course, be changed every year as a response to changes in fashion. By nature, it will always be a bit off. But after two hundred and thirteen years of existence, including one hundred and thirty-six of service as national anthem, it is time to shed the Marseillaise of the most shameful remnants of its original text. The music will stay; but the words must adapt to today’s France, which does not whine about a troubled past but looks forward to a bright future.

Only weak peoples seek unity only through the detestation of others. Their songs are full of rejection and negation. Strong peoples, for their part, invoke positive images. Which phrase better projects the proud attitude of a nation that believes in its destiny: “it’s us versus tyranny“, or “with us, marches democracy”? “Their impure blood” or “our pure hearts”? “Slit throats” or “admire”? Be the judge.

There have been proposals for alternative Marseillaises before, but they tend to be mirror images of the original, falling into their own excesses, such as a rabidly anti-militaristic version which can only exacerbate divisions. We will not gain anything by replacing ancient grievances by modern insults.

The following version, illustrated below by the first verse and the chorus (and given in a literal English translation not meant for singing, whereas the French text respects the prosody and versification of the original Marseillaise) pursues a different goal: not antagonizing people, but uniting them; highlighting not differences, but affinities; and allowing everyone to bellow it: with no shame; instead, with pride.

Children of the fatherland, come along
The day of glory has come
With us, marches democracy
We have raised our shining flag.
Do you hear, in the countryside,
The murmur of those envious peoples?
They come to our towns and mountains
And cannot stop admiring them.

(Chorus)

Together, citizens!
Let us make our union stronger!
Let our pure hearts
Vibrate in unison.

A Marseillaise for our age

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[This blog is normally in English, but today’s article is particularly relevant to French speakers. The topic: freeing a national anthem of its hateful overtones.]

Mardi dernier quatorze juillet, une fois de plus, la Marseillaise a retenti un peu partout. C’est le jour où les hommes politiques s’essayent à l’entonner, juste ou (plus souvent) faux. On peut s’imaginer, en fait on espère, qu’ils sont ici et là un peu gênés. “D’un sang impur, abreuve les sillons!“. Vraiment ? Qu’est-ce qui rend un sang si impur que tout bon patriote ait le devoir de le faire jaillir ?

Certes, c’est arrivé, il y a trois quarts de siècle, quand on a soudain avisé des centaines de milliers de Français que leur sang était désormais classé non conforme. Il y a quelques autres épisodes de ce genre dans l’histoire du pays ; ce ne sont pas — pour dire les choses poliment — les plus reluisants, et certainement pas ceux que le chant national devrait glorifier.

À entendre ces jours-ci une petite tête blonde de sept ans chanter (juste) le sang impur qui doit abreuver les sillons, je me suis demandé quelles pensées ces slogans pouvaient bien éveiller pour les enfants des écoles à qui l’on enjoint de les répéter en choeur. Et l’étendard sanglant ? Et les tyrans (Matteo Renzi ? Mario Draghi ?) qui nous envoient leurs féroces soldats non seulement mugir mais, jusque dans nos bras, égorger nos fils, nos compagnes?

Il est temps de réformer ce chant raciste et haineux. Qu’il ait joué son rôle n’est pas la question. La révolution avait ses ennemis, elle se défendait. Quand nous l’invoquons aujourd’hui, cette révolution, ce n’est pas à Robespierre et à l’assassinat de Lavoisier (la république n’a pas besoin de savants) que nous devrions faire appel, mais à son message de liberté et de fraternité. Assez de sang, de batailles, de férocité. Place à ce qui nous définit vraiment aujourd’hui.

Il ne s’agit pas de changer tous les ans d’hymne national en réponse aux modes. Il sera toujours, par nature, un peu déphasé. Mais après deux cent treize ans de Marseillaise, dont cent trente-six ans de service continu comme chant officiel du pays, il est temps de se séparer des relents les plus honteux de son texte d’origine. La musique restera, assez bonne pour avoir été reprise par Schumann, Tchaikowsky, Beethoven, Rossini et bien d’autres ; mais les paroles doivent être adaptées à ce qu’est la France moderne, tournée vers  l’avenir.

