ok...
so, to understand this piece, it's necessary to go back to 1998.
i was working out primitive sequencer parts for the first inri demo and it just sort of crossed my mind that there was really nothing stopping me from composing symphonies except for a lot of music theory. well, if i could write electronic music without training, why couldn't i write symphonies without training? i mean, the score writing program exists in front of me. it was just a question of experimenting with it. i could do it myself...
...but i actually already had a pretty hefty disdain for music theory by the age of 17. i'd managed to come across a music history textbook that traced the deconstruction of western theory from beethoven through to schoenberg and this, combined with my experiences as a guitarist, was enough to prevent me from taking it seriously. the perception i had was of modern composers viewing music theory sort of like how biologists viewed creationism. i use that analogy fairly frequently. it just didn't strike me as relevant.
now, i've softened a bit over time to a view that music theory is best understood in terms of the underlying physics. this renders the theory useless, but upholds the basic relationships between tones as physical, mathematical realities. the thing is the next step of abstraction is understanding that these mathematical objects can be arranged and analyzed in any arbitrary way, and the conventional theory really *is* a fallacy akin to creationism. so, i still hold to the general thesis. this is actually the first serious example of me putting that disdain for the idea that music should have a theory into real action. i remain adamantly of the view that art is not a realm where theories should exist or be viewed with anything other than scorn. theories are rigid, formal things; art is informal, chaotic.
so, it's 1998. i have a scorewriter and a very basic soundcard and i want to bullshit a symphony out of it. i did this by composing a single brief melody by randomly mashing notes into a scorewriter. i then took that melody and pasted it over top of itself at differing speeds (64th, 32nd, 16th, 8th, quarter, half, whole notes). i then took that, cut it off near the end of the half notes and pasted it over itself, backwards.
that might sound like it's going to sound awful, but it actually sounds quite lovely. one could analyze it quite easily, but it's creation is beyond the realm of any rules of construction.
which is where art belongs.
...excepting the algorithm i used, of course. i suppose it's more reich than schoenberg, but kind of more xenakis than either.
the initial version ended up subsumed underneath a messy noise collage that i created independently and have lost the source material for. that messy noise collage was eliminated from the track for the 1999 version, which was reconstructed by reproducing the algorithm. these are tracks 19 and 20 on this systematic exploration of the theme.
in 2001, i ran the midi file through my soundblaster live!, which as primitive as it is, has a much nicer wavetable in it than the primitive soundcard i used in 1998 and 1999 (i don't remember what it was). this is track 21. i also slowed it down by about 20 bpm and allowed the full file to "intersect", which let it breathe more. i've previously not done anything with this mix other than append it to some mix cds. the guitars on the soundblaster are notoriously bad, so there wasn't a lot to do with it....
why? well, i was writing a lot with scorewriters at the time and was just experimenting with the old file, really. but i was also finishing up what would be the only year i would spend in the math-physics department, and thought it sounded like i would imagine intersecting particles *should* sound like. i was generally interested in finding ways to combine science with music then - an interest that is present in older tracks as well and that has stuck with me. i may explore these themes further in time. one of the ideas i really wanted to accomplish was a physical modelling of the universe, to actually simulate the music of the spheres, as pythagoras imagined it. i think i underestimated the complexity of such a task....
of course, i never expected the music of the spheres to be tonal. and i wouldn't expect the sound of particles intersecting to be musical, either. but, we can take some artistic license. if intersecting particles are to make a sound, it OUGHT to be something like this!
now, the place to work out the actual intersection is rather arbitrary. i had initially cut off the entire section of pure whole notes, back in '98. what i wanted to do in '01 was create a sequence where it's cut off incrementally, creating shorter and shorter pieces. i didn't actually do that then, but i have now.
as for the piece, i haven't changed it much. i've doubled the guitar with a pizzicato string section, and put it through a better guitar synthesizer (and amp simulator, and effects). the sound fonts are otherwise identical, just updated mildly to a better synthesizer.
i've included the midi files of the original composition, if you'd like to mess with it on your own.
written june, 1998. reimagined june, 2001. slightly rearranged and re-rendered at the end of july, 2014. the renders here are from june 1998, june 1999, june 2001 and july 2014. as always, please headphones.
credits:
j - programming, digital effects & treatments, digital wave editing, composition.
the rendered electronic orchestras variously include piano, electric guitar, orchestra hit, synth pads, pizzicato strings and pc card.
released june 18, 2001
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-intersection-of-two-identical-particles-moving-in-completely-opposite-directions
Friday, July 25, 2014
nexus card arrived in the mail today.
first show over will be the seminal kraut-noise act, oneida.
i'm learning that detroit has a show i'd spend $10 on pretty much every day. i don't have $10 to spend every day. if i were to somehow find a job, i'd not be able to go to a lot of the shows, so it's a catch-22. worse, it costs $9 (maybe $7, i'll find out) in tolls to get back and forth. that's going to mean i'm going to not buy very much beer when i'm over. going across 4 or 5 times a month (which is roughly the current plan) is going to add up to substantial border tolls, unfortunately. i mean, the cost of a $5 show is actually $15. that's a big difference. i can't resolve that, i just have to eat it.
so, that means i'm going to be picky. but, the flip side is that i have a huge array of options. as i'll be keeping a close eye on things, i'll also point out here shows that i nearly attended but didn't. unfortunately, these are probably going to be a lot of the up and coming acts i'd otherwise take a chance on. and i will miss some things in person.
for the next few months, i have an increased amount of disposable income. i will be over quite often.
oneida is a good first show. first update on the first of august.
first show over will be the seminal kraut-noise act, oneida.
i'm learning that detroit has a show i'd spend $10 on pretty much every day. i don't have $10 to spend every day. if i were to somehow find a job, i'd not be able to go to a lot of the shows, so it's a catch-22. worse, it costs $9 (maybe $7, i'll find out) in tolls to get back and forth. that's going to mean i'm going to not buy very much beer when i'm over. going across 4 or 5 times a month (which is roughly the current plan) is going to add up to substantial border tolls, unfortunately. i mean, the cost of a $5 show is actually $15. that's a big difference. i can't resolve that, i just have to eat it.
so, that means i'm going to be picky. but, the flip side is that i have a huge array of options. as i'll be keeping a close eye on things, i'll also point out here shows that i nearly attended but didn't. unfortunately, these are probably going to be a lot of the up and coming acts i'd otherwise take a chance on. and i will miss some things in person.
for the next few months, i have an increased amount of disposable income. i will be over quite often.
oneida is a good first show. first update on the first of august.
at
00:06
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Thursday, July 24, 2014
deathtokoalas
i refuse to follow the rules that exist in conventional english grammar regarding its/it's, as it demonstrates rather clearly how grammar is in fact a form of mind control. it clearly follows that weird al is an nwo pawn, btw.
but, let us analyze this carefully. we have three things to take into account.
1) contractions. it's can clearly be used as a contraction for "it is". no argument.
2) plural. generally, when used without an apostrophe, an s at the end of a word means that the idea expressed is one of plurality.
3) possessive. generally, we use apostrophes to indicate possessives.
it follows that, to be consistent across the language, its should mean plural and it's should be used for both the contraction and the possessive. yet, for absolutely no discernible reason other than the arbitrary dictate of some centralized grammar authority somewhere, this convention is shattered for it's/its. i don't know the history, but it almost certainly reduces to somebody's arbitrary opinion on the matter.
i reject all of this as inconsistent with the principles of natural justice, which demand that laws be on a firm, rational basis rather than at the arbitrary dictate of some authoritarian body. with enough push back, we can take back our language as a democratic, dynamic entity and have this changed to something more rational.
so, please join in me in ignoring the irrationality of this particular rule of modern english - and any others you may find.
Luke
What do you have against koalas?
deathtokoalas
it's the cuteness. puts me into a rage just thinking about it...
Mario
whether or not you're being a troll, you make a rather interesting claim. You must be the life of the party, too. Haha take care.
deathtokoalas
well, in some sense, i'm drawing from orwell. but, you don't really need to draw on fiction. you can look at the development of french. the history of repression that has gone into french is very deep and well documented. most people that today speak "proper french" previously spoke a different dialect of latin, such as occitan. these dialects have been viciously repressed through forced schooling in a manner that is every bit as heavy-handed as the forced anglicization of natives in australia and canada. the development of france as a nation-state is inherently connected to the standardization of french as a language.
if you analyze french, you'll immediately realize how ridiculously constructed it is. the gendering is really quite ridiculous, and consider how much deference it provides to authority (specifying between the tu and the vous seems entirely arbitrary, until you realize it's meant to enforce a hierarchy).
linguists will tell you that language is really at the core of how we think. how many philosophical debates reduce to the meaning of a term? and, there's good reason for this, as it's at the core of how we grasp concepts. if the centralized grammar authorities (dare i say grammar nazis) can get you to think in a way that upholds hierarchy and defers you to authority, they're a good ways towards getting you to behave in the way they want.
it's/its may be trivial in that context, and english is not nearly as controlled as french is. but, it's a good place to start in deconstructing the conditioning and questioning the ideas underlying the grammatical rules.
a better example in english is capitalization.
stop and think about what they teach kids in schools. whenever you capitalize a proper name, you're enforcing a hierarchical relationship between people. when a child writes "the president", it's marked as incorrect. it must be The President. for the rest of your life, you will write The President, The Prime Minister, The CEO, etc.
this is so engrained it's not even thought about. but it's a means of enforcing a social order.
Mario Venegas
holy shit. I wish I had that much time on my hands. Well, TIL. Thanks for that wall of awesome information. That's pretty rad stuff. What do you do for a living, if I may ask? You seem very knowledgeable. I apologize in advance, English isn't my first language.
deathtokoalas
let's just say i'm a musician. you can hear my music by clicking my name.
lsm234
You rage against the machine, bro!
deathtokoalas
i'd advise building parallel structures, instead. far more productive.
(evil laugh)
J.D.
Look out we have a rebel here! Mwahaha that was a fragment! that will show the establishment!
deathtokoalas
nonono, rebels necessarily acknowledge the existence of the state and flail hopelessly against it. post-leftists are trying not to do that any more, because there's a recognition that it's just a waste of time. it's a bit elitist, but it's really more realistic. one of the problems is that we don't breed in the first place, so this whole idea of building for future generations is really just empty liberal rhetoric. the focus needs to be on the now. and that's actually getting back to roots; it's a forgotten central aspect of marxism that workers can only live for the present if they stop living for the afterlife. so, the new anti-establishmentarianism rejects rebellion in favour of creative building. there's not much hope that it's going to create systemic change, but it at least allows us to get a feeling of freedom while we're actually still alive. leave the rebellion for the terrorists. gimme an art commune in the mountains, and put your guns away...
Amy
I think you lost 80% of your audience when you started using multi-syllabic words. Great diatribe, though :)
Chris
Have you heard of Weird Al's parody of "Royals" by Lorde called "Foil". He actually talks about the illuminati and consperacies and what not. Weird Al is not a mastermind of evil, he is a mastermind of parody. And I started to listen to your so called "music" before I had to turn in off because of the LITERAL irritaion it brings to my brain. If you want to become a successful muscian, try less scratching on the chalkboard and more actual musical instruments, like say a piano. I would abadon your music career and go into writing. You are obviusly a better writer than a muscian.
deathtokoalas
there's plenty of pianos in there, but i'm actually a guitarist. there's a few poems, too. i mean, there's 70 some songs up. try the "recent" playlist a few lines down.
that song i have up is a bit of a joke, but it's necessary for another week because i'm putting the songs up in the same order and length as i wrote them, meaning they'll consistently be staggered by about 18.5 years. i'll have you know i was 15 when i jammed that out in 1996. it was my first demo tape....
....and if you appreciate it for what it is, it pulls it off well. but it's not for everyone, admittedly.
Monotremata
the subterranean tremor that being currently engineered is language mash-up : spanglish, frenglish, sprench, germalian, bulgarese, etc. Cityspeak and Newspeak will merge with these into an 'idiomatic singularity' - the corridors of power speaking in code, separating the rulers from the ruled. Doubleplusgut! \m/
rejectfairytales
While I share your view that there is much in thoughtlessly spoken language that ought to be opposed I think you've made a poor choice in railing against non-use of the apostrophe in this case. If anything I think we should use apostrophes less. I agree with the trend toward using a lone s or es for plurals, eliminating nonstandard plurals eg: plural of squid should be squids not squid ; plural of octopus should be octopuses not octipodes. Just this would make English a lot simpler, which I think is important because as +jnrclerk points out, language is NOT the be all and end all. Meaning is so much more important so the more we can eliminate arbitrary rules the better.
In terms of improving society I think encouraging brevity would be the best cause. Just think of all the empty verbiage floating around especially in legislative documents, legal documents, and the procedural documents of many companies. I find that most people who use too many words have a similar thing to hide - they are talking bullshit! Of course that isn't always the case but it often is. Leave the koalas alone - I'm just sayin!
deathtokoalas
yeah, the meaning > procedure thing is really the crux of a lot of my grammar anti-authoritarianism. language is spoken first and foremost. writing is important, it's importance cannot be understated, but the purpose of writing something down is to get a meaning across.
i've put it down to focus purely on recording right now, but i've been reading a bit of archaic political literature lately by the likes of richard price and thomas hobbes (the aim is to get in between the historical debate over the french revolution that happened between thomas paine and edmund burke). it's impossible not to notice that the spelling and grammar used in texts before 1900, and especially before 1800, is dramatically different than spelling and grammar used today. yet, when i'm having trouble following something, it has more to do with attitudes that have changed than the difference in writing conventions. that's to say nothing of shakespeare or chaucer who were legitimately writing in a different language. yet, if you let a grammar authoritarian loose on these texts, the result would be ugly. with hobbes, it's just missing the point that language is constantly evolving; with shakespeare, it actually diminishes the artistic expression.
and, it's worthwhile to wonder what somebody will think of reading this very youtube comment in the year 2200, if youtube is still online that far into the future. i'd normally say something like "if we avoid blowing ourselves up", but i suspect that if we do blow ourselves up the internet will keep running without us for quite some time into the future. web pages written in archaic language could be an interesting phenomenon in the not so distant future.
somebody pointed out that this whole thread is sort of funny because my grammar is actually almost spotless. well, most of the rules make sense. i want to go back to the idea of reason being the guiding force, rather than convention. language will shift, but reason will stay mostly static. if we focus on reason rather than convention, we will provide future generations the ability to disassemble our archaic writing; if we focus on convention over reason, we run the risk of becoming incoherent to future audiences.
akkinex
It's is the conjugated form of both 'it is' and 'it has.' FYI
Oh, and this might help to explain why the apostrophe for the possessive 'its' was dropped a couple hundred years ago. From http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp
From what we understand, the possessive was also written it’s until a couple of hundred years ago. While we don’t know for certain, it is possible that the apostrophe was dropped in order to parallel possessive personal pronouns like hers, theirs, yours, ours, etc.”
deathtokoalas
hrmmmn. thanks for that.
i've deleted about a dozen posts explaining that the rule applies because "it" is a "personal pronoun". the people posting thought they were smart, but it's actually a really dumb response that i didn't want to get into. i didn't know that it's was an Officially Correct possessive in the past; in light of that information, your post has made me reconsider.
rather than focus on pronouns, let's look at a concept called a "possessive determiner". consider the following:
this is our house / the house is ours.
that is their house / the house is theirs.
this is your house / the house is yours.
that is her house / the house is hers.
this is it's house / the house is it's.
