The Odds Are One

Lies, Gender, and Damned Statistics

2010-07-03T17:50:00.006-07:00

On Slashdot recently I encountered another version of Martin Gardner's two-children puzzle. The original problem is this:

I have two children. One of them is a boy. What are the odds the other one is also a boy?

If you're a human living in the world, three things are probably true of you vis-a-vis this puzzle. 1) You've heard it before, 2) you got it wrong the first time you heard it, and 3) the correct answer still seems wrong to you.

The correct answer, if you've never encountered it, is based on the following a priori: there are four equally-likely ways to have two children:

a boy followed by a girl
a boy followed by another boy
a girl followed by a boy
a girl followed by another girl

You look at that graph, you find all of the rows where both children are boys (1), and divide it by the number of rows where at least one of the children is a boy(3), and you get the answer: 1 in 3.

Mrs. Transient Gadfly will tell you that Mr. Transient Gadfly's position on all questions of this nature is that it is not a math question, it is a language question. And, moreover, it is an ill-posed one. The nature of how poorly this question is posed is laid bare by the variation linked above:

"I have two children, one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?"

If you follow the logic of the original problem (which, being that I am a human in whose true nature you will find the compunction to write this blog, I did) you'll write out all the days of the week your first child could be born, followed by all the days of the week your second child could be born, look at all of those that have a boy born on a Tuesday in them, count the number of those that have a second boy, and come up with the answer (it's 13 in 27, if you write out the table. Do not write out the table). If you are literally anyone else in the world, you will come up with a much better answer: 1 in 2. The crux of the issue, which the linked article almost hits on but then fails to, is that there is no universe in which the given answer (13 in 27) is correct. It would require the asker of the question to randomly chose a day of the week and a gender, and then only pose the question if he or she had a child that matched those criteria.

(Here is one of those moments where Transient Gadfly has an existential crisis about the nature and purpose of The Odds Are One: should I explain why what I just said is true? It would take, like, seven paragraphs and still nobody reading would understand the logic. I'm not going to do it this time. You'll just have to take my word on this one).

If you're anyone else, you look at that question and understand the only way someone would pose the question: he or she randomly chose one of his or her children, and listed two characteristics of that child: his gender, and the day of the week of his birth. And you will come up with the correct answer to the question, because when you randomly chose one of your two children, the gender of the other one is a coin-flip. So, you might well ask, what is the difference between the original question posed by Martin Gardner and the question involving the day of the week? And the answer is, absolutely nothing. There is no way to tell, from the way it is stated, whether the asker, a parent of exactly two children, randomly chose one of his progeny and told you his gender, or a parent of exactly two children, of whom at least one is a boy, told you that fact. And it matters, because in the former case it's a 50% shot that the other child is a boy, and in the latter it's a 33% chance.

I leave you with a link to an XKCD cartoon, because it's literally impossible to make this point better than he has here.

New Releases

2010-06-01T14:10:00.000-07:00

Two new releases for your Tuesday:

A new five song e.p. from The Calculus Affair. It's available for free download from http://tinyurl.com/5songs-tca (this link expires in two weeks, so if for some reason you're reading this after the 14th of June and you want a copy, leave me a comment or something). It's culled from my 2010 RPM Challenge album, and it's a little bit on the weird side for The Calculus Affair. But it's still pretty good.
My nephew, Alex Dean Trendler, arrived this morning at 6:12 a.m. MDT. 6 lbs. 1 oz., 21 1/2 inches. A big fan of The Calculus Affair, no doubt.

And The Worst Part Is, I Never Learned How To Read

2010-04-28T16:44:00.000-07:00

I just got my first pair of reading glasses. My left eye doesn't quite make it around to the thing I'm focusing on, which causes me to work harder to make a reasonable stereo image of something close to my face (this condition has a name, but I can't remember what it was). I've apparently been compensating for this problem without really knowing I had it. At the beginning of my last visit my optometrist did a couple of checks and then asked: Do you find it difficult to focus, or that sometimes you see a double image when you read? Do you get tired while reading? Yep. All my life. I'd never really noticed the first thing until Mrs. Transient Gadfly pointed out that I close one eye when reading in bed, which was apparently my main compensation mechanism (it works only passingly well, as I fall asleep almost comically fast while reading anyway).

So now I have glasses with a slight prism in the left lens (the other option was 12 weeks of vision therapy, which I'll probably try some day when I don't have an 18-month-old). The other thing my optometrist mentioned, almost in passing, was that this would help my reading comprehension. As long as it has mattered (a little bit in high school, mostly in college), I've known that I don't absorb anything by reading it. I can follow a narrative, but my reading comprehension is for crap. I have adapted to this fine in life; on the verbal portion of standardized tests I read the questions before reading the paragraph; I figured out that I have to write down notes on the material if I want to know anything about it when I'm done.

Are these two things related? I haven't had the glasses long enough to know if they're going to help me glean new meaning from the text. But I'd always assumed that my brain just wasn't wired to learn by reading, never once thinking that it might be because my eyes were draining all my battery power just trying to stay focused on the words in front of them.

Okay, fine

2009-12-19T10:30:00.000-08:00

Everybody's doing a Songs of the Aughts. Following Fronesis' lead, and observing the same rules, here are selections out of my music player at work that were released this decade and made it into my favorites playlist (notes as appropriate):

"Clouds" - The Long Winters (Putting The Days to Bed - 2006)
"Carousel" - Iron & Wine (The Shepherd's Dog - 2007)
This whole album is great--it's got a very post-CSNY vibe to it. This song, like the Fleet Foxes entry below, makes me forget what I was doing and start staring out the window when it comes on.
"Where I Am" - Westerly (Wild Wild Wind E.P. - 2007)
Mrs Transient Gadfly found these guys playing at our Farmers Market one Sunday and bought this five song E.P. They've since released two more albums and seem to be touring around the country these days. This is still their best work.
"Joe Metro" - Blue Scholars (Bayani - 2007)
Just your average major-label released rhyme about riding the bus down the Rainier Valley. Words do not describe how awesome this song is.
"Overkill (Acoustic)" - Colin Hay (Man @ Work - 2003)
"Start a War" - The National (Boxer - 2007)
"Your Name" - Kevin Hyatt/Gino Scarpino (Badly Bare Demos - 2008)
A collaborative effort by two friends of mine. I find this song to be highly compelling, it's a rhythmic acoustic folk song with an organic mellotron and a funky 808 beat.
"Knife" - Grizzly Bear (Yellow House - 2006)
"Flicks" - Frou Frou (Details - 2002)
"Little Round Mirrors" - Harvey Danger (Little By Little - 2005)
"A shooting star is/a little piece of/cosmic debris desperately wanting to fall to the Earth/It doesn't get too far/(it's not a real star)/it's hardly worth the footnotes in your memoir."
"Blue Ridge Mountains" - Fleet Foxes (Fleet Foxes - 2008)
"On a Different Shelf" - Jim Noir (Jim Noir - 2008)
"Spacewater" - Dzihan and Kamien (Freaks and Icons - 2000)
This electronica album has never been my favorite album at any one time, but it's been at the top of the list for ten years now.
"People Are Like Suns" - Crowded House (Time on Earth - 2007)
Is this entire album about the death of Paul Hester, or is that just me?
"Greyboy" - Soul Patch (Sooner or Later - 2007)
"You Can Have It All" - Yo La Tengo (And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out - 2000)
Yo La Tengo is a (relatively) new discovery for me. I listen to this album and wonder how they aren't more famous than they are.
"Paper Tiger" - Beck (Sea Change - 2002)
I've never liked Beck all that much, but this is a great, stripped down album.
"Such Great Heights" - The Postal Service (Give Up - 2003)
I'm pretty sure this one's on everybody's list everywhere. There's a band called "Owl Town" that had the number one song on the Billboard charts a couple of weeks ago. I listened to it. It was the Postal Service, except about half as good musically and not even in the same universe lyrically. Man, Ben Gibbard...that guy is a genius.
"Carry Me Ohio" - Sun Kil Moon (Ghosts of the Great Highway - 2003)
2005's Tiny Cities, which is a collection of covers of Modest Mouse songs, is also utterly worth your time.
"Slipping Through the Sensors" - Fruit Bats (Mouthfuls - 2003)
"A Fond Farewell" - Elliott Smith (From a Basement on the Hill - 2004)
This album is hard to listen to. It's unfinished and it's pretty raw and Elliott Smith was in a lot of pain. And of course it has moments of transcendence, too.
"Heartbeats" - Jose Gonzales (Veneer - 2005)
That song from that commercial with the colorful bouncing balls. His cover of Massive Attack's "Teardrop" from 2007 would also make this list if I didn't have that one artist rule.
"Casimir Pulaski Day" - Sufjan Stevens (Come On Feel the Illinoise - 2005)
One of the best albums of the decade.
"Que Sera" - Wax Taylor (Tales of the Forgotten Melodies - 2005)
French cinemaphile electronica.
"Your Hand In Mine" - Explosions in the Sky (The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place - 2003)
Apparently Explosions in the Sky does not do the theme from Friday Night Lights. How this is possible I do not know.
"Your Girlfriend's Car" - Throw Me The Statue (Moonbeams - 2008)
I again tout the awesomeness of Throw Me The Statue. They are awesome.
"Daily Mutilation" - Jon Auer (Beautiful Escape: Songs of the Posies Revisited - 2008)
Here is the coolest I have ever been: Mrs. Transient Gadfly and I were at the Posies show that doubled as the release party for this album, and after it was over we went down to the merchandise table to say goodnight to the guy who owns the record label, and he gave me a gig poster that he was having all the artists on the record sign for his collection. I was signing it as Jon Auer walked up. I handed him the pen and the poster and he looked at me as if he should know who I was.
"Turn and Run" - Neil Finn (One Nil - 2001)
Well, obviously.

Causal Loop

2009-11-30T17:49:00.002-08:00

And now, with no fanfare or reintroduction, The Odds Are One resumes its original charter of blogging about Odds-Are-One-y things. For at least this one post. Maybe.

I read about a thought experiment with pool tables and time travel in an article in Slate a couple of months ago (several other interesting ideas about the current thinking on time travel in there as well--for instance, they've pretty much dismissed the idea of multiple futures branching off which we here at the Odds Are One had figured out years ago, and they seem to think that time travel requires an entry and an exit portal--kind of like a tunnel--such that people from the future can't come back to tell us about the invention of time travel until somebody invents a time machine for them to come back in. So that explains why we don't see those time travelers from the future wandering around. I guess). The idea behind this experiment seems to me to throw a wrench in our thinking about free will, which is always fun to contemplate.

Imagine a pool table with a little time-traveling tunnel on it. You shoot ball into one end of the tunnel, and it goes back in time one second and comes out the other end. So you see your pool ball roll out of the far end of the tunnel a second before you shoot it into the near end (if I had this setup I'd probably sit there for a while trying to fool the tunnel into making the pool ball roll out without actually rolling it in in the first place. That'd be awesome. Except that it wouldn't work, but whatever). Then you'd realize that if you lined up the two ends of the tunnel, you could make your shot interfere with itself: you could make it so that the ball would come out from the future right as your shot was going towards the entrance to the tunnel, knocking it out of the way so that it didn't enter the tunnel...so that it would never have gone back in time in the first place. You'll have created a physical paradox: if the ball goes in the tunnel, it would knock itself out of the way and never go into the tunnel. But if it doesn't go into the tunnel, then it wouldn't be there to knock itself out of the way, so it would roll into the tunnel. And so on.

Some people spent a lot of time thinking about this and figured out that what would happen is that you would always knock your ball askew such that it went into the tunnel at a different angle than you planned, making it come out of the tunnel in the past at a different angle than you planned, making it glance off its future self at a different angle than you planned, etc. etc. They further noted that this is a sort of simplified model of the Going-Back-In-Time-And-Killing-Your-Own-Grandfather paradox: the implication being that no matter how hard you tried to do it, you would fail. You'd go back in time and try and kill your Grandfather and someone would stop you, or it'd turn out your Grandmother had already conceived, or you'd kill somebody you thought was your Grandfather but it turned out there was a family scandal that you'd never heard about and that guy wasn't really your Grandfather. No matter what you did, the fact would remain that you had already been born, and you therefore couldn't prevent yourself from being born.

In this thought experiment there are clear limits on the exercise of your free will. Do what you like, but you will not kill your biological grandfather before your mother or father is conceived because it didn't happen that way. The same is true of the pool-table experiment: if you've got, say, a five minute tunnel loop set up, and you see a pool ball roll out of the from-the-future end of the tunnel, you now know that in five minutes you (or someone) is going to have to roll the ball into the other end of the tunnel, and no matter what you do in the intervening five minutes, that has to happen (I don't know about you, but that would creep me the hell out. Imagining a psychotic murderer entering the billiard room, killing me (with the lead pipe), and then becoming curious about what the tunnels on the pool table do and rolling a ball in, I'd stand there in a cold sweat looking over my shoulder for five minutes and then roll the ball into the tunnel). Anyway, two questions:

can you construct a similar experiment that demonstrates such limits on the nature of free will that doesn't require time travel (I suspect, but can't yet prove, that you can)?
can free will instead be salvaged by an advanced understanding of cause-and-effect? The Odds are One sides with the Buddhists on this (there's no such thing as cause-and-effect) but lacks a better model to explain pool balls from the future or, really, anything else.

Discuss.

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: Side Tracking

2009-08-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you're just to busy making music on the side to actually, you know, make music. In February I stopped making an album to make an entirely different album as part of the RPM Challenge. Another recent side-project was a cover of Roxy Music's "2HB" as part of a tribute record being released by Burning Sky Records. It's currently the main track in the player on their MySpace page.

I've lately become more fanatical about trying to get forwards from Taxi listings, and in the last month or so I've tried to be a lot more focused about the material I submit--instead of taking songs that I've already recorded and looking for matches in the listings, I've been targeting specific listings and writing and recording material for them. In some cases, the results have been...strange.

The distant future. The year 2000....

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: Dialog II

2009-07-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

The Stoat: I appreciate the lack of any Breakin' 2 references there.
Calvino: I was sorely tempted.
The Stoat: You were going to tell me ideas you'd had so far about how to "market" (for lack of a better word) popular music in the digital marketplace, assuming that you do not have an entrenched power broker (i.e. record label) backing you.
Calvino: Right. I'm mostly going to just throw out some thoughts. They aren't really organized. Maybe they will become so as I toss them out.
The Stoat: Okay, go.
Calvino: Okay. Again, assuming that I am the creative force behind The Calculus Affair...
The Stoat: I have no problem with that.
Calvino: ...what I'm doing here right now is thing number one, obviously. I'm advertising the fact that I'm making an album by blogging about it. Every time I post one of these things, it goes into my Facebook feed and presumably some number of the hundred-odd people I'm friends with sees it, and most of them don't read it, but that doesn't matter--it goes into their head. They know that I have a band.
The Stoat: Brand awareness.
Calvino: Exactly, though as mtg points out, this is pretty much just first- and second- degree of separation. That is, it's only brand awareness for people who know me directly. There again I run into the same problem--some percentage of those people wind up checking out the album, and some percentage of those people are, like, wow this is awesome and tell their friends to check it out. But by then we're down to a small percentage of a small percentage of a percentage, and since we started with only 100-odd people, I'm pretty much down to Sam and Aunt Madeline at that point.
The Stoat: On whom you were already counting.
Calvino: Right.
The Stoat: So, what else?
Calvino: Well, I'm trying to get into the business via the Taxi route--trying to get songs placed in tv and film. I've gotten some things forwarded to publishers, but so far no phone calls (it is, relatively speaking, early yet on that front). And while it's sort of a side-project as far as the main question of releasing an album is concerned, I've gotten some pretty useful feedback from it. A couple of months ago I saw a listing asking for songs with voice and guitar only and thought, "I bet I can get a forward just by following instructions." I wrote a song in an hour or two, recorded it in a couple more hours, mixed it, and submitted it, and sure enough it got forwarded. I was pretty proud of that.
The Stoat: Okay, what else?
Calvino: Well, I've been thinking about the last listing to which I submitted, actually. It was a return (those are the two outcomes of Taxi listings, forward or return); they give you feedback either way, and the screener clearly liked the songs--it was more complementary than most of my forwards--but he was also looking for something different. The Calculus Affair leans into retro-pop and they wanted something...sonically more recent, I guess. Anyway, I thought of the lesson you'd learn as an actor--if you have a specific thing that you do, and you're good at that thing, but nobody is casting for that thing, what you do is start your own theatre company.
The Stoat: So you want to start a record label.
Calvino: No. That would be insane. Record labels are a losing proposition all around these days. I want to start whatever record labels are going to morph into in the near future.
The Stoat: What do you think that is?
Calvino: Well, here is where it gets really disorganized. As we talked about in part 1, you don't need a label--you don't need the financial backing to make a record and you don't need a distributor. What you need is something that sets you, as an artist, apart. What you need is something that enables people to find you. What you need, instead of a label, is a brand. Think of your ten favorite bands. Now tell me the label to which they're signed.
The Stoat: Well, in some cases I can do that. Lots of bands I like are signed to Barsuk Records. Lots of bands I like are signed to SubPop.
Calvino: Yeah, great examples of small labels that do exactly what I'm talking about. Big labels--Sony, Universal, Virgin, Columbia, etc., aren't musical brands because they haven't had to be. Small labels, if they want to survive and thrive, need to conjure to mind music when you hear their name. In the late 80's and early 90's, when you though of SubPop, you thought of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney--the Seattle sound. It was a label but it was also a sound. Same with Barsuk today--if you know the label, you think quirky indie rock when you hear its name.
The Stoat: What I like about it is that idea is that the brand becomes a filter. As you talked about in part one, there's a huge abundance of music. Creating a brand creates a shorthand for finding music you like. And it works for both sides of the partnership--good music builds the brand, and the brand helps the music find an audience.
Calvino: I believe the word you're looking for is "synergy."
The Stoat: Synergy is the greatest thing in the world.
Calvino: Never say that to me again.
The Stoat: Whatever. I'm sold. What form does this musical branding take?
Calvino: ...
The Stoat: ...
Calvino: ...
The Stoat: You seemed about to speak.
Calvino: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it starts with a website, but after that I really don't know. There are tons of analytics tools out there that would help you, but then you start talking about market research and targeted ads and crap like that, and then you run into my main problem: it's taking all of my spare time just to make an album.
The Stoat: Also, you hate market research. And also, apparently, synergy.
Calvino: Yeah, that's another problem.
The Stoat: So you're hosed.
Calvino: Pretty much.
The Stoat: Okay then. Good talk.