Seuls les peuples faibles ne savent s’unir qu’à travers la détestation des autres. Leurs chants sont emplis de rejets et de négations. Les peuples forts s’appuient, eux, sur des images positives. Quelle formule projette le mieux  l’attitude fière d’une nation confiante en son avenir : “contre nous, de la tyrannie“, ou “avec nous, la démocratie” ? “Un sang impur” ou “nos coeurs purs” ?  “Égorger” ou “admirer” ?Jugez-en.

Il existe des Marseillaises alternatives, mais souvent elles ne sont que le miroir de la première, avec leurs propres excès ; voir par exemple cette version sympathique de prime abord mais d’un anti-militarisme qui ne peut que diviser encore. Point n’est besoin de remplacer les anciens cris par des insultes nouvelles.

La version qui suit — chantable, respectant la métrique,  et dont je fournirai les autres couplets si elle provoque autre chose que des invectives — a un tout autre but : non pas diviser, mais réunir ; attiser non pas les différences mais les affinités ; et permettre à chacun de la chanter à pleine voix : sans honte ; au contraire, avec fierté.

Allons enfants de la patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
Avec nous la démocratie
L’étendard vaillant est levé (bis)
Entendez-vous, dans les campagnes,
Frémir tous ces peuples envieux ?
Ils viennent, jusque sous nos cieux,
Admirer nos villes, nos montagnes.

(Refrain)

Ensemble, citoyens !
Renforçons notre union !
Que nos cœurs purs
Vibrent à l’unisson.

 

Résidence de l'ambassade de France, Berne, 14 juillet 2015
Résidence de l’ambassade de France, Berne, le 14 juillet 2015

How to learn languages

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Most people in technology, trade, research or education work in an international environment and need to use a foreign language which they learned at some earlier stage [1]. It is striking to see how awfully most of us perform. International conferences are a particular pain; many speakers are impossible to understand. You just want to go home and read the paper — or, often, not.

Teachers — English teachers in the case of the most commonly used international language — often get the blame, as in “They teach us Shakespeare’s English instead of what we need for today’s life“, but such complaints are  unfounded: look at any contemporary language textbook and you will see that it is all about some Svetlanas or Ulriches or Natsukos meeting or tweeting their friends Cathy and Bill.

It is true, though, that everyone teaches languages the wrong way.

There is only one way to teach languages right: start with the phonetics. Languages were spoken [2] millennia before they ever got written down. The basis of all natural languages is vocal. If you do not pronounce a language right you do not speak that language. It is unconscionable for example that most of us non-native speakers, when using English, still have an accent. We should have got rid of its last traces by age 12.

I cannot understand why people who are otherwise at the vanguard of intellectual achievement make a mess of their verbal expression, seemingly not even realizing there might be a problem. Some mistakes seem to be handed out from generation to generation. Most French speakers of English, for example, pronounce the “ow” of “allow” as in “low”, not “cow” (it took a long time before a compassionate colleague finally rid me of that particular mistake, and I don’t know how many more I may still be making); Italians seem to have a particular fondness for pronouncing as a “v” the “w” of “write”; an so on.

The only place I ever saw that taught languages right was a Soviet school for interpreters. Graduating students of French, having had no exposure to the language before their studies, spoke it like someone coming out of a Métro station. (Actually they spoke more like a grandmother coming out of the Métro, since they had little access to contemporary materials, but that would have been easy to fix.) The trick: they spent their entire first year doing phonetics, getting the “r”and the “u” and so on right, shedding the intonation of their native tongue. That year was solely devoted to audio practice in a phonetics lab. At the end of it they did not know the meaning of what they were saying,but they said it perfectly. Then came a year of grammar, then a year of conversation. Then came the Métro result. (This is not an apology of the Soviet Union. Someone there just happened to get that particular thing right.)