(it may be a cat, for example)
in each case, the first phrase is using what you may mistake as a pronoun as a "possessive determiner". the second phrase is the possessive pronoun. the s in each case is not due to possession, but due to it being a pronoun rather than an adjective.
wikipedia (i don't have time to go to the library, sorry) lists possessive determiners in english as:
1) my, your, his, her, its, our, their, whose
2) the saxon genitives formed from other nouns, pronouns and noun phrases (one's, everybody's, Mary's, a boy's, the man we saw yesterday's).
you can clearly see from this that its is used in exactly the same way as a general noun possessive is. yet, it inconceivably isn't written that way.
ok.
i had to triple check that and rewrote it a few times, not being somebody that cares a lot about grammar. the only reason my grammar doesn't suck is because i spent my entire childhood in my room reading and i picked it all up through intuition. it's just about what looks right.
but i'm done now. the personal pronoun thing is not correct. so, please stop posting it. i will block you!
John
The current iteration ofit's versus its has a very simple explanation to it: The form it's is always a replacement for either it is, or it has. Perhaps this is the whole point. If we used the apostrophe in possessive situations, wouldn't that remove the need for its to exist? That would also mean that it's would not always be a contraction of it is or it has. That could be the very reason for this rule, to keep the two meanings visually, and identifiably separate. For the record, I have no idea how many times I confused myself trying to write this comment. I sincerely hope that this is an acceptable means of emphasis, or at least acceptable in the absence of access to italics? Knowing my luck though, my grammatical discussion is grammatically incorrect somewhere. Blimey, I should have ceased this comment sooner.
Oh come on! Why did that have to be a short cut for strikethrough?! -_-
deathtokoalas
you can get italics by surrounding the word with _. you can bold by surrounding the word with *.
_ italic _ . without the spaces: italic.
i've always understood the difference as being an attempt to separate the meanings in the way you've provided. but, there's virtually no chance anybody is going to get confused. with all the homonyms out there, confusing the contraction with the possessive should be the least of anybody's concerns...
Unofficial winner
It makes us look professional.
deathtokoalas
please. most professionals can barely spell their own names.
it makes you look like a social outcast, or an english professor that can't find a real job.
i was in school a long time. math. physics. programming. law. music. a few other things. i'll admit it was very surprising to me the first time i realized the guy in front of me, who has a phd in an incredibly abstract topic and dozens of published papers, was not able to get his homophones straight. it was just like...
"did he just write there on the board when he meant their? i thought this was a university. give me my money back..."
....but it's so overwhelmingly common in the university classroom that you eventually get used to it.
professionals are interested in the thing(s) that they're studying. you'll run across the odd one that is particular about the grammar, but for the most part they simply don't care.
you've just been lied to by your high school teachers. the truth is nobody cares about your grammar or is going to judge you based on it.
it's not the only thing they lied to you about, either.
"i know she just built a usable prototype for a quantum computer, but she didn't capitalize her proper place names, so how can we hire her?"
it doesn't happen.
people will judge you on your work.
i refuse to follow the rules that exist in conventional english grammar regarding its/it's, as it demonstrates rather clearly how grammar is in fact a form of mind control. it clearly follows that weird al is an nwo pawn, btw.
but, let us analyze this carefully. we have three things to take into account.
1) contractions. it's can clearly be used as a contraction for "it is". no argument.
2) plural. generally, when used without an apostrophe, an s at the end of a word means that the idea expressed is one of plurality.
3) possessive. generally, we use apostrophes to indicate possessives.
it follows that, to be consistent across the language, its should mean plural and it's should be used for both the contraction and the possessive. yet, for absolutely no discernible reason other than the arbitrary dictate of some centralized grammar authority somewhere, this convention is shattered for it's/its. i don't know the history, but it almost certainly reduces to somebody's arbitrary opinion on the matter.
i reject all of this as inconsistent with the principles of natural justice, which demand that laws be on a firm, rational basis rather than at the arbitrary dictate of some authoritarian body. with enough push back, we can take back our language as a democratic, dynamic entity and have this changed to something more rational.
so, please join in me in ignoring the irrationality of this particular rule of modern english - and any others you may find.
Luke
What do you have against koalas?
deathtokoalas
it's the cuteness. puts me into a rage just thinking about it...
Mario
whether or not you're being a troll, you make a rather interesting claim. You must be the life of the party, too. Haha take care.
deathtokoalas
well, in some sense, i'm drawing from orwell. but, you don't really need to draw on fiction. you can look at the development of french. the history of repression that has gone into french is very deep and well documented. most people that today speak "proper french" previously spoke a different dialect of latin, such as occitan. these dialects have been viciously repressed through forced schooling in a manner that is every bit as heavy-handed as the forced anglicization of natives in australia and canada. the development of france as a nation-state is inherently connected to the standardization of french as a language.
if you analyze french, you'll immediately realize how ridiculously constructed it is. the gendering is really quite ridiculous, and consider how much deference it provides to authority (specifying between the tu and the vous seems entirely arbitrary, until you realize it's meant to enforce a hierarchy).
linguists will tell you that language is really at the core of how we think. how many philosophical debates reduce to the meaning of a term? and, there's good reason for this, as it's at the core of how we grasp concepts. if the centralized grammar authorities (dare i say grammar nazis) can get you to think in a way that upholds hierarchy and defers you to authority, they're a good ways towards getting you to behave in the way they want.
it's/its may be trivial in that context, and english is not nearly as controlled as french is. but, it's a good place to start in deconstructing the conditioning and questioning the ideas underlying the grammatical rules.
a better example in english is capitalization.
stop and think about what they teach kids in schools. whenever you capitalize a proper name, you're enforcing a hierarchical relationship between people. when a child writes "the president", it's marked as incorrect. it must be The President. for the rest of your life, you will write The President, The Prime Minister, The CEO, etc.
this is so engrained it's not even thought about. but it's a means of enforcing a social order.
Mario Venegas
holy shit. I wish I had that much time on my hands. Well, TIL. Thanks for that wall of awesome information. That's pretty rad stuff. What do you do for a living, if I may ask? You seem very knowledgeable. I apologize in advance, English isn't my first language.
deathtokoalas
let's just say i'm a musician. you can hear my music by clicking my name.
lsm234
You rage against the machine, bro!
deathtokoalas
i'd advise building parallel structures, instead. far more productive.
(evil laugh)
J.D.
Look out we have a rebel here! Mwahaha that was a fragment! that will show the establishment!
deathtokoalas
nonono, rebels necessarily acknowledge the existence of the state and flail hopelessly against it. post-leftists are trying not to do that any more, because there's a recognition that it's just a waste of time. it's a bit elitist, but it's really more realistic. one of the problems is that we don't breed in the first place, so this whole idea of building for future generations is really just empty liberal rhetoric. the focus needs to be on the now. and that's actually getting back to roots; it's a forgotten central aspect of marxism that workers can only live for the present if they stop living for the afterlife. so, the new anti-establishmentarianism rejects rebellion in favour of creative building. there's not much hope that it's going to create systemic change, but it at least allows us to get a feeling of freedom while we're actually still alive. leave the rebellion for the terrorists. gimme an art commune in the mountains, and put your guns away...
Amy
I think you lost 80% of your audience when you started using multi-syllabic words. Great diatribe, though :)
Chris
Have you heard of Weird Al's parody of "Royals" by Lorde called "Foil". He actually talks about the illuminati and consperacies and what not. Weird Al is not a mastermind of evil, he is a mastermind of parody. And I started to listen to your so called "music" before I had to turn in off because of the LITERAL irritaion it brings to my brain. If you want to become a successful muscian, try less scratching on the chalkboard and more actual musical instruments, like say a piano. I would abadon your music career and go into writing. You are obviusly a better writer than a muscian.
deathtokoalas
there's plenty of pianos in there, but i'm actually a guitarist. there's a few poems, too. i mean, there's 70 some songs up. try the "recent" playlist a few lines down.
that song i have up is a bit of a joke, but it's necessary for another week because i'm putting the songs up in the same order and length as i wrote them, meaning they'll consistently be staggered by about 18.5 years. i'll have you know i was 15 when i jammed that out in 1996. it was my first demo tape....
....and if you appreciate it for what it is, it pulls it off well. but it's not for everyone, admittedly.
Monotremata
the subterranean tremor that being currently engineered is language mash-up : spanglish, frenglish, sprench, germalian, bulgarese, etc. Cityspeak and Newspeak will merge with these into an 'idiomatic singularity' - the corridors of power speaking in code, separating the rulers from the ruled. Doubleplusgut! \m/
rejectfairytales
While I share your view that there is much in thoughtlessly spoken language that ought to be opposed I think you've made a poor choice in railing against non-use of the apostrophe in this case. If anything I think we should use apostrophes less. I agree with the trend toward using a lone s or es for plurals, eliminating nonstandard plurals eg: plural of squid should be squids not squid ; plural of octopus should be octopuses not octipodes. Just this would make English a lot simpler, which I think is important because as +jnrclerk points out, language is NOT the be all and end all. Meaning is so much more important so the more we can eliminate arbitrary rules the better.
In terms of improving society I think encouraging brevity would be the best cause. Just think of all the empty verbiage floating around especially in legislative documents, legal documents, and the procedural documents of many companies. I find that most people who use too many words have a similar thing to hide - they are talking bullshit! Of course that isn't always the case but it often is. Leave the koalas alone - I'm just sayin!
deathtokoalas
yeah, the meaning > procedure thing is really the crux of a lot of my grammar anti-authoritarianism. language is spoken first and foremost. writing is important, it's importance cannot be understated, but the purpose of writing something down is to get a meaning across.
i've put it down to focus purely on recording right now, but i've been reading a bit of archaic political literature lately by the likes of richard price and thomas hobbes (the aim is to get in between the historical debate over the french revolution that happened between thomas paine and edmund burke). it's impossible not to notice that the spelling and grammar used in texts before 1900, and especially before 1800, is dramatically different than spelling and grammar used today. yet, when i'm having trouble following something, it has more to do with attitudes that have changed than the difference in writing conventions. that's to say nothing of shakespeare or chaucer who were legitimately writing in a different language. yet, if you let a grammar authoritarian loose on these texts, the result would be ugly. with hobbes, it's just missing the point that language is constantly evolving; with shakespeare, it actually diminishes the artistic expression.
and, it's worthwhile to wonder what somebody will think of reading this very youtube comment in the year 2200, if youtube is still online that far into the future. i'd normally say something like "if we avoid blowing ourselves up", but i suspect that if we do blow ourselves up the internet will keep running without us for quite some time into the future. web pages written in archaic language could be an interesting phenomenon in the not so distant future.
somebody pointed out that this whole thread is sort of funny because my grammar is actually almost spotless. well, most of the rules make sense. i want to go back to the idea of reason being the guiding force, rather than convention. language will shift, but reason will stay mostly static. if we focus on reason rather than convention, we will provide future generations the ability to disassemble our archaic writing; if we focus on convention over reason, we run the risk of becoming incoherent to future audiences.
akkinex
It's is the conjugated form of both 'it is' and 'it has.' FYI
Oh, and this might help to explain why the apostrophe for the possessive 'its' was dropped a couple hundred years ago. From http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp
From what we understand, the possessive was also written it’s until a couple of hundred years ago. While we don’t know for certain, it is possible that the apostrophe was dropped in order to parallel possessive personal pronouns like hers, theirs, yours, ours, etc.”
deathtokoalas
hrmmmn. thanks for that.
i've deleted about a dozen posts explaining that the rule applies because "it" is a "personal pronoun". the people posting thought they were smart, but it's actually a really dumb response that i didn't want to get into. i didn't know that it's was an Officially Correct possessive in the past; in light of that information, your post has made me reconsider.
rather than focus on pronouns, let's look at a concept called a "possessive determiner". consider the following:
this is our house / the house is ours.
that is their house / the house is theirs.
this is your house / the house is yours.
that is her house / the house is hers.
this is it's house / the house is it's.
(it may be a cat, for example)
in each case, the first phrase is using what you may mistake as a pronoun as a "possessive determiner". the second phrase is the possessive pronoun. the s in each case is not due to possession, but due to it being a pronoun rather than an adjective.
wikipedia (i don't have time to go to the library, sorry) lists possessive determiners in english as:
1) my, your, his, her, its, our, their, whose
2) the saxon genitives formed from other nouns, pronouns and noun phrases (one's, everybody's, Mary's, a boy's, the man we saw yesterday's).
you can clearly see from this that its is used in exactly the same way as a general noun possessive is. yet, it inconceivably isn't written that way.
ok.
i had to triple check that and rewrote it a few times, not being somebody that cares a lot about grammar. the only reason my grammar doesn't suck is because i spent my entire childhood in my room reading and i picked it all up through intuition. it's just about what looks right.
but i'm done now. the personal pronoun thing is not correct. so, please stop posting it. i will block you!
John
The current iteration of
Oh come on! Why did that have to be a short cut for strikethrough?! -_-
deathtokoalas
you can get italics by surrounding the word with _. you can bold by surrounding the word with *.
_ italic _ . without the spaces: italic.
i've always understood the difference as being an attempt to separate the meanings in the way you've provided. but, there's virtually no chance anybody is going to get confused. with all the homonyms out there, confusing the contraction with the possessive should be the least of anybody's concerns...
Unofficial winner
It makes us look professional.
deathtokoalas
please. most professionals can barely spell their own names.
it makes you look like a social outcast, or an english professor that can't find a real job.
i was in school a long time. math. physics. programming. law. music. a few other things. i'll admit it was very surprising to me the first time i realized the guy in front of me, who has a phd in an incredibly abstract topic and dozens of published papers, was not able to get his homophones straight. it was just like...
"did he just write there on the board when he meant their? i thought this was a university. give me my money back..."
....but it's so overwhelmingly common in the university classroom that you eventually get used to it.
professionals are interested in the thing(s) that they're studying. you'll run across the odd one that is particular about the grammar, but for the most part they simply don't care.
you've just been lied to by your high school teachers. the truth is nobody cares about your grammar or is going to judge you based on it.
it's not the only thing they lied to you about, either.
"i know she just built a usable prototype for a quantum computer, but she didn't capitalize her proper place names, so how can we hire her?"
it doesn't happen.
people will judge you on your work.
at
16:33
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
wasps (and hornets) are such insane creatures.
it's trying to kill a venomous spider in order to lay an egg inside of it, which will eat the spider as it matures.
the result presented here makes the behaviour seem like such wantonly pointless violence. ok, ok - maybe it's going after a competitor. but, surely there are less dangerous ways to lay some eggs...
it's stuff like this that makes you realize there's no way this shit was designed. this defies all reason. and there's thousands of similar examples.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg7XGTiNis0
it's trying to kill a venomous spider in order to lay an egg inside of it, which will eat the spider as it matures.
the result presented here makes the behaviour seem like such wantonly pointless violence. ok, ok - maybe it's going after a competitor. but, surely there are less dangerous ways to lay some eggs...
it's stuff like this that makes you realize there's no way this shit was designed. this defies all reason. and there's thousands of similar examples.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg7XGTiNis0
at
16:02
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
publishing the symphony of psilocybin induced madness (inri046)
so, that means i need to record here that today is the day that inri027 was compiled as a four track ep.