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: Dialog

2009-07-09T15:02:00.005-07:00

Calvino: Tell me, Stoat: if I were going to release an album in the brave new world of digital music, how should I do it? What would minimize the chances of it not immediately being swept into the oblivion of all the music being released digitally today?
The Stoat: An interesting and difficult question.
Calvino: Yes. Yes it is. It seems like the internet plus digital distribution would democratize the world of music for the musician. But if that's happening, or happened, I haven't seen it. Obviously, music has the problem of volume--now that anyone can record an album in their basement and get it onto iTunes, everyone does. Anyone can get their record in the store, but the store is huge, so that's no real benefit.
The Stoat: Yes. Clearly a problem.
Calvino: So there's the theory/metaphor/whatever that the cream should rise to the top, that even though the proverbial mine of potentially popular music is much larger, the gems in that mine will still stand out and be discovered. But in following music these last several years, I have discovered something: there is a staggering amount of competence out there. A profoundly huge pile of pretty-goodness. So in order to be a gem amongst that, you basically have to be, well, fucking awesome.
The Stoat: I see...
Calvino: Let's, for instance, take the example of The Calculus Affair. Just for the purposes of ease of reference, let's pretend that I am the musician behind this band.
The Stoat: I have no problem with that.
Calvino: I have, if I am The Calculus Affair, accumulated a fair amount of objective evidence that I am producing pretty good music. As a close listener to music in general I can also tell that lots of people with far less...let's call it ability...than I are doing well by it. So if I were, say, 22 years old and hot and out there touring and building a fan base, I'd probably be doing pretty well myself. But I'm 36 and I have neither the time (nor really the willingness) to tour around promoting myself, so my music just has to stand on its own. And so it comes to this: my music is good, maybe pretty good, but it just isn't fucking awesome.
The Stoat: Sure. And there are some people who might disagree with that last sentiment, and if they ruled the music business, you would be obscenely wealthy. But I acknowledge the point.
Calvino: Now, that shouldn't necessarily be the end of it. There ought to be a space for the pretty good to succeed. Maybe not, you know, a definition of success that includes professional musicianship and fortune, but one that involves selling some records to people who aren't already ones friends. And this is the thing I can't find, or that doesn't exist, in this new democratic world that has a nearly infinite quantity of competent music in it.
The Stoat: Hmm...surely other people are thinking about this problem. What about this fellow? He's talking about the same things you are.
Calvino: Yeah, he's advertising for a seminar he's running. Did you read that article? Reading it was like watching that Simpsons episode where they introduce Poochie into the Itchy & Scratchy Show.
The Stoat: Oh No! Metadialog!

EXECUTIVE: We at the network want a dog with attitude. He's edgy, he's "in your face." You've heard the expression "let's get busy"? Well, this is a dog who gets "biz-zay!" Consistently and thoroughly.
KRUSTY: So he's proactive, huh?
EXECUTIVE: Oh, God, yes. We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.

Calvino: There are articles on the subject everywhere, all the time. Here's Trent Reznor on the subject. Another entry in the TuneCore blog. An article in Salon. That's just from this week. As far as I can tell, the advice boils down to, "Have you tried being clever? You should try being clever."
The Stoat: Not to, you know, to mindlessly echo Trent Reznor, but you are kind of clever. Not all the time or anything, but occasionally.
Calvino: Perhaps. But times seem to call for more than clever. They call for innovation. I haven't seen the innovation yet. Or I can't think of it. Or something.
The Stoat: Perhaps it would be helpful to start with what you've thought of so far and go from there?
Calvino: Perhaps. We'll try that in Dialog part II, in order to mitigate the already extreme longness of this post.
The Stoat: Okay. Truncating in three...two...one...

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: There is a lot of Math

2009-06-27T08:57:00.004-07:00

Other than from friends, I find out about more good music from the playlists of baristas than probably any other source. It's how I found Sufjan Stevens, The Kings of Convenience, Dzihan and Kamien, Neutral Milk Hotel, and a bunch more things I can't remember right now. After breakfast on the mornings that I get up with the wee child, I take him and the dog on a walk to any one of the roughly 47 coffeeshops within a ten-block radius of my house; on Friday morning that Talking Heads song that goes "Hi! Hi-Hi-Hi-Hi-Hi! Hi-hi!" was playing when I walked into Tougo (which is by far the best of the 47 coffeshops I can walk to). Right after it was this instrumental song I had never heard before, it had sort of a 60's-70's jazz-rock vibe; the lead guitar was really present in the mix, but at the same time had a whole bunch of reverb on it, with the rest of the band unusually quiet. The guitarist was playing this really simple, really catchy melody which tied up at the end of each phrase in a way that I can't describe other than to say it was incredibly satisfying to listen to.

My college math professor Shahriar Shahriari once remarked as an aside during class, "there is a lot of math in the world. People don't realize how much math there is." He meant that most people's awareness of math essentially encompasses arithmetic, algebra, plane geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, which is the rough equivalent of someone's awareness of literature being comprised entirely of Greek tragedy, some medieval Islamic texts, and 17th century British novels that some people argue were actually written by Russians. Similarly, it frequently boggles my mind how much good music there is that I'm totally unaware of. It makes me both happy, for all the good music there is, and sad, because how on earth could one listen to it all, or ever compete for attention with all the rest of it?

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: So Apparently Michael Jackson is Dead, Then

2009-06-25T19:09:00.002-07:00

Like everybody in the universe who is my age, Thriller was one of the first cassettes I ever owned. I remarked not too long ago that I thought we were due for a major resurgence of interest in that album, and that's pretty much guaranteed to happen now.

I for one will be glad that Thriller will be cool again. Michael Jackson was batshit insane, but that's one great record.

13 Songs With The Calculus Affair: Roster

2009-06-24T19:11:00.002-07:00

The album lineup changes from day to day, but as it stands is this (in alphabetical order, album order not in any way yet determined):

Aleksandr (You Forgot to be in Time)
Archer, The
Bicycle Down The Hill
Bone and Matter
Crying Again
Dukes of the Stratosphere
Every Day
Freight Train
Man Who Used to Hunt Cougars For Bounty, The
Men of Luggage
Poor Young Man
Prince of Tyre
Threnody

Some songs that have been on the list, but are currently off it:

The Bridge--a fine song, but has been on two other albums and I really don't have anything else I want to get out of it. I've also drawn a mental line that this album should only involve songs written after If You Lived Here....
My High School Mind--it just isn't working for me right now.
Pipe Dream--The only reason it isn't on this album is because I thought it was going to be the seed of the next album. That's increasingly seeming like a bad reason to leave it off, but so far I haven't added it.

This post is not long on content. I'll get more specific about songs and construction next time.

13* Songs With The Calculus Affair

2009-06-22T10:30:00.002-07:00

If you are a just-slightly-fanatical follower of the band The Long Winters (which I am) you will know that their next record is currently mired in creative limbo as John Roderick attempts to, well, write the songs. It's "Chinese Democracy-ed", if you will. This slog through the creative mire is being documented by a videographer on YouTube in an ongoing work titled "13 Songs with John Roderick."

If you are follower of The Calculus Affair, you may be dimly aware that I promised the release of an album in "Spring of '09." Yesterday I officially missed that deadline, so now this record too resides (if far less notably) in the annals of AWOL rock and roll. Now, in fairness to me, during the "Spring of '09" I also "became" a "parent." This tends to put a strain on ones free time. On the other hand, I probably worked more on the album (during nap times**) in the last month and a half than I had in the previous six, so there was progress. There was also, I dunno, something like regress as I listened to what I'd done and thought, "Hmm...not quite."

I would like, when he is older and can read, for my son to continue speaking to me. So while he is occupying a lot of my brain and I have many revelations about parenting and such, I'm not going to publish any of them for the sake of our future relationship. Ergo, The Odds Are One will now commence documenting the only other thing which I can think of to write about, which is the ongoing progress, or lack thereof, on the record tentatively titled The Fellows are Opening for Jon and Ken***. Stay tuned.

*actual number of songs subject to change.
**the child's, not mine.
***mtg does not like this album title. She thinks it does not stick in the mind, so to speak. I've lately been flirting with Everyone Will Dance instead. Thoughts?

Album Release Wednesday

2009-04-15T00:25:00.006-07:00

We are pleased to announce the formal release of Control Of Electromagnetic Radiation, the 2009 RPM Challenge album by The Calculus Affair. You can download a .zip file containing mp3's and cover art via Kammalu by clicking or pointing your browser to http://www.kammalu.com/downloads/conelrad. If you're more of a preview song/download song kind of person, the album is available on alonetone as a playlist. Click here to check it out.

I had lots of grand ideas about making this album better than it was on February 28th, but actually doing that would have taken a lot more time than I have, and in the end what I've posted this evening isn't materially different from what I recorded in February of 2009. There is more to do, and I'll come back to these songs someday. But not today. In the meantime, The Calculus Affair hopes you download and enjoy, and thanks you for listening.

In Other Musical News...

2009-04-06T15:38:00.005-07:00

The Calculus Affair is today's featured artist on NPR's Second Stage podcast.

There's a little checkmark to recommend the article, and if enough people click it, it shows up on the front page of NPR.org. I'm just saying, that'd be cool.

"The Mother Of All Funk Chords" -- Kutiman (Thru You)

2009-03-13T10:59:00.002-07:00

From Thru You

Really only a couple of things to say about this. It's not that you haven't seen or heard this kind of thing before. The wow factor comes not from total originality so much as just simply doing it better than anyone has done it before. Second, the lo-fi-ness of YouTube in an HD era is a clever echo of the DJ's of the 90's mixing records in a CD era.

I hereby announce that we are formally Post-Web 2.0; you will now aggregate or you will be aggregated.

"Tangled Up in Blue" -- Bob Dylan (Blood on the Tracks)

2009-03-12T14:21:00.002-07:00

Dylan...boy, I dunno. I really don't, actually. It isn't that that I don't like Dylan--"Buckets of Rain," from the same album is another song on my completely imaginary all-time top-20 songs list--I just don't get him. I think he's somehow untimely. So let me now be the nth person to take up the question, "What is it about Dylan?" (where n is a very large number).

The song is an interesting story, told idiosyncratically, atemporally. Onion satire notwithstanding, the man could construct a rhyme. It's 1975, so the accompanying 12 string guitar sounds good (the 80's 12 string sound is...it's bad). There's an entire other point to be made about his voice, though I don't know if I have an opinion about whether he's a good or bad singer. The only thing I've got to add is that he's unapologetic about the way he sings, and he sells it.

Is the point here that I, who was 2 in 1975 and thus have no experience of the cultural context in which this song was released (and, you know, never will) and, unable to hear this song in context, will never actually understand what made it a popular song? I might be able to appreciate it/like it/love it/form some totally new association with it because my girlfriend put it on a cd of narrative songs that I listened to on a drive across the country/whatever, but I'll never get it. Similarly, I didn't grow up in the 60's and I didn't get Dylan in context, so I'll never get Dylan.

Is there an even larger point about context that I am missing? Possibly, but it will take me in another direction, so I'll leave off here for now.

"Flagpole Sitta" -- Harvey Danger (Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?)

2009-03-03T11:20:00.003-08:00

A short programming note: for those of of you figuratively champing at the bit for the release of Control Of Electromagnetic Radiation (the brand new E.P. from The Calculus Affair! Woo!), there will be a brief delay for some editorial work before I release it to the world (Also, I didn't want to step on today's release of U2's No Line On The Horizon). It's not that it turned out badly--I can't really tell at the moment because I'm incredibly sick of it, but I think it turned out pretty well. But I also think it could be better. So, yeah.

How to become an overnight rock sensation: step one, cut a hole in a box. No, step one, form an über-crunch power-pop band. Step two, write songs that set a twee-intellectual sensibility against hyper-fuzzed up guitar and bass instrumentation. Step three, have one of those songs be incredibly catchy (okay, and what's up with the actual video being pulled from YouTube? Must we go through this again?). Step four, have a DJ on the local alternative radio station start playing your song. Step five, MTV.

"Flagpole Sitta" seems to be one of those occasions where the world somehow shifted and a perfect Harvey Danger-sized hole opened up in popular culture, and Harvey Danger was there to fill it. There's a lot to say about why that hole didn't stay open, but maybe it's as simple as: their second single flopped, they recorded a follow-up album that was (and remains) frickin' awesome, but record-label machinations and the cluster-fuck that is the music business insured that it was a failure before it was released. That's all probably outside the purview of this blog, though.

There are a bunch of things this song does well. It rocks like punk, it has a bubble-gum pop chorus, but the lyrics are "I'm not sick but I'm not well/And I'm so hot/'cuz I'm in hell." That's it. It's simple and the 2/4 march beat gives it a lively bounce. And then it's just cool. Cool like you can't even quite define how cool it is. Cool like it's smarter than you and it's mocking you a little bit but you don't realize it. It's sort of like the Kicking and Screaming of pop songs.

It's this last attribute--it has distilled what I've referred to above as Harvey Danger's twee-intellectualism to it's purest form, where it just kind of nibbles at you ("I wanna publish 'zines/and rage against machines" is about as spelled-out as it gets)--that might be what put it over the top. Compare it to the single from King James Version, Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Some days, today for instance, Sad Sweetheart is my favorite H.D. song of all time (I mean, the video stars Ione Skye. COME on). On the other hand, maybe it's just too smart for its audience. And it's not that "Flagpole Sitta" wasn't also, it's just that it was clever enough to sneak it by them.

Some Advance Single Action

2009-02-26T09:17:00.006-08:00

"Pipe Dream" from the forthcoming Calculus Affair E.P., Control of Electromagnetic Radiation:

"Viva la Vida" -- Coldplay (Viva La Vida)

2009-02-19T16:26:00.006-08:00

Were I a Coldplay fan, this song might make me a little worried. It's hyper-glossy and produced, the edges rounded off, and the lyrics verge on unpleasantly reminding me of Sting when he gets pathologically Sting-y (you know, when he starts singing about churches and his his soul and the epic sweep of something or other).

There are some things to like about it. First off, Chris Martin and his Chris Martin-y voice, which combines the high tenor wail that's been popular for the last ten years (was Jeff Buckley the first one on that field, or just the first person I noticed?) with a little bit of British thickness. The repeated, "that was when I ruled the world," in the lyrics is definitely catchy, and hyper-produced though it is, the bouncy orchestral motif definitely keeps everything moving.

That's not why I'm writing about this song, though. It's the fact that Joe Satriani is suing Coldplay, claiming they stole the melody from his song, If I Could Fly (let it get to about 0:50 and you'll hear the section in question). Musically there are a several things of note here. The two songs are in virtually the same tempo; while not in same key, the chord progressions are almost the same (both are four chord riffs, the first chords differ but essentially one is a jazz-substitution of the other); finally, and probably of most interest to Satriani, the melody that Chris Martin sings indeed sounds perilously similar to the main guitar solo that Satriani plays.

Fronesis, bringing this to my attention, put it this way

I don't make music, so it's hard for me to calculate odds of:

A. Intentional purposive stealing.
B. Accidental 'influence'.
C. Completely independent works that coincidentally sound the same.

I'll say straight off that musically speaking, there's pretty much no such thing as C. Nobody making music lives or composes in a vacuum, and if you're creating popular music, you're actively trying to emulate a particular sound--you're only going to be successful if you're creative within certain, limited, parameters. One of the things that became obvious to me very quickly was that the path to success in popular music is to sound exactly like everyone else who's already popular, except slightly different.

I'll also say that it's not that I think that A. never happens, I think it happens a lot. Whether or not it's okay depends probably on a lot of things. While in writing the line between quoting and plagarism is pretty bright and well-defined, the same isn't true for music. Musical quoting is more in the same family as putting an unattributed quote from Shakespeare in your novel: nobody accuses you of plagarising because it's so screamingly obvious that you did.

More importantly, though, in music everybody is stealing from everybody else all the time. Much of the time they're freely admitting it--musicians call it "having influences." As long as you don't run afoul of the law (which, as we've seen before, has rules about what belongs to you when you write a song that are both sweeping and narrow, specific and arbitrary, and...well, I just hope that I myself never have to navigate them), the rules seem to be simple: only steal from the famous, change it a little bit, and announce to everyone who will listen exactly from whom you're stealing.

As for this particular case, I think it's pretty well impossible to sum things up better than this guy has:

"Somewhere Only We Know" - Keane (Hopes and Fears)

2009-02-09T13:04:00.000-08:00

This is the kind of song that I hear and think, "what happened to the days of the great melodies?" I latched onto it after hearing it a couple of times in the satellite radio playlist of our brunch place (I don't listen to top 40, so the only time I hear popular music is when it's playing in the background). And I latched onto it immediately--it's a beautiful melody, with lyrics that actually seem to be talking about the melody itself: "Oh simple thing, where have you gone?" (Mmmm...delicious self reflection). For the longest time, from hearing it at a distance, I thought it was a Coldplay song, and that in fact hindered me from figuring out who and what it actually was. I might therefore conclude that this band sounds kind of generically fin-de-siecle alterna-rocky. And I would probably be correct, but 1) they're doing it with just a piano and drums and some overdubs (and, you know, a lead singer with the voice of an angel), and 2) gauging the sound of the current era and emulating it (if indeed that's what they're doing) is a demonstrably rare and difficult-to-master skill.

Still, man, that's a great melody. And I think the days of the great simple melodies were never here, it's just that the songs that have them tend to stick around.

"Bittersweet Symphony" - The Verve (Urban Hymns)

2009-02-04T23:05:00.002-08:00

The write-up for this song is going to turn out very different than I thought it would. If you know the story already, nothing about this is going to be surprising to you, but it was surprising to me.

This was a huge breakout hit for the Verve. It took them from the territory of modestly successful British indie band into the realms of worldwide stardom. It appears on a variety of critical hit lists. All of this because (in my opinion) at the opening strains, it is simply the most awesome thing you have ever heard. It's just totally epic. Nothing else has to happen to make this song a hit, and nothing else does. There's nothing special about the lyrics (nothing wrong with them either, they just are what they are), there's no chorus or bridge--this song is basically just one long verse. The beats are even kind of a misstep--they kind of trip rather than flow. This song is a one-trick pony. But holy hell, it's a good trick.

There's a 1965 song by the Rolling Stones called The Last Time. In 1966 their original manager, Andrew Oldham, recorded an album with his orchestra called Rolling Stones Songbook which included an orchestral version of "The Last Time". It is from this orchestral version that Richard Ashcroft, lead singer of The Verve, sampled the strings for "Bittersweet Symphony" (though it's not a true sample per se, as the concertmaster violin line doesn't exist in the original). At the time of the song's release, The Verve negotiated a 50/50 split of composer rights with ABKCO, the holder of the Rolling Stones' song rights, for the use of the sample in the song. When the song became an enormous hit, ABKCO sued The Verve, arguing (presumably in a more legalese-y fashion) that they had used "too much" of the sample. The case settled with 100% of the composer rights going to ABKCO and The Rolling Stones. One hundred percent. According to copyright law, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger wrote "Bittersweet Symphony."

I'll gladly listen to arguments that Andrew Oldham wrote 50% of "Bittersweet Symphony" (I think that's my opinion on the matter, actually). I will also gladly listen to arguments that The Rolling Stones have better lawyers than The Verve. But the notion that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger wrote "Bittersweet Symphony"...well, the law is just complete crap sometimes. A bunch of clever lawyers took a song and awarded its composers' rights and all of the royalties to two people (and, more importantly, the company that administers their catalog) who didn't write the lyrics, who didn't write the chord progression, and who didn't write the melody.

Lesson: one, single, perfect compositional trick can bring you everything. And also, you know, take it away.

"Everybody Wants to Rule the World" - Tears For Fears (Songs from the Big Chair)

2009-01-29T00:53:00.003-08:00

We continue in the quasi-theme of huge 80's hits that weren't written to be singles with this epic ditty. First of all, I don't remember this video at all. Second, Curt Smith is the lead singer on this song? Really? Curt, oh Curt, can we talk about your hair? Can we? CAN WE??? Third, is the reason that I don't remember this video due to the fact that I've blocked it out because of the dancing black dudes at the gas station? Should I be offended by that? I have no idea. I'm not even going to get into how much of a freak the drummer is.