We should teach everyone this way. There is no reason to tolerate phonetic deviations. If you do not get the sounds exactly as they should be, everything else will be flawed. Take, for example, the “r”. If, like me, you cannot roll your “r”s, then when you try to speak Russian or Italian, even if you think you can get the other sounds right you don’t because  your tongue or palate or teeth are in the wrong place. Another example is the “th” sound in English (two distinct sounds in fact) which I never got right. I can fake it but then something else comes out wrong and I still sound foreign. My high-school teachers — to whom I owe gratitude for so much else — should have tortured me until my “th”s were perfect. True, teaching time is a fixed-pie problem, but I am sure something else could have been sacrificed. Since, for example, I can answer in a blink that seven times nine is sixty-three, I must at some stage have taken the time to memorize it. In retrospect I would gladly sacrifice that element of knowledge, which I can reconstruct when needed, for the ability to roll my “r”s.

Age is indeed critical. While we humans can learn anything at any time, it is a well-known fact (although the reasons behind it remain mysterious) that until puberty we are malleable and can learn languages perfectly.  Witness bilingual and trilingual children; they do not have any accent. But around the time we develop new abilities and desires our brain shuts itself off to that particular skill; from then on we can only learn languages at great pain, with only remote hopes of reaching the proficiency of natives. The time to learn the phonetics of a foreign language, and learn it perfectly, is around the age of nine or ten at the latest. Then, at the age of reason, we should learn the structures — the grammar. Declensions in German, the use of tenses in English, the perfective and imperfective aspects of Russian. Conversation — Svetlana greeting Cathy — can come later if there is time left. Once you have the basics wired into your head, the rest is trivial.

Focusing children on phonetics as the crucial part of learning a language will also help them shine. Like physical appearance, verbal clarity is an enormous advantage. I must not be the only one in conferences who pays far more attention to the content of an article if the speaker has impeccable pronunciation, innate or learned. Syntax and choice of words come next. Of course substance matters; we have all heard top scientists with accents thicker than a Humvee tire and grammar thinner than a summer dress.  Everyone else needs fluency.

Conceivably, someone might object that a year of phonetic drilling is not the most amusing pastime for a 10-year-old. Without even noting that it’s not worse than having to learn to play the violin — where did we ever get the idea that learning should be fun?

As to me, like those who before they die want to get into space, visit the capitals of all countries on earth or reach the top of Mount Everest, I have my dream; it has lesser impact on the environment and depends on me, not on the help of others: just once, I’d like to roll an “r” like a Polish plumber.

Notes

[1] Many native English speakers provide the exception to this observation, since they often do not learn any foreign language beyond “Buon giorno” and “melanzane alla parmigiana”, and hence will probably not see the point of this article.

[2] And motioned. Sign language as practiced by deaf people (informally before it was codified starting from the 17th century on) is also a potential teaching start.

The secret of success

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In the process of finishing a book right now, it occurred to me that writing is really a simple matter. There are only three issues to address:

  1. How to start.
  2. How to finish.
  3. How to take care of the stuff in-between.

In the early stages  (1) you face the anguish of the “empty paper, defended by its whiteness” (Mallarmé) and do not know where to begin. If you overcome it, you have all the grunt work to do (3), step after step. At the end (2), while deep down you feel you have done enough and should be permitted to  click “Publish”, you still have to fill the holes, which may be small in number but have remained holes for a reason: you have again and again delayed filling them because in reality you do not know what to write there.

All things considered, then, it is not such a big deal.

Reuse of another kind

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This is a plug for a family member, but for a good cause: reuse and the environment. There are many reasons for promoting reuse in software; in other fields some of those reasons apply too, plus many others, economic and environmental. The core concern is to reduce waste of all kinds.

One of the most appalling sources of waste is the growing use of throw-away food containers. It is also avoidable.

A new company, bizeebox [1], has devised an ingenious scheme to let restaurants use containers that can be washed and reused many times. It is easy to use by both restaurants and customers, saves money, and avoids heaping tons of waste on landfills. Their slogan: “Take the Waste Out of Takeout“.

The founders of bizeebox have run successful pilot projects and are now starting for real with restaurants in the Ann Arbor area. They have launched a campaign on Indiegogo, with a $30,000 funding goal. Reuse deserves a chance; so do they.

References

[1] bizeebox page, at bizeebox.com.

[2] bizeebox Indiegogo campaign: here.