==
the core of this was written in my parent's basement in the spring of 2001. planning on going to a rave that weekend, i had previously purchased a large amount of drugs; i was, however, forced to stay in due to having a calculus test that sunday (the rave was out of town). well, my parents were gone for the weekend, most of my friends were out of town and i had a massive stash of drugs...
it is quite literally a symphony of psilocybin induced madness and was written directly into an ancient, hacked score-writing program. while it has been labelled as a symphony of drunken confusion in certain contexts to get around certain social stigmas, this is inaccurate.
around 2006 or so, i took a course in electronic music design that had a recorded component and pulled the score off of my hard drive with the intent of finally recording it properly. the dx7 i had available to me greatly improved the synth patches, enough that i'm willing to let the track rest that way.
i've included midi files of the original composition, if you'd like to mess with it on your own.
i consider this my second symphony.
written early 2001. reconstructed in the first quarter of 2006, especially over march. as always, please use headphones.
credits:
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-symphony-of-psilocybin-induced-madness
==
the core of this was written in my parent's basement in the spring of 2001. planning on going to a rave that weekend, i had previously purchased a large amount of drugs; i was, however, forced to stay in due to having a calculus test that sunday (the rave was out of town). well, my parents were gone for the weekend, most of my friends were out of town and i had a massive stash of drugs...
it is quite literally a symphony of psilocybin induced madness and was written directly into an ancient, hacked score-writing program. while it has been labelled as a symphony of drunken confusion in certain contexts to get around certain social stigmas, this is inaccurate.
around 2006 or so, i took a course in electronic music design that had a recorded component and pulled the score off of my hard drive with the intent of finally recording it properly. the dx7 i had available to me greatly improved the synth patches, enough that i'm willing to let the track rest that way.
i've included midi files of the original composition, if you'd like to mess with it on your own.
i consider this my second symphony.
written early 2001. reconstructed in the first quarter of 2006, especially over march. as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - electric guitars, programming, digital effects & treatments, composition, production.
the rendered electronic orchestras variously include synthesizers, clavinet, kalimba, nylon guitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass guitar, piano, banjo, electronic drums, pc card, violin, cello, bamboo flute, flute, viola, soprano saxophone, tuba, trumpet, organ and music box.
released may 15, 2001
the rendered electronic orchestras variously include synthesizers, clavinet, kalimba, nylon guitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass guitar, piano, banjo, electronic drums, pc card, violin, cello, bamboo flute, flute, viola, soprano saxophone, tuba, trumpet, organ and music box.
released may 15, 2001
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-symphony-of-psilocybin-induced-madness
at
22:20
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
so, i've already explored this composition in much more depth; i just pulled these four mixes off my hard drive - and that is the totality of inri027.
1) carleton mix, for music 3604 (2006). includes ambient guitar into/outro, entirely live guitars and the symphony partly played through a dx7 and partly through the soundblaster.
written early 2001. reconstructed in the first quarter of 2006, especially over march. this version was finalized on march 30, 2006.
2) divine amoebas mix. in 2004, i lifted the piano part to form the end of an anti-war protest piece i was putting together. it's slowed down to half speed and combined with an 808 going haywire, beethoven samples and backwards guitars.
piano part written in early 2001. this construction is from january, 2004.
4) alt mix. this is also from 2001, but it's a bit mysterious. i don't have a date, just an mp3 from 2007. i'll have to briefly explain.
this is a process piece, like most of the things i worked out through 2001. i initially composed it to repeat in patterns of 9, where each pattern had an extra bar of silence at the end of it. this created a twenty minute piece that spiralled down into nothingness, and became rather sparse at the end. for the final, published version i ended up modifying the patterns of 9 to decrease as the length of the pattern increases. so, if the initial section that repeats in a pattern of 9 had 8 bars of rest then the next pattern with 12 bars of rest would repeat in patterns of 8, and so on down to 3. this had the effect of shortening up the piece by about 50%. beyond that, i then added a piano part and a ridiculous crescendo.
so, this early mix is the initial cycling of 9s across the score. i don't remember why i cut it to 5:30 back in 2007, but i do think it's the perfect cut off point and will stick to it.
written early 2001. this render is from july, 2007.
5) initial soundcard mix. as with all the pieces from 2001 that i'm finishing, this was written in a scorewriter and monitored using the ol' soundblaster. i've got these mixes up because it's interesting to hear what this actually sounded like as i was composing it.
written early 2001. this render is actually from may 13, 2001.
that's almost an hour of difficult listening. good luck...
3) is a forthcoming vst mix. i'm not sure if i'm going to try and reintegrate the guitars from the carleton mix into the new vst mix or leave it as is as the final render.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-symphony-of-psilocybin-induced-madness
1) carleton mix, for music 3604 (2006). includes ambient guitar into/outro, entirely live guitars and the symphony partly played through a dx7 and partly through the soundblaster.
written early 2001. reconstructed in the first quarter of 2006, especially over march. this version was finalized on march 30, 2006.
2) divine amoebas mix. in 2004, i lifted the piano part to form the end of an anti-war protest piece i was putting together. it's slowed down to half speed and combined with an 808 going haywire, beethoven samples and backwards guitars.
piano part written in early 2001. this construction is from january, 2004.
4) alt mix. this is also from 2001, but it's a bit mysterious. i don't have a date, just an mp3 from 2007. i'll have to briefly explain.
this is a process piece, like most of the things i worked out through 2001. i initially composed it to repeat in patterns of 9, where each pattern had an extra bar of silence at the end of it. this created a twenty minute piece that spiralled down into nothingness, and became rather sparse at the end. for the final, published version i ended up modifying the patterns of 9 to decrease as the length of the pattern increases. so, if the initial section that repeats in a pattern of 9 had 8 bars of rest then the next pattern with 12 bars of rest would repeat in patterns of 8, and so on down to 3. this had the effect of shortening up the piece by about 50%. beyond that, i then added a piano part and a ridiculous crescendo.
so, this early mix is the initial cycling of 9s across the score. i don't remember why i cut it to 5:30 back in 2007, but i do think it's the perfect cut off point and will stick to it.
written early 2001. this render is from july, 2007.
5) initial soundcard mix. as with all the pieces from 2001 that i'm finishing, this was written in a scorewriter and monitored using the ol' soundblaster. i've got these mixes up because it's interesting to hear what this actually sounded like as i was composing it.
written early 2001. this render is actually from may 13, 2001.
that's almost an hour of difficult listening. good luck...
3) is a forthcoming vst mix. i'm not sure if i'm going to try and reintegrate the guitars from the carleton mix into the new vst mix or leave it as is as the final render.
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-symphony-of-psilocybin-induced-madness
at
01:33
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
the symphony of psilocybin induced madness (final mix)
the core of this was written in my parent's basement in the spring of
2001. planning on going to a rave that weekend, i had previously
purchased a large amount of drugs; i was, however, forced to stay in due
to having a calculus test that sunday (the rave was out of town). well,
my parents were gone for the weekend, most of my friends were out of
town and i had a massive stash of drugs...
it is quite literally a symphony of psilocybin induced madness and was written directly into an ancient, hacked score-writing program. while it has been labelled as a symphony of drunken confusion in certain contexts to get around certain social stigmas, this is inaccurate.
around 2006 or so, i took a course in electronic music design that had a recorded component and pulled the score off of my hard drive with the intent of finally recording it properly. the dx7 i had available to me greatly improved the synth patches.
written early 2001. reconstructed in the first quarter of 2006, especially over march.
it is quite literally a symphony of psilocybin induced madness and was written directly into an ancient, hacked score-writing program. while it has been labelled as a symphony of drunken confusion in certain contexts to get around certain social stigmas, this is inaccurate.
around 2006 or so, i took a course in electronic music design that had a recorded component and pulled the score off of my hard drive with the intent of finally recording it properly. the dx7 i had available to me greatly improved the synth patches.
written early 2001. reconstructed in the first quarter of 2006, especially over march.
at
22:45
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Monday, July 21, 2014
publishing the time machine (inri044)
and there it is. inri025.
inri026 is the adventures in guitarland, already completed.
inri027 is my symphony of psilocybin induced madness and is actually finished in it's fully complete form with live guitars. i'm going to construct a vst mix out of it, which will make this a little different than the other tracks as the synths in the full section are from the dx7 in the closet in the music department at carleton university. but, i shouldn't have to actually play any parts, so it should be relatively fast to run through.
===
the various rendered electronic orchestras include acoustic bass, synth bass, electric bass, brass, orchestra hit, drum machine, electronic drum kit, nylon guitar, electric guitar, synthesizers, synthesizer effects, music box, piano, bells and mellotron.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-time-machine
inri026 is the adventures in guitarland, already completed.
inri027 is my symphony of psilocybin induced madness and is actually finished in it's fully complete form with live guitars. i'm going to construct a vst mix out of it, which will make this a little different than the other tracks as the synths in the full section are from the dx7 in the closet in the music department at carleton university. but, i shouldn't have to actually play any parts, so it should be relatively fast to run through.
===
regarding
this piece, my memory is blurry; yet, i have a vivid recollection of
playing parts of it for my guitar teacher on a sunny day, where there
was still snow on the ground. it's funny how we remember seemingly
irrelevant details, but i guess the atmosphere of the performance is
important because the performance is. that would date it to roughly
march, 2001.
i switched the piece from classical guitar to piano halfway through writing it, and vaguely remember thinking that an impossible interval had something to do with it (a specific c# cannot be hit on a standard classical). yet, that doesn't change the fact that it's guitar music. the counterpoint is very guitar.
to further complicate things, i've long wanted to turn the piece into a jazzy idm romp. it has a kind of a jingly feel to it that belongs in the warp records sphere.
so, what is this? a classical guitar piece? a jazzy piano piece? a techno tune? all of the above! as with other pieces from this period, this is presented here in multiple formats: several rendered midi tracks, live guitar versions, a vst version and a "full band" version.
i have included the original midi file (and sheet music in pdf) as a bonus item in the download, if you want to play with it on your own.
conceptually, the time machine aspect referred simply to the slowed down guitar chords at the beginning of the song. if you play it a certain way, it sounds like time is collapsing in on itself. or, so i thought, anyways. the various versions i have created here have made an attempt to take that idea to it's logical conclusion. it's a mix of the vision i had at the time and a bit of hindsight.
written early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. rendered, arranged and performed over june and july, 2014. as always, please use headphones.
i switched the piece from classical guitar to piano halfway through writing it, and vaguely remember thinking that an impossible interval had something to do with it (a specific c# cannot be hit on a standard classical). yet, that doesn't change the fact that it's guitar music. the counterpoint is very guitar.
to further complicate things, i've long wanted to turn the piece into a jazzy idm romp. it has a kind of a jingly feel to it that belongs in the warp records sphere.
so, what is this? a classical guitar piece? a jazzy piano piece? a techno tune? all of the above! as with other pieces from this period, this is presented here in multiple formats: several rendered midi tracks, live guitar versions, a vst version and a "full band" version.
i have included the original midi file (and sheet music in pdf) as a bonus item in the download, if you want to play with it on your own.
conceptually, the time machine aspect referred simply to the slowed down guitar chords at the beginning of the song. if you play it a certain way, it sounds like time is collapsing in on itself. or, so i thought, anyways. the various versions i have created here have made an attempt to take that idea to it's logical conclusion. it's a mix of the vision i had at the time and a bit of hindsight.
written early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. rendered, arranged and performed over june and july, 2014. as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - electric guitar, programming, digital effects & treatments, digital wave editing, loops, production, composition.
the various rendered electronic orchestras include acoustic bass, synth bass, electric bass, brass, orchestra hit, drum machine, electronic drum kit, nylon guitar, electric guitar, synthesizers, synthesizer effects, music box, piano, bells and mellotron.
released march 21, 2001
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-time-machine
at
21:50
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
the time machine (ambient mix)
this slowed down ambient version is the final piece of inri025, which is now complete.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further remixed over july, 2014. this version of the track was completed on july 21, 2014.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further remixed over july, 2014. this version of the track was completed on july 21, 2014.
at
20:45
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
the time machine (electric guitar mix)
the track was originally written for classical guitar, and then switched over to piano because there is a high c# that cannot be reached on very many classical guitars. however, the c# can be reached on an electric, so i've chosen to play it that way instead.
played straight through at a steady 180 bpm, the track is rather boring, so i've interpreted it a little differently for playing purposes. i suppose this is the final interpretation of the track as a solo piece.
written in early 2001. reinterpreted in july, 2014; this version of the track was completed on july 21st, 2014 and adjusted for volume on may 27th, 2015.
played straight through at a steady 180 bpm, the track is rather boring, so i've interpreted it a little differently for playing purposes. i suppose this is the final interpretation of the track as a solo piece.
written in early 2001. reinterpreted in july, 2014; this version of the track was completed on july 21st, 2014 and adjusted for volume on may 27th, 2015.
at
14:21
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
i'm glad i'm finally awake. i passed out thursday afternoon when i
got back from detroit and slept pretty much all of friday, saturday,
sunday. it was a compound burnout, the type that is inevitable after so
many weeks of 30 hour days. when these burnouts hit, the tiredness is
just relentless...
for example: i was able to make it to get groceries on saturday morning, but i was so tired and void of energy that i could barely lift my school bag full of groceries. that's the same school bag of groceries that i normally fill and carry on my back without any effort whatsoever.
i don't think i've been awake more than four hours at a time since. but it's weird because you don't sleep long periods when you burn out like this, either. it's three hours awake, four hours asleep, 2 hours awake, 3 hours asleep, etc.
i'm alert now, though. thankfully. and hopefully for the next 30 hours...
for example: i was able to make it to get groceries on saturday morning, but i was so tired and void of energy that i could barely lift my school bag full of groceries. that's the same school bag of groceries that i normally fill and carry on my back without any effort whatsoever.
i don't think i've been awake more than four hours at a time since. but it's weird because you don't sleep long periods when you burn out like this, either. it's three hours awake, four hours asleep, 2 hours awake, 3 hours asleep, etc.
i'm alert now, though. thankfully. and hopefully for the next 30 hours...
at
04:37
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
deathtokoalas
see, this is why i gave up on physics. well, not exactly this, but basically this. there's a certain strain of analytic thought going back to descartes that suggests that photons are massless and move in a straight line, but i can't fathom how any atheist could stand on a podium in 2014 and declare a photon massless. the mass may be very, very, very small, but it defies all reason to suggest it doesn't exist at all. and, when the mass is experimentally verified as non-zero, physics is going to face an incredible crisis.
the unfortunate nature of relativity is that it's axiomatic. einstein was operating at precisely the moment that mathematicians were beginning to reject axiomatic systems as facile and naive. ironically, einstein had to reject the most praised axiomatic system of them all - euclid's - in order to get to where he got to. it's bizarre that he upheld the process, given what he knew. and, one has to wonder how different relativity would have been had godel got his ideas out before einstein did.
in the end, the religious have an absolutely valid point in claiming science is another religion. it's not because that's what science always is, or what science should be, or what science wants to be, it's just because it's all science can be once we get beyond the basic abstraction of what we can see and feel and otherwise experience directly. axiomatic systems are axiomatic systems, whether they're labeled with an S or an R.