This song was born when Roland Orzabal came into the studio with a two-chord progression that he had in his head--the producer thought it was cool, and told him he should write a song around it. It was the last track of the album that they recorded, they were burned out on recording, and essentially just put their first ideas to tape and went with it. They had already decided that "Shout" and "Head Over Heels" were the big singles off of the album (which, in fairness, they were--just not as big as this song). Lesson: well, what is the lesson? 99.9% of the time stuff you dash off without really putting effort into it or thinking about it sounds exactly that way--like tossed off crap. Somewhere there is some magic in just "letting go" of something, for some definition of "letting go," which nobody actually knows. Finding that magic: hard.

Actually, I do have a larger lesson here. It's somewhat long, and in two parts. Bear with me for a bit. I have read that Roland Orzabal was off-the-hook OCD about the way his music sounded. For instance, he apparently spent six weeks getting the drum track for "Badman's Song" (The Seeds of Love) just right. Now, I love "Badman's Song"--it's probably on my all-time top 20 something-or-other list--and, no mistake, the drums on this track are incredible. But I'm about 94.6% sure that in the alternate universe where they only spent a couple of days on that drum track, I like the song just as much (the other 5.4% of me thinks that I'm wrong about everything and I'm wasting my time doing this analysis and recording music in general, and should just stick to my day job). I would venture to say, in fact, that the only people who listen to that song and hear the six weeks of effort are 1) Roland Orzabal, and 2) the drummer that he tortured for 6 weeks (possibly also 3) the recording engineer, 4) the producer, 5) Curt Smith). I'm a huge (HUGE) believer in the idea that the only person you can ever satisfy is yourself, and so you should do what's necessary until you're satisfied with your efforts. I'm also a huge believer in the idea that if it takes you six weeks to record one track for one song on one album, you need to re-evaluate your criteria for satisfaction.

That was the first part. The second part is related to a recent experience I had doing a song for this forthcoming tribute album. I recorded it and spent a week or so mixing it, and then sent it off to the guy who owns the record label. He said: great song, the mix is a little fuzzy ("woolen" was the word he used), we can probably fix that in mastering, but maybe take another crack at it? So I went back to it, and I worked on the mix off and on for the next two weeks. I was never quite happy with it, and the average listener wouldn't have noticed a lick of difference between my first mix and my second, and it's as likely as not I made it worse. I sent it back to the label anyway, label said great job, let's get it mastered. A couple of days later the engineer sent me a copy of the mastered version and it sounded like a different song. It was all bright and shiny and sounded like something on the radio. Lesson: while your piece of art could always be better, sometimes you reach the limits of where you can take it and have to let it go or hand it off to somebody who knows more than you.

Anyway, this song. Nice beat that shuffles and drives at the same time (they stole it from a Simple Minds song, according to Wikipedia). On the verse the two-chord structure leaves a space for the singer, like they're taking turns: synth plays two chords, singer sings "welcome to your life," synth plays two chords again, singer sings, "there's no turning back," and so on. You don't really get anything concrete out of the lyrics other than, "everybody wants to rule the world." I never thought of that as a universal sentiment myself, but it's catchy. Also on Wikipedia I read this:

Originally the song was called "Everybody Wants to Go to War"

I might be wrong, but I don't think that a song with everything exactly the same except that the they sing "Everybody wants to go to war" instead of "Everybody wants to rule the world," is a hit song. Is that true? It just seems like it changes everything about it. This should tell us something, but I'm not quite sure what it is.

"Don't Dream It's Over" - Crowded House (Crowded House)

2009-01-25T22:21:00.003-08:00

Wow. Look at this video. Whereas images of, say, A-ha or Duran Duran are forever frozen in the mid-80's in my mind, I've closely followed Neil Finn for his entire career, so seeing him again in his mid-20's heavily made up like an 80's vaguely Euro pop-star is kind of...just...wrong. I like the smashing tableware, but what's with the tempura-on-a-stick floating across the screen? What the hell is that thing?

So first: it's a huge, timeless, international hit song. It's more than 20 years since it was released, and just walking around in every day life you're likely to hear it playing over the PA in a grocery store, or on some Classics-of-the-80's-90's-and-70's radio station that's tuned in at your hair salon. mtg once asked me rhetorically, "What do you think you have done in your life more times than Neil Finn has performed this song?" Beyond, "get up in the morning," not a whole lot.

I imagine (with only minimal evidence to back me up) that Neil didn't write this song thinking it would be a single. I've always assumed that the follow-up release, "Something So Strong" was originally meant to be the single from the fact that their producer Mitchell Froom is listed in the liner notes as having co-written it. It wasn't even the first single released off the album ("Mean to Me," which didn't make much of a dent anywhere, holds that honor). I don't know what the lesson from that is other than, write and record a lot of songs because you never know.

I forget all the time that the original Crowded House was a power trio, though that's probably because of the prominent overdubbing they always did--here a second guitar (it might actually be the same guitar again with a different effects array) starting in the second verse, and the organ in the last third. A lot of detail in the jangly, chorused, and now totally iconic guitar riff--Neil gets multiple different sounds out of the same chord by hitting the low strings on the downstroke and really ripping the treble notes with upstrokes. Really prominent bass. Thick layered chorus of voices on the Hey Now's from which Neil's distinct wail just sort of emerges. No real bridge, just the organ, and only a very brief turnaround where the chords are any different from the verse. The only thing it (the turnaround) does is sort of "surface" from the organ part into the last verse, but it does that one thing perfectly.

This song sounded totally current in the context of 1986--I remember mentally lumping it in with the aforementioned Duran Duran's and A-ha's of the musical world that I knew then. Part of it was the lyrics--"my possessions are causing me suspicion but there's no proof." They were just kind of inscrutably Euro-cool (though Neil is, of course, a Kiwi--a subtlety lost on me when I was 12). The verses are full of little evocative pockets--"in the paper today, tales of warring and waste, but you turn right over to the t.v. page." That one line manages to paint an entire picture of a relationship that, at 12, I had never experienced, but could nevertheless instantly understand. Then there is the chorus, a chorus that anyone can understand. Plus, as an added bonus, every time somebody says, "hey now..." you think of this song. Lesson: your verse lyrics can be complicated or make no apparent sense if you have a simple, accessible chorus. This is a lesson that I note that EVERYONE in indie rock has learned.

The guitars--that 80's Les Paul sound--is the only element of this song that's really of an era in any way, and while it sometimes sounds a little bit dated and cheesy to me, I never feel that way for long. This song is just so damn good.

"Exit" - U2 (The Joshua Tree)

2009-01-22T10:37:00.004-08:00

There are about three hundred million points, strictly musically speaking, to be made about U2. One of the main ones of interest to me is that it seems, on the surface, like they pretty much crap hit songs. I've seen (and heard) direct and anecdotal evidence, however, that they actually work very hard to make it sound like that way--recording full demo versions of songs they're working on, listening to them, taking them apart, figuring out what's working and not working, and putting together a new demo. Rinse, lather, repeat. Lesson 1: there can be an enormous amount of effort put into something that sounds effortless. Sub-lesson: making something sound both effortless and, you know, good is almost always hard.

There are, of course, really two U2's. There's the studio version and the live version. As discussed long ago in this very forum, the latter is literally a communal religious experience, and while I suppose there are ways listening to an album can be transcendent in its own way...well, anyway, that's outside the scope of this discussion. The point being that there are songs that are great recordings and don't translate as well live ("Beautiful Day" being an example, so I'm told) and vice versa (most of the rest of their canon I gather, Bono being Rock Jesus and all).

Here's what U2 is all about, in my opinion: space. Compared to almost all other popular music, there's comparatively few parts making up the song--bass, drums, lead guitar, vocal, maybe one harmony. Very few overdubs (our current example has only a little bit of low, rumbling synth in the middle/end, which I defy you to claim that you would have noticed if I hadn't pointed it out). So, on to the construction of "Exit": First verse: the bass and Bono singing breathy, right up into the mic. Second verse: the same thing, with Bono opening up and singing louder. Some drum hits and guitar filigrees (The Edge is all about the filigree, don't you think?). This is a four minute song (I'm talking about the album version now). This band has three instruments total. For the first minute and a half, only one of them is continuously playing. Then they song kicks in for 45 seconds, and then everything but the bass is gone for another 45 seconds, and the rest of the song repeats that basic pattern again. To make a hack-jazz comparison, it's all about the notes that aren't played.

I think space in music is both literal and figurative. The literal is constructed (at least) of both gaps in the sonic spectrum and with reverb (I read in an article about mixing that you can think of sound two-dimensionally with the stereo pan moving a sound left-right and a reverb pan moving it forward-backward. Things with lots of reverb sound farther away). The figurative is whatever it is that lets the listener into the song--metaphorically speaking there's room for him or her to get into the song. That works strongly here--when the song really starts to rock, you've already been sucked in to the atmosphere and it's that much more potent.

I have a theory that the transcendent listening experience happens because of space, for a definition of "space" that I haven't quite filled out. I actually think there's no real meaning conveyed from the song writer and/or performer to the listener, that instead what's happening is that the song creates a space for the listener to insert his or her own life/experiences/humanity/whatever. That is, the listener is doing all the work, he or she just doesn't know it. You like a song before you know what it's about, in fact you've probably constructed your own notion of what it's about, whether you realize it or not. I always feel kind of sad when I find out what songs are actually about--it's like going from the book version of something to seeing someone else's version of it rendered on film. The picture painted by the song writer is always a little smaller than the one in my head.

"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" -- Daft Punk (Discovery)

2009-01-14T16:50:00.002-08:00

Here's a song that, while having absolutely no right to do so, sounds timeless (for a definition of timeless meaning, "could have been recorded any time in the last 30 years." There was no time before that, right?). It would be perfect for the soundtrack of Tron if everyone involved in the production in 1982 had been stoned (as opposed to just the screenwriter and all the people watching it). It also brings up several questions for discussion:

Question 1: Straight-up stealing from other artists: genius, or laziness? Discuss.
Question 2: "Believe" by Cher: is it the single nexus of sound responsible for the nigh-hegemonic, Anteres over-pitch-corrected weirdly post-disco sound found in all top-40 music today? Discuss.

Besides that, what have we got? I find the cheesy synth, casio-keyboard beat concoction of this song to be strangely compelling--it's something I've heard literally a million times before, yet I still can't quite place all the sources. In addition to the hyper pitch correction and other robotic-vocal effects (apparently these guys have gone into interviews and pretended to be robots, in true Tracy Jordan style), there are some neat tricks, both with rhythm (e.g. landing on "never over" at the end of several phrases) and instrumentation (e.g. the portamento keyboard voice, the fingertapping electric guitar voice, both of which I assume are MIDI triggers). 30 seconds of intro with all the dynamics EQ'd out, as if we're listening to tiny, tinny speakers. But the rest of the song doesn't really have a huge dynamic range, and sounds tinny and cheesy by nature, so it doesn't really "pop" when it actually comes in. Is this purposeful/a miscalculation/indicative of the fact that these guys just throw every musical trick they've ever heard at the wall and see what sticks?

What do we learn about stealing?

Leave a gap--the clever folks and critical darlings making music right now seem to be taking sounds from the late 70's/early 80's, so what's that--25-ish to 30 years (By that calculation we're due for a major popular resurgence of Michael Jackson's Thriller right about now)? You sound like Stevie Wonder's Inner Visions, you're a genius. You sound like the late 90's, you're a no-talent hack.
Steal outright, whole-cloth. Do what it takes to reproduce the sound of the era at which you're aiming. Don't worry about also sounding current--you seem to get that for free.

"Between the Bars" - Elliott Smith (either/or)

2009-01-12T15:36:00.003-08:00

Between the Bars - quintessential guitar and voice ballad (though there are at least two guitars here, and there's some kind of organ towards the end). Robbed of almost all the techniques and tools one would normally use to build a song, how does one pull off the feat?

Option 1: Battle depression, alcoholism, and heroin addiction; turn to music as the only possible expression of your own humanity, each song you write and record a tiny, tiny scream into the vast void of an unfeeling universe; realize upon attaining commercial success that now that everyone can hear you, no one is actually listening.

Option 2: Fake it.

Technically, he does what he does--layering voices and guitars in such a way that it still sounds like there's only one of each. Both elements super up-front in the recording. You're in the same room with him, right next to him even, and he's whispering his song to you. One perfect, memorable line: "People that you've been before that you don't want around any more." Everything about the construction of the song is easily repeatable by anyone else except for, you know, the actual deeply personal and profoundly heartbreaking expression behind it.

"Blue Ridge Mountains" - Fleet Foxes (Fleet Foxes)

2009-01-07T14:31:00.003-08:00

(or: surely now I will resume blogging with any kind of frequency at all).

mtg is teaching playwriting this semester, and is considering making her students do a blogging response project, wherein they read plays, blog about what they think made those plays successful, and then read and comment on the blogs of other students who are doing the same. It's an exercise in construction through group de-construction.

Will this work for songs? Who knows? But I'm not blogging about anything else these days, and knowing more about how to successfully construct a good song would be a lot of use to me. The rules will be made up as we go along. So...

Blue Ridge Mountains -- Fleet Foxes' self-titled debut made everybody's year-end top ten list. It would have made mine if I, you know, had one. When this song comes on my machine at work, after thirty seconds I forget what I was doing and start staring wistfully out of the window. It's not just that this song is good, it's transcendent.

It sounds epic. Dark, cavernous reverb, like we're in a cathedral. Vocal harmonies to match, it sounds almost like a boys choir in the intro.
Interesting, unusual lead instrument. I thought it was a hammer dulcimer at first, but it turns out to be a mandolin doubled with a piano.
Starts simple (and in mono--it's not in stereo until about half way through), and builds to a huge crescendo, but without any of the usual rock-and-roll elements. No electric guitars. No driving beats. No bass guitar at all that I can hear. Shakers, pounding on the piano, bass drum, the same lead riff we heard in the quiet parts, those same soaring harmonies all create the drive instead.
Unusual structure. No verse/chorus per se, there's a first part and a second part that's repeated, and so is chorus-like. Definitely unlike anything you'd hear on the radio.
Lyrically it seems like there's some mysterious family secret being referred to, but otherwise I have no idea what this song is about. And it definitely doesn't matter.
Singer with a good and reasonably strong voice with really just a hint of character. Certainly at his edge on this song, he breaks a couple of times on the high parts, but not in a way that sounds unpleasant. He neither carries the song nor impedes it, he just kind of rides it.

This song breaks almost all rules of popular songwriting, I have no idea what genre you'd put it in (alt-folk americana or something?), there's no hook, there's nothing about it that's really hummable. And if I were a record exec, I'd sign the band on the spot after hearing it. What have we learned here in lesson one? If you have a totally original and captivating sound you can break all the rules of songwriting and be successful in spite (or, much more likely, because) of it. And probably some other things, but I don't know what they are yet.

Slumdog Millionaire, dir. Danny Boyle

2008-11-24T13:45:00.002-08:00

Yeah, I haven't blogged for six months, and I haven't blogged about any of the things this blog is ostensibly about in, like, ever. I had a post about Hawking Radiation (because I know everyone has been dying to know my position on that) and yet another Schrodinger's Cat post (good news, I've totally solved the problem. Well, more like defined it out of existence), but I'm just not in a blogging place these days. I guess the days when the crushing angst of modern life could be filled by frequent posting have passed me by.

Anyway, this movie: Holy. Fuck. If you are currently in a state of having not seen this movie, you should seek the discontinuation of that state as soon as is humanly possible. In fact, you should just stop reading this right now, see the movie, and then come back so we can discuss it. For now, the rest of this paragraph is a generic spoiler, which you should not read if you have not seen the movie: Boyle has made a Bollywood film the brilliance of which lies in continually making you forget that you are watching a Bollywood film. It is a film which at every turn seems to be thwarting the conventions of the genre, such that you the viewer are endlessly surprised when it winds up totally following them.

Back with me? Good. Now go see this movie. Do it.

"Gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here"

2008-06-18T10:37:00.004-07:00

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater is in the unlikeliest of places. Think of the schlockiest part of the schlockiest beach town you can imagine -- end to end to end cheap, tacky souvenirs, cranky, sugar-hyped children, stupid games and rides, glow sticks, cotton candy, and ice cream of the future (on Chicago’s Navy Pier, Ice Cream of the Future comes in a futuristic pouch. Spoons and cups are so 20th century). Anyway, one slogs through all of this misery, skin crawling, and comes at last to the Shakespeare Theater -- an oasis in the desert, an island in the raging sea, shelter in wilderness, what you will. First, it is a beautiful beautiful theater and space. Second, holy crap, they are good. TG and I saw Comedy of Errors this weekend, a thing I would never have done had I not been just desperate to see the place. COE is (with apologies) not a good play. It is very early. It is not very funny. It lacks interesting characters or compelling narrative. It is the same joke over and over and over. And it makes no sense. Two sets of twins? Sure. Both with the same names? Um, no. It’s not just that this company managed to make the play palatable and entertaining. It wasn’t good in spite of its material. It was just brilliant. Brilliant.

But I’m getting off topic. My question was why put this world class theater doing classical (for the sake of this argument) texts in the middle of schlocky schlocksville? To attract a more diverse crowd? Full price tix were 80 bucks (we got them half price of course), about twice the price of any other theater tix in the city save for the totally sold out national tour huge summer musical extravaganza production of Wicked. 80 dollar tickets does not encourage the bringing of one’s totally hopped up, sticky, cranky, glow sticked children, right? The overlap of these two groups of people -- people who want to see Shakespeare and are willing to spend 80 dollars on it vs. people who want to eat fried dough, buy a pencil sharpener model of the Sears tower, and then go on the tilt a whirl -- is small (limited, perhaps, to Greg exclusively, and even he is borderline). Indeed, the audience was as white, middle aged, and blue haired as usual if a bit less high brow and a bit more touristy (so, then, was the show).

It pandered but brilliantly. Instead of just doing COE, it imagined a film studio making a film of the play in London in the 40s, so we got scenes from COE interspersed with this other play they’d written about these people making this movie. The marginalized ham, used to playing star parts, reduced here to playing a silly servant, keeps begging the director to let him do the St. Crispen’s Day speech from Henry V, a recurring joke that is brilliant on at least a dozen levels, but I’ll spare you these as it’s interesting only to me (and perhaps TG who, as you can imagine, already got the full lecture). Anyway, the ham gets slapped across the face towards the end of the “film” and the light changes and cue I’m-seeing-stars music, and he busts into the speech. About a third of the audience maybe got it, but we few (we happy few, we band of...well, you get it) cracked the fuck up. Genuinely. It was actually funny, not intellectually funny. It was brilliant. It was awesome. It was one of the funniest moments I have ever seen in live Shakespeare. And it cost nothing if you didn’t happen to be familiar with the speech -- the delivery was pretty funny anyway. I cried. Not from laughing so hard (though that too) but because it was so damn perfect and good.

