Monday, March 30, 2009

banter.

Springing Into the Air, originally uploaded by superhiker (uh, that would be my kid)

OK, so for a little light-hearted banter because a) I am pretty flippin' impressed and b) it is pretty flippin' hilarious (at least to me) ...

So, Saturday morning we woke up and before even getting out of bed I was showing J how to use the brush to mask things in Photoshop. It was at about the five minute mark he gave me the ol' 'OK, Dad, I get it' and went off to his room where he proceeded to spend a good bit of the weekend surprising me with his imagination, creativity, apparent Photoshop wizardry (I've known supposed retouching pros who cannot composite this well) and downright resourcefulness with a slew of images he quickly posted to his Flickr stream.

This one was one of the most impressive (or certainly one of the most amusing). I must say I took no part in this – this is all him. I don't even know where he found the shot of him pogo-sticking, but apparently one exists; or where he got the idea for this composite. I about rolled off the kitchen chair when I saw the thumbnail.

Props to my kid.

escape velocity [recorded].

Well, finally, just the idea of it. Hammered away on the Bechstein, then back to the keyboard (still need an interface and a pair of mics to record the piano for real) to lay it out. Know exactly what I want to say but unable yet to really say it. Julian came by wondering what I was up to, so I showed him around Logic a bit – creating objects, sends and effects. Editing a few mis-played notes. Adjusting levels and so on. He looked at me and said when I get everything together it is going to be awesome. I guess I am on the right track.

The more I listen to the playback and play it myself (different still every time as I have yet to really nail down how exactly it goes) and the more I read about the Apollo missions and the Voyager missions I get this enormous sense of optimism that cannot be contained and I want to find a way to put that into lyrics for music that is huge and larger than almost anything I have ever written trying to make the analogy to our ever-so-short-lived quest – triumphs and tragedies and all – to reach the stars. The idea of hope beckons with this image in my mind of an enormous Saturn V rocket – a triumph of the humankind – lifting off and in an instant out of sight, hurtling away from Earth and everything we know out into a vastness we cannot comprehend, but with so much promise and mystery.

I have tried in the past (feebly at best) to describe places here on Earth through which I have traveled and become a part of if even short-lived, but it is that much more difficult I am finding to write about experiences I cannot imagine – of looking back at this tiny world on which we find ourselves for now from an unimaginable distance in some attempt to understand our fragility, our isolation and loneliness, our dependence on one another, our need to respect all that we have. It is quite simple to say, on one hand, how this fascination of mine with the stars and my zealousness to study them and the sciences to which they relate has given me this notion that we can indeed overcome our odds and prove our potential to all those generations before us and all those yet to come. Impossible on the other to find a way to say how.

Maybe I should just leave it at that for now. Try to get some sleep. Think about it some more. Maybe one day I will be able to write what I want to say.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

the bechstein.

There really is no better sound in this world (other than perhaps none at all, as in complete silence found only while high up in the mountains far removed from everything) than a just-tuned piano. Without the cancellations of duplexed and triplexed strings beating out of sync, the piano gains enormous volume – nearly too much for this little living room in which I find myself this afternoon. It has a certain power to it that it does not have at any other time, and a perfection in its imperfections. Made especially clear because of the routine of tuning, where you of course only tune one note per string at a time, and get quite used to the rather lackluster sound that creates. But then, once having finished all the keys, the task begins of tuning the unisons – over two hundred of them in all – and the sound begins to take shape.

After all too much time spent on keyboards in Logic, the inexplicable acoustic power of this hundred-and-thirty-nine-year-old German grand piano, strings copper wound by now-antiquated machines and hammers voiced by delicate hands nearly a century-and-a-half ago, the soundwaves upon soundwaves multiplying on top of each other until nearly exploding, is just an absolutely phenomenal sensation to behold.

I love acoustics.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

heaven and hell.

This is the music by the Greek composer Vangelis that Carl Sagan chose as the theme music to his PBS series Cosmos, here set to iTunes' visualizer sequence.


I have been fascinated by watching these installments, courtesy of Netflix. Tonight's was about time travel, the theory of relativity and how light bends and time decays near the speed of light (and props to J for getting through all of it this time without stating to me "too many facts, Dad!").

Absolutely incredible, even if I still have a difficult time wrapping my head around those ideas, and the idea of wormholes and the possibility that the laws of physics (admittedly, as we know them to be up until now) might allow space and time to be non-simply connected (also known as "multiply connected," depicted by the diagram above) as Sagan postulated in his novel Cosmos.