i was skeptical about the lhc, too. but, i think it should be stressed a bit more loudly that it didn't provide that missing link the way the popular press has suggested. nor would it matter much if it did because we already know the standard theory is wrong, anyways. but, if you want to talk simple naivete? it doesn't get more simple or naive (or quasi-theological) than symmetry. and the lhc results have finally thrown symmetry in the trash can where it belongs....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGhUDByWdPQ
monkone
(deleted post)
sahilmalhotra17
Present a hypothesis that backs up your claims. how does a photon with rest mass = 0 cause calamities for physics.? Photons are light quanta which travel at speed of light. A stationary photon does not exist. A lot of things may be feel wrong but until you present the mathematics backing up your feeling, we have to work with the theoretical framework that predicts the greatest number of things with the highest accuracy. You have a different opinion? Bring out the mathematics. You can be skeptical about the lhc and as for what they did find, how about you read the scientific publications instead of the media to find out what you are being skeptical about...
deathtokoalas
+monkone
"It always travels at the maximum velocity it can irrespective of how much energy it is carrying, which is a clear as day indication that a photon has... how much mass?"
that's an empirical question. however, modern physics treats it as an assumption. that is, there is no empirical evidence that what you're saying about light is actually true.
you kind of have to get into the philosophy of it. kant had this idea that "synthetic a priori" systems (he used euclidean geometry as his sacred example) are the most pristine type of knowledge. but, as kant was writing his epistemological treatises, various mathematicians were realizing that a geometry that negates the third postulate is potentially consistent with itself. the whole idea that space may be curved actually comes from that realization in geometry, which more or less throws kant's epistemology out the window. yet, einstein based his theory on a "synthetic a priori" axiomatic system, nonetheless, potentially carrying in the same kinds of problems that make euclidean geometry obsolete in all but the historical sense (or in a practical engineering sense).
the thing about light not having a mass (and moving in a straight line) actually comes from the history on the philosophical side of physics. and, if you follow the argument, it's actually theological.
now, i'm not saying that light must have mass. i'm saying it's an empirical question. currently, the best we can do is provide a bound for it. however, there would be a very simple test to demonstrate that light does indeed have mass: find a tachyon.
i don't pretend to understand the nature of light perfectly. i don't think anybody claiming such a thing would be speaking honestly. but, we know that light displays both particle and wave behaviour. that particle behaviour, in my opinion, provides strong evidence for a non-zero rest mass. it's not a scientific proof, but if it really had no mass then how could it actually display particle behaviour? see, this is where the thing defies reason at a really basic, intuitive level. we hold the massless photon as such a basic assumption due to so many years and such tradition in doing so that we don't really think that through carefully. high school teachers laugh at the student that suggests otherwise. but, that was exactly the case with the parallel postulate, as well.
it's not an assumption i was able to take seriously, and i had a hard time taking the theories built on it seriously as a result of it.
"As for the standard model being wrong. Uhm."
relativity and quantum theory are incompatible with each other (they can't both be right; it depends on the nature of space, another empirical question that is very difficult to understand how to experiment for), and the general way to dealing with this is in fact to contemplate physics "beyond the standard model". the lhc was supposed to help in sorting this out. i haven't heard anybody come out and say it yet, it's maybe a little too unsettling, but the fact that the lhc results agree so perfectly with the standard model actually merely indicates that its far more wrong than anybody could ever imagine.
"Making mathematical models is fun and all but without empiricism it's called making random shit up in a fantasy land."
that's right. that's why i switched from physics into math. i figured if i was going to be working in lala land, it would be more worthwhile to do so as a mathematician, rather than as a magician.
most of what passes as modern physics (from string theory to relativity itself) doesn't pass any meaningful definition of science. almost none of it is falsifiable, and there's virtually no experimental data underlying any of it. almost all of it is legitimately just mathematics. and, when you take into account what i said about euclid up there, that makes a lot of it more or less useless. they use all kinds of geometry in their models without having any kind of empirical basis as to the validity of the geometry itself.
worse, you get prominent scientists (like stephen hawking) taking outlandish positivist positions that declare that the model creates the reality. i've literally choked listening to these people talk, in absolute awe.
then, they confuse themselves misapplying godel. hawking actually published a paper a while back declaring that godel's math implies a theory of everything is impossible. that only makes sense under the assumption that the model and the reality are inseparable from each other.
so, yeah. you're right. and that's the exact reason i gave up on physics.
"Something tells me proving photons have non-zero rest mass is going to be a tricky one, however even if it were proven to be so it would be such a tiny tiny mass as to be negligible."
i couldn't see how to do it, other than finding a tachyon. but, i think the implications are more profound than you're realizing.
deathtokoalas
+sahilmalhotra17
well, i'm not skeptical about the lhc results. and, my argument is purely rational. it's really so simple that you wouldn't expect it would even be controversial, once you think it through. i'd direct you to my previous response.
light does indeed travel at the speed of light, that's tautological. but, does the speed of light actually provide a speed limit?
i'm going to try not to take on your claims about mathematics too directly, other than to point out that the way you're thinking about this is actually the root of the problem in the way that physicists think, and it comes out of these philosophical treatises written in the previous centuries. something we've learned over the last century is that what we call mathematics is itself merely a model to try to understand numbers. despite hawking's sad and comical attempt to grapple with it (those are strong words, and i don't state them lightly), i don't feel that modern physics has really come to terms with godel's work and it's not going to get anywhere further until it does. i guess hawking gets credit for actually realizing there's a problem, there.
there are a number of geometric issues in mathematics that cannot be resolved by starting with a set of axioms and deducing things. these are empirical issues. and, until they're worked out, we're going to have to deal with a lot of nonsense in geometry like the banach–tarski paradox that reduces both fields to idle speculation.
mathematics is not the language of nature. i know physicists like to think that, but that thinking is obsolete. mathematics is merely another model, and it has some really serious problems in it.
stated another way, a lot of what mathematics models is not the reality we live in. you can't split a ball into two equal balls in reality. it defies conservation laws. when physicists take that mathematics and try to use it to develop physical theories, their results consequently do not apply to reality, either.
but, as for light? it has a particle nature. as far as i'm concerned, that implies it has a mass.
monkone
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
well, i'm not going to stand here and argue that all physics is wrong, and i'm sorry if you got the impression that this is what i was saying. this computer i'm typing on, and the method used to communicate with you over a network, would belie such an outlandish statement. and, yes, science is a work in progress, and that's what makes it science. nor do i have anything to counter any of the points you just made. all these things are true enough.
it was more the epistemological basis that turned me off. and, the more i learned about math, the more dissatisfied i became with the whole hurrah. i didn't feel i was actually learning anything of any value, i was just following through on a lot of assumptions that i couldn't really swallow as accurate. so, i play guitar now.
i could pull the copenhagen consensus out as another head-scratcher. basically, it's this:
"we, the pre-eminent german scientists of the world, cannot figure this shit out. therefore, let it be decreed across the world that nobody shall ever figure this shit out for all of time eternal."
that is something i can sympathize with einstein on.
monkone
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
yeah, i've seen that explanation before, but i believe it's just an interpretation. i don't think the duality is really settled in any authoritative way.
i haven't seen the matter-antimatter argument before, but allow me to be skeptical in pointing out that if the mass is small enough it will wash out in the error.
monkone
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
well, the funny thing is i gave up on math when i came to the conclusion that it ought to be empirical, and everybody realized it, and nobody wanted to do anything about it, or seemed to even really care.
Atwa Jesper
Sorry if I'm intruding but I wanted to interject very quickly and bring up the fact that some 'debaters' get lost in the heat of the arguments and usually and unintentionally digress from the main topic.
We could spend days throwing theories and studies on the table that at the moment seem to be contradicting each other but the God discussion and Science, have not much to do with "what seems logic to me" or with the typical "it doesn't make sense". The universe doesn't care for what seems plausible or not, reality is reality and if a phenomenon behaves in a certain way, well, we test it and prove it with evidence and that's it. How many things that nowadays work and seem to make perfect sense, didn't seem logic or natural when they were being developed by those 'crazy thinkers'. Big masses of Metal are able to float on water and carry a lot a things, or we could have also leave the Skies to the birds but we still made it. With today's knowledge all of that seems normal because we know how it's done but again, those ideas didn't seem to be any logical.
Anyways, it seems I'm digressing myself. Regardless of the limited understanding that we have today of the natural world, we shouldn't fall again in the fallacies of "arguments from ignorance" or "the God of the gaps". The fact that many things are still unknown to humanity and Quantum physics doesn't seem to make much sense, doesn't mean therefore God.
The massless protons and other topics must be resolved for science advancement purposes, not to prove that any God does or does Not exist.
Btw, the ones making the assertion that a God exists are the ones obliged to prove it. The burden of proof is on the ones making the assertion, not the other way around.
deathtokoalas
that's all very true, but it doesn't really have anything to do with what i posted.
the value of science in my view is twofold: falsifiability and repeatability. but, when you look at the bulk of modern theoretical physics, very little of it meets either criteria.
that in no way implies a god must exist, and again, i'm sorry if you thought that's what i suggested. but it does place the two fields on a roughly equal footing. in my mind, that doesn't give religion more credibility, but it does give parts of modern physics less credibility.
in religion's defence, it's a bit of a strawman to argue it's rooted solely in faith. i'm simply not aware of analogues in other religions, but christianity has libraries and libraries worth of material that attempts to deduce aspects of morality using reason. we think of the "natural law" that defines what is roughly thought of as "secular humanism" as a modern, liberal idea but it in reality traces back to christian theologians like augustine and aquinas. it's use in the english legal tradition actually has more than a little bit to do with the feudal system. when the english scholars of centuries past deduced that natural law ought to be supreme to legislated law, what they really meant was that the church's law is supreme to the king's law, and for the precise reason that the king was still viewed as subservient to the pope, at least in moral purposes if no longer in political ones. it may have earlier roots in aristotle, but the reality is that secular humanism is the philosophical continuation of a branch of christian theology. both systems appeal to reason to determine moral value, rather than the dictates of human beings. the difference is merely that the christian theologians thought god acted through reason, and modern humanists tend to consider that to be a question that is not worth asking.
yes, you have to work in ideas like infallibility of the pope into the equation, and write them off as ridiculous on their face. however, it's not really fair to blame that on the religion itself - it's more of a consequence of human politics and the tendency of power to act as a corrupting influence. in christianity's further defence, it must be pointed out that the pope has never existed without theological opposition of some sort, and that the reformation is a historical event that actually did happen.
i'm losing a bit of focus. biology is quite different because it is far more empirical than modern physics - a situation that is the reverse of what it was 100 years ago and that i think most people haven't really come to terms with yet.
i was simply responding to a comment krauss makes at the beginning of the video about physics not being "just another story" because it makes testable predictions. but, this is largely untrue. physics does make some testable predictions, but it makes far more untestable claims by deducing things from a set of first principles, just as aquinas did. it follows that when the religionists argue that physics is mostly just another story, they are making a valid point.
but, no, that doesn't mean a god must therefore exist.
just throw an epsilon in there and see what happens. publish it if you want, i don't care, my aspirations are all in music.
(noting, of course, the conceptual change that light could be at rest in the first place.)
ok, i know physicists like to think in terms of consequences. it bugs me, but i'll go with it. it may actually make a few things make more sense.
consider the idea of determining the relativistic mass of a photon. you know the formula (hopefully), with the big M equal to the little m over the square root of one minus v/c squared. if you actually plug zeros into there, you get the lovely 0/0, so you take a limit. but think about what you're doing when you take a limit - you're setting them both to non-zero. if you were actually setting them to zero, you'd set them to zero. when you're taking a limit, you're getting as close to zero as you possible can, without actually getting to zero. that is, you're assuming a non-zero rest mass.
mathematically speaking, you would actually formally even plug an epsilon into the m, and c-delta into the v. that is because m (epsilon) is approaching zero and v is approaching c (or delta is approaching 0). but, then you go and set it all to zero. that's really not consistent with itself.
now, on a graph, you might plug in an imaginary point to make the thing continuous, if you want it to be continuous. but it would be crazy to do that in the realm of physics. that's forcing reality to obey something that isn't even an arbitrary convention, but a pure fantasy that mathematicians create purely for the fun of it. plotting that point is carrying out magic. it's a magic point...
what the formula actually states is that light can never reach the speed of light. this is tautologically false.
if you just plugged a non-zero epsilon in there in the first place, set v equal to the speed of light and set a new speed limit of pure energy at "c+delta" (and you could maybe even come up with delta in terms of epsilon some other way, but be careful that you're not being circular) you'd get the same mathematical idea, but in a way that actually makes mathematical sense.
and i actually hope that example further demonstrates some of the problems in the way physicists use mathematics.
they always said einstein failed math.
russellrummage
Well, with respect, physics seems to have done very well so far. Sure, it is all model dependant, no one claims it as absolute truth do they. Yes you seem to know your stuff, mostly on the maths side. But I think I will put my confidence in the current prevailing views rather than a random Youtuber who looks like they have smoked enough weed to embarrass the biomass of the Amazon rainforest. Call me some sort of utilitarian if you wish, but these flawed theories you critique have done a great job of explaining many things. In any case, c is just the speed of a massless particle in a vacuum. Being called the speed of light is just a historical artifact. So even if it turns out a photon does have an incredibly small mass, I don't see how it breaks the theory. But most importantly, what the fuck's your problem with koalas?
deathtokoalas
the idea that nothing can move faster than pure quantized energy (massless particle strikes me as an undefined concept) strikes me as pretty rational, and not something i'm going to argue against. but, if we accept that light does have a mass, it opens up a lot of questions as to what that means, exactly. is it even defined? is it an imaginary limit, in the sense that nothing actually achieves it? is the difference between the speed of light and the speed limit large or small? if it's large, what effects does that have on things like time dilation? space travel? as i mentioned before, i don't think you're really thinking through the possible ramifications. mathematically, it may only be a set of minor fixes. but this could have very large results, depending on the nature of those fixes.
see, this is why i gave up on physics. well, not exactly this, but basically this. there's a certain strain of analytic thought going back to descartes that suggests that photons are massless and move in a straight line, but i can't fathom how any atheist could stand on a podium in 2014 and declare a photon massless. the mass may be very, very, very small, but it defies all reason to suggest it doesn't exist at all. and, when the mass is experimentally verified as non-zero, physics is going to face an incredible crisis.
the unfortunate nature of relativity is that it's axiomatic. einstein was operating at precisely the moment that mathematicians were beginning to reject axiomatic systems as facile and naive. ironically, einstein had to reject the most praised axiomatic system of them all - euclid's - in order to get to where he got to. it's bizarre that he upheld the process, given what he knew. and, one has to wonder how different relativity would have been had godel got his ideas out before einstein did.
in the end, the religious have an absolutely valid point in claiming science is another religion. it's not because that's what science always is, or what science should be, or what science wants to be, it's just because it's all science can be once we get beyond the basic abstraction of what we can see and feel and otherwise experience directly. axiomatic systems are axiomatic systems, whether they're labeled with an S or an R.
i was skeptical about the lhc, too. but, i think it should be stressed a bit more loudly that it didn't provide that missing link the way the popular press has suggested. nor would it matter much if it did because we already know the standard theory is wrong, anyways. but, if you want to talk simple naivete? it doesn't get more simple or naive (or quasi-theological) than symmetry. and the lhc results have finally thrown symmetry in the trash can where it belongs....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGhUDByWdPQ
monkone
(deleted post)
sahilmalhotra17
Present a hypothesis that backs up your claims. how does a photon with rest mass = 0 cause calamities for physics.? Photons are light quanta which travel at speed of light. A stationary photon does not exist. A lot of things may be feel wrong but until you present the mathematics backing up your feeling, we have to work with the theoretical framework that predicts the greatest number of things with the highest accuracy. You have a different opinion? Bring out the mathematics. You can be skeptical about the lhc and as for what they did find, how about you read the scientific publications instead of the media to find out what you are being skeptical about...
deathtokoalas
+monkone
"It always travels at the maximum velocity it can irrespective of how much energy it is carrying, which is a clear as day indication that a photon has... how much mass?"
that's an empirical question. however, modern physics treats it as an assumption. that is, there is no empirical evidence that what you're saying about light is actually true.
you kind of have to get into the philosophy of it. kant had this idea that "synthetic a priori" systems (he used euclidean geometry as his sacred example) are the most pristine type of knowledge. but, as kant was writing his epistemological treatises, various mathematicians were realizing that a geometry that negates the third postulate is potentially consistent with itself. the whole idea that space may be curved actually comes from that realization in geometry, which more or less throws kant's epistemology out the window. yet, einstein based his theory on a "synthetic a priori" axiomatic system, nonetheless, potentially carrying in the same kinds of problems that make euclidean geometry obsolete in all but the historical sense (or in a practical engineering sense).
the thing about light not having a mass (and moving in a straight line) actually comes from the history on the philosophical side of physics. and, if you follow the argument, it's actually theological.
now, i'm not saying that light must have mass. i'm saying it's an empirical question. currently, the best we can do is provide a bound for it. however, there would be a very simple test to demonstrate that light does indeed have mass: find a tachyon.
i don't pretend to understand the nature of light perfectly. i don't think anybody claiming such a thing would be speaking honestly. but, we know that light displays both particle and wave behaviour. that particle behaviour, in my opinion, provides strong evidence for a non-zero rest mass. it's not a scientific proof, but if it really had no mass then how could it actually display particle behaviour? see, this is where the thing defies reason at a really basic, intuitive level. we hold the massless photon as such a basic assumption due to so many years and such tradition in doing so that we don't really think that through carefully. high school teachers laugh at the student that suggests otherwise. but, that was exactly the case with the parallel postulate, as well.
it's not an assumption i was able to take seriously, and i had a hard time taking the theories built on it seriously as a result of it.