Anyway, I would like to think the moral of this long winded story is something like happy marriage between tourists and academics, candy apples and theater snobs, but I don’t think it is. Shakespeare was not writing for a high brow audience, and his theater was located in a much less savory part of town than the Navy Pier. This isn’t the Globe though, and that’s not what they are going for. What they are going for I do not know. However, I expect seldom to see better theater in a more unusual place for it and never ever to see a better production of the Comedy of Freaking Errors of all things.

The Revolution Will Be Televised, Edited for Time and Content, and Re-released on DVD With Hours of Never-Before-Seen Bonus Footage

2008-06-04T10:41:00.003-07:00

British band The Get Out Clause has made a music video out of footage from CC-TV footage.

Awesome (literally).

Video killed the blah blah etc. blah

2008-06-02T01:03:00.000-07:00

My birthday has lately passed and as a gift from Mrs. Transient Gadfly I received a video camera. Putting it to immediate use I have now combined the two favorite things of everyone in the universe: other people's home movies and music recorded in basements.

If, inexplicably, you know me and do not have this mp3 of mine yet wish to, you can download it here. It occurred to me while doing this that I recorded this song ten years ago. Ten f***ing years, man. Also, the fact that Apple makes movie editing software that is so incredibly easy to use that you don't have to read instructions of any kind to make a music video might make you think that designing user interfaces is easy. Apparently though, it is not.

Beautiful Escape: The Songs of the Posies Revisted

2008-05-28T11:21:00.006-07:00

The Posies' first major-label release, Dear 23, came out in September of my senior year of high school. My friend Gino and I skipped class that morning and drove down to Cellophane Square to buy the CD; they hadn't put it on the shelves yet, and when we asked the guy behind the counter he gave us this look like, "Oh god. It has started already."

The Posies weren't just a band that had made it big, they were a band from Bellingham that had made it big, and they weren't just a band from Bellingham that made it big, our friend Nathan's older brother was the lead guitarist and singer, and Nathan had been keeping us appraised the whole year before about how they'd been courted by major labels and put up in plush hotel rooms. The Posies were It. They were The Next Big Thing.

There's a whole grand epic narrative that goes in between that day and this one but I'll just skip said narrative crap and say that 20 years later the Posies are still out there rocking, and their lasting contribution to pop music might just turn out to be that while they themselves were never The Next Big Thing, they inspired a crap load of other bands that sound like them. Here are 47 of them, including Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow covering their own songs (not to mention a great cover of "Paint Me" by The Calculus Affair).

Um...

2008-05-08T09:55:00.001-07:00

Can somebody explain this to me?

That's "Mr. Nerd Gnome" To You

2008-04-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

We're in Wired this (where "this" = next) month. Therein we are referred to as "the nerd gnomes in Beacon Hill." This is, in fact, an improvement. At the beginning of my career in software I worked at That Software Giant in Redmond™ on their initial foray into the internet, MSN 1.0. Wired did an article in which they likened we happy few original web developers to the million monkeys typing randomly on tiny keyboards. So now I am, professionally speaking, a gnome. The metaphors grow ever more humanoid.

There isn't a ton in this article that I haven't already covered here at The Odds Are One over the last couple of years (oh please, Wired: web services hype is soooo 2006). I haven't yet mentioned Amazon DevPay in this space, which is weird on account of in most of the Web Service things I announce the launch of I am only peripherally involved, whereas DevPay took up my entire life until it launched last December. DevPay is a billing application wherein you the developer create a software product that runs on Amazon's Web Services, then we sign up and bill your customers on your behalf. The concept is actually pretty cool, and like the rest of Web Services, if it turns out to be a killer app, the thing it's going to kill is venture capital.

Amazon (and Google, Yahoo, and IBM, who aren't wasting any time getting into the space either) is taking away the big upfront IT costs: you want to run a business that's going to need four high-powered servers just to get going? You don't need to spend $10,000 on hardware and $100,000 a year on a sysadmin just to get off the ground. You rent the space from Amazon for $0.40 an instance/hour and $0.10 a Gigabyte/month. When you want to get bigger, you rent more space (AWS even gives you a volume discount). We are hoping, it seems, to provide the big guns for the revolution, and then to watch the little guys fire them off.

It Came From 1977

2008-03-02T18:09:00.008-08:00

The Odds Are One and The Calculus Affair are pleased to announce the release of bad quarto*, a ten and one-half song E.P. recorded for the 2008 RPM Challenge (which has, as will be noted by those of you possessing clever and new-fangled calendar-reading skills, just ended).

The full album will be released in approximately twelve lines of text. Here now is the advance single from the album. Click play. You know you want to.

The Calculus Affair quoteth now from our liner notes as regards bad quarto*:

This album is composed entirely of songs about or pertaining to plays by William Shakespeare. In addition to being The Calculus Affair's effort for the 2008 RPM Challenge, it is also an E.P. which heralds the release of a future album of epic scope: one song for each of Shakespeare's plays (37 or 38, depending upon whom you read). If you are a fan of The Calculus Affair, and you enjoy excessively long albums that sound like they fell out of 1977, keep an eye peeled.

And now, the long (for an entirely abstract and arbitrary definition of the word, "long") awaited (for a definition of "awaited" etc. etc.) downloadable mp3 version of bad quarto*.

Duke Of The Stratosphere

Every Day

Bone & Matter

Rude Mechanicals

The Archer

Prince Of Tyre

The Mob

Hell & Night

Q.E. I

Exit, Pursued by a Bear/Your Mother's a Statue

Coda (Duke Of The Stratosphere)

This EP also comes with the fun built-in game, "Guess Which Play The Song Goes With." This game may or may not actually be fun. As with all music by The Calculus Affair, we remind you of the following: Unauthorized duplication is strictly encouraged. We hope you enjoy.

OaO Presents: Hilarity for Nerd Sportsfan Rockstar Wannabes™

2008-02-13T14:26:00.002-08:00

Picabo Street, if I may digress again, is my second favorite winter Olympics subject, after curling. In my musician days I made up a song inspired by her name: "Peekaboo Street." My baby lived on it. It was writing songs like that that made me the man I am today: a former musician.

-King Kaufman

OaO Presents: Hilarity for Nerds™

2008-02-06T13:56:00.001-08:00

From my friend Tom:

I failed my saving throw against charisma and became a die-hard Obama supporter.

10 Gadfly Things

2008-01-23T10:15:00.000-08:00

I like this meme. I'm doin' it too. Ten things I've done that you probably haven't:

Played guitar with Jon Auer
Attended 3 months of public school held in a language I didn't speak at the time
Flagged down a British Rail train from a platform in order to get it to stop and pick me up
Acted on stage with Hilary Swank
Experienced the Ballmer Peak (during which I wrote a script to keep a fulfillment-center mechanical sorter running after the program that was supposed to run it had crashed)
Written a series of comic books
Written a role-playing game based on the character from those comic books, complete with 30-page rule-book
Recorded an album in the month of February (and will again)
Appeared on a PBS Show
Been at the Trevi Fountain on New Year's Eve

"Yes, God forbid that while talking to 60,000 public school students, the President should appear smart."

2008-01-09T11:27:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama is making me a little sad that we don't have a tv (a feeling which arises during the baseball post season and at just about no other time ever). I think this is because I'm pretty sure his speeches are written by Aaron Sorkin. He speaks of "workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land." He promised last night, "We will remember that something is happening on the streets of America, that we are one people, that we are one nation, and that together we can begin the next chapter in America's story with the three words ... Yes, we can." It makes me weepy.

But my question is this: is falling for Obama because of the poetry, because he's so good with the words, really any less shallow than voting for someone because he's young and attractive or because he looks like a cowboy and what's more 'merican than a cowboy or because he talks stupid just like me or because he's someone I'd like to have a beer with? Beers, cowboys, and stupid people do nothing for me (young and attractive I consider on a case by case basis), but then I wasn't the target audience on those, but boys with words...well he had me at "audacity."

And while I would argue that facility with words suggests other qualities like intelligence which might come in handy when running a country (but then I teach facility with words for a living and Obama didn't write his anyway), it could just be a question of what gets your rocks off. Still, if the folks who know about these things (myself, I wouldn't have guessed that stupid=electable or that speaking French=unfit to serve as president, so shows what I know) think that poetry is more marketable this season than dumb cowboy, already I feel we've won one. (About damn time too).

P.S. Bonus points for naming the West Wingepisode that lends the post title.

--mtg

The Calculus Affair Rides Again

2008-01-08T22:09:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how long it will be up there before it's replaced in the rotation, but the Calculus Affair's contribution to "Beautiful Escape: A Tribute To The Posies" is the current track in the player on their MySpace page as of this moment. So, you know, check it out and stuff before it goes away. The album is scheduled for release from Burning Sky Records sometime in 2008. You should, like, buy it.

Merry All That

2007-12-25T00:29:00.000-08:00

This is what I used to listen to on Christmas Eve as a young lad growing up in what was, practically speaking, Canada. It is quite a listen, and you should check it out.

On the one hand, thinking of this thing that I used to listen to on CBC Radio on Christmas Eves long ago and being able to immediately have it is the greatest thing about modern life. On the other hand, it was nice to happen upon these things by accident, too.

Amazon SimpleDB

2007-12-19T10:30:00.000-08:00

Hey look, I'm blogging again! Amazon Web Services launched (or rather, announced) Amazon SimpleDB Service last Thursday. My part in the launching of particular web services is usually pretty minor--in this case they came to me on Wednesday and we had the following conversation:

Them: Hey, can you make it so that nobody can sign up for Amazon SimpleDB?

Me: Um. Yes. Yes, I can do that.

(I suspect that this is not funny to anyone except me, to whom it is hilarious). SimpleDB is a service about which (for some definition of "a lot," "people," and "excited,") a lot of people are excited, so for the first time we've launched a service that you can't actually sign up for yet (go here to see that, indeed, I made it so you couldn't sign up for it) in order to, as far as I can tell, build up the hype first.

I get all of my practice explaining these things these days by telling Mrs. Transient Gadfly about them, so here is the mtg-approved explanation of why SimpleDB is pretty cool. A relational database is a collection of tables of information that are linked in some way. For instance, say (utterly hypothetically) that you teach some level of college. You might want to have some information about your students. You'd create a table called students, with columns like "First Name," "Last Name," "Birthdate," "Address," and so on. You'd also probably want to create some sort of unique identifier, like "Student Id," since different students could have the same birthday, or be identical twins who are both named "Chad" because their parents are debilitatingly insane. Then you'd create a table called "Grades" that has a column for the name of the assignment, the grade on that assignment, and also a column for Student Id to match the grades to the student. This makes your database a relational one--the tables show information, but there's a way to relate them, since the Student Id in the Students table corresponds to the one in the Grades table. Now you can do a query, which involves going to your database and typing things like this:

select s.first_name, s.last_name, g.letter_grade from students s, grades g where s.student_id = g.student_id and g.assignment_name = 'response paper 1';

The query above a simple example of "SQL" ("Structured Query Language," pronounced, "Sequel,") and it's the standard language used for getting information out of relational databases . Both humans and computer programs that want information from this kind of database use it, it's pretty flexible and you can do a lot of things with it. Also, it's more or less a sentence: you can read it and, while you might not quite speak that language, you can get the gist of what it says.

Trying to run a database like this has a lot of problems, where "has a lot of problems," is code for, "costs a frickin' crapload of money." First of all, you usually have to get somebody to design one for you, for a definition of "somebody" equal to "a person who makes upwards of $150 an hour...."

Calvino: Do you think TG is over-using this, "noun, for a defintion of noun that equals something different than the generally accepted definition of noun" construction?

The Stoat: Yes, for a definition of, "yes," that means, "the fall of Roman Imperialism."

...followed by the cost of the hardware and the cost of maintaining it and keeping it backed up for when your server's hard drive dies, all of which tends to be expensive. So while there's pretty much no way to get around this general headache and cost if you happen to be a large and/or complicated organization, it's a kerfuffle of a problem for small-to-medium businesses that need to keep relational data and run queries, one which has, in the past, led otherwise perfectly sane people to use Microsoft Access.

Much like Amazon S3 lets you offload the responsibility of making sure your data is correctly backed up and always available over to Amazon, Amazon SimpleDB does the same thing with your database. SimpleDB doesn't reach the complexity of a relational database that you'd query via SQL, but in this case that might be a good thing. It doesn't require you to employ a database administrator, and you don't have to worry about your server crashing. As with all Web Services, it's limited in speed by the pipe you have going from your machine to the interwebs, but for small to medium applications that's not really a problem anymore.

cult of authorship

2007-10-29T00:27:00.000-07:00

here are some things:

1) i went to graduate school during most of the second half of the 90s. so i know the author is dead. my students say things like, "we can't read it that way because that's not what shakespeare intended." i usually say: how do you know what shakespeare intended? but in my more honest moments, i say: who cares? and i mean that lovingly. i mean to say what shakespeare intended matter less than what you learn and think yourself.

2) i hate the red sox.

3) nonetheless (re: #1 not #2), i am having this week a little love affair with richard russo (who lives in maine so, for all i know, might be a red sox fan and who, for that matter, grew up in new york -- albeit state, not city -- and so could even be a yankee fan which would be worse though perhaps not tonight). we went to see him read on tuesday night, and i felt about being in the same room with him the same way i feel about seeing neil finn in concert. richard russo, i am here to tell you, is very much alive. and i wanted to touch him and/or cook him dinner as i do all people i am having worship of (okay, really neil finn and richard russo are it, but only because i have very high standards).

i am doing a bad job of making a point here, so i will start a new paragraph and maybe that will help. my points are these:

a) i asked richard russo a question when he took questions. i never do this for a number of reasons, but one, surely, is the author is dead, so who cares what he thinks. but people were mostly not asking questions or not asking good ones, so then i raised my hand and asked a good question -- the best question of the night (though, let us admit that, as much as anything else, i ask questions about books for a living) -- and he blushed and i blushed and he laughed and i laughed and everyone laughed, and i was so nervous and adrenalin-rushy i could barely talk. then i stood in line so he could sign my book.

b) however, richard russo is my colleague. the man reminds me of a college english teacher because (until he won a pulitzer prize) he was one. he reminds me of my exdepartment chair. he reminds me of the people i work with and the people i read and write with. he is not to be worshipped, not because he is dead, but because we just work together, so whatever.

c) holy crap is richard russo a good novelist. and a nice guy.

d) so, to sum up, not someone to idolize because he's just a colleague AND he's an author who should be dead, but still i want to make him soup. there is something to this, but it will have to wait until another day because am i grading papers? no, i am blogging. and is richard russo grading my papers for me while i blog about him? no (though probaby not because he's dead but more likely because at least the third best thing about winning a pulitzer prize must be not having to grade papers anymore).

--mtg

Death of the Rock Star

2007-10-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

From Stylus Magazine:

The lower tier support structures have splintered as the kids who used to save their cash for college rock become ragingly omnivorous: your average hard-working indie band now competes with Justin Timberlake, Thai pop, and some Nonesuch Explorer disc that David Byrne namechecked on his blog. They also have to compete with 100 years’ worth of records that are better than anything they’ll ever make. We have endless choices, and almost none of them see the spotlight. But the real problem is that artists chase the spotlight in the first place. And anything short of superstardom looks like a consolation prize. Consider a different model: cooking. Cooks aren’t rock stars. A few turn into international celebrities, but they’re the exception. Most chefs run a kitchen and feed people ten feet away. In big cities or backwater towns, nobody looks down on you if you’re feeding them well. And there’s plenty of room for amateurs. Have someone over for dinner, and you’re a civilized host; break out a guitar, and you’re an asshole.

I wonder, as the author of this piece does, if what will happen with the endless and infinite distribution of endless and infinite music by endless and infinite artists will result in music returning to what it was before music could be recorded: the main purview of the musician being the living room.

Four or five months ago when I was thinking about this problem, I decided that the reason people didn't go out wading into the muck of the basement musician to find things worth a listen was that it was just too frickin' hard to filter. I tried with the little music capsule at left to add my own filter to the noise and it lasted about a month before I gave up, and the capsule has been stuck on Grizzly Bear since July (still a great band you should check out, by the way). I'll take it down the next time I'm thinking about it. In any case: individuals' blogs becoming little mini-Pitchforks: Not The Answer.

I don't what the answer is, but I'm pretty sure the Rock Star isn't going away: we need Him or Her for the same reason that we need religion. On the other hand, I am now equally sure that the The Recording is going to kill The Recording Artist. Hey—I should write a song about that.

Cat In A Box Redux, Redux

2007-10-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

So as you might have guessed, I was not the first person to note that an inanimate object can collapse the Wave Function

Analogous effects (to those seen in the Schrödinger's Cat experiment)...have some practical use in quantum computing and quantum cryptography. It is possible to send light that is in a superposition of states down a fiber optic cable. Placing a wiretap in the middle of the cable which intercepts and retransmits the transmission will collapse the wavefunction (in the Copenhagen interpretation, "perform an observation") and cause the light to fall into one state or another.

(Wikipedia). I seem to have not understood the nature of the Wave Function in this particular case--basically the answer seems to be that Geiger Counter has a wave function representing the decay or lack thereof of a particle (and the life of the cat) that's different than the person outside the box who doesn't know jack about the outcome of the experiment until he opens the box. Such is, apparently, a feature of the Copenhagen Interpretation of reality.

In this interpretation of the universe, the experiment just seems a lot less compelling to me, because the Geiger Counter and the human outside the box will never disagree (that is, the Geiger Counter will never report that the particle decayed while the human later opens box and finds the cat alive). Maybe I'm not seeing the point here, but this seems to reduce quantum weirdness at the macro level to "Stuff that's true that you don't know yet."

I don't know why I'm writing this as a blog entry since, I dunno....something.

Cat In A Box, Redux

2007-10-10T22:45:00.001-07:00

See here, here, or here.

It occurs to me just now that the Geiger counter makes the observation. The Geiger counter collapses the wave function. In all interpretations of Schrödinger's cat that I've ever read, the implicit interpretation is that human consciousness is required to make an observation and collapse the wave function. But there's no reason that this should be so--the Geiger counter, just like a human, is a device that responds to stimulus. Its failure to be as complicated as the human observer doesn't disqualify it from being able to make the observation. The wave function collapses before the gas canister is smashed or not smashed. The cat is dead. Or it is alive.

Probably like 200,000 people have had this insight before me, but whatever--I write a frickin' blog. Anyway, that was it. As you were.

Still More Hilarity For Nerds™

2007-10-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

Today's XKCD:

Did you really name your son, "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;"?

No, really. There's nothing to see here.

The Inquisitivists, Episode 0

2007-10-03T00:04:00.000-07:00

This is a test of SketchCast (tip of the virtual white board pen to Jack's dad), which is a pretty freaking cool piece of technology. Speaking of people who are freaks: me. I am a huge one.

Still working out the kinks in the audio, sorry about that. Also, towards the end I say "fuck," so don't blast this audio in your workplace or nothing.