In preparation for that book, he consulted with a friend from Cal Tech named Kip Thorne – a leading and world-renowned theoretical physicist – who initially dismissed the idea of wormholes, but later had an epiphany that they could in fact be used as time machines and ended up publishing a thesis entitled Wormholes, Time Machines and the Weak Energy Condition (it is, I should note, highly speculative at this time).

I still have to read Sagan's novel, and I am all set to watch the movie adaptation again. And we still have three more discs of Cosmos in our Netflix queue. And additionally, Stephen Spielberg is set to release a film called Interstellar that is based on Thorne's theories of time travel through wormholes (though a release date is not given).

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

time stands still.

And then it hit me. I had come up with the melody of the verses for this song years ago but it had a very dour lyrical approach which I wanted to revisit and rewrite completely new but out of nowhere the melody hit me tonight and then as I went over it in my head I came up with the chorus which sent me rushing to the little corner in my living room to fire up my Mac and get this idea on tape (or, in this case, hard disk) before it escaped me for another couple of years. It is like everything driven by a very heavy, dense piano line and is a song as I hear it still in my head that builds and builds until it reaches the first chorus, then keeps that level but builds more upon the second chorus, then keeps that, then crescendos unbelievably with the third chorus and the end. This is incredible and a song that over the course of roughly fifteen minutes went from an age-old idea in my head to something of substantial worth that will be developed at all costs! Lyrics are lame at the moment but trying to wrap my head around what it is I want to write hopefully ambiguous of course and then will figure out how to write it. The idea is what I will fall asleep with in my head tonight, better that than this pounding music.
And time stands still
Must all be veiled? Unseen?
Where "and time stands still" starts out on the third of a C♯ minor, then rises to an E major then a B major then a G♯ minor with an enormous crescendo at "unseen" but rising still higher to end back on a C♯ minor an octave-and-a-half above and at least a few dynamic markings higher than where the phrase started and then an enormous ending and silence and in fact the whole song is hugely-intense and very heavy-sounding with quite phenomenal and enormously difficult guitar and piano lines. But regardless, it will be something else entirely to find someone who can sing this that I hear in my head.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Thursday, March 19, 2009

globe at night.

So, ever since coming across the Astronomy Pic of the Day site, it has become J's and my tradition to look at it every day. I let him read it which gives him a nice challenge with a lot of the astronomical words (haha, thank you very much – and I also showed him the option--D shortcut while hovering over a word which will pop up a dictionary with the definition, which he does with some fascination). We have learned some amazing things, but I thought I would share this particular one from today's post:

Explanation:
How many stars can you see? Through next week, the GLOBE at Night project invites people from all over the world to go outside at night, look up, and see!

Specifically, people are invited to go out an hour after sunset and look for the constellation Orion toward the west. Rather than count Orion's stars directly, however, the GLOBE at Night website has made things easier by providing several star charts to which you can compare your view of Orion.

Possible matches extend from a bright sky where only a few Orion stars are visible, to a very dark sky where over 100 Orion stars are visible.

These are results from last year's sky observation campaign. Since 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy (bet you didn't know that!), it is hoped that an even better map can be created this year. By participating in this easy and fun activity, you are helping humanity to better understand how light pollution is changing across the Earth.

So we of course did this, and have ascertained that where we live on a clear night we are about a magnitude 5 (as in, we can see the three stars of Orion's belt - including of course the Orion Nebula - but not quite as many other stars the magnitude 5 chart depicts). And another interesting bit I did not know is that apparently Orion's belt points towards Taurus (and the Pleiades).

It also of course made me wish I could be somewhere again with a magnitude 7 view.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

tragedy of the commons.

Beyond making a somewhat cool song title, this is an interesting concept introduced in an influential article written by an ecologist named Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968. The article describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen.

Central to Hardin's article is a metaphor of herders sharing a common parcel of land (the commons), on which they are all entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin's view, it is in each herder's personal interest to put as many cows as possible onto the land in order to maximize their own profits, even if the commons are damaged as a result. The herder receives all of the benefits from the additional cows, while the damage to the commons is shared by the entire group. The catch is of course that if all herders make this individually (and therefore seemingly) rational decision, however, the commons are destroyed and all herders suffer.