"As for the standard model being wrong. Uhm."
relativity and quantum theory are incompatible with each other (they can't both be right; it depends on the nature of space, another empirical question that is very difficult to understand how to experiment for), and the general way to dealing with this is in fact to contemplate physics "beyond the standard model". the lhc was supposed to help in sorting this out. i haven't heard anybody come out and say it yet, it's maybe a little too unsettling, but the fact that the lhc results agree so perfectly with the standard model actually merely indicates that its far more wrong than anybody could ever imagine.
"Making mathematical models is fun and all but without empiricism it's called making random shit up in a fantasy land."
that's right. that's why i switched from physics into math. i figured if i was going to be working in lala land, it would be more worthwhile to do so as a mathematician, rather than as a magician.
most of what passes as modern physics (from string theory to relativity itself) doesn't pass any meaningful definition of science. almost none of it is falsifiable, and there's virtually no experimental data underlying any of it. almost all of it is legitimately just mathematics. and, when you take into account what i said about euclid up there, that makes a lot of it more or less useless. they use all kinds of geometry in their models without having any kind of empirical basis as to the validity of the geometry itself.
worse, you get prominent scientists (like stephen hawking) taking outlandish positivist positions that declare that the model creates the reality. i've literally choked listening to these people talk, in absolute awe.
then, they confuse themselves misapplying godel. hawking actually published a paper a while back declaring that godel's math implies a theory of everything is impossible. that only makes sense under the assumption that the model and the reality are inseparable from each other.
so, yeah. you're right. and that's the exact reason i gave up on physics.
"Something tells me proving photons have non-zero rest mass is going to be a tricky one, however even if it were proven to be so it would be such a tiny tiny mass as to be negligible."
i couldn't see how to do it, other than finding a tachyon. but, i think the implications are more profound than you're realizing.
deathtokoalas
+sahilmalhotra17
well, i'm not skeptical about the lhc results. and, my argument is purely rational. it's really so simple that you wouldn't expect it would even be controversial, once you think it through. i'd direct you to my previous response.
light does indeed travel at the speed of light, that's tautological. but, does the speed of light actually provide a speed limit?
i'm going to try not to take on your claims about mathematics too directly, other than to point out that the way you're thinking about this is actually the root of the problem in the way that physicists think, and it comes out of these philosophical treatises written in the previous centuries. something we've learned over the last century is that what we call mathematics is itself merely a model to try to understand numbers. despite hawking's sad and comical attempt to grapple with it (those are strong words, and i don't state them lightly), i don't feel that modern physics has really come to terms with godel's work and it's not going to get anywhere further until it does. i guess hawking gets credit for actually realizing there's a problem, there.
there are a number of geometric issues in mathematics that cannot be resolved by starting with a set of axioms and deducing things. these are empirical issues. and, until they're worked out, we're going to have to deal with a lot of nonsense in geometry like the banach–tarski paradox that reduces both fields to idle speculation.
mathematics is not the language of nature. i know physicists like to think that, but that thinking is obsolete. mathematics is merely another model, and it has some really serious problems in it.
stated another way, a lot of what mathematics models is not the reality we live in. you can't split a ball into two equal balls in reality. it defies conservation laws. when physicists take that mathematics and try to use it to develop physical theories, their results consequently do not apply to reality, either.
but, as for light? it has a particle nature. as far as i'm concerned, that implies it has a mass.
monkone
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
well, i'm not going to stand here and argue that all physics is wrong, and i'm sorry if you got the impression that this is what i was saying. this computer i'm typing on, and the method used to communicate with you over a network, would belie such an outlandish statement. and, yes, science is a work in progress, and that's what makes it science. nor do i have anything to counter any of the points you just made. all these things are true enough.
it was more the epistemological basis that turned me off. and, the more i learned about math, the more dissatisfied i became with the whole hurrah. i didn't feel i was actually learning anything of any value, i was just following through on a lot of assumptions that i couldn't really swallow as accurate. so, i play guitar now.
i could pull the copenhagen consensus out as another head-scratcher. basically, it's this:
"we, the pre-eminent german scientists of the world, cannot figure this shit out. therefore, let it be decreed across the world that nobody shall ever figure this shit out for all of time eternal."
that is something i can sympathize with einstein on.
monkone
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
yeah, i've seen that explanation before, but i believe it's just an interpretation. i don't think the duality is really settled in any authoritative way.
i haven't seen the matter-antimatter argument before, but allow me to be skeptical in pointing out that if the mass is small enough it will wash out in the error.
monkone
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
well, the funny thing is i gave up on math when i came to the conclusion that it ought to be empirical, and everybody realized it, and nobody wanted to do anything about it, or seemed to even really care.
Atwa Jesper
Sorry if I'm intruding but I wanted to interject very quickly and bring up the fact that some 'debaters' get lost in the heat of the arguments and usually and unintentionally digress from the main topic.
We could spend days throwing theories and studies on the table that at the moment seem to be contradicting each other but the God discussion and Science, have not much to do with "what seems logic to me" or with the typical "it doesn't make sense". The universe doesn't care for what seems plausible or not, reality is reality and if a phenomenon behaves in a certain way, well, we test it and prove it with evidence and that's it. How many things that nowadays work and seem to make perfect sense, didn't seem logic or natural when they were being developed by those 'crazy thinkers'. Big masses of Metal are able to float on water and carry a lot a things, or we could have also leave the Skies to the birds but we still made it. With today's knowledge all of that seems normal because we know how it's done but again, those ideas didn't seem to be any logical.
Anyways, it seems I'm digressing myself. Regardless of the limited understanding that we have today of the natural world, we shouldn't fall again in the fallacies of "arguments from ignorance" or "the God of the gaps". The fact that many things are still unknown to humanity and Quantum physics doesn't seem to make much sense, doesn't mean therefore God.
The massless protons and other topics must be resolved for science advancement purposes, not to prove that any God does or does Not exist.
Btw, the ones making the assertion that a God exists are the ones obliged to prove it. The burden of proof is on the ones making the assertion, not the other way around.
deathtokoalas
that's all very true, but it doesn't really have anything to do with what i posted.
the value of science in my view is twofold: falsifiability and repeatability. but, when you look at the bulk of modern theoretical physics, very little of it meets either criteria.
that in no way implies a god must exist, and again, i'm sorry if you thought that's what i suggested. but it does place the two fields on a roughly equal footing. in my mind, that doesn't give religion more credibility, but it does give parts of modern physics less credibility.
in religion's defence, it's a bit of a strawman to argue it's rooted solely in faith. i'm simply not aware of analogues in other religions, but christianity has libraries and libraries worth of material that attempts to deduce aspects of morality using reason. we think of the "natural law" that defines what is roughly thought of as "secular humanism" as a modern, liberal idea but it in reality traces back to christian theologians like augustine and aquinas. it's use in the english legal tradition actually has more than a little bit to do with the feudal system. when the english scholars of centuries past deduced that natural law ought to be supreme to legislated law, what they really meant was that the church's law is supreme to the king's law, and for the precise reason that the king was still viewed as subservient to the pope, at least in moral purposes if no longer in political ones. it may have earlier roots in aristotle, but the reality is that secular humanism is the philosophical continuation of a branch of christian theology. both systems appeal to reason to determine moral value, rather than the dictates of human beings. the difference is merely that the christian theologians thought god acted through reason, and modern humanists tend to consider that to be a question that is not worth asking.
yes, you have to work in ideas like infallibility of the pope into the equation, and write them off as ridiculous on their face. however, it's not really fair to blame that on the religion itself - it's more of a consequence of human politics and the tendency of power to act as a corrupting influence. in christianity's further defence, it must be pointed out that the pope has never existed without theological opposition of some sort, and that the reformation is a historical event that actually did happen.
i'm losing a bit of focus. biology is quite different because it is far more empirical than modern physics - a situation that is the reverse of what it was 100 years ago and that i think most people haven't really come to terms with yet.
i was simply responding to a comment krauss makes at the beginning of the video about physics not being "just another story" because it makes testable predictions. but, this is largely untrue. physics does make some testable predictions, but it makes far more untestable claims by deducing things from a set of first principles, just as aquinas did. it follows that when the religionists argue that physics is mostly just another story, they are making a valid point.
but, no, that doesn't mean a god must therefore exist.
just throw an epsilon in there and see what happens. publish it if you want, i don't care, my aspirations are all in music.
(noting, of course, the conceptual change that light could be at rest in the first place.)
ok, i know physicists like to think in terms of consequences. it bugs me, but i'll go with it. it may actually make a few things make more sense.
consider the idea of determining the relativistic mass of a photon. you know the formula (hopefully), with the big M equal to the little m over the square root of one minus v/c squared. if you actually plug zeros into there, you get the lovely 0/0, so you take a limit. but think about what you're doing when you take a limit - you're setting them both to non-zero. if you were actually setting them to zero, you'd set them to zero. when you're taking a limit, you're getting as close to zero as you possible can, without actually getting to zero. that is, you're assuming a non-zero rest mass.
mathematically speaking, you would actually formally even plug an epsilon into the m, and c-delta into the v. that is because m (epsilon) is approaching zero and v is approaching c (or delta is approaching 0). but, then you go and set it all to zero. that's really not consistent with itself.
now, on a graph, you might plug in an imaginary point to make the thing continuous, if you want it to be continuous. but it would be crazy to do that in the realm of physics. that's forcing reality to obey something that isn't even an arbitrary convention, but a pure fantasy that mathematicians create purely for the fun of it. plotting that point is carrying out magic. it's a magic point...
what the formula actually states is that light can never reach the speed of light. this is tautologically false.
if you just plugged a non-zero epsilon in there in the first place, set v equal to the speed of light and set a new speed limit of pure energy at "c+delta" (and you could maybe even come up with delta in terms of epsilon some other way, but be careful that you're not being circular) you'd get the same mathematical idea, but in a way that actually makes mathematical sense.
and i actually hope that example further demonstrates some of the problems in the way physicists use mathematics.
they always said einstein failed math.
russellrummage
Well, with respect, physics seems to have done very well so far. Sure, it is all model dependant, no one claims it as absolute truth do they. Yes you seem to know your stuff, mostly on the maths side. But I think I will put my confidence in the current prevailing views rather than a random Youtuber who looks like they have smoked enough weed to embarrass the biomass of the Amazon rainforest. Call me some sort of utilitarian if you wish, but these flawed theories you critique have done a great job of explaining many things. In any case, c is just the speed of a massless particle in a vacuum. Being called the speed of light is just a historical artifact. So even if it turns out a photon does have an incredibly small mass, I don't see how it breaks the theory. But most importantly, what the fuck's your problem with koalas?
deathtokoalas
the idea that nothing can move faster than pure quantized energy (massless particle strikes me as an undefined concept) strikes me as pretty rational, and not something i'm going to argue against. but, if we accept that light does have a mass, it opens up a lot of questions as to what that means, exactly. is it even defined? is it an imaginary limit, in the sense that nothing actually achieves it? is the difference between the speed of light and the speed limit large or small? if it's large, what effects does that have on things like time dilation? space travel? as i mentioned before, i don't think you're really thinking through the possible ramifications. mathematically, it may only be a set of minor fixes. but this could have very large results, depending on the nature of those fixes.
at
03:14
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Sunday, July 20, 2014
american military aid always means aid to weapons contractors. that means sending american weapons to a state which is not yet - and probably never will be - a solid american ally. i mean, look at all the leaked calls. they must have been leaked by ukrainian agents sympathetic to russia...
that's the reason.
that's the reason.
at
00:53
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
there's two possibilities regarding this downed plane in ukraine.
a) the separatists accidentally shot it down, which would be very sad but is the consequence of flying into a war zone. the fact that this question (why didn't they detour?) isn't being asked is very telling. but, i'm not willing to escape occam's razor just yet.
b) it's the american government's most recent staged attack to launch a war.
the idea that the rebels would purposefully shoot down a foreign plane is laughable on it's face, and the moment you start hearing that you know the answer is (b).
and that is a frightening possibility.
just on the most basic issue of resources, the rebels in ukraine could not possibly think the lives of the people on the plane are worth the price of the missile to shoot it down. they have real targets to worry about.
"shit. the ukrainians just took the city."
"why didn't you shoot the helicopter down?"
"we used our last missile on a terrorist attack on a malaysian passenger plane, and don't expect more until
tomorrow."
"you idiots."
"appears to be the case, sir...."
i mean, shit happens. it could have been a botched shot. but it could not have been purposeful, and anybody suggesting otherwise is lying to you with a straight face.
a) the separatists accidentally shot it down, which would be very sad but is the consequence of flying into a war zone. the fact that this question (why didn't they detour?) isn't being asked is very telling. but, i'm not willing to escape occam's razor just yet.
b) it's the american government's most recent staged attack to launch a war.
the idea that the rebels would purposefully shoot down a foreign plane is laughable on it's face, and the moment you start hearing that you know the answer is (b).
and that is a frightening possibility.
just on the most basic issue of resources, the rebels in ukraine could not possibly think the lives of the people on the plane are worth the price of the missile to shoot it down. they have real targets to worry about.
"shit. the ukrainians just took the city."
"why didn't you shoot the helicopter down?"
"we used our last missile on a terrorist attack on a malaysian passenger plane, and don't expect more until
tomorrow."
"you idiots."