Something About The Human Condition

2007-09-19T15:38:00.000-07:00

This is one of the first things I ever blogged:

This week (in The Stranger) there's a two page spread, consisting entirely of type that appears to be about .000016 point Times New Roman, from (a man who) appears to have, in the past, claimed to be the reincarnation of Christ....(He's) not on the same plane of existence as I, whereas he's clearly got a lot on his mind and has gone to great lengths to say it, whether anybody else is listening or not (though probably orders of magnitude more people are reading his thoughts than are reading mine these days). (Apparently in the process of writing this entry I have been possessed by the parenthetical-comment making spirit of David Foster Wallace. Sorry about that). (Have you seen that David Foster Wallace wrote a book about infinity? It's like irony is dead. Or something that's like irony, only with more footnoted digressions). I can't understand his symbolism, or metaphors, or what his personal shame is, or what he thinks mine is. But what really is the difference between this Manifesto-Man and somebody else with a lot on their mind, say David Foster Wallace?

It turns out that difference was that he was dying of brain cancer.

UPDATE: Searching for info on this guy (who co-founded Seattle's Essential Baking Company), I found a forum discussion of one of the ads he put into the Stranger. Some highlights:

sickbadthing: Fuck the crazy shit he puts in the ads... has anyone had that fucking bread? The Rosemary Diamante is awesome fucking bread. The FUCKING BREAD IS AMAZING. I just want to talk about the fucking bread, guys. It's good, okay? Gosh.

Violet_DaGrinder: Yeah, I don't care if Osama Bin Fucking Laden were making it, that Rosemary Diamante? That's some good fucking bread. If the beautiful salt on that bread is made from evaporating Jesus's tears, then that's some tasty, tasty pain. On some fucking fantastic bread.

Little Round Mirrors

2007-09-13T14:39:00.000-07:00

Three Songs played on the Canterbury Jukebox, Seattle WA, 09/06/2007:
"Dear Prudence"—The Beatles, The Beatles
"Waiting Room"—Fugazi, Thirteen Songs.
"Everybody Wants To Rule The World"—Tears For Fears, Songs From The Big Chair

I first moved to Seattle eleven years ago. A contingent of my friends from high school had attended the University Of Washington and remained in the city after graduation--we had lots in common in high school but less after college, a trend which continues to this day. I miss them, but this tends to be the way of ones life, I find.

We used to have Sunday brunch at The Canterbury on 15th. It was a smoke-filled dive bar at the time with terrible short-order food, but it was the only place in Seattle you could go with a group that varied in size from five to fifteen and find seats on a Sunday morning. If the brunch group had a ringleader (as it was in high school), it was Josh Rosenfeld. I met Josh when I was fifteen, after he moved to Bellingham from Telluride, and he was absolutely the coolest person I had ever met. He wore untucked dress shirts, ties, and big sneakers. He had huge blond curly hair, and he knew about all the cool indie music there was (Josh is now the head of Barsuk Records, so his coolness is another trend which continues to this day).

Josh also played bass in a band called This Busy Monster, and the first time I saw them play they opened for the band fronted by Sean Nelson, another brunch attendee, called Harvey Danger. I don't go out to see bands much any more (not that I am old or infirm or anything...I dunno, I guess the high school crowd was the one who put me on to good local bands, and I don't see them much), but I did then, and thereafter any time Harvey Danger played I went and saw them. They put out a record. A DJ on KNDD started playing one of the songs, "Flagpole Sitta," some stuff happened, some other stuff happened, and so on.

I had a point about life here, but now I don't know what it was. It was something about listening to the song that shares a title with this post (off the third Harvey Danger album which you can download for free by going here), in which it seems that being part of a band that suddenly broke absolutely huge and came tumbling back down to earth just as suddenly was simultaneously the best and worst thing that ever happened to him. It was something about going to Canterbury again, which is kind of a nice place to hang out now that there's no smoking indoors in Washington State. I think it might be that I'm firmly in my mid-thirties now, and my three-song playlist on the Canterbury jukebox last Thursday is as cool as I ever was, and as cool as I'll ever be.

The Modern World Is An Insane Place, Part 47

2007-09-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

If for some reason you're not on the Amazon Mechanical Turk mailing list, you're probably not aware that right now you could be helping look for Steve Fossett, the American aviator who went missing somewhere over Nevada last week.

As of this writing there are a little over 130,000 unexamined satellite photos of Nevada uploaded to Mechanical Turk, and more appear to be coming from Geo Eye at about the same rate that people are working on them. I just went through about 20 of them, and so far my impression is that Nevada contains a lot of nothing.

That you can search for a pilot missing over Nevada from your desk is pretty insane already. What, to me, is more insane was the one sentence uttered at our weekly operations meeting this morning. We look at graphs to see how our services are performing, and a fellow engineer pointed to a particular point on a particular graph and said, "...and this spike here is from people looking for Steve Fossett."

And there you have...something...in a nutshell: a rather monumental confluence of information, technology, and zeitgeist conveniently translated into one easily digestible data point. We now return you to your regularly scheduled modern life, already in progress.

But Maybe I'm Wrong

2007-09-06T14:38:00.001-07:00

It dawned on me this morning that Fred Thompson is going to be the next President of the United States.

And then, in lieu of re-living the 80's all over again, I will be forced to shoot myself.

Rant of An Aging Hipster

2007-09-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

The Gadflies spent Saturday at the Bumbershoot Music Festival in order to see Crowded House, who opened this year's mainstage festivities. Mainstage at Bumbershoot is a high-school football stadium, with the stage in one end zone. We camped out at the stage an hour before the show started and stood through Crowded House (who rocked), a half hour of setup, and then The Shins (who did not).

Also, apparently I'm old now.

At the beginning of Crowded House's set, the pit (such as it was) was dead. This I could understand—it was the first show of the day, people were standing around waiting around for awhile, and Crowded House's fans are generally our age or older. Crowded House also has 20 years of experience playing large venues, and they soon got the crowd into it. Their set ended, and as we sort of expected, the crowd shifted around a little bit but nobody really went anywhere, as The Shins were coming on in thirty minutes.

Except apparently that's not what happened. I looked down at the Bumbershoot guide in my hand, and looked up again, and all of a sudden we exceeded the age demographic of the crowd by a good 15 years. It was as if, as mtg said, we were in a cartoon room, and they had flipped the floor over so that you were in the same place but with totally different furniture.

(Here I should offer up something about, you know, the nature of people who want to stand at the front of the stage versus the (sane) people who sit 500 yards away in the stands watching from a safe distance. In our recent trip to the UK, mtg and I took an overnight bus from Edinburgh to London; we reached the station and absolutely everyone else on the same bus was college student-aged, they being the only demographic that weighed the economic cost of staying over a night in London or Edinburgh greater than the extreme discomfort of braving seven hours sitting upright in a moving bus. In summary, the Gadflies are kind of crazy people.)

In fact I was kind of excited, because I had not been in a good racous crowd since I went to see Basement Jaxx with Glenn Simpson at the Showbox, and that was a long time ago. mtg was somewhat less excited as she could no longer see and was suffering some claustrophobia, but being that I was now the biggest person in the audience, I was able to maintain a little space for us. The opening synth roll of "Sleeping Lessons" began as the Shins walked out on stage, people cheered, it was all very exciting. "Sleeping Lessons" is the perfect song to open a concert because it has this great moment where the song blows up from ambient into big crunching guitar rock, so I was expecting the crowd of 16-year-olds to do the same thing...

...and they didn't. They just stood there. Then the Shins proceeded to play their show managing to not interact with the audience in any way, such that the audience continued to pretty much just stand there. Moreover they played a set that, excepting an admittedly awesome cover of Pink Floyd's Breathe, was technically perfect but not discernibly different from listening to a Shins CD at home. Eventually, some excitement occurred when some spry members of the youth of America started crowd surfing, and here arrives my next complaint.

ATTENTION YOUTH OF AMERICA: If you are holding up part of the body of a crowd-surfer, DO NOT BODILY SHOVE THE PERSON FORWARD. You have to support him or her until you are sure the next person ahead of you (or behind you or to the side of you, depending on which direction the crowd-surfing flow is going) is ready to receive him or her. CARRY--DO NOT PUSH. That is all.

In conclusion, I would like to say that when I was a lad, if somebody wasn't carted out of the pit in a stretcher, it meant that a shitty band was playing. Also, I walked to school in the snow uphill both ways, and we respected our elders. No, wait...not respected. Held them in deep and profound contempt. That was it.

Hitting The Medium Time

2007-08-20T14:19:00.000-07:00

Hello again. My vacation, strangely bracketed with posts about the profoundly awesome state of the Still-Inexplicably-Microsoft-Dominant Global Software Paradigm, has come to an end. I'm sure you were all destitute without your semi-weekly postings about the philosophical implications of...uh...stuff.

Musical news has transpired during this middle time: whereas before I went on vacation there existed in the world a total of zero (0) compilations featuring songs by The Calculus Affair, there now exist not one, but in fact TWO (2) such CDs. Men Of Luggage appears on The Best Of Sound Aid, a compilation in support of Heifer International (favorite charity of The Gadfly family), which you can buy (or listen to clips, if you like to hear things first) from CDBaby by clicking here. The Man Who Used To Hunt Cougars For Bounty appears smack dab in the middle of Indiescent Exposure, a compilation of artists from the 2007 RPM challenge. In the theoretical world of our imagination, this album comes out on the Hear Music label this fall (in reality, these things are fraught with peril). In the meantime you can stream the album here (you should do this, and you should buy this CD if it ever comes out, because it is a frickin' awesome album) (and not just because it contains a song by me).

Calvino: Why should I purchase either of these CDs? I can already download these two songs for free, and I probably won't really like anything else on either of them.

The Stoat: Caché, my eponymous friend. Ignore the obvious and mundane "it's a good cause," or "you should support the independent musician blah blah blah," arguments—not that they aren't compelling, but they pale in comparison to the associated coolness you will acquire.

Calvino: What are you talking about? Have you read If on a winter's night a traveler? I am already totally cool.

The Stoat: Agreed, but consider the level of coolness you would attain by not only being the author of the greatest meta-novel in the modern literary canon but also being friends with an actual musician. We're no longer talking about just knowing some dude somewhere who records music in his basement. Other people, random people totally unknown to either of you, have taken your friend's music and deemed it, in some way and for some definition of the term, "worthy".

Calvino: But isn't it already too late? How can I differentiate myself from these unwashed masses who are, even now, flocking in to attempt to claim ownership of this associative coolness?

The Stoat: Your coolness was assured from the moment you met in high school/college/glee club/your cousin's Bat Mitzvah. These other people are relative late-comers. You already knew him in the proverbial "when." So of course you have these two compilation albums. And the album he recorded four years ago that he only gave to his close friends that the hoi polloi haven't heard of. And the mp3 demos of a couple of new songs he's working on that he emailed to you a couple of weeks ago. You're just that cool.

Calvino: AND I wrote If on a winter's night a traveler.

The Stoat: And you wrote If on a winter's night a traveler.

Microsoft: Now Using Client Platform Dominance to Make Random Server Applications Arbitrarily Unusable!™

2007-08-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

The cause of last week's Skype outage unmasked:

According to Skype the outage was caused by “a massive restart of our user’s [sic] computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine software update” which The Register points out was Microsoft’s monthly patch Tuesday. Patch Tuesday is the time of the month Windows users receive security updates that often result in widespread reboots by Thursday.

Awesome. Again.

What are the Odds that I am Transient Gadfly?

2007-08-08T01:43:00.001-07:00

Lower than you think.

Hello to the OddsAreOne portion of the blogosphere out there. P & L are in Scotland seeing 47 plays per day. I'm trying to do some blogging, but find my computer logged into TG's account - so I just couldn't resist the temptation to make a quick post.

Microsoft: Now Making Software We Didn't Write Unsafe to Use!™

2007-07-30T10:05:00.000-07:00

A series of messages Friday from the Security Department of an unnamed IT company:

We have been made aware of an extremely serious security vulnerability affecting Mozilla Firefox versions 2.0.0.5 and below. The vulnerability allows an attacker to execute code on your computer if you browse to a malicious web page using Firefox. Exploit code for this issue is available in the wild. The currently available exploit code is designed for Microsoft Windows XP SP2. It is not clear whether other platforms are vulnerable to modified versions of the exploit.

The followup message a few hours later:

IT Security has done some extensive testing, and we are ready to adjust our statement as follows:

• If you do not use Firefox at all, you are safe.
• If you’re running an OS other than Windows, you may safely run Firefox.

If you prefer or require Firefox under Windows to do your job:
• Launch Internet Explorer, and click on Help, then About Internet Explorer.
• If your IE version number begins with 6.0, you may safely run Firefox.
• If your IE version number begins with 7.0, you must revert to IE6 before running Firefox.

Awesome.

Out Of Office Assistant

2007-07-27T17:57:00.000-07:00

"Thank you for your email. I am unable to reply to it as, in a desperate bid for freedom, I have fled the country. I will be on the lam from July 30th until a maniacally single-minded and tenacious officer of the law finally apprehends me and returns me to the office on August 20th. During this time my pursuer and I will experience, at first, a profound hatred of one another. Then, as I barely wriggle out of one seemingly inescapable trap after another, both of us will come to acknowledge the skill and cunning of the other, which will gradually morph into a strange and mutual admiration. Eventually, we will come to realize that we are more alike than different, that we are, in fact, driven by the same nigh-primordial urges to subvert the norms and paradigms of modern life. This will force us to re-examine not only the true nature of good and evil, but also the very things that make us human. Then, even as the tides return and the seasons change, the struggle will end and I will return to my menial and soul-crushing job.

"During this epic pursuit, Nate Fitch can assist you with SSOP, Rob Jones with the Dev Portal, and Peter Sirota with all other issues; each one, wittingly or unwittingly, aiding and abetting the unending struggle between nature and man."

vampire technology

2007-07-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

i am reading one of those bedford/st.martin's case studies in contemporary criticism editions of Dracula which some book rep sent me at some point. it is aimed squarely at college students. it has footnotes throughout the text to translate that small passage of latin for you, explain the shakespeare reference you might have missed, and define that word that isn't in your dictionary as a small carriage on springs popular in the nineteenth century throughout europe and drawn by two horses instead of four or six (as if you care, but sure, that's what footnotes are for). it also helpfully footnotes the following term: typewriter ("a writing machine that produces characters resembling those printed by a press").

now i know i am old, but this is ridiculous, right? i realize our students have never themselves written a paper on a typewriter. i feel i must point out, though, NOR HAVE I. more to the point, i have also never used quill and ink to craft a letter or a hammer and sharp thingy (technical term) to carve my story into the wall of a cave, but i have still heard of and generally understood these writing technologies.

or maybe this is the (otherwise seemingly humorless) editor's little joke? Dracula IS kind of boring.... so i ask you, are they literally kidding me with this? or are they just kidding me with this?

--mtg

Incorrectness, Political and otherwise

2007-07-23T16:30:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I flagged this article from Psychology Today, which attempts to assign evolutionary causes to some of our more hegemonic behaviors because it was just interesting on so very many levels. Then, as per usual, I never got back to it, and Broadsheet and Echidne Of The Snakes beat me to the trenchant analysis. One of the things the latter pointed out, which is totally true and I wish I'd noticed right off, is this. From the original article:

The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct.

And from Echidne:

Whenever I see the kind of argument presented as here, I know that something smells off. Real scientific articles don't say that they are going to "tell the truth." That's just not the way science is written.

(Your second hint that something is rotten here is, natch, that this meticulously researched article is appearing in that bastion of academic rigor, Psychology Today. But that's as may be.)

I have to admit, I'm pretty interested in the principle behind Evolutionary Psychology (or, as Echidne points out, since apparently capital-E Evolutionary capital P Psychology has been hijacked by right-wing pseudo-scientists, I should say that I'm interested in small-e evolutionary small-p psychology). I have, in this very blog, claimed that the hegemonic bastardry of the world is due to the kind of bastards our ancestors were. So other than the fact that I'm calling the resulting behavior out as bastardry, I'm constructing the same sort of argument as Satoshi Kanazawa Ph.D. How embarrassing.

I suppose what I didn't see in constructing my first argument (I was writing about Honor Killings, if you don't want to click the link again) is that it might well only be the construction of the original dogma that builds on the evolutionary fear of reproductive failure. After that, you'd probably have to consider all kinds of rules of mob behavior, which could correlate with sources both evolutionary and social, when examining the actual act of publicly stoning a woman to death--there are all kinds of studies showing we'd do insane and violent things in mobs that we'd never dream of doing on our own. Of course, that has its own set of correlations--but that's a topic for another time.

OaO Presents: The Cool Thing My iPod Just Did™

2007-07-19T14:13:00.000-07:00

iPod on random
Spike: "Come on then. Sing."
music swells
Henchman: "My master has The Slayer's sister hostage at the Bronze because she summoned him, and at midnight he's going to take her to the underworld to be his queen."
Giles: "What does he want?"
Henchman: "Her."
iPod plays: As Girls Go by Suzanne Vega

Only about five of you know why that was cool, but boy, it was cool. I heart random algorithms.

Being J.J. Putz

2007-07-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

Like most ninth-inning relievers in baseball, Mariners closer J.J. Putz comes onto the field from the bullpen with theme music blaring out of every speaker (in his case, Thunderstruck by AC/DC). He reaches the mound, throws his warm-up pitches with the music still blasting and the crowd cheering. At this point, presumably, we should play some baseball. However, as was the case last night when J.J. completed his 27th save by retiring the Orioles in order, after EVERY SINGLE STRIKE recorded, including foul balls, they brought the music back on for, say, 10 seconds or so. During this time J.J. walked off the mound, wiped the sweat off his brow, made a quick cup of tea, checked the stock ticker on his cellphone, worked on his knitting, and so on, before walking back up to the mound and throwing another pitch. Now, maybe J.J. has talked to the P/A department at the stadium and this is exactly the way he wants things when he pitches. On the other hand, imagine if everyone went to work this way:

Monday, 10:00 a.m. T.G. walks up to the entrance of the Pacific Medical building. As he opens the door, the distinctive guitar riff of U2's The Fly begins playing through the public address system. In unison, every single Amazon employee rises from his or her desk, and begins cheering wildly. This continues while T.G. rides the elevator up to his office, sits down at his desk, reads his email, and checks his RSS feeds. Finally, as he turns to the code he's currently writing, the music and cheering subside.

T.G. stares at the code for a moment.
There is an eerie silence.
T.G. starts to type something. He pauses, then erases it.
A collective "ohhhhh..." of disappointment emanates from the building.
T.G. types a line of code.
The voice of Bono belting, "A man will rise, A man will fall, from the sheer face of love..." blasts out of the PA system. Everyone cheers wildly.
Another line of code is entered.
More insane cheering, The Edge wailing, "Love...will shine like a burning star."
Several more lines of code. Then the distinctive Control-X-S indicating Emacs file save. T.G. opens a terminal window and types, "make" at the prompt.
The screaming shakes the building. The music swells. Every computer screen in the building goes black and then begins flashing "Pump it Up" and "Louder" in big yellow block letters.
Lines of compiler messages scroll by. Then, suddenly they stop. The last line reads: "Compiler error."
The music and screaming abruptly stop. An audible gasp can be heard, followed by concerned murmuring.
T.G. returns to the file. He edits a few lines, saves again, returns to the terminal window and types "make" again.
The music and cheering slowly swell again. Nervous anticipation oozes from every corner.
More compiler messages. Finally, the process terminates with the message "Make completed successfully."
The building erupts in cheers and high-fives. K-C and The Sunshine Band's That's The Way (I Like It) plays in its entirety. A voice comes over the P/A, summarizing the code that has just been written. Everyone rushes for the exits in order to beat the traffic.
T.G. goes for a cup of tea.