At the beginning of his essay, Hardin draws attention to problems that cannot be solved by technical means (in other words, as distinct from those with solutions that require "a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality"). Hardin contends that this class of problems includes many of those raised by human population growth and the use of the Earth's natural resources. To make the case for "no technical solutions," Hardin notes the limits placed on the availability of energy (and material resources) on Earth, and also the consequences of these limits for "quality of life." To maximize population, one needs to minimize resources spent on anything other than simple survival, and vice versa. Consequently, he concludes that there is no foreseeable technical solution to increasing both human populations and their standard of living on a finite planet.

From this point, Hardin switches to non-technical management solutions to population and resource problems. As a means of illustrating these, he uses the hypothetical example of a pasture shared by local herders. The herders are assumed to wish to maximize their yield, and so will increase their herd size whenever possible. The utility of each additional animal has both a positive and negative component:
Positive: the herder receives all of the proceeds from each additional animal.
Negative: the pasture is slightly degraded by each additional animal.
The crucial piece here of course is the division of these costs and benefits is unequal: the individual herder gains all of the advantage, but the disadvantage is shared among all herders using the pasture. Consequently, for an individual herder the rational course of action is to continue to add additional animals to his or her herd. However, since all herders reach the same rational conclusion, overgrazing and degradation of the pasture is its long-term fate. Nonetheless, the rational response for an individual remains the same at every stage, since the gain is always greater to each herder than the individual share of the distributed cost.

Because this sequence of events follows predictably from the behaviour of the individuals concerned, Hardin describes it as a "tragedy." In the course of his essay, Hardin develops the theme, drawing in examples of latter day "commons," such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, wildlife, national parks and advertising. A major theme running throughout the essay is the growth of human populations, with the Earth's resources being a general commons.

In the context of avoiding over-exploitation of common resources, Hardin concludes by restating "liberty is the recognition of want." He suggests that "liberty" completes the tragedy of the commons. By recognizing resources as commons in the first place, and by recognizing that, as such, they require management, Hardin believes that humans "can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms." Aside from its subject matter (resource use), the essay is notable (at least in modern scientific circles) for explicitly dealing with issues of morality. In fact, the subtitle for the essay is "The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality."

As a metaphor, the tragedy of the commons should not be taken too literally. The phrase is shorthand for a structural relationship and the consequences of that relationship, not a precise description of it. The "tragedy" should not be seen as tragic in the conventional sense, nor should it be taken as condemnation of the processes that are ascribed to it. Similarly, Hardin's use of "commons" has frequently been misunderstood, leading him to later say that he should have titled his work "The Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons."

As it relates to social evolution, a tragedy of the commons is brought about by selfish individuals whose genes for selfish behaviour come to predominate, so the metaphor cannot necessarily explain how altruism arises. This question is addressed instead by models of possible mechanisms that can give rise to "reciprocal altruism," leading to ideas like the quid pro quo rule of reciprocation (or the Brass Rule from an earlier – also quite lengthy – post). These models freed evolutionary theory from the limitations imposed by the concept of "inclusive fitness," a previous explanation for altruism, which proposed that organisms help others only to the extent that by doing so they increase the probability of passing shared genes to the next generation (as it turns out, we help one another because it makes us feel good).

The commons is a specific class of social dilemma in which people's short-term selfish interests are at odds with long-term group interests and the common good. In academia, a range of related terminology has also been used as a kind of shorthand for the theory behind it, including resource dilemma, "take-some" dilemma and common pool resource. Commons dilemma researchers have studied conditions under which groups and communities are likely to under- or over-harvest shared resources in both the lab and the field. Research programs have concentrated on a number of motivational, strategic and structural factors that might be conducive to commons management. And finally, in game theory, which constructs mathematical models for individuals' behavior in strategic situations (like the Prisoner's Dilemma), the corresponding "game," developed by Hardin himself, is known as the Commonize Costs — Privatize Profits Game (CC–PP game), which definitely does not have as good a ring to it as the aforementioned game.

Breaking this down some more, we can examine some of those factors that have been considered. First, when looking at motivational factors, research shows that some people are more motivated than others to manage the common resource responsibly. Using the commons dilemma game, researchers found that people with "prosocial" value orientations harvest less from a resource during a period of scarcity. These same individuals are also more inclined to engage in sustainable environmental behaviours such as taking public transport, conserving energy and water, and explaining their decisions in terms of environmental impact. Motivation to conserve a common resource is also promoted by people’s group ties – when people identify with their group, they are more likely to exercise personal restraint. Similarly, something that was noticed in the field was that strongly-knit communities are usually better at managing resource shortages than communities with weak social ties. Something else that was realized was that resource uncertainty seemed to further contribute to over-harvesting. In commons dilemmas, this tends to increase individual "harvesting" (of those resources) and expectations about how much other people harvest. When there is uncertainty, people overestimate the size of the resource and perceive greater variability in how much other people take.