"appears to be the case, sir...."
i mean, shit happens. it could have been a botched shot. but it could not have been purposeful, and anybody suggesting otherwise is lying to you with a straight face.
at
00:15
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Saturday, July 19, 2014
the time machine (final mixes)
1) so, i've completed (yet) another track.
a reminder: what i'm doing right now is sorting through a number of scores (these are literally written pieces of music) that i wrote out over 2001 and never got around to converting into listenable music. they've been sitting around, for the most part, because i was hoping i could actually get real life orchestras to play these pieces. delusions of grandeur...
the technology is now accessible and pliable enough that you don't really need real musicians to play a score anymore. i've played most of the guitar sections, but i have to admit that the vst-based samplers that are out there now are quite phenomenal. i actually had to come to the hard realization with this track that i couldn't play the nylon guitar part better than the sequencer, and i was just going to introduce noise to the track by mic-ing myself. now, the nylon guitar part in this piece is very metered - there is no expression in the arpeggiation and the notes need to be directly on the beats. so, on one hand it's not surprising that a machine is able to be a robot better than a person. regardless, as a musician, it's a disturbing feeling to come to terms with.
i retain the right to add my wanky guitar part at the very end, but i don't think it's going to happen. it's better without it.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further constructed, warped and appended to over july, 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTXTBZcQK
2) so, this is the final version of this track, with live guitars throughout. i've cut off the end section and placed it in a separate track; the full version in one piece can be found on the single's associated record, jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further constructed, warped and appended to over july, 2014. this version of the track was completed on july 11th, but picked up the end swell on july 19th when it was separated from the full mix.
3) i've added an ambient section to the piece, as i always meant to. the thematic idea behind the time machine actually just comes out of the introductory guitar part, but it was supposed to be further interpreted through a sound collage that creates the impression of floating through space.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further constructed, warped and appended to over july, 2014. this version of the track was completed on july 19th.
a reminder: what i'm doing right now is sorting through a number of scores (these are literally written pieces of music) that i wrote out over 2001 and never got around to converting into listenable music. they've been sitting around, for the most part, because i was hoping i could actually get real life orchestras to play these pieces. delusions of grandeur...
the technology is now accessible and pliable enough that you don't really need real musicians to play a score anymore. i've played most of the guitar sections, but i have to admit that the vst-based samplers that are out there now are quite phenomenal. i actually had to come to the hard realization with this track that i couldn't play the nylon guitar part better than the sequencer, and i was just going to introduce noise to the track by mic-ing myself. now, the nylon guitar part in this piece is very metered - there is no expression in the arpeggiation and the notes need to be directly on the beats. so, on one hand it's not surprising that a machine is able to be a robot better than a person. regardless, as a musician, it's a disturbing feeling to come to terms with.
i retain the right to add my wanky guitar part at the very end, but i don't think it's going to happen. it's better without it.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further constructed, warped and appended to over july, 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTXTBZcQK
2) so, this is the final version of this track, with live guitars throughout. i've cut off the end section and placed it in a separate track; the full version in one piece can be found on the single's associated record, jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further constructed, warped and appended to over july, 2014. this version of the track was completed on july 11th, but picked up the end swell on july 19th when it was separated from the full mix.
3) i've added an ambient section to the piece, as i always meant to. the thematic idea behind the time machine actually just comes out of the introductory guitar part, but it was supposed to be further interpreted through a sound collage that creates the impression of floating through space.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. further constructed, warped and appended to over july, 2014. this version of the track was completed on july 19th.
at
15:32
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Friday, July 18, 2014
i have the cockroach specimen you requested
hi.
i got the roach you asked for. i'll be out tomorrow morning for groceries, but should otherwise be home almost all of the upcoming week.
a few notes.
1) that's the first roach i've seen since the first week of june, and it's also the first roach i've killed on the side of the apartment closest to the door. it was actually right outside the door, in the hallway, and scattered when i turned on the light. so, it got stomped on. that felt good.
2) it is indeed an oriental roach, which is determined primarily by it's dark colour.
3) oriental roaches are seasonal. it's been cool overnight this week. they tend to come inside in the fall. so, i was expecting them and hoping this would be a good test if my barriers were working.
4) the fact that it was stumbling around in the hallway far from a water source does suggest as much, although it also suggests that it may have been scattered in an unexpected direction from it's entry path in the back area by the residual sprays. i'll monitor the situation further, but if i continue to see roaches scattering around on the outside of the apartment, i'm going to request that the back room gets inspected for holes and has steel wool or whatever else put in to patch them up. i can help with looking for holes. the thing is that i can block the holes in the apartment, but i can't block the doorways, so if they're going to be coming in through there then the basement entry points need to also be addressed.
5) for now, i'm cautiously concluding that i've blocked this space off, but that it's only a partial barrier. further, there's really no way for me to guess where it actually came from, so no further leads on holes to patch.
(pause)
i'm sorry, i just want to clarify that when i say
"back room gets inspected for holes"
i mean inspected by you or i or paul or whatever. i'm NOT requesting an exterminator.
those guys tell you lies half the time, anyways. they want to be able to come back repeatedly, otherwise they're out of a job.
j
i got the roach you asked for. i'll be out tomorrow morning for groceries, but should otherwise be home almost all of the upcoming week.
a few notes.
1) that's the first roach i've seen since the first week of june, and it's also the first roach i've killed on the side of the apartment closest to the door. it was actually right outside the door, in the hallway, and scattered when i turned on the light. so, it got stomped on. that felt good.
2) it is indeed an oriental roach, which is determined primarily by it's dark colour.
3) oriental roaches are seasonal. it's been cool overnight this week. they tend to come inside in the fall. so, i was expecting them and hoping this would be a good test if my barriers were working.
4) the fact that it was stumbling around in the hallway far from a water source does suggest as much, although it also suggests that it may have been scattered in an unexpected direction from it's entry path in the back area by the residual sprays. i'll monitor the situation further, but if i continue to see roaches scattering around on the outside of the apartment, i'm going to request that the back room gets inspected for holes and has steel wool or whatever else put in to patch them up. i can help with looking for holes. the thing is that i can block the holes in the apartment, but i can't block the doorways, so if they're going to be coming in through there then the basement entry points need to also be addressed.
5) for now, i'm cautiously concluding that i've blocked this space off, but that it's only a partial barrier. further, there's really no way for me to guess where it actually came from, so no further leads on holes to patch.
(pause)
i'm sorry, i just want to clarify that when i say
"back room gets inspected for holes"
i mean inspected by you or i or paul or whatever. i'm NOT requesting an exterminator.
those guys tell you lies half the time, anyways. they want to be able to come back repeatedly, otherwise they're out of a job.
j
at
23:07
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Thursday, July 17, 2014
they're going to need all the help they can get.
http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=d6dff6e4ce6ea2ad881224abf&id=91b6e8147c&e=5f5e2b367a
i recognize that aboriginal communities are in bad shape in canada, but i don't support the idea that ethnic groups can or should own land and i'm flat out violently opposed to reasserting traditional societies and all the social and religious implications it implies. i cannot reconcile my scientific, atheistic anarcho-communism with support for traditional, conservative societies. to me, these groups aren't allies in the world i want to build - they're really quite active opponents.
and few people may be willing to state that, but i know a lot of people agree with me. and, i know the indigenous groups themselves are always apprehensive about these groups of white university students that think they're dealing with some cartoonish archetype of tonto (or, worse, something out of a fictitious engels text) rather than anything that approaches reality.
it just makes it difficult. i want to support the environmental aspect, but i can't organize with groups that want to force people into strict gender roles and think that trees have spirits. i want to organize with scientists, atheists and socialists that want to build high tech renewable systems.
you go to one of these things, and you have to endure all kinds of indigenous religious nonsense, and you walk out smelling like you bathed in sage - which is every bit as bad as patchouli. it's hard to sit through without snickering, or storming off.
like, if i wanted to hang out in a fucking church, i wouldn't be an anarchist, y'know? i'd just go be a christian...
more than anything else, that's what needs to be cut out of the process. but, you can't convince an indigenous leader that there ought to be a separation between religion and politics, because, to them, it's a holistic whole.
and that should frighten people. i'm always confused when it doesn't. but, do you want to know why it doesn't, really? because they're not perceived as a serious threat.
you get white people talking like that, and they're instant targets. think of ann coulter. but the natives don't get the same reaction because all the propaganda has them pegged as inferior "noble savages" that could never set up that kind of society.
but if these white "allies" had taken an afternoon to read up on it, rather than relying on 60s folk songs, they'd realize that it's EXACTLY what they want to set up.
the thinking seems to be that we have to bend on this and deal with the mumbo jumbo or they won't organize with us, but i really think it needs to be other way around.
i'd like to organize with people of all backgrounds, races, genders, orientations and whatever else - just so long as they leave their beliefs at home, where they belong. and the focus should be on kicking out the people that want to force their religious beliefs on others.
for now? there's no way this gets to critical mass so long as the religion and nationalism remains intertwined with the environmental politics. it's a humongous stretch to move from one to the other. and what it actually does is chase off the left and bring in the right.
people will talk about relativism and colonialism and whatnot, and it's not that i'm ignoring or discounting any of that, it's just that it's placing the solidarity in the wrong place. i'm never going to be able to place any solidarity with any group that wants to set up any kind of hierarchical, oppressive system. my solidarity lies with the individuals that could potentially be told they can't do something - a woman who is told she can't do something because she is a woman - and not with the tribal system.
and, there's not any way to synthesize this. cultural relativism works when you're talking about things like diet. i can't eat caterpillars, but, hey, that's how some people get their protein. it doesn't work when you're talking about individual rights. that's where the solidarity needs to be at all times.
and, i'm even mostly on the side of "letting" (that's a colonial idea, but you get the point) cultures work out their own solutions. that's democracy, right? but, it's one thing to stand back and let them work their shit out, and it's another to actively work towards putting oppressive systems in place.
i again need to point out that the white allies (or, more generally, non-indigenous allies) just mostly don't understand what they're actually supporting. but, i do, and my conscience will not allow me to support the underlying aims of nationalism, tribalism and exclusion.
this pipeline is not likely to be stopped. and this focus on traditional ways of thinking is going to be one of the primary reasons.
the organizers need to change their approach and start focusing more on getting scientists and technologists out on the front lines.
i've tried to bring up these concerns, but i haven't been successful in convincing anybody.
and i fully understand i'm moving against the grain of post-leftist thinking.
http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=d6dff6e4ce6ea2ad881224abf&id=91b6e8147c&e=5f5e2b367a
i recognize that aboriginal communities are in bad shape in canada, but i don't support the idea that ethnic groups can or should own land and i'm flat out violently opposed to reasserting traditional societies and all the social and religious implications it implies. i cannot reconcile my scientific, atheistic anarcho-communism with support for traditional, conservative societies. to me, these groups aren't allies in the world i want to build - they're really quite active opponents.
and few people may be willing to state that, but i know a lot of people agree with me. and, i know the indigenous groups themselves are always apprehensive about these groups of white university students that think they're dealing with some cartoonish archetype of tonto (or, worse, something out of a fictitious engels text) rather than anything that approaches reality.
it just makes it difficult. i want to support the environmental aspect, but i can't organize with groups that want to force people into strict gender roles and think that trees have spirits. i want to organize with scientists, atheists and socialists that want to build high tech renewable systems.
you go to one of these things, and you have to endure all kinds of indigenous religious nonsense, and you walk out smelling like you bathed in sage - which is every bit as bad as patchouli. it's hard to sit through without snickering, or storming off.
like, if i wanted to hang out in a fucking church, i wouldn't be an anarchist, y'know? i'd just go be a christian...
more than anything else, that's what needs to be cut out of the process. but, you can't convince an indigenous leader that there ought to be a separation between religion and politics, because, to them, it's a holistic whole.
and that should frighten people. i'm always confused when it doesn't. but, do you want to know why it doesn't, really? because they're not perceived as a serious threat.
you get white people talking like that, and they're instant targets. think of ann coulter. but the natives don't get the same reaction because all the propaganda has them pegged as inferior "noble savages" that could never set up that kind of society.
but if these white "allies" had taken an afternoon to read up on it, rather than relying on 60s folk songs, they'd realize that it's EXACTLY what they want to set up.
the thinking seems to be that we have to bend on this and deal with the mumbo jumbo or they won't organize with us, but i really think it needs to be other way around.
i'd like to organize with people of all backgrounds, races, genders, orientations and whatever else - just so long as they leave their beliefs at home, where they belong. and the focus should be on kicking out the people that want to force their religious beliefs on others.
for now? there's no way this gets to critical mass so long as the religion and nationalism remains intertwined with the environmental politics. it's a humongous stretch to move from one to the other. and what it actually does is chase off the left and bring in the right.
people will talk about relativism and colonialism and whatnot, and it's not that i'm ignoring or discounting any of that, it's just that it's placing the solidarity in the wrong place. i'm never going to be able to place any solidarity with any group that wants to set up any kind of hierarchical, oppressive system. my solidarity lies with the individuals that could potentially be told they can't do something - a woman who is told she can't do something because she is a woman - and not with the tribal system.
and, there's not any way to synthesize this. cultural relativism works when you're talking about things like diet. i can't eat caterpillars, but, hey, that's how some people get their protein. it doesn't work when you're talking about individual rights. that's where the solidarity needs to be at all times.
and, i'm even mostly on the side of "letting" (that's a colonial idea, but you get the point) cultures work out their own solutions. that's democracy, right? but, it's one thing to stand back and let them work their shit out, and it's another to actively work towards putting oppressive systems in place.
i again need to point out that the white allies (or, more generally, non-indigenous allies) just mostly don't understand what they're actually supporting. but, i do, and my conscience will not allow me to support the underlying aims of nationalism, tribalism and exclusion.
this pipeline is not likely to be stopped. and this focus on traditional ways of thinking is going to be one of the primary reasons.
the organizers need to change their approach and start focusing more on getting scientists and technologists out on the front lines.
i've tried to bring up these concerns, but i haven't been successful in convincing anybody.
and i fully understand i'm moving against the grain of post-leftist thinking.
at
23:33
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
suicide is ALWAYS a conscious decision. take a step back away from
your self-important worldview and ask yourself: is your perception of
somebody else's life more valuable than the person that owns it?
whether the attempt is through overdosing on pills, cutting wrists or anything else, i would consider STOPPING a suicide attempt to be a FUNDAMENTAL INFRINGEMENT OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS, and anybody that gets in between somebody and their INHERENT RIGHT to kill themselves should be kicked in the forehead, tarred and feathered and forced to walk through the city with a sign that says "I PREVENTED SOMEBODY FROM CARRYING THROUGH WITH THEIR RIGHT TO DIE.".
if you see somebody trying to die, you should not interfere. life is not sacred. god does not exist. you are in control. don't deify the state in response. deify yourself.
whether the attempt is through overdosing on pills, cutting wrists or anything else, i would consider STOPPING a suicide attempt to be a FUNDAMENTAL INFRINGEMENT OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS, and anybody that gets in between somebody and their INHERENT RIGHT to kill themselves should be kicked in the forehead, tarred and feathered and forced to walk through the city with a sign that says "I PREVENTED SOMEBODY FROM CARRYING THROUGH WITH THEIR RIGHT TO DIE.".
if you see somebody trying to die, you should not interfere. life is not sacred. god does not exist. you are in control. don't deify the state in response. deify yourself.
at
21:26
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
well, that was indeed a kafkaesque mess but i got my expedited border
clearance. hey, all those years of avoiding a criminal record came in
handy. i'm squeaky clean. i get to use the special line...
but, that doesn't mean this wasn't a pain in the ass. i've ranted about this here quite a bit over the last year. it's only fitting that the last section of it was off the wall ridiculous...
getting across the actual border was not a problem. i just showed them my letter, and he let me through. but, he chuckled and wished me luck. he knew what was coming...
the walk up fort street at around 7 am was purposefully brisk; i was admittedly a little uncomfortable. but, the more i walked, the more it just reminded me of montreal. yes: detroit is full of decaying bridges, falling apart buildings, abandoned industrial centres, smoldering sewers and people sleeping on the street. but, i didn't feel threatened so much as i felt a level of empathy. how'd it get that bad, anyways?
the other thing that made me relax a little was a friendly retriever that ran over across a field to say good morning. it's funny how goldens are basically the universal stress reliever.
it was about twenty minutes to the bridge, which is a short walk for me.
once i got there, though, i wasn't sure how to proceed. i tried going under the bridge first. this is the first point that the smog got to me: i nearly heaved, and had to sit down. first attempt at directions was a hotel that looked like something out of a stephen king movie...