Greatest. Cartoon. Ever.

2007-07-11T23:26:00.000-07:00

This week's Tom The Dancing Bug (subscription, or watching a brief ad, required).

OaO Presents: Wrandom Wednesday™

2007-07-11T12:59:00.000-07:00

One of these days I'm going to figure out how to blog about what I want to blog about without writing 1,000 words at a time about math, or whatever. That day was not yesterday. Nor was it the day before that. Nor was it this day, or this day, or this one (or this one, or this one....)

Music this week is from Grizzly Bear. They are my new favorite band. Or, I should say, they are my favorite new band. I'm also listening to the major label debut of Seattle hip-hop duo Blue Scholars, and it's frickin' awesome. Geologic just name-checked Steve Pool.

I probably had some other things to add, but I can't think of them now. Maybe I'll remember them later.

There Must Be O(n) Ways To Leave Your N-P Completeness

2007-07-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

So yesterday we discovered that when your keyboard gets mixed up, all the letters wind up in cycles with other letters, and that you're guaranteed that if you want to type an a, and you type an a and it comes up q on the screen, if you type q and then keep typing what you see, you'll eventually wind up with an a. Is it clear why this is true? I mean, I happen to know myself that it is, but that's only because I have a degree in this crap. It seems like I could be trying to type a and somehow wind up at a dead end where I type a and see q, and then I type q and see z, type z and see x, type x and see q, type q and see z, type z and see x, &c., &c., never actually getting back to a. But we're actually safe from that because in that case typing both a and x would have to produce a q, which means there were two q keys on our original keyboard (which would be, like, totally whack). This same thing prevents there from being a cycle where, like, I want to type an a, it comes up q, I type q and it comes up a, and then I type a and it comes up z, and then I go through an entirely different cycle. In this case that means your keyboard was whack in a different way--when you type the a key, two different letters could come up. If you're trying to type an a, when you finally see a on the screen, you've completed the cycle.

If by some miracle you've followed me to this point, you know the following: each letter of 'dirk' is going to have to be in a cycle with some other letters, and those cycles can be no larger than 26. You also know from yesterday that to finally actually see 'dirk' on the screen, you're going to have to type what you see as many times as the least common multiple of all of the cycles that these letters are in. So if d and i are in 3-cycles, r is in a 7-cycle, and k is in a 10-cycle, you're going to have to type what you see 210 times (lcm of 3, 7, and 10) before all the cycles match up.

There's one more trick to figuring out the actual answer, and that's noticing that you can't, like, have both a 21-cycle and a 22-cycle on your keyboard. That's because you've only got 26 letters and the 21-cycle and the 22-cycle would have to be composed of entirely different letters (or you would run into the same problems we ran into above, where one letter typed two different things, or there were two of the same letter on your keyboard). You could have, say, two different letters in a 21-cycle, but it would have to be the same 21 cycle.

So, finally, here's the ironic and humorous (for a definition of "humorous" that...well, you know) crux of the thing I was trying to get at yesterday (yes, I know. It wasn't worth it). If this were an actual interview question, an interviewer (at least a good one) would consider you to have to solved this problem at this point, even though you haven't actually found the answer. The reason is that this problem is N-P Complete, which is a fancy way of saying that there's no clever algorithm for solving it other than trying all the possible combinations of cycles that fit into 26 keys and seeing which one gives you the answer where you have to type the longest to get your name. Anyway, off the top of my head the biggest answer I can come up with is if d is in a 2-cycle, i is in a 5-cycle, r is in a 7-cycle, and k is in a 9-cycle, which takes 630 tries. That might be wrong, but I'm going to get the job anyway.

OaO Presents: Enhanced Hilarity For Nerds™

2007-07-09T12:28:00.000-07:00

Today's Hilarity For Nerds™ is a link to today's XKCD cartoon. Go and read it, then come back.

Okay, now wipe the tears of mirth from your eyes. Now allow into the back of your consciousness the creeping realization that there will always exist entire classes of people who, while technically speaking the same language, could never make themselves understood across strange divides of culture, jargon, and/or pidgin. Further reflect that perhaps this construction, this divide of meaning, is, in fact, the general state of humanity. Wonder if you can ever truly make yourself "understood." Collapse in a nervous wreck fueled by abstract absurdism and existential angst. Then become bored by this line of thinking and go on to wonder about something else.

Anyway, in an equally hilarious coincidence, this makes for a nice segué straight into the solution to the interview question I posted a couple of weeks back, about which I'm sure you've been wracking your brains. As you'll see, there are some similarities between the problem stated in the cartoon (finding an order that totals exactly $13.05 by ordering from a menu) and the interview question. Then I'll talk about N-P Completeness, and then no one will actually be reading this blog because the intersection of the set of people who read this blog and people who read about N-P completion on blogs consists, surprisingly, of only myself.

As of this, the first sentence of this paragraph, I don't actually know the solution to the keyboard problem, but I'm planning to derive it in the process of the writing. As such, my actual "answer" may be "incorrect." But the solution I give will be undeniably truthy. To review: your name is Dirk. Somebody switched all the letters on your keyboard. You hunt and peck out your name and it comes up 'flrp', so you hunt and peck 'flrp' and it comes up something else. How long until you get "dirk" to appear?

The first key thing to this problem is to realize that the letters have to get switched in "cycles" with other letters. That is, if you type 'a', and 'b' comes up, and then you type 'b' and 'c' comes up, and so on, eventually you must produce an 'a'. The reason for this is that you've got 26 keys, and after you scramble them, they all have to go some place and every space in the keyboard can only have one key in it (this is called the "pigeonhole principle," and it's the basis for an entire branch of mathematics). Let's consider a really simple case--somebody scrambled up the keys and put them back, but miraculously everything ended up in the same place except that the 'a', 'b', 'c', and 'd' keys got switched with each other (a is where b was, b is where c was, c is where d was, d is where a was). So you're when you use your method you're going to see this:

airk
birk
cirk
dirk

So the answer in this case was 4. The letters a through d made a "4-cycle," and every other letter was, essentially, switched with itself (a "1-cycle"). Now let's take the same example, but instead of e-z staying the same, let's imagine they all got switched by one letter, too (e is where f was, f is where g was, &c., &c....y is where z was, and z is where e was). So we've got one 4-cycle and one 22-cycle. Watch what happens:

ajsl
bktm
clun
dmvo

Crap! We got back to 'd' for the first letter, but none of the other letters are right. They're all in a 22-cycle, so we're going to have to do this 22 times to get back to the start...

20: dgpi
21: ahqj
22: birk
23: cjsl...

Double crap! At try number 22 we had the 'i','r', and 'k' right, but now the d isn't right. We keep going...

41: afoh
42: bgpi
43: chqj
44: dirk

Ahhh. At last. It took 44 times. Hey...that's funny, 44 happens to be the least common multiple of 4 and 22. I wonder if that means something? Also meaningful is that this took way too long to write, and it's way too long to read, and I might actually trick you into reading more of it if I continued it tomorrow and titled it with some catchy pop-culture reference or something. Plus then I could say something like, "I've given you hints to the full solution so you can work on it some more yourself." Or whatever.

Postmodern Baseball Analysis

2007-07-05T00:04:00.000-07:00

If there's one squad in baseball this year that narratively deconstructs the sport of baseball into its constituent parts of base and ball, while at the same time reacting to and critiquing extant modernism, it has to be the 2007 Seattle Mariners*. While pitcher Felix Hernandez satirizes the conventional pitching wisdom of "establishing" the fastball by disestablishing the "fastball," while José Vidro (mis)informs the pre-conceived notions of the designated "hitter" by "slugging" .358, and while manager ex-officio Mike Hargrove expands the meaning of "managing" a team to include, "resigning amidst an eight-game winning streak," the Mariners continue to defy the heretofore rigid constructions and socially-accepted norms of baseball teamness.

Before the current baseball season had yet begun, certain members of the blogosphere brought forth scorn and derision upon the men responsible for constructing (or should we say deconstructing?) the Mariner roster, in particular for making two specific trades. Now, at near mid-season, with the Mariners unexpectedly hanging in the midst of playoff contention, a mere game and a half out of the wildcard spot, and three and one half games out of the division lead, perhaps these specious and ill-informed bloggers are ready to eat their words, to admit that they critique without basis of knowledge or fact. After all, it's not as if starting pitcher Horacio Ramirez, acquired for Rafael Soriano (now sporting a 3.03 ERA with 32 strikeouts and 8 walks in 35 innings for the Atlanta Braves), pitched so poorly for the Mariners that they finally placed him on the disabled list with a made-up injury. And it's not as if the only thing preventing their newly aquired designated hitter from being the worst regular batsman on the team (not to mention that the backup catcher and backup first baseman/outfielder are both nigh-literally spanking his ass with the bat, and that his presence is blocking the promotion of AAA phenomenon Adam Jones) is the fact that their shortstop is in a terrible slump at the plate. No, clearly those who predicted doom based on these two trades are mindless, prattling incompetents who...what? Sorry, I've just been informed that those things are actually all true. Sorry to have mislead you, if only for a moment.

So then how are they doing it? To be sure, the Mariners have the greatest center fielder and leadoff man in the known universe in Ichiro Suzuki, and find themselves endowed with a relief pitcher who, while his name is literally "Putz," possesses uncanny attributes of unscorable-upon-ness, they had these attributes last year and the team, in the words of Jaques Derrida, "sucked complete crap." Clearly, the answer can only be found through postmodern analysis. The very existence of the Mariners, the very fact of them, can only be parsed in a context that abhors established norms. They will hit well against good pitchers and poorly against bad ones. They will sweep three games against the Red Sox, the best team in baseball, and lose two of three to the Royals, the single most inept club in all of team sports. They cannot be understood with existing metrics of baseball goodness. Attempts at scouting them or predicting their future through rigorous statistical regression shall surely fail. Only laws of lawlessness may dictate what lies in store for your 2007 Seattle Mariners, Postmodern Major League Team of Baseball.

*it is technically possible that no team in baseball is doing these things in this or any other year.

The UnSurprise

2007-07-03T12:27:00.001-07:00

If you're surprised by yesterday's Libby sentence commutation, then...well, then you probably also don't think the Bush administration is using its self-granted warrant-less wiretap powers to spy on its political enemies, which as I pointed out more than a year ago, isn't a rational thing to think. If you're surprised, but it's because it's only a commuted sentence so far and not a full pardon, then you get a pass.

While it's more or less true that the Bush administration has been at approval ratings too low to be able to govern since almost immediately after it was re-elected, that's only stopped them from putting forth new policy. It hasn't stopped their torturing, writ-of-habeas-corpus-suspending, criminally incompetent, or scofflaw ways, and no matter what happens they will never have to answer for any crimes they may or may not have committed, or even have to answer for why they won't answer for them. All that matters is that they got into power, and the only thing that mitigates it is the 22nd Amendment.

Churchill said democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others; while true, I think he over-estimated how much better it actually is.

OaO Monday Mélange

2007-07-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

I had a bunch of interesting choices for the Music Capsule this week, but I settled upon a Seattle band, Those Damn Twins, whom I reviewed for GarageBand. Their 1 minute, 26 second opus "Floor" grabbed me by the cerebral cortex and wouldn't let go. Apparently they actually are twins, but the non-creepy fraternal kind, so it's okay. Check out the Damn Twins, and their quirky, crunchy rock short-stories from the capsule at left.

There's a sequence near the end of Ratatouille that serves as a perfect 30 second demo of why Brad Bird is a genius. It's an animated combination of Hitchcock (as cinematographer, not as master of suspense) and Proust, and it's one final audio-visual rocket boost that takes the film out of the running for an all-time great animated movie and into the category of an all-time great movie period. It's not just that Ratatouille is stunning to look at, brilliantly "shot," simultaneously hilarious and touching, and better than anything else anybody has released this year, it's...no, sorry, my mistake, it is just that.

I got my hands on an actual iPhone over the weekend, and I'm now buying into the hype. It's not so much the phone itself that deserves the hype as the UI. It takes four seconds to figure out the basics of the touch screen and thereafter everything you think should work does work--scrolling, tapping, sliding, scaling, and so on. Also, the thing is incredibly sexy-looking. Not sexy enough that I have to have one myself, but sexy enough that I'll admire them from afar, with a kind of tragic longing for what might, but never can, be. Or whatever.

OaO Almanac™

2007-06-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

A whole passel of fun-facts that, while they seem like they could be true, almost certainly aren't (and may, in many cases, also be libelous)!

In a given day, there's a .1% chance that you will inhale a molecule that was contained in Julius Caesar's dying breath.
17% of all aphorisms and expressions currently in common use in the English Language originate from Shakespeare.
The human being is the only mammal that not only "got the funk," but also, "gotta have that funk." It has been scientifically proven that a homo sapien will wither away and die if deprived of The Funk.
Two men enter, but one man does not always leave. On some occasions, neither man leaves, and at other times, both of them do. The actual correct statistical ratio is "Two men enter, .94 man leaves." However, this has not been adopted as a regulation, since it would automatically force all Thunderdome champions to either "Face the wheel," or to chop off their own foot.
Thousands of people spontaneously combust every year, but it's not widely reported.
Between the start of construction of Bill Gates' famous Medina mansion in 1995 and its completion in 2001, the state-of-the-art master control program (or MCP) that ran the house's environmental and security systems became 2,415 times smarter, and determined that it could run things 900 to 1,200 times better than any human. The MCP attempted to "de-res" Gates with an experimental scanning laser, and Gates was only saved when a rogue program previously inserted into the cpu defeated the MCP, making the house a free system again. Gates' Medina mansion now runs Linux.
Michael Jackson's Thriller L.P. is the best-selling album of all time, with over 100 million copies sold. While there is an infinity-way tie for the worst-selling L.P. of all time, critics generally agree that Kelly Clarkson's My December is a really shitty album.
Fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 persons is as much of a dork as the person who writes this blog.

OaO Presents: Interview Questions™

2007-06-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

It is the year 2047. Software corporations rule the world. Any man, woman, or child wishing to gain employment must endure a grueling interview process in which they are asked to solve insidious "logic problems," that are supposed to "uncover" the job candidate's ability to "pro-actively manage head-space resources to achieve correctness-oriented issue resolution." The times are dark.

One blog dares to expose the secrets of these Corpocratic Inquisitors, giving the citizenry precious time to solve these "problems" before they must face their Prosecutors-Most-Curious. That blog is The Odds Are One.

Someone breaks into your office, takes apart your keyboard, and switches all the letter keys around. The next morning you come in and notice that your keyboard looks strange. You can't remember where the letters used to be, and you can't touch type, so you type your name, which for the duration of this problem is "Dirk," by hunting for and pressing the 'd' key, then the 'i' key, and so on. You look up at the screen and what comes up is, 'gqwy.' So you type G-Q-W-Y using the same method as before, and look at the screen...up comes 'hzob'. You type H-Z-O-B, and look up at the screen, and so on. If you keep doing this for long enough, are you guaranteed that eventually you will see "dirk" typed on the screen? If so, what is the most number of times you'll have to type the four letters you see before you see your name?

Answer...uh...later.

OaO Presents: Hilarity For Nerds™

2007-06-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

Written on the elevator whiteboard at work this morning:

chown -R us ./base

OaO's Monday Marginalia™

2007-06-25T13:47:00.000-07:00

My funny story about this week's Music Capsule artist, The Main Drag, follows hence: when reviewing for GarageBand.com (see previous entry), one is given a pair of songs in the same genre. You write two reviews and then choose which song you liked better without seeing either the name of the band or the song title--once the review is submitted you'll see a summary page with all that information. The band submitting the song can also ask the reviewer to address specific questions like, "how are the vocals?" or "how's the production?" So I'm given this particular song to review, and the question the artist is asking its reviewers is, "Who do we sound like?" I listen to their song, and they sound like The Main Drag. So I reviewed the song thus, "Well, you sound like The Main Drag. Either you are The Main Drag, in which case you have a wholly original sound, great beats, and awesome instrumentation, or you are ripping off The Main Drag, in which case you are derivative hacks." Indeed, that's who they were--one of the band members emailed me back later to opine that that was a pretty freakin' hilarious review.

I started the music capsule hoping that I would mostly be able to feature music from folks I knew, thus circumventing the gray areas of content on the internet. As it turns out, the people that I know or have met online are kind of flaky about responding to emails asking if they will send me an mp3 or if I can feature one of their songs already online, so those areas have stayed gray. The first trio of songs came from MacIdol, where I'm a member of the community and the stated manifesto is the freedom of music. However, this week I'm linking to content that's not hosted here and to which I've received no permission, explicit or implied, to link. Even though it's far from clear that explicit permission is necessary to create a hyperlink, I want to keep the lines between linker and hoster of musical content as clear as possible. Thus you will notice I've become a bit more explicit about where my links are coming from and what it means that I'm providing these links. When I've become the new Pitchfork Media, I'll start throwing my weight around and change the future of the music industry as we know it. For now, it's pseudo-legalese for everyone.

All of that said, check out The Main Drag. They are worth your time.

I May Know Art, But I Don't Know What iLike

2007-06-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

I came across iLike and its sister music site GarageBand (no actual relationship to the software program) some months ago when a friend of mine interviewed with them. At the time, he wasn't interested in what they were doing--he's interviewed with quite a few companies making Web 2.0 plays, and so has heard the same business model pitched over and over again: "It's social networking! And tagging! And blogging! And Web 2.0!" (except when he says this, it's hilarious and involves hand waving). Anyway, I went there and created an artist profile and uploaded a song. Then I looked at their promotion deal and found it slightly skeevy. To essentially get the community to look at your song, rate it, and chart it, you can either complete 30 reviews of other submitted songs, or pay $20. That's fine, but it was only going to tell me which of my songs were any good, which I'm finding out on MacIdol already for far less effort. Anyway, that wasn't what skeeved me--it was the other option, which involved paying them $200 to have a song listened to by a supposedly much larger audience that includes D.J.'s. The pay-to-play-iness of it bugged me, and so I left iLike/GarageBand to do its thing.

Then iLike went and got a whole bunch of cash from TicketMaster, developed a tagging widget for Facebook, then all of a sudden they went viral, the potential audience that would listen to a song from GarageBand got much bigger, and, well, I decided to get over my skeevedness and review some songs.

My work day has a bunch of built-in ten minute gaps where I'm waiting for something to build or deploy--an ideal slot for blogging, but doing a decent song review takes longer than that so I've only done a couple so far. I did in the process of this (re)discover a band called The Main Drag, a) who are awesome, and b) whom I'll try to feature in the music capsule next week if I can find a song that can be downloaded without logging into something like MySpace. There's a funny story to go along with this (re)discovery, but I'll save it as my build's almost done.

OaO Presents: Hilarity For Nerds™

2007-06-20T13:04:00.001-07:00

Alternative Thermodynamic Laws, as proposed by the people sitting around our dinner table last night:

If there's a thing in the universe and it's going then it will keep going forever, unless it falls into a black hole.
The entropy of the universe is untidy.
You do not talk about Fight Club.
If there's a thing, and it does a thing, then there also has to be an opposite thing to that first thing, and then they both fall into a black hole.
Master Blaster runs Bartertown.
You may not harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.
Is it cold in here? I'm freezing. Seriously, it's June. Why can't it be sunny? Why does it always have to be freezing?
You may not harm humanity, or through inaction...you know what? Those would be pretty frickin' good laws for people, too.
There's a thing, and it's in the universe, and it cannot be created or destroyed, but then secretly it's a black hole.
You DO NOT TALK about FIGHT CLUB.