Further studies looked at how real-world communities manage communal resources, such as fisheries, land irrigation systems and farmlands, and they identified a number of factors conducive to successful resource management. One factor is the resource itself – resources with definable boundaries like land can be preserved much more easily. A second factor is resource dependence – there must be a perceptible threat of resource depletion, and it must be difficult to find substitutes (um, think oil). The third is the presence of a community – small and stable populations with a thick social network and social norms promoting conservation seem to do better (think of native tribes or – on a larger scale – Europe, which does not suffer from suburbia and the disconnection that produces nearly to the extent as does the United States). A final condition is that there are appropriate community-based rules and procedures in place with built-in incentives for responsible use and punishments for overuse (do not think of the United States – at least not currently).

This seems all quite relevant today in the predicaments we find ourselves and those last results seem quite obvious. It is frustrating to hear about "tragedies" like that played out by AIG (where they are clearly not concerning themselves with the commons), and of course the many varied "tragedies" we have endowed upon ourselves when it comes to the environment. The question circles back to the studies already carried out and being undertaken that deal with how we can view the common thread that connects us all? Will we succeed or will we fail?

Regardless, it is inherently impossible that some of us will succeed while others fail; we will either – all as one common species – succeed or we will similarly all fail. I tend to hold onto my optimistic point that someway, somehow we will indeed find our way.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

core audio.

So tonight I was mixing one of the first tracks I recorded in Logic and kept getting the audio overload. Hmm, so I froze the bulk of the tracks which freed up 90% of my system resources (BTW, Activity Monitor on a Mac is wonderful though Logic also has its own CPU and disk I/O meters) and all was well, but ... I was still curious as I have other songs with loads more tracks and do not get an audio error so I took a peek at the Audio Object layer in the Environment to find (much to my surprise) – forty-eight instrument tracks, two aux sends, eight busses, and two master objects (monitor and fader). Most of them obviously unused on this arrangement, but that was the default setup for Logic when I first installed it and I had not tweaked it yet before tracking this song.

Fortunately, Logic provides an easy way to select all unused objects and delete them which is what I promptly did. But admittedly it looked really cool with a screen full of faders.

gigabit.

Sweet.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

sometime around midnight.

I came across this from someone having posted it on Facebook and the lyrics are terribly corny and cheesy though the music makes up for it and for some reason when I listen to it I am reminded of why I would always rather want what I do not have rather than have what I want because it is in that intensity I thrive and find all of my inspiration for everything that I aim to do in this life.

So I downloaded it today.

cheers

astronomy images.

After reading this month's Discover article about the violent birth of stars (which featured, of course, the Orion Nebula, along with the other notorious nebula Eagle which contains one of the most famous star-forming regions known as the Pillars of Creation), I somehow wound up on this site, which features astronomy pics updated daily. Upon a quick scroll, it would seem it has a photo for every day from today back through 1995. I have been excitedly clicking/downloading/creating folder for my screensaver of various incredible images. Um, wow.

The image above that I discovered is of course Saturn, but unique in the fact it was taken by Cassini after finding itself in the giant planet's shadow, looking back at the eclipsed sun. This is perhaps now the most incredible image I have ever seen (though this standing will likely change soon the more I scroll through these archives, but really, this is quite amazing). This is a view like no other. First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against the planet, but quite bright when viewed lighted from behind by slightly scattering sunlight. Saturn's rings light up so much that new rings were discovered, although they are hard to see in the above image. Visible in spectacular detail, however, is Saturn's E ring, the ring created by the newly discovered ice-fountains of the moon Enceladus, and the outermost ring visible above.

Perhaps most significant (albeit maybe just to me) is that – far in the distance, visible on the image left just above the bright main rings – is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

halcyon.

I have been listening to my iPod on shuffle mode for the last couple of days on the way into work both via car and train and today on the way home almost there it cold outside again the light pale but intense from a crazy weather day cloudy but light along the horizon I found myself listening to this song for I think the first time called Halcyon (Beautiful Days) by a band called MONO and I found myself purposely stalling to get home just to listen to it in its entirety and no, I do not expect anyone else to sit through the eight-and-a-half-minute-long song but that is perfectly acceptable and it is very MONO-esque and quite beautiful and now I must go for a walk listening to it over + over + over ...