"do you know if i can get in some kind of plaza around the bridge?"
"no."
"does that pay phone work?"
*laughs* "no."
"do you know if there's a phone around here?"
"there's no gas stations for a good ways in either direction."
"well, thanks, then."
so, i went back under the bridge again...
there was a side street running along the complex (and it was a complex. it looked like a prison.) that i decided to take a walk up, and it took me into a nicer street full of very old churches and quaint, if dilapidated houses. three houses in a row had angry, barking, unchained rottweilers that could have easily hopped their four foot tall enclosures should they have decided to. it's a problem in windsor, too. cheaper than a security system, i guess.
and apparently very necessary.
i bumped into a border cop on his way to work and flagged him down...
"how do i get in here?"
"do you have a car?"
"no."
"well, why do you want to get into here?"
"i have a nexus interview."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"
"so i can get across the border. i'm from canada..."
"you're from canada? how did you get across the border?"
"the tunnel."
"and how did you get here?"
"i walked."
*awkward pause*
"well, you can't get in here without a car. you're going to have to call a cab."
ok, so here's the thing: i can see the enrollment centre through the fence. it's a few hundred yards, at most. and, yet i need to call a cab to transport me those few hundred yards? yes, i do: this is what the cop is trying to tell me. but, i'm not about to call a cab, so i keep walking.
eventually, i get to a cross street with a big sign
MICHIGAN WELCOME CENTER* --->
*note yankee spelling.
well, that sounds like a good thing to try.
hours:
9 am - 4 pm
it's like 7:30...
so, i look up the road and notice it runs into customs. i'm thinking "maybe there's a phone in there". customer service is closed, and there's no barriers so i just keep walking, until a border cop yells at me:
"WOAH. WOAH. YOU CAN'T BE IN HERE. WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING?"
well, i'm looking for a phone. is there one in that building?
"PLEASE STEP TO THE SIDE AND EMPTY YOUR POCKETS."
ok.
so, i pull out some pieces of paper, keys, a few dollars...
"who do you want to phone?"
"i'm trying to get in contact with the nexus office."
"how did you get in here?"
"i just walked in. there's no barriers or anything."
"do you have a car?"
"no."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"
"well, i'm from canada and..."
"you're from canada? how did you get across the border without a car?"
"i took the tunnel."
"what? how did you get here?"
"i walked"
*awkward pause*
another officer walks over....
"this person just strolled in here, can you believe that."
"where are you going?"
"i'm looking for nexus."
"do you have a car?"
"no."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"
i laughed out loud at this point.
"because i'm from canada and..."
"wait. how did you get across the border?"
"i took the tunnel."
"and they let you in without documents?"
"well, i have this nexus document. i'm here for a defined purpose."
"pfft. anybody could print that off. do you have any drugs on you?"
"what? no..."
"yeah. right. step into the office, please"
so, i walk into the office...
he takes my id and starts running it through the system, asks me all kinds of absurd questions, accuses me repeatedly of living in collingwood and having a record of escaping the custody of an officer, visibly shatters a blood vessel in his forehead when i provide "jessica" as an alternate name and eventually gives up.
"go back to the michigan welcome center and call a cab from there."
again with the cab. they were really serious about this.
i did walk back to the welcome center, but i was planning on calling the enrollment centre, not the cab. it's now barely 8:00, so i have an hour to wait, and wait an hour i did.
the cop drives by about 8:30...
"listen, i knew this was going to be a problem, but i'm pretty sure the person i initially talked to said they'd give me a lift. the thing is i think they meant from canada, and i couldn't get a hold of anybody to provide instructions, so here i am."
he seems to have softened up a bit, after realizing i'm both harmless and frustrated. the absurdity of the situation actually seems to have become clear to him. but...
"i'd drive you down there myself, but then i have to pat you down, which means i need a female officer present and there aren't any."
"i can't waive that?"
(i don't care what gender my doctor is, and i don't care what gender the cop patting me down is)
"no. plus, i'd have to do all kinds of paperwork, and i just don't want to."
ah, yes. a lazy cop. gee, whudda thunk that possible, huh?
"but, i'll call you a cab if you want."
there's no irony in any of this.
i refuse the offer, and suggest i'll call the place when the welcome center opens.
this is where i got a break, and i have to say it's every bit as surreal as the rest of this. the place opens at 9:00, i use the bathroom, and then ask if there's a pay phone...
there isn't, but he offers the office phone, depending on who i'm calling.
i'm calling nexus, because i'm on foot and need to find out how i'm going to get in there.
apparently, this kind fellow has been working at the michigan welcome center for years and years, and given out instructions on how to get into the nexus office hundreds of times, but has never been in there himself. he's been wondering the whole time if his directions are even accurate, and he wants to know what it looks like inside the complex.
so, he offers to drive me in.
and i graciously accept.
he takes me back along the side street i came in at, past the entrance the first border cop went in, back under the bridge and around through a gated area. i am now finally at the nexus enrollment area. i thank the kind fellow and that is that.
but, the border guards are concerned about how i'm going to exit the complex.
"i guess i'll call a cab."
nobody else got the sarcasm. i was actually planning on asking somebody for a lift to the other side of the fence.
so, the interview goes well. the interviewer was a little older, and i seemed to convince him i'm a good kid. which is what i needed to do.
i got the marijuana question, i was honest, and he overlooked it. they can be very strict about that. but, the thing should get here in 7-10 days.
at the end of it, he asks me if i have a phone. i don't carry a phone. so, he picks up the phone and starts dialing the number for a cab for me...
"listen. if you call me a cab, i'm just going to ask that they drop me on the other side of the fence and walk back to the tunnel. so, why don't you just let me ask somebody for a lift out?"
and, finally, i got some fucking logic from somebody.
"no. we'll just escort you out."
a few minutes later, a truck pulls up with a border cop in it.
"are you here to escort me out?"
"yes."
so, i reach for the door....
"no. i'm not driving you. you're going to walk."
at first, he tries to lead me to the exit to the ambassador bridge.
"canada is that way, but where's your car?"
"i don't have a car."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"
i was on the brink of being a smartass, but managed to restrain myself.
"so i can get across under the tunnel. i just need to get to fort street."
"well, how are you going to get over the bridge?"
"no, i want to walk to the tunnel."
"walk...to...the....tunnel?"
at this point, i understand that every single one of the awkward pauses was shock that i'd walk that far. remarkable.
"yeah."
"well, follow the truck around the building and meet me at the crossing."
i did this, and we walked to the gate that first border cop went through. then i was out the side street and back up fort towards the tunnel...
without having to call a cab.
this is your tax dollars at work protecting you from terrorism.
but, that doesn't mean this wasn't a pain in the ass. i've ranted about this here quite a bit over the last year. it's only fitting that the last section of it was off the wall ridiculous...
getting across the actual border was not a problem. i just showed them my letter, and he let me through. but, he chuckled and wished me luck. he knew what was coming...
the walk up fort street at around 7 am was purposefully brisk; i was admittedly a little uncomfortable. but, the more i walked, the more it just reminded me of montreal. yes: detroit is full of decaying bridges, falling apart buildings, abandoned industrial centres, smoldering sewers and people sleeping on the street. but, i didn't feel threatened so much as i felt a level of empathy. how'd it get that bad, anyways?
the other thing that made me relax a little was a friendly retriever that ran over across a field to say good morning. it's funny how goldens are basically the universal stress reliever.
it was about twenty minutes to the bridge, which is a short walk for me.
once i got there, though, i wasn't sure how to proceed. i tried going under the bridge first. this is the first point that the smog got to me: i nearly heaved, and had to sit down. first attempt at directions was a hotel that looked like something out of a stephen king movie...
"do you know if i can get in some kind of plaza around the bridge?"
"no."
"does that pay phone work?"
*laughs* "no."
"do you know if there's a phone around here?"
"there's no gas stations for a good ways in either direction."
"well, thanks, then."
so, i went back under the bridge again...
there was a side street running along the complex (and it was a complex. it looked like a prison.) that i decided to take a walk up, and it took me into a nicer street full of very old churches and quaint, if dilapidated houses. three houses in a row had angry, barking, unchained rottweilers that could have easily hopped their four foot tall enclosures should they have decided to. it's a problem in windsor, too. cheaper than a security system, i guess.
and apparently very necessary.
i bumped into a border cop on his way to work and flagged him down...
"how do i get in here?"
"do you have a car?"
"no."
"well, why do you want to get into here?"
"i have a nexus interview."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"
"so i can get across the border. i'm from canada..."
"you're from canada? how did you get across the border?"
"the tunnel."
"and how did you get here?"
"i walked."
*awkward pause*
"well, you can't get in here without a car. you're going to have to call a cab."
ok, so here's the thing: i can see the enrollment centre through the fence. it's a few hundred yards, at most. and, yet i need to call a cab to transport me those few hundred yards? yes, i do: this is what the cop is trying to tell me. but, i'm not about to call a cab, so i keep walking.
eventually, i get to a cross street with a big sign
MICHIGAN WELCOME CENTER* --->
*note yankee spelling.
well, that sounds like a good thing to try.
hours:
9 am - 4 pm
it's like 7:30...
so, i look up the road and notice it runs into customs. i'm thinking "maybe there's a phone in there". customer service is closed, and there's no barriers so i just keep walking, until a border cop yells at me:
"WOAH. WOAH. YOU CAN'T BE IN HERE. WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING?"
well, i'm looking for a phone. is there one in that building?
"PLEASE STEP TO THE SIDE AND EMPTY YOUR POCKETS."
ok.
so, i pull out some pieces of paper, keys, a few dollars...
"who do you want to phone?"
"i'm trying to get in contact with the nexus office."
"how did you get in here?"
"i just walked in. there's no barriers or anything."
"do you have a car?"
"no."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"
"well, i'm from canada and..."
"you're from canada? how did you get across the border without a car?"
"i took the tunnel."
"what? how did you get here?"
"i walked"
*awkward pause*
another officer walks over....
"this person just strolled in here, can you believe that."
"where are you going?"
"i'm looking for nexus."
"do you have a car?"
"no."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"
i laughed out loud at this point.
"because i'm from canada and..."
"wait. how did you get across the border?"
"i took the tunnel."
"and they let you in without documents?"
"well, i have this nexus document. i'm here for a defined purpose."
"pfft. anybody could print that off. do you have any drugs on you?"
"what? no..."
"yeah. right. step into the office, please"
so, i walk into the office...
he takes my id and starts running it through the system, asks me all kinds of absurd questions, accuses me repeatedly of living in collingwood and having a record of escaping the custody of an officer, visibly shatters a blood vessel in his forehead when i provide "jessica" as an alternate name and eventually gives up.
"go back to the michigan welcome center and call a cab from there."
again with the cab. they were really serious about this.
i did walk back to the welcome center, but i was planning on calling the enrollment centre, not the cab. it's now barely 8:00, so i have an hour to wait, and wait an hour i did.
the cop drives by about 8:30...
"listen, i knew this was going to be a problem, but i'm pretty sure the person i initially talked to said they'd give me a lift. the thing is i think they meant from canada, and i couldn't get a hold of anybody to provide instructions, so here i am."
he seems to have softened up a bit, after realizing i'm both harmless and frustrated. the absurdity of the situation actually seems to have become clear to him. but...
"i'd drive you down there myself, but then i have to pat you down, which means i need a female officer present and there aren't any."
"i can't waive that?"
(i don't care what gender my doctor is, and i don't care what gender the cop patting me down is)
"no. plus, i'd have to do all kinds of paperwork, and i just don't want to."
ah, yes. a lazy cop. gee, whudda thunk that possible, huh?
"but, i'll call you a cab if you want."
there's no irony in any of this.
i refuse the offer, and suggest i'll call the place when the welcome center opens.
this is where i got a break, and i have to say it's every bit as surreal as the rest of this. the place opens at 9:00, i use the bathroom, and then ask if there's a pay phone...
there isn't, but he offers the office phone, depending on who i'm calling.
i'm calling nexus, because i'm on foot and need to find out how i'm going to get in there.
apparently, this kind fellow has been working at the michigan welcome center for years and years, and given out instructions on how to get into the nexus office hundreds of times, but has never been in there himself. he's been wondering the whole time if his directions are even accurate, and he wants to know what it looks like inside the complex.
so, he offers to drive me in.
and i graciously accept.
he takes me back along the side street i came in at, past the entrance the first border cop went in, back under the bridge and around through a gated area. i am now finally at the nexus enrollment area. i thank the kind fellow and that is that.
but, the border guards are concerned about how i'm going to exit the complex.
"i guess i'll call a cab."
nobody else got the sarcasm. i was actually planning on asking somebody for a lift to the other side of the fence.
so, the interview goes well. the interviewer was a little older, and i seemed to convince him i'm a good kid. which is what i needed to do.
i got the marijuana question, i was honest, and he overlooked it. they can be very strict about that. but, the thing should get here in 7-10 days.
at the end of it, he asks me if i have a phone. i don't carry a phone. so, he picks up the phone and starts dialing the number for a cab for me...
"listen. if you call me a cab, i'm just going to ask that they drop me on the other side of the fence and walk back to the tunnel. so, why don't you just let me ask somebody for a lift out?"
and, finally, i got some fucking logic from somebody.
"no. we'll just escort you out."
a few minutes later, a truck pulls up with a border cop in it.
"are you here to escort me out?"
"yes."
so, i reach for the door....
"no. i'm not driving you. you're going to walk."
at first, he tries to lead me to the exit to the ambassador bridge.
"canada is that way, but where's your car?"
"i don't have a car."
"why do you want a nexus card if you don't have a car?"
i was on the brink of being a smartass, but managed to restrain myself.
"so i can get across under the tunnel. i just need to get to fort street."
"well, how are you going to get over the bridge?"
"no, i want to walk to the tunnel."
"walk...to...the....tunnel?"
at this point, i understand that every single one of the awkward pauses was shock that i'd walk that far. remarkable.
"yeah."