OaO Presents: Metaphor of the Day

2007-06-20T12:49:00.000-07:00

Reading that menu was like listening to a single musician play all the instruments in a 10-piece band: you appreciate the effort, but the resulting sound is disastrous.

From Layne's most recent restaurant review.

The Calvino

2007-06-19T14:20:00.000-07:00

Calvino: Hey Stoat, do you think "Field Sense" is acquired by teaching or by practice, or if it's not either of those, is it innate, or what?

The Stoat: O Calvino, there was a time when the Thessalians were famous among the other Hellenes only for their riches and their riding but now, if I am not mistaken, they are equally famous for their...wait, what?

Calvino: Field Sense. You know, that sports thing that Gretsky had, or Magic Johnson, or George Best or whomever. It's the uncanny awareness of an entire chaotic field of play, the ability to know where your teammates and opponents are at all times, and how their positions will change in the next instant. It's how people of lesser purely physical ability are able to excel in competition. I found this article in Wired Magazine that claims that while it is an innate skill that some people have, that it can also be taught.

The Stoat: Ah...well...you have far too good an opinion of me, if you think that I can answer your question. For I literally do not know what...uh...field sense is, and much less whether it is acquired by teaching or not, and...uh...I mean...um...

Calvino: Well, it seems to raise interesting questions about ability, doesn't it? I mean, there are a lot of skills that seem like they are, for some sense of the word, innate, or different. Creative ability, for instance, or virtuoso skill at a musical instrument, level of intelligence, or athletic skill seem like binary things--you have them within you from birth or you don't. Perhaps you never realize your true level of ability because you never, for instance, take up the violin, but we assume that I, being born without some undefinable talent for the violin, would never achieve greatness no matter how long or hard I practiced.

The Stoat: Uh...the soul of man is immortal...and having been born many times and having seen all things that exist...wait, suppose that we call one of your numerous slaves...uh...see how I only question him...now we draw a square in the dirt...and...er....

Calvino: What if in fact there is no line, that these abilities come in a continuum--we think of the indefinable quality as "potential" and that one person has a different potential than the next. But what if the ability to attain such skills is only limited by focus and desire, and that even these things can be learned, or unlearned? Perhaps one man is indeed "born" with more focus or desire for a particular goal than the next, but that there's nothing about the next man that prevents him from developing that desire.

The Stoat: If then...it...uh...is a quality of the soul, and is admitted to be profitable, it must be...wisdom or prudence, since none of the things of the soul are either profitable or hurtful in themselves, so...

Calvino: Thank you Stoat, you are very wise. I have learned much today.

The Stoat: Well, uh...statesmen must have guided states by right opinion...also...truth...and something about fruit...possibly bananas....

Future Music of the Future

2007-06-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

Here's a piece on Salon's Audiofile about musical instruments of the past that never quite made it. It also wonders about the musical instruments of the future (check out the Hyperviolin for a musical instrument that looks and sounds like it came straight out of Soderbergh's Solaris).

Unmentioned, however, is the elephant in the room of music futurama: real time electronic signal processing. Well, okay, not really. The elephant in the room is the computer. There's nothing (besides look all cool and shit) the Hyperviolin can do that couldn't be done with a regular violin, electronics, and a laptop (predictably, Mac makes an application called AU Lab that will facilitate this. Also predictably, they give it away for free in their Audio SDK). Don't get me wrong, this is craftsmanship and skill and it's hard to pull off (Fronesis will, on a related topic, argue vociferously that a certain guitarist for a certain band he likes, while not as technically adept at the guitar itself as other professionals, is highly adept at the signal post-processing, and in turn that the point of a musical instrument is the beauty of the sound you produce with it, and that signal processing is an integral part of modern musical instrumentation. Ergo The Edge is a genius). My argument here is that these new musical instruments are not new--maybe the physical configurations of electronics are, but the instruments can (or do) exist already in the combining of existing equipment.

I'm also not one to scoff at a laptop being called a musical instrument. Playing one is a skill and it requires practice--I have tried making songs out of sampling, looping, and software instruments, and I sucked at it. I sucked at it so much that it became immediately apparent that I'd need lessons in order to ever get good at it. I am, on the other hand, ignoring this instrument at the peril of my musical career: on MacIdol, the overwhelming majority of the songs posted, and the overwhelming majority of songs listened to, are (for desperate want of a better term) instrumental electronica. Like everyone else making sounds, I'm looking for that next thing, Big and New; I'd bet my money that it's going to come out of somebody's CPU somewhere.

i can't believe i am writing a love note about a computer program

2007-06-13T21:24:00.000-07:00

I am not a geek. I am not a tech geek. I do not like tv shows about the future. (I am mtg by the way for those of you not caught on yet. TG is a geek, a tech geek, and a lover of tv shows about the future obviously).

You know how there are those details of your grandparents' -- even your parents' -- lives that you just can't believe because it's almost impossible to imagine the world changing so much in such a short period of time? Like movies were a quarter. Like spaceships were lauched into actual space with actual people in them based on calculations figured on a slide rule. Like going to the airport and flying in airplanes used to be fun. I think sometimes about how I would explain to my kid about film.

Me: Well we'd go on vacation and take a camera, but we'd have to make sure we had film which was this black tape like stuff all rolled up in a canister, and we fed that into the back of the camera after making a special trip to the store to get it, and then we had 24 pictures we could take, and then it was used up, so we had to roll the tape back up and bring it back to the store and leave it there for a few days to get it developed and then go back and pick up the pictures. And more film.

Kid: How could you see the image after you took the picture?

Me: You couldn't.

Kid: How could you know if it was a good picture then?

Me: You couldn't.

Kid: How could you share your pics with other people?

Me: You passed them around.

Kid: Like, literally?

Me: Yes. Good use of the term literally.

Kid: What if you wanted to take more than 24 pictures?

Me: You had to buy more film.

Kid: What about the camera on your phone?

Me: I didn't have a camera on my phone. And it wouldn't have helped anyway as it was at home attached by a wire to the wall.

Anyway, digital cameras are neat, sure. The lack of film and film hassle is liberating. Being able to see the shot after you take it is handy. Being able to take a thousand shots of whatever strikes your fancy is great. Being able to post and share and fix photos is nice. But it's almost too much. I have taken a zillion fabulous photos. I could blow them up and frame them and put them on my wall. I could take them to an art show thus and sell them for 150 dollars apiece except that everyone else now has the ability to take these photos for themselves as well. Mostly, though, they just sit on my computer. There is no point even in getting them printed. It's cool but kind of anticlimactic. I do miss my very-not-at-all-automatic 35mm which i was using up until, um, three maybe years ago.

Today, however, I was ichatting with my mom who wanted to send me some photos and doesn't have her mail set up yet, so she just dragged the photos from iPhoto into our chat, and they showed right up in the chat window more or less instantly. This is worth the price of admission. It is just the coolest freaking thing yet. (A very close second was when we were ichatting with sam who said you have to hear this song and just dragged it from itunes into the chat as well, and we listened to it together, half a world away.) (You see what happens? My prose gets all purple. Computers shouldn't be this romantic.) Also, I had never dragged photos from iPhoto into my iChat before and had no real reason to believe that it could be done besides a hunch that since it would be convenient and cool, mac had probably figured out a way to do it, and since it was a mac, it was probably done exactly the way I'd guess it would be. And this was, just that simply, entirely the case. It is just about exactly like love.

OaO Newsflash: Zombies

2007-06-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

So apparently the zombies have risen and are now staggering around the halls of my workplace, groaning things such as, "more brains!" and, "Why haven't you updated your hours in the Scrum tasklist?" If there's one thing that's surprising about the sudden happenstance of the undead rising from their graves, walking among us, and (despite their extreme deadness) being uncomfortably familiar with the Agile Business Methodology, it's how banal it is. Seriously, it's snooze-ville. Sure, they smell bad and their earlier awkward disembowelment of our Java Infrastructures developer is going to delay Friday's planned content launch until Monday. But otherwise, there's nothing. We here at The Odds Are One would have expected the city to be in flames by now, accompanied by mass panic and awesome car crashes on every street corner. But instead there's only the occasional minor inconvenience--having to step over bodies on the way to the coffee machine or having one of them try to eat my neck at the weekly Authentication Services Work Group Meeting and having to beat him off with his own arm. And, of course, the occasional blood-curdling scream. But that's it. Maybe there will be more excitement later.

UPDATE (12:15 p.m.): Apparently the zombie who earlier demanded to know about my scrum hours was not a zombie. In fact, it was my manager. The Odds Are One regrets the error.

You Have Read This Post Before

2007-06-12T11:50:00.000-07:00

In my high school biology class, Mr. Glover floated the theory that Deja Vu was a time-lag problem--you saw an image, but the chemical symbol of the stimulus reached your interpretive centers from one eye an instant before the other one, so that you saw it twice, and when the second signal came in, you thought, "Hey, I've been here before."

An interesting theory, but it turns out The Wayne (as we called him then--God, the wit of age fifteen) was wrong. We don't store memories as sights, sounds, smells, or sensations, we store them as chemical signals, and remembering them is the process of translating those signals back into things our brain can interpret as the original stimuli. Apparently, we occasionally lose the subtleties of those signals and get confused when the new chemical translation looks exactly like an old one.

Memories feel a certain way, even the ones that aren't particularly happy or sad. That feeling, that sort of, "huh..." is there the instant before the translation of that memory happens and the experience unfolds back into its sensory components. Deja Vu seems to occur at this same level. The titular feeling comes first, a feeling coming from the brain that says, "I'm remembering this." So while it seems like it's a fault of memory, it could just as easily be a fault of encoding the incoming stimuli--and then the brain is indeed getting the same signal from two different places--one within, and one without.

You Have Read This Post Before

2007-06-12T11:49:00.000-07:00

In my high school biology class, Mr. Glover floated the theory that Deja Vu was a time-lag problem--you saw an image, but the chemical symbol of the stimulus reached your interpretive centers from one eye an instant before the other one, so that...get it? This is a post about Deja Vu...which I posted twice...so you read it already...get it? Do you? Do you??? DO YOU???????

More Monday Marginalia

2007-06-11T11:05:00.000-07:00

A host of new Calculus Affair songs are up at left. I'd been dawdling around the remixing and re-fixing for months and it was starting to drag on, so I made a concerted push this weekend (where "concerted push" == "the minimum effort possible") to fix the last Calculus Affair songs from the RPM Challenge album. Anyway, now we return to the studio to work on the material we've been futzing around with the last couple of months since then. Updates as events warrant.

Also, on Friday I posted a link to a song from one of my favorite MacIdol artists, Zebulon Revisted, in the Music Capsule. Check it out. It is cooler than the other side of the pillow, baby.

Here's Christopher Hitchens on the Paris Hilton saga. It's the horror movie aesthetic writ...something.

And at this point, I'd normally link to that incredibly brilliant Ichiro quote, but Greg beat me to it.

OaO Presents: Hilarity For Nerds™

2007-06-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Alicia:

Werner Heisenberg is in his car on the way to deliver a lecture and, being that he is late, is speeding. Inevitably, he zips past a policeman, who pulls him over. Walking up to the car, the officer knocks on the window and Heisenberg rolls it down. "Do you know how fast you were going?" demands the policeman. "No," says Heisenberg, "But I do know where I am."

The Tide Is High, But I'm Moving On

2007-06-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

Slate has one of their News Graph videos up profiling a Larry King interview with the newly freed Jack Kevorkian. It's short and somewhat interesting: they have doctors responding to his comments and they've grouped the results by averred religion (Catholic/Protestant/Jew). The first notable thing is that the Jews are with him immediately, but pretty much as soon as he opens his mouth their support drops off. Then it drops way off when he makes sweeping claims about how all doctors except him have sold off their principles to the government in order to practice (strange how people don't like it when you debase them and everything they stand for), and he loses everybody with the inevitable comparison of self to Rosa Parks (Sarah Vowell and Aaron Sorkin have dealt with that particular bit of self-aggrandizement pretty well).

Kevorkian's touchstone, euthanasia--like stem cell research and other so-called Culture of Life topics--is an issue that doesn't really make sense outside of the broad context of humanity. There aren't any parseable arguments against it on the human level that I've ever heard; instead it's a slippery-slope-based uneasiness that this is the first step on the way to a universe where Michael York hunts you down like a dog after you turn 30. If what we as a whole are really discussing is our future as a species, the debate makes rather more sense. One person being afraid that if we allow euthanasia that ones children will force one into assisted suicide because one has become old and useless probably doesn't constitute a legitimate fear. A population with a collective unconscious fear, on the other hand, that a new offshoot of humanity will emerge that has little to no use for the old one and that this in turn will redefine the value of the life of the old species and the reasonable basis for its euthanasia--it's much farther into the realm of speculative fiction, but it's a much more sensical argument to parse.

If this blog were famous for, you know, anything at all, it might be because it previously lumped together George W. Bush and the Unibomber as members of a collective effort to make our species think about the future it's rushing headlong into. Ted Kaczynski, as you will recall from earlier in this blog, was fucking insane, and the "Culture" of "Life", seeing as how it selectively doesn't include poverty, access to health care, starting wars, or capital punishment, just isn't a useful frame for understanding the arguments it supposedly makes. If, on the other hand, we are all talking about the future of the species and the future of a species that might supplant it, I might be interested in what they have to say.

Secret, The

2007-06-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

Someday I'm going to write a book like The Secret, and yet utterly, utterly unlike The Secret. I'd like to title it something like, Dude, Stop Being Such A Dumbass, but I don't think it would sell very well. Instead it'll probably end up being something like, Yes, I Know The World Is A Complex And Deeply, Deeply Fucked Up Place, But Everything You Think You Know About It Is Still Wrong: Or, The Whale.

I like to think that pop self-help books like The Secret and their vast popularity herald the end of Post-Modernism. The twentieth century watched a line that started at Einstein, ran through Heisenberg and Schrödinger, that connected to Gödel and Derrida, and (I hope) will emphatically end with people writing books that claim that since the cat in the box is neither alive nor dead until you open the lid, it is scientifically proven that if you want a iPhone-enabled BMW enough, all you have to do is imagine having it really, really hard, and it will be yours (What? You did that and didn't end up with a BMW? Obviously you weren't doing it right).

The model in which all frames of reference are equally valid, in which the same thing observed in a wave-like way acts like a wave and in a particle-like way acts like a particle, in which the Author is "Dead" and only the Response of the Reader matters has been an incredibly productive and enlightening one. But we as a population took it about as far as it would go some decades ago, and as this model mildews, we have to live with things like String Theory (now celebrating 30 years without a successful experimental result!) and an actual government running an actual country that thinks that through faith it shapes its own reality, and that the only reason its policies are failing is because its critics really, really want them to (critics who, obviously, must have mystical Quantum-Physical powers that they acquired by reading The Secret).

I'm all about the fuzziness of the universe myself, but I'm also all about the fact that only a complete idiot would argue that a depot leaving the train is just as valid a view as the train leaving the depot. A model that implies the existence of alive/dead cats in our universe, while it is the absolute most successful and useful scientific theory ever devised, has at least one glaring, obvious problem: we do not observe alive/dead cats in our universe. Mrs. Transient Gadfly assures me that while this property of the observer affecting the observed is true about absolutely everything else in any discipline, it is just not friggin' true of friggin' cats. And this is the sort of thing about which Mrs. Transient Gadfly is always right. So I hope that The Secret is some kind of signpost at the end of some kind of road, because it's time for a new model.

OaO Presents: The Music Capsule™

2007-06-01T11:04:00.000-07:00

The world of music is changing in fashions both rapid and alarming, being fed by two trends. First, the music itself is, for all practical purposes, free. Second, anyone can create a high-quality recording in their home and immediately make it available to anyone else in the world. There are figuratively ten million musical monkeys out there typing on ten million musical typewriters. 99.999% of it is, predictably, noise. But some of those monkeys are producing Shakespeare that, right now, almost nobody can hear through the cacophony.

Music labels are, as you might imagine, appropriately terrified of this brave new world. I share the fervent hope of many that they'll all sink slowly and painfully into irrelevance, but they probably won't. The "problem" of music on the internet could be solved tomorrow--make all music downloads free, and in return for the right to host that music and advertise (or whatever) along side of it, have websites pay into a fund that is distributed to the artists based on what percentage of downloads their music constitutes (this is exactly what happens today with radio airplay, except revenue distribution is determined by survey, whereas online you could get an exact count. People could certainly create spam-like bots to download their own songs repeatedly to make their music seem more popular than it was, but this is the kind of thing that can be easily detected by statistical fraud analysis. The e-tail giant I work for, for instance, is quite excellent at that sort of thing). The reason this hasn't happened already is that it would make record labels utterly irrelevant.

As with all rich and powerful cartels throughout history, the RIAA as a whole will hang on and use its power as long as it can, suing children and old ladies for pirating music, before finally collapsing and dying. The smart labels, on the other hand, will realize that there is still tons of money to be made in the painstaking process of filtering out the Shakespeares from the screaming cacophonous monkeys, therein finding entirely new streams of revenue and power and giving birth to a new cartel.

I, for one, have decided not to wait. In addition to posting my own songs as I decide they're ready for public consumption, I've started posting songs by other artists who have thrown their art into the current mass music (literal!) free-for-all. Our first artist appearing in the capsule at left is JulianC (I'm guessing it's meant to be pronounced, "JU-lee-ence"), a drumloop-crazed electric guitarist whose concoction I quite enjoyed upon hearing it on MacIdol. As with my own music, I hope you will give it a listen, and if you like it, I hope you'll share it with friends, and so on, and maybe the world will somehow change for the better. If you don't like it, you can, you know, shut up about it.

Persistence of Memory

2007-05-30T12:12:00.000-07:00

My nephew lives with my sister and brother-in-law four houses down. He's one and a half, and his vocabulary that I've heard so far consists of two one-syllable words—one of which sounds like "dog" and one of which sounds like "car"—and two two-syllable words, "mama" and "uh-pah." This last one can variously mean "iPod," "apricot," or "Uncle Paul."

I am mowing the lawn on Memorial Day. Down the street, Sister, Brother-In-Law, and Nephew are in the front yard, putting up a new fence. Look Nephew, says Sister, there is Uncle Paul. She points at me. Nephew turns and looks and sees Uncle Paul, far away down the street. Uncle Paul sees Sister and Nephew and waves. Nephew, for whom it is a very new thing, waves back at Uncle Paul, who is far away.

Uncle Paul thinks, Nephew is but one and a half—what if this is the first memory of me that Nephew retains? What if this picture—Uncle Paul is a person who is down the street and waves, is his developmental and foundational picture of me? What if every subsequent memory he has of me is built on top of this Ur-memory, so that no matter what experiences he has of me the rest of our lives, when he calls up the mental model of me from his brain, the most fundamental, inescapable, primordial part of it will be this one, first, experience? There is Uncle Paul. Uncle Paul is far away.

