i stopped by at the doctor's office today, hoping to get more info on the urologist referral. no progress. but, i got him to print off my full blood test results, and it turns out i also picked up hep A.

or, perhaps i got a twinrix vaccine? i went to florida when i was a kid. hrmmn. oddly enough, the presence of hep A antibodies is making me think it's more likely that i was vaccinated.

hep A hits faster. and, i was quite sick about a week after the blackout. it seems a bit quick, though, even for hep A; i thought it was some kind of bacterial infection in my throat, and tied it to a toke at a steve reich concert. could it have been both? apparently, hep A is mostly about anal sex. it felt bacterial. it's gross, but it actually makes sense.

with no memory, it's very hard to say anything.

the fresh air was beneficial; i feel better than i have in weeks. so, hopefully i'm over it. i'm still waiting until early march for the next blood test; results are on the 6th.

also, note: hitler was defeated not by the descendants of aryan migrants in britain, but by a horde of supposedly inferior half-mongoloid russian communists.

i know that's not how it's usually framed. but it's what actually happened.

european civilization suffered several devastating bouts of plague. the one in the 1300s was particularly brutal, killing more than a third of the population in certain regions. it happens to be that this was also the period when european civilization was under it's greatest threat of invasion from both the south and the east.

it is actually not at all outlandish to consider an alternate history where the closest ancestors of the ancestral native american populations - turks, mongols - could have swept into europe and utterly decimated the civilization there. there is even ample historical evidence as to what this would have been like, in the advances of genghis khan into afghanistan, iran and syria.

once again: the best argument against racism is history.

Aug 8, 2014

tubas are actually the best punk instrument if you play them loud enough. for some reason, though, tuba players seem to be incredibly shy and refuse to rock out. i want a rockin' tuba solo, thought punk might be the right search word...

but, no. as timid as ever. sorry, but that tuba player's just not into it. not feeling it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JFkg4rKv9s

aug 8, 2014

this is, in fact, the correct way to play the tuba - with extreme force. to hell with all the weakling bourgeois players that are afraid of playing too loud. to get this instrument to sound the way it ought to requires every ounce of lung strength and emotional catharsis you can pull out of the innermost depth of your absolute being. a proper tuba performance should require an oxygen tent.

it's a shame the quality is bad. i need a good sample to get the dynamics right; i'm trying to figure out how to make my guitar sound like one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o966wA2N7Q

aug 8, 2014

i haven't listened to this in a while. 2 & 3 are both quite strong - much more interesting than his operas. somebody said something about vivaldi, but glass is far darker and far more vivid than vivaldi. i get more debussy out of it.

i'm trying to find some good tuba samples to model the dynamics properly on a midi guitar. the kind of tuba playing where somebody is blowing into the thing with the aim to knock the house down. it's harder than you might think. oddly, tuba players seem to be unusually reserved and polite folks, which is rather remarkable given the nature of the instrument they play. perhaps they realize the extent of their power and that leads to an exaggerated sense of responsibility. i suppose that would make them excellent nuclear engineers, but they seem to be rather boring musicians. the tuba players of the world really need to throw caution to the wind and let it all loose. they need to unleash all that power and force...

this kind of jumped in my head for the end section, but it's not quite what i want, either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zem4amEEzL4

aug 8, 2014

impressionism or expressionism, as though they're opposite terms? that's an anecdote your teacher pulled out of her ass and is asking to determine if you went to class or not. the truth is it's both and the teacher's a dork.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA40lE83jLo

aug 9, 2014

i'd love to learn how the play the tuba one day, just to get some of those cracked out bass lines down. it's not socially acceptable, though, so i'd basically have to move to a cave.

maybe that's what i'm missing out on in life. should i sell all my possessions to buy a tuba then find a cave and just sit around playing cracked out bass lines?

"dude, where's that weird sound coming from?"
"oh. it's just jess in her cave, playing her cracked out bass lines. you'll get used to it."
"not sure about that...."

maybe i should ease into it by sequencing some cracked out parts, first, before making any drastic decisions. i hope i can get the computer to pull it off convincingly...

now, how am i going to do this? i don't know what tempo it's in, and i need to get the computer to play back something microtonal.

i'm gong to try and riff something out and see how melodyne interprets it. i remember reading something about melodyne being able to handle microtones. i guess i'll have to do a little research on that first.

if i can get the basic tones down, i should be able to fix it up in a scorewriter from there.

if that doesn't work, i could try feeding it into a synth using the midiguitar route, but i don't know if it'll handle the microtones or snap into the nearest proper tone...

actually, i think i have a better chance at getting really raw, cracked out tuba like dynamics by using a pick.

midi guitar's my best choice...

i need to remind you that i've studied math, and i've studied physics, but i have not studied politics or history. this is my academic background. and you should actually take what i say about science far more seriously than what i say about politics.

put another way, i picked up everything i know about politics at the library or at wikipedia. it's substantial, obviously. but my degree is a b. mathematics.

===

aug 1, 2014

he's not really right, here.

the uncertainty principle is one of those things that's open to a few different interpretations. the standard one is that it's a law of physics, and there's even a mathematical proof for it. what he's saying is in that context, and if you're working in that context it would indeed be impossible - in that context.

but, there are two other interpretations of the uncertainty principle. as neither are demonstrably wrong, it's not rigorously correct to conclude that transportation is impossible due to the uncertainty principle.

the basic idea is that measuring the position necessarily changes the velocity, and vice versa, and there's nothing that can be done about that. but, is that a law of physics or a statement about our tools? well, the answer you're going to hear from a lot of people is actually that it's a law of physics that it's a statement about the tools. i'm not arrogant enough to state that as an irresolvable fact. i see no reason, to write this off, a priori, from any underlying principles. i have to admit i'm a little skeptical, though, as i couldn't imagine how. see, that's the real reason physicists hold to this. the mathematical proof is really just a convenient way to convert an intuitive assumption into something that certain types of philosophers can't really argue with.

the second alternate interpretation of the uncertainty principle is that it is a misnomer - it should actually be called the certainty principle. this is kind of more where i'm at. basically, it's a logical fallacy to deduce that unpredictability implies actual randomness. it certainly implies perceived randomness, but that perception could very well be an illusion deriving from the inability to measure. you can think of it like this: the movement of the planets would have seemed random before newton. you could have come up with probabilistic laws to govern their motion, and mostly got it right. that doesn't mean gravity didn't exist, it just meant it wasn't understood. you don't necessarily have to get to a hidden variable theory from this. the behaviour might neither be (locally) causal nor deterministic. this is a perfectly valid way to interpret the uncertainty principle: it might be that certain things happen in ways that are not predictable and can never be modified but are not actually random, but arise from non-understood causes. that is, the inability to predict the behaviour may actually merely demonstrate that there are causal things in front of us that we cannot alter.

i usually bring up this argument in the context of a fatalist v. undetermined universe, as the uncertainty principle is sometimes presented as an argument for the latter. however, it really provides no information in either direction, as it can be interpreted just as strongly for an argument in either direction. those who wish to argue the future does not exist will say you can't predict the path, it happens randomly. but we can't prove this beyond our perception. we can just as easily say that the seeming fact that you can't predict the path also means you can't alter it, and all phenomenon is the result of a first cause.

if the perceived randomness is merely an illusion, the argument against teleportation also collapses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD7X9vGMX0k