"well, follow the truck around the building and meet me at the crossing."
i did this, and we walked to the gate that first border cop went through. then i was out the side street and back up fort towards the tunnel...
without having to call a cab.
this is your tax dollars at work protecting you from terrorism.
at
15:04
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
so, i took a google tour up fort street, which is where i'm headed this morning.
it's pretty run down, but it's an industrial area so i'm not really walking through the 'hood. and there's only been one shooting in the vicinity this year.
there's been two on my block in windsor. yeah. well, it's perspective.
i'll be fine...
i'll point out i *am* wearing $5 shoes and a stained white tshirt.
it's less about wanting to keep the shoes and more about not projecting wealth.
not that i have any wealth, of course. but shit is relative.
it's pretty run down, but it's an industrial area so i'm not really walking through the 'hood. and there's only been one shooting in the vicinity this year.
there's been two on my block in windsor. yeah. well, it's perspective.
i'll be fine...
i'll point out i *am* wearing $5 shoes and a stained white tshirt.
it's less about wanting to keep the shoes and more about not projecting wealth.
not that i have any wealth, of course. but shit is relative.
at
05:20
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
llessa
Finally we see the face of nazism in all its glory on VICE. Just to note, this nazi scumbag Lyashko runs ukrainian Radical party which is currently leading the polls in Ukraine.
deviousdevil75
So Fucking what. One man, one vote.
Jacob Paprotskiy
were the fuck were you when the majority of ukrainians elected a moderate pro eu president?
llessa
actually only 9 million ukrainians voted for poroshenko, out of 45
deathtokoalas
i've never seen a poll that puts that guy higher than 10%, and public opinion has consistently been against military action to root out the "separatists". i'm from canada, i know how that word gets distorted. he may be a "right-wing populist" in the classification sense, and the murdoch empire may consequently be pushing for him on behalf of the state department, but he is not and never has been and never will be a serious political candidate.
KnowledgeDriven
uprated fr t.o. like so much these days - alciada, ISIL, chocoking over there are but a few - remove the USAID (subset also CIAFBI-AID) and the whole enterprise vanishes into thin air.
Tadas Urbonas
I would rather see Hitler leading Ukraine than Putin. That communist son of a bitch can go straight back to hell, where he belongs. Russians have done FAR worse crimes than anything the ukrainians radicals can ever do. And it is sad to see that the same people who gave the orders are still the elite of Russian society, whether they are billionaire oligarchs or top government officials.
deathtokoalas
you realize that putin is a free market conservative that, if american, would be on the right-wing of the republican party, right?
Finally we see the face of nazism in all its glory on VICE. Just to note, this nazi scumbag Lyashko runs ukrainian Radical party which is currently leading the polls in Ukraine.
deviousdevil75
So Fucking what. One man, one vote.
Jacob Paprotskiy
were the fuck were you when the majority of ukrainians elected a moderate pro eu president?
llessa
actually only 9 million ukrainians voted for poroshenko, out of 45
deathtokoalas
i've never seen a poll that puts that guy higher than 10%, and public opinion has consistently been against military action to root out the "separatists". i'm from canada, i know how that word gets distorted. he may be a "right-wing populist" in the classification sense, and the murdoch empire may consequently be pushing for him on behalf of the state department, but he is not and never has been and never will be a serious political candidate.
KnowledgeDriven
uprated fr t.o. like so much these days - alciada, ISIL, chocoking over there are but a few - remove the USAID (subset also CIAFBI-AID) and the whole enterprise vanishes into thin air.
Tadas Urbonas
I would rather see Hitler leading Ukraine than Putin. That communist son of a bitch can go straight back to hell, where he belongs. Russians have done FAR worse crimes than anything the ukrainians radicals can ever do. And it is sad to see that the same people who gave the orders are still the elite of Russian society, whether they are billionaire oligarchs or top government officials.
deathtokoalas
you realize that putin is a free market conservative that, if american, would be on the right-wing of the republican party, right?
at
04:59
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
yeah. this isn't very realistic.
the thing with coke is actually that you don't really get high from it. it's a five-ten minute buzz that you have to continue doing to maintain the effects of. this is the reason people get hooked on it.
unfortunately, these videos are never going to be effective. smart kids are going to do the research and figure out that it's a better idea to go to the 7-11 and get a slurpee, or bring a thermos of coffee to school and chug it at recess. dumb kids aren't going to be persuaded by anybody, and the more you try the more they react.
it's not even really the buzz that's the problem. kids are going to get high at school, and it's not really going to affect them too badly. with coke, it's what happens afterwards that's the problem, and something you only really learn from experience. i've sat at a friend's house all weekend to help him detox, only to find out he relapsed on monday (and stopped calling). it's something that tends to hit the guys that think they're invincible.
"i can handle it. i want to prove i can handle it."
well, you owned a car a few days ago, and now you don't. nice job handling it....
the thing with coke is actually that you don't really get high from it. it's a five-ten minute buzz that you have to continue doing to maintain the effects of. this is the reason people get hooked on it.
unfortunately, these videos are never going to be effective. smart kids are going to do the research and figure out that it's a better idea to go to the 7-11 and get a slurpee, or bring a thermos of coffee to school and chug it at recess. dumb kids aren't going to be persuaded by anybody, and the more you try the more they react.
it's not even really the buzz that's the problem. kids are going to get high at school, and it's not really going to affect them too badly. with coke, it's what happens afterwards that's the problem, and something you only really learn from experience. i've sat at a friend's house all weekend to help him detox, only to find out he relapsed on monday (and stopped calling). it's something that tends to hit the guys that think they're invincible.
"i can handle it. i want to prove i can handle it."
well, you owned a car a few days ago, and now you don't. nice job handling it....
at
23:59
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
see, in order to get across the border, i need a nexus card. but, in
order to get the nexus card, i need to get across the border. it would
be a simple exercise if the enrolment centre was in an accessible
location, but it's located directly underneath a bridge that i cannot
cross. (that sounds poetic, but i can't cross because i don't have a
vehicle, and they do not allow pedestrian crossing, and there's no
public transportation, and it's almost impossible to find a taxi cab
driver both willing and able to cross). so, the only option i can
conceive of is to try and cross somewhere else, and hope they let me
walk, or escort me to the centre and back. but i'm not really hopeful
either is a possibility...
i will say that when i get to the border, i'm certain that i'll understand what my actual options are. i'm just a little fearful that none of them are going to be realistic.
but, logically, is there really much of a difference between letting me drive over a bridge to the center and letting me walk over? i'm clearing customs and being allowed to move from customs to the centre on my own either way, right? i may be freaking out over a perception of the location of the office to the bridge, rather than anything rational that the border guards can actually interpret, one way or the other.
if my plan *does* work, i'm basically going to be walking through detroit at 6:00 am. well, i'm going to end up doing that relatively frequently anyways. my experience with walking through unsafe neighbourhoods has mostly been that thugs go after thugs and so long as one does not project wealth (meaning, it's not a good idea to pull out a roll of hundred dollar bills....as though i have any, right...), there's really little risk in these supposed high risk neighbourhoods.
and, for me, in the end, i'm on their side. i've had my share of conversations with thugs that are probably thinking some nasty shit in the back of their mind, but i tend to convince 'em i'm cool - and not any better off than they are. despite being white and well spoken....
the only other thing i can think of is trying to hitch over the bridge. if that's my only option, that's my only option. i'll find out.
i don't want to come off some drug war narc, i'm really not, but i know that the big problem is not poverty but drugs.
and not any drugs. it's the nasty ones. coke. meth. there's no discussion there, no attempt to size me up - it's just a possible income source to exploit to get high.
i know to stay on the main roads.
and 6:00-7:00 am is not 3:00 am, either.
i'll be fine...
like, i've never seen or heard of a fight in any place in any city in any downtown that wasn't ultimately about cocaine. even when it's about sex, it's really about cocaine...
so...
hey, kids.
i'm not going to tell you not to do drugs. drugs can be fun, sometimes!
but cocaine is baaaaaaad.
baaaaaaaad.
baaaaa.
it IS though. don't do coke...
i will say that when i get to the border, i'm certain that i'll understand what my actual options are. i'm just a little fearful that none of them are going to be realistic.
but, logically, is there really much of a difference between letting me drive over a bridge to the center and letting me walk over? i'm clearing customs and being allowed to move from customs to the centre on my own either way, right? i may be freaking out over a perception of the location of the office to the bridge, rather than anything rational that the border guards can actually interpret, one way or the other.
if my plan *does* work, i'm basically going to be walking through detroit at 6:00 am. well, i'm going to end up doing that relatively frequently anyways. my experience with walking through unsafe neighbourhoods has mostly been that thugs go after thugs and so long as one does not project wealth (meaning, it's not a good idea to pull out a roll of hundred dollar bills....as though i have any, right...), there's really little risk in these supposed high risk neighbourhoods.
and, for me, in the end, i'm on their side. i've had my share of conversations with thugs that are probably thinking some nasty shit in the back of their mind, but i tend to convince 'em i'm cool - and not any better off than they are. despite being white and well spoken....
the only other thing i can think of is trying to hitch over the bridge. if that's my only option, that's my only option. i'll find out.
i don't want to come off some drug war narc, i'm really not, but i know that the big problem is not poverty but drugs.
and not any drugs. it's the nasty ones. coke. meth. there's no discussion there, no attempt to size me up - it's just a possible income source to exploit to get high.
i know to stay on the main roads.
and 6:00-7:00 am is not 3:00 am, either.
i'll be fine...
like, i've never seen or heard of a fight in any place in any city in any downtown that wasn't ultimately about cocaine. even when it's about sex, it's really about cocaine...
so...
hey, kids.
i'm not going to tell you not to do drugs. drugs can be fun, sometimes!
but cocaine is baaaaaaad.
baaaaaaaad.
baaaaa.
it IS though. don't do coke...
at
23:01
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
i
think i'm just going to spend the night listening and analyzing. i've
gotta leave early in the morning to go on what will no doubt be a
surreal, kafkaesque journey of a nightmare to get a nexus card in detroit...
at
22:27
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
i can tell you right now what part of my new coffee machine will break.
they set the spring to a lever, so it opens up a hole. cheap plastic. another year, tops...
they set the spring to a lever, so it opens up a hole. cheap plastic. another year, tops...
at
10:45
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
grargh. i still can't get a hold of anybody on the other side of the
border. and it turns out booking a taxi is a process of trial and error -
most taxi drivers can't or won't drive across the bridge. after all,
that's what the tunnel bus is for. and it's going to cost like $40....
catch-22s. gotta love 'em.
i'm just going to show up at the tunnel really early and see what happens. i'm hoping that if they don't let me walk they'll escort me, and if they don't do that they'll let me call the center from detroit, where it's not long distance.
i tried calling two of those numbers from a pay phone.
one was a full mailbox, the other was an automated system. i can't be dropping $5 on dead ends over and over. that $10 is waste enough.
catch-22s. gotta love 'em.
i'm just going to show up at the tunnel really early and see what happens. i'm hoping that if they don't let me walk they'll escort me, and if they don't do that they'll let me call the center from detroit, where it's not long distance.
i tried calling two of those numbers from a pay phone.
one was a full mailbox, the other was an automated system. i can't be dropping $5 on dead ends over and over. that $10 is waste enough.
at
09:11
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
clearing my head at a math rock show in windsor
i needed to clear my head a little tonight, so i hit a show with a few different spins on what's currently called "math rock". i'm glad i did, as i'm feeling nicely relaxed at the moment.
first up was sly why, which was a valiant (and sometimes successful) attempt to cross hip-hop with chick corea. when it clicked, it was pretty groovy, but i was left with the overall impression that it was a proof of concept that requires quite a bit more work to get to where it needs to be.
the rhythm section was really outstanding in the synthesis. the bassist did a decent jaco, while the drummer effectively spliced breakbeats with fusion drumming. where it fell apart a little was with the vocalist/keyboardist.
it's not that he wasn't a good player - he was. but , the vocals seemed rather superfluous, in the sense that i didn't get much interesting out of it. further, he used the same electric piano sound on every single track, and it got a little monotonous after a while. i mean, chick had limited technology at his availability in the late 60s and early 70s. this guy could make his keyboard do whatever he wants it to by merely connecting it to his phone, y'know? why settle for a single, 40 year old tone?
i wanted to suggest he check out some squarepusher, but i instead just suggested he consider orchestrating the keys a little more. i suspect the thought has already crossed his mind, as he mostly agreed with me.
with that in mind, these kids have the potential to do something special, if the vocalist also decides to step back a little from the mundane topics explored in modern commercial hip-hop. i'd keep an eye on this space. i know i will.
toasted plastic, which i'm not repeating the silly chillwave anti-phonetic styling on, was up next and they presented a somewhat generic (but entirely competent) rendition of the emo/math thing that's been floating around since roughly 2000. if there's something worth noting here, it's that the drummer is quite talented. he was able to push through some otherwise predictably unpredictable (if you know math, you get that) songwriting and entirely generic singing.
on the other hand, sometimes you just want to stand in front of some amps and get blown over by them. it's kind of why i left the house tonight, actually.
it's nothing special, but it's loud and melodic and just a little bit complex and it's consequently worth cover if you're looking for it.
what i wanted tonight was just to sit back and have a beer and relax, and it was this act that i thought would be most conducive to that atmosphere. it was a lot of tapping on the ol' ibanez, with some relaxed drumming. again: not a lot to talk about, in terms of originality. but if you like the kind of passive jazz/post/math that's been floating around on bandcamp the last ten years or so, and you want a beer, it's worth the $5.
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2014/07/15.html
first up was sly why, which was a valiant (and sometimes successful) attempt to cross hip-hop with chick corea. when it clicked, it was pretty groovy, but i was left with the overall impression that it was a proof of concept that requires quite a bit more work to get to where it needs to be.
the rhythm section was really outstanding in the synthesis. the bassist did a decent jaco, while the drummer effectively spliced breakbeats with fusion drumming. where it fell apart a little was with the vocalist/keyboardist.
it's not that he wasn't a good player - he was. but , the vocals seemed rather superfluous, in the sense that i didn't get much interesting out of it. further, he used the same electric piano sound on every single track, and it got a little monotonous after a while. i mean, chick had limited technology at his availability in the late 60s and early 70s. this guy could make his keyboard do whatever he wants it to by merely connecting it to his phone, y'know? why settle for a single, 40 year old tone?
i wanted to suggest he check out some squarepusher, but i instead just suggested he consider orchestrating the keys a little more. i suspect the thought has already crossed his mind, as he mostly agreed with me.
with that in mind, these kids have the potential to do something special, if the vocalist also decides to step back a little from the mundane topics explored in modern commercial hip-hop. i'd keep an eye on this space. i know i will.
toasted plastic, which i'm not repeating the silly chillwave anti-phonetic styling on, was up next and they presented a somewhat generic (but entirely competent) rendition of the emo/math thing that's been floating around since roughly 2000. if there's something worth noting here, it's that the drummer is quite talented. he was able to push through some otherwise predictably unpredictable (if you know math, you get that) songwriting and entirely generic singing.
on the other hand, sometimes you just want to stand in front of some amps and get blown over by them. it's kind of why i left the house tonight, actually.
it's nothing special, but it's loud and melodic and just a little bit complex and it's consequently worth cover if you're looking for it.
what i wanted tonight was just to sit back and have a beer and relax, and it was this act that i thought would be most conducive to that atmosphere. it was a lot of tapping on the ol' ibanez, with some relaxed drumming. again: not a lot to talk about, in terms of originality. but if you like the kind of passive jazz/post/math that's been floating around on bandcamp the last ten years or so, and you want a beer, it's worth the $5.
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2014/07/15.html
at
02:49
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
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