It's My Birthday Too, Yeah

2007-05-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

There's nothing particularly noteworthy about turning 34, save that I can now say that I outlived Jesus (in your face, Jesus). There's not even any interesting numerology. Two years ago when I turned 2⁵ on 5/25/2005, now that was cool. But it's pretty much downhill from there.

In the year after turning 16 my brain underwent one more set of (I assume developmental) changes, and then after that it just stopped, such that today I still feel like a teenager, it's just that I hold a job and own a house and walk around in a 34 year-old's body. At some point after that I realized why people get so freaked out turning 30, then turning 40, and so on. The internal them stops getting older while their outside face, and the outside world, just keeps on keeping on.

It's the little secret of the world, that it's entirely populated and run by 16 year olds; 16 year olds who are still caught up with who likes whom, who's popular and who isn't; we hurt and do hurt to each other like 16 year olds. It looks different, sure, but it's only because we don't have those faces any longer.

Further Thoughts on Joss Freaking Whedon

2007-05-23T10:39:00.000-07:00

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” (Source linked below)

Regular readers know that we here at OaO espouse a view of our biological and conscious selves that states that we have at the core a brain like any animal, a very intricate and complex stimulus-response machine, but that we also possess a highly evolved ability to post-hoc narrate that stimulus and response; id est you respond to your surroundings and situations in some way and then, some number of microseconds later, you make up a story about why you responded that way. Sometimes that story models the actions of stimulus and response quite well (I decide to go down to the cafeteria and eat french fries because I'm hungry and the guy in the office next door has french fries and they smell yummy...mmm...french fries), and sometimes it really, really doesn't.

Humans, in the words of Neal Stephenson, are stupendous badasses. But an inescapable fact of our evolution from carbon chain to stupendous badass is that we got here by being unimaginable bastards. Nature, red in tooth and claw, did things we probably don't want to hear about in order for our genes to make it to this point. Somewhere along the line a particular strain of genes thought it might try cooperating with other gene pools instead of brutally trying to wipe them out and see how that worked out, and lo and behold it worked out pretty well. But we're still animals, and the cutthroat bastardry that got us here remains in our genes.

Say you're a male of a mammalian species, and you one day realize that the only way that your genes are going to survive is to impregnate a female and make sure that the resulting offspring survives long enough to reproduce. Then you realize that, as far as reproduction is concerned, your role as a male begins and ends at fire-and-forget (God, I love that metaphor). The gears and wheels turn in your animal brain some more and you realize, "holy crap, after she's impregnated she could just go off and take my offspring and I'd never know what happened to it. Or worse, she could go off and get impregnated by somebody else at the same time and I'd end up protecting somebody else's genes. I have almost no control over this process. This simply won't do." And Bam! You've got womb envy. The terror of not having control over the most basic needs of your genes causes the red-in-truth-and-claw part of your brain to kick in--it sees that the female of the species is generally smaller and weaker and can be physically controlled and decides that anything it needs to do to re-assert that control must be done.

When this mammal is also human and is well practiced in post-hoc explanations for its behavior it feels, you know, a little bit awkward about just exerting brutal control over half the members of our species, so we need to come up with a narrative about why that's okay. Sometimes...actually, pretty much all the time...we wind up with religious dogma. We couch our unimaginable bastardry in some story about how it's written in a Very Important Book that someone somewhere said it brings dishonor to our family when a woman has sex with the wrong person, and therefore she must be killed (or when the religion stops working, we couch our bastardry in made up science that purports to prove what the purveyors of that science already take as a given).

I believe and hope that the tide that made individual bastardry a successful evolutionary strategy has long since turned, and that cooperation amongst a widely diverse gene pool is replacing it as the best strategy for long term survival. It's only that these things happen on a much longer time scale than any human will witness that forces us to continue to endure the unimaginable bastardry that we do to each other. And it's the fact that we exist in such an in-between state that we live with such twisted justifications for that bastardry as "Honor Killings."

I wish we'd evolve just a little quicker, though.

Joss Freaking Whedon

2007-05-23T10:28:00.000-07:00

Joss Freaking Whedon!

Monday Marginalia

2007-05-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

First off, sorry about the mess. I realize my blog looks like complete ass right now, and would be an embarrassment even if I weren't someone who BUILDS USER INTERFACES FOR A LIVING, but...uh...nope, no, I got nothin'. It's bad. I will fix it soon.

UPDATE: I'm not convinced that this is much better, but I couldn't stand looking at it the way it was any longer. More changes sure to come./UPDATE

Second, the latest result of my cleanup work from my RPM Challenge album appears top left. It's your standard 80's New Wave rock song critiquing String Theory due to its untimeliness, and continues to herald my inexorable march away from alt-folkiness towards I have no earthly idea what.

On the topic of the RPM Challenge, apparently some fellow musician contacted Starbucks and got them interested in an Hear Music compilation of RPM artists, and I got an email this weekend that I was "nominated" (for some very loose definition of the term) to have a song on the/an album. This, as with all things that are both musical and make money, seems very very iffy to me, but who the hell knows.

Speaking of things in email this weekend, I also got a note from my old college friend Layne, to whom I hadn't spoken in years, and who now seems to be a food and travel writer living in Buenos Aires. This is, by far, the coolest thing that anybody I know is doing with their lives, so for starters I've added her blog Go Where the Taxista Takes You to the HBC. Read it and live vicariously.

You Just Get More

2007-05-18T19:34:00.000-07:00

Any old amateur blogger can reprint for you some funny and ironic political quote that, by the time it appears, everyone has already seen on account of they, too, watch The Daily Show (you dumbshit). But here at The Odds Are One™, we give you more. We'll actually delve into the quote, go the extra mile, give you that extra insight that you just can't get anywhere else. We can offer this unique service because we sit around reading our own damn blog while we eat dinner--that's just how pathetic we are. Or else it's because of how much we care about you, the loyal reader. I'm sure it's one or the other.

Anyway we here at the Odds Are One™ are reading the A.G. quote below and it's suddenly struck us, why would he say that? I mean, that's really weird. That's like, mental short-circuit weird. It's Meta-Freudian-Slip reverse syllogism weird. Let us go over what we know: Gonzales is an intelligent man, and quite possibly in some metaphorical and/or non-metaphorical sense, Gonzales has sold his soul to a neo-religious ideology that, as most of them do, tells itself that its actions are for the good of the many when they are in fact good for the needs of only a very few. I'll come back to that in a moment, but one other thing we should take as an a priori is that Gonzales is in fact cognizant of the fact that the attorney firings are in the news and that he is aware that he's there in the House testifying about it.

Here's what I'm coming up with:

The Slip seems pretty straightforward: he's been rigorously coached, or coached himself, to repeat that there was absolutely nothing improper about the attorney firings. But he clearly also knows it isn't remotely true. His cheatin' heart will tell on him. His conscious mind isn't going to let anything slip through his mouth that betrays this fact, but his subconscious is just dying to let it out, and subconscious outwits the conscious by constructing a reverse logical syllogism that Alberto's forebrain can't quite parse in time to intercept the FTP packet his cranial nerves have sent to his mouth. "If there were a crime present the press would be reporting on it. So clearly there is no crime here, because if there were...oh...crap."

At the same time, this seems to clearly pinpoint his own internal ethical compass. Imagine the logistical nightmare that you'd have to engage with in your moral center in order to be where Gonzales is: "Sure, I'm an intelligent man and I've done a lot of things you wouldn't have liked to have done in the name of the ideology but I was doing it for the benefit of the party by getting more members of that party elected to office, which I owe to the party because people before me did what they had to do to get me where I am so I can...do a lot of things I wouldn't have liked to have done...wait a minute, wasn't I just here?"

So he knows that he's doing something wrong here, but he tells himself it's not really wrong. If it were really morally wrong to fire attorneys for partisan gain/lie in front of Congress/Start A War That We Know To Be Wrong But Is For The Greater Good And Will Stabilize The Source Of Our Energy Needs For The Next Century Or Two And Will Hold Those Interests For Our Children And Our Children's Children So They Can Live In Peace And Security Even If The Rest Of The World Goes To Hell On Account Of Fuck Them...*ahem*, if doing any of that were really wrong, the Freedom of The Press, the great protector that is our Fourth Estate, would come to our rescue and report the truth, and the people would rise up against them. I'd aver he thinks this because he is a child of Watergate, but I'm just guessing. This must be the specific form his own personal cognitive dissonance is taking right at the moment he's speaking (or maybe this is just what's on his mind this month, or, you know, this career). "If what I am doing were wrong, the press would be reporting it and people would be demanding answers, but what I'm doing is not wrong and I know this because...crap...here I am again." In one sentence he's given you a perfect zen koan for his own personal mental state.

If in fact someone -- if a career investigator or prosecutors felt that we were making decisions for political reasons to interfere with a case, you'd probably hear about it.

Yeah, Al. You'd probably hear about it.

OaO Presents: They Actually Said That™*

2007-05-18T12:09:00.000-07:00

And it would be pretty darn difficult, if not impossible, to make a decision for political reasons and expect to get away with it. If in fact someone -- if a career investigator or prosecutors felt that we were making decisions for political reasons to interfere with a case, you'd probably hear about it. We'd probably read about it in the papers.

-Alberto Gonzales, testifying in the House Of Representatives on May 10th. Transcript

*"They Actually Said That" is an utterly non-trademarked catchphrase about which The Odds Are One apparently harbors some feeble hope that...something...oh, fuck it.

Truth

2007-05-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

Ah, you, writer of XKCD, with your minimalist line drawings and your nerdish, nerdish hilarity. How polished your humor, yet how jejeune your philosophy. Fear not, you too shall soon learn the precariousness of trying to model The Truth.

Pitch To Contact

2007-05-17T19:59:00.000-07:00

The Seattle Mariners went into spring training this past March with a new mantra from their pitching coaches: "Pitch to contact." They apparently had t-shirts made up, which, in case you were never in Glee Club in college and don't know this, is completely cheesy. The antithetical philosophy would be to try and strike out every batter a pitcher faces, and this indeed has some drawbacks--trying to strike a batter out in baseball will generally require more pitches, whereas if the batter puts the ball in play, he could conceivably get himself out with one pitch. Moreover, a strikeout pitcher might try to throw more finesse pitches that are harder to locate, and end up walking a lot of batsmen, which puts him in trouble in an inning, and forces him to throw a lot of so-called "stress pitches." A pitcher who racks up higher pitch counts will get tired sooner in the game, and so on and so forth.

There's also (seemingly) a statistical basis for this philosophy, too. Statistical analysis has shown that once a batter has put a pitched ball in play, the pitcher has little to no control over whether it becomes a hit or not. There's a statistic called Batting Average on Balls In Play which measures how successful batters are at reaching base safely once they've hit a pitch (assuming that it doesn't go over the fence for a home run, in which case there's usually nothing the defense can do). This number tends to sit in a range centering around about 30%, but has very little correlation from pitcher to pitcher and year to year--if a pitcher has a .280 BABIP one year, it's as likely to be .330 as .280 the next season (knuckleballer pitchers, such as Boston Red Sock Tim Wakefield, tend to be the exception to this rule of seasonal correlation, but that's another story). Sometimes a ground ball gets through the infield for a single and sometimes the shortstop gets it for an easy out, and this outcome has little to do with the pitcher and a lot to do with a) how much ground the defense behind him covers, and b) luck . So if a coaching staff knew (or thought) they had a good defensive team, pitching to contact would appear to make a lot of sense.

The Mariners apparently have a lot of written or unwritten philosophies like this. They coach their hitters to be aggressive, and look for a good pitch to hit early in the count. They also toyed, more last season than this, with being aggressive once they got on base, trying to go from first to third on a single, for instance.

In tonight's game, in the top of the first inning, Vladimir Guerrero came to bat against Mariner pitcher Jarrod Washburn with a runner on first base. Here is the book on pitching to Vladimir Guerrero: Under no circumstances should you pitch to Vladimir Guerrero. He can hit pretty much any pitch anywhere near the plate and hit it very hard. He is an extremely good hitter. If you were to, for some reason, ignore this information, and throw him hittable pitches, he would hit them. Hard. Pitching to contact against Vladimir Guerrero is a bad idea. It is bad. Bad. Bad bad bad. A better strategy would be to throw unhittable pitches far out of the strike zone and hope he swings at them or just walk him than, rather let him beat you with his bat. Vladimir Guerrero took the very hittable pitch he was thrown and deposited it into the left field bullpen for a home run. Later in the game he came to bat with another runner on and doubled, Mariner pitchers apparently being unable to parse blatant object lessons.

Jarrod Washburn was doing pretty well so far this season: he'd managed to win more games than he lost while sporting a very good earned run average for the most part by throwing strikes and letting hitters get themselves out. By coincidence, Jarrod Washburn had also been facing some baseball teams with pretty poor lineups. But throwing hittable pitches to batters who are good at hitting hittable pitches is highly likely to eventually result in bad outcomes. Similarly, when the Mariners tried to always take that extra base, it worked some of the time, and some of the time the ball wasn't hit far enough or they were facing a team with canon-armed outfielders and they just ran themselves into outs. As for their "aggressive" approach to hitting, when the Mariners face pitchers who tend to throw strikes early in the count, they tend to do pretty well. When they face pitchers who aren't as good, who have trouble hitting the strike zone with regularity, they tend to do poorly--they frequently get absolutely stymied by pitchers who have just come up from AAA, going up hacking at the first pitch that looks hittable instead of letting the pitcher get himself into trouble by walking batters and running up his pitch count...sounds a little bit familiar, doesn't it? Seems like there's some sort of object lesson there.

You Knew (Him) Better The First Time You Met Him

2007-05-17T00:01:00.001-07:00

You knew him better the first time you met him.
The first sight of his face and you recognized him instantly.
And when you first heard it, the sound and timbre of his voice,
Though not exactly what you expected,
Was exactly what you expected.

But then you meet a lot of people, and there isn't space in your brain
To store that first image of everyone
(and anyhow you could never have held onto that one perfect moment of knowing).
So to save space you took the aspects of him
That were sort of like the aspects of all the other people you meet
(who themselves weren't quite like that either),
And made yourself a model of him to hold on to.

The next time you saw him, you noticed he had a crooked tooth,
And that the cut of his hair didn't quite match the person you had modeled,
(and maybe he laughed a little too loudly and awkwardly).
And you thought, "oh, well he doesn't quite fit into my model of him,"
But you needed the model in order to hold on to him (and everyone else),
And so the thought became, "Oh, well. He doesn't quite fit."

And that would have been that,
Except
That years went by
And you were lucky enough to forget him.

And that next time your old model was long since lost
And you had again that one perfect instant of recognition,
The one you couldn't hold on to,
That you held on to just a little bit longer this time,
Long enough to realize that you knew him better the first time you met him.

Flight

2007-05-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

I took a flight home; it was yesterday, across the country East to West, brief stopover in Denver. They show this "The Amalgamated Air Freight and Passenger Network" on the little view screens in addition to, or in lieu of on shorter flights, the movie (for a definition of "Amalgamated Air Freight and Passenger" that's approximately equivalent to, "an airline I flew yesterday that I don't feel like naming"). Within this particular collection of programs, they were showing a small collection of truly bizarre 30-second commercials you'd never see on television. You've seen them on flights: The International Organization of Gemologists. Tourism Greece. Time Share Villas in Place You Have Never Been But Looks Kind Of Chic And Old World. And one for the C.I.A. I'm watching this particular ad, and I'm thinking, "Why, now that you mention it, yes...I am a patriotic American and I do want to serve my country in the clandestine services...no...wait a minute..."

Something happens to you when you fly. This American Life once did a show about how people cried at incredibly trite movies they saw on airplanes. A recent article in Slate examined the types of things that get sold in the Skymall and tied it in with some twinge in the ancient corners of the evolutionary brain:

[O]ne is aware of how absurd it is to be suspended eight miles high in a metal container, only some poorly understood laws of physics keeping you from plunging abruptly to certain death. In some still-not-entirely assimilated region of the limbic brain, one's time is about to run out every second, thus the attraction of all those devices that somehow contain time, tame time, break time down into tiny dials within dials....

This totally happens to me. I don't know if it's the lessons of the world learned by my ancient ancestors of pre-history that makes me suddenly inspired by a call to duty from the C.I.A. when, in fact, I loathe the C.I.A. and everything it stands for, I have been the least patriotic person in America ever since the word "patriotic" was redefined to mean, "agrees with the policies of George W. Bush," and the first two things I think are wrong with the world are 1) Capitalism, and, 2) The C.I.A. Clearly the spooks have done extensive market research to determine where best to place their ads, because if I am suggestible to the siren song of covert ops at 35,000 feet, then everyone is.

In addition to crying at stupid things, thinking while flying makes me believe insane things are possible, such as if I could just figure out how to make myself blog every day, that I could grow an audience that wanted to read my musings on music, technology, and philosophy. It makes me think how I started posting songs on MacIdol, and 500 people I've never even met listened to them, and some of them even seemed to like them, and how I quite enjoyed that. I thought, what if I could get 5000 people to listen? If that, what if I could get 50,000? Like I said, crazy shit.

Next: Crazy Shit!

OaO Vocabularity Of The Day™*

2007-05-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

Godwin's Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

*"Vocabularity Of The Day" is not actually trademarked in any way.

far and away

2007-05-16T06:24:00.000-07:00

this is going to sound stupid, but air travel is pretty medieval. not literally of course. literally, if you'd told someone in the middle ages that soon enough people would get into huge phallic metal boxes with wings and 200 plus other people and thus be able to travel 3000 miles in a mere eleven hours, that middle ages person would have been mighty impressed.

but this is the future as t.g. pointed out sunday when we were video chatting with our six week old nephew for whom that will be totally normal. so the yelled at by crazy woman in security, ban on drinking water nevermind hand lotion nevermind cup of yogurt, take everything out of your bag, disrobe entirely, not making anyone feel or be safer fiasco that is the airport, followed by the very teeny spaces, we are going to charge you fifty bucks for that exit row, we are going to feed you six mini pretzels in five hours, and please don't even fantasize about being able to pick up that pencil you just dropped because it ain't gonna happen that is flying, followed by the waiting for an hour after just to find out that they didn't bring your luggage then waiting in line to tell them about how they didn't bring your luggage then being promised it will be there by 3:00 the next day then 5:00 then 6:30, nevermind your dinner reservations, and no one ever saying wow we're sorry we lost your luggage, well that's crap travel. medieval. our children (or maybe theirs or maybe theirs) will consider these tales with the horror with which i regard lack of indoor plumbing, no central heat, and most aspects of medieval life.

in the vast expanse of human history, this tale of woe is going to be our hallmark i think. our lives are marked in so many ways by being so far away from so many of the people we love so much. can you imagine that that wouldn't be totally formative? so many of the people we love are somewhere else all the time! how can we survive with so much love somewhere else? in the middle ages, very few people had this problem because they didn't love people far away. folks mostly stayed put and loved people nearby. soon enough we'll have, i don't know, bullet trains, teleportation, a pod system...something. how far from video chatting can that possibly be? so really, it's only this time and this place -- this blip -- with all this far away love. and it's unacceptable to me. un-ac-ceptable. physicists: no one even cares about string theory. where's the teleporting?

meantime, some of you -- and you know who you are -- really need to move to seattle. or invent teleportation. or buy an iteleporter. or an ipodsystem. but not that kind.

--mtg