Sunday, September 26, 2010

Albert Einstein said--

"The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance, and even our very existence depends on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to our lives."

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Not Yours To Give

In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. 'No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose.--Horatio Bunce to Col. Davy Crockett

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Schrodinger had more than a cat:

"Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in
the singular. How does the idea of plurality (emphatically
opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all? .... the
only possible alternative is simply to keep the immediate
experience that consciousness is a singular of which the
plural is unkown; that there *is* only one thing and that
what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different
aspects of this one thing produced by deception (the Indian
maya) - in much the same way Gaurisankar and Mt Everest turn
out to be the same peak seen from different valleys."

- E. Schrodinger, "What is Life"

Delve deeper into music and become more of an engineering and math geek, such is life, for me anyway.

Have a song:

Wonder what it would be like to be squeamish

P-- "Authorities say three children were found shot to death and a man was found wounded at a suburban Houston apartment complex."
Tom-- did they donate the meat to the homeless shelter?
P-- best use of handguns i can come up with, kids are annoying at times
Tom--Doesn't say? Waste of protein!

I am a pathologists son. No doubt about it.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Share The Love

Drenched in wonderful Marshall tones.

Fellow Traveler in the land of Harmonic Designs

Ray Tomes' - Harmonics Theory - The Physics and Maths

"This page discusses the fundamentals of physics in layman's terms, showing how present theory must inevitably lead to all waves losing energy and forming harmonically related waves, the end result is a very specific detailed structure that matches the observed universe and explains many previously mysterious observations."

It's all about music and, as Billy Joe Shaver says, "GOD LOVES YOU WHEN YOU DANCE."

Paraphrase from emails with Ray Tomes about this:

If the most fundamental physics theories are examined, they are all
wave equations. That is, they are about waves, which are the same as
cycles. To the extent that particles exist, they should be understood
as special wave structures, namely spherical standing waves. The
wave-particle duality is simply a misunderstanding resulting from not
recognizing that particles are really just standing waves. They can
be treated like "particles" but they're really just a form of
waveform.

Particle physics is an artificial human construct to make "simpler" calculations simpler, even when wave equations better describe the universe. You don't need wave equations to do engineering, unless it's harmonic related engineering most of the time, so it's simpler to pretend some things are static/fixed objects when they really aren't.

People mostly don't like doing second order differential equations if they don't have to.

Almost no instruments are in tune and it's annoying

The "well tempered" scale is BROKEN just as the "just tempered" scale is broken, just in different ways, so I end up playing fretless things and slide or bending a LOT behind frets to be marginally close to in what is "in tune". I can tune instruments by ear and have been able to do that since I was about three years old, but the basic tuning breaks up really badly on fret instruments and keyboards, because it's either the "well tempered" "average things wrong" or the "just tempered" I can only play in one key.

Bastard thing and God is laughing at us for it but I'm thinking about making a fretless Telecaster so I can play more easily in tune, but the actual notes sound different than fret notes, when it's just finger pressing string to neck, so you're screwed either way.

Been looking at a lot of ways to fret a neck where it'd be closer to in tune but still have frets but they all seem to have their own problems, and we are back to God is laughing at us. Wish all I liked to play was fretless things and steel, but I like fretted instruments too. I am doomed! Anyway, as for something related and to listen to and think about on insomniac odd person Saturday...

The black keys were originally on pianos, as they were notes you might not want to hit, iffin the piano was just tempered.

Now we have nice fifths and octaves but lost thirds and sixths unless you go fretless.

Unless one of these multiple "just tempered" microtonal guitars works out...We shall see. Or else I'll just keep bending the hell out of things while I'm fretting notes and HATING PIANO AND KEY PLAYERS because their instruments are intentionally designed to be marginally out of tune in all keys.

My Bagpipes are in C and D and they are perfectly in tune in both, my fretless instruments are as in tune as my ear, and fretted and keyboard instruments are BROKEN by design, although I like Thelonious Monk and a lot of fretted picked stuff.






This



OR



RECKON "BOTH"???

Actually own one of the fretfull Godin guitars, back from the days David Allan Played them, takes TWO nine volt batteries to run the electronics and was made when you had to pay CRAY to have a fast computer and the English still had industry that wasn't things they just broker and have made in China... :-)

Nothing works right, some things are just closer than others in a particular context.

Frequency ratios that reduce to small whole number ratios are perceived as consonant. The ear hears many of the notes of the overtone series as being consonant but not all of them. The ear may discern a pattern in equal divisions of the octave, but does not hear it as consonant.

After you take the quiz, GO LEARN SOMETHING :-)

Another thought:



Or TWO



From an old article that agrees with my ranting:

"For centuries, equal temperament didn't catch on because musicians tended not to like it. Even when fretted instruments were invented and lutes and guitars were mostly tuned in equal temperament, they still didn't like it. Most especially, musicians didn't like the fat major thirds of equal temperament, which are way out of tune with nature. They preferred the sweet thirds of meantone temperaments, with all their limitations. For another thing, in meantone each key had an audible personality, from, say, the almost-pure and upstanding C major, suitable to moods of equanimity and celebration, to shadowy C minor, suitable for doubt and despair. Equal temperament leaves every key with exactly the same personality, which was widely felt to be boring. Musicians still preferred, then, the old varieties of what is generically called unequal temperament."

Boomer Lad likes B, A, and G when they aren't equally tempered, with a bit of a B-Flat fetish...Keys are like colors, unless you fuck them all up by evening things out, designed for people that think capos are a good idea for guitars because they're too fucking lazy to figure out how to play in the key they want to play in and basically want to spend their whole fucking life using chord shapes that most people learned in their first week of guitar lessons because they suck and are lazy and such. Many of them are good lyricists, few of them are good guitarists. Capos and equal temper, crutches for people with broken ears? Occasional applications of all tools can be useful, at times, but to intentionally spend your whole life a bit lazy and out of tune doesn't sound like much of a winner to me.

Properly tempered and likely the most unlikely and coolest version of a familiar tune you might hear this year, or decade.

As it progresses, you WILL SMILE, as you realize the origins.

Music that's IN TUNE and it'll make your brain hurt a bit to think about, regarding managing this on a fretless guitar?