Monday, February 28, 2011
New Blindside album May 6
wshww from Blindside Sweden on Vimeo.
Blindside announced their new album today via Twitter and Facebook. With Shivering Hearts We Wait is due May 6 ("underground release"; "worldwide release" is on May 7). This is a long time coming, their most recent LP is from 2005 and their most recent EP 2007.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Sunday Numbers 2.0, Vol. 2: Perpendicular
90 degrees. Rectangular or square corners. Perpendicular. Vertical meets horizontal. All these words and phrases mean the same thing, and just to add to the confusion slightly, mathematicians will refer to it as orthogonal. But really, there is little confusion in the general public on this mathematical concept because we see it so often.In some ways, the 90 degree angle is more a part of human nature than it is of "nature" nature. There are a few crystals that naturally place a flat surface perpendicular to another flat surface, and in studies of electrical fields, an electric current creates a second current that flows orthogonally to the original. But in nature, other forces interact with perpendicular surfaces, so even a tree that wants to grow straight up and down from the level surface of a prairie will be bent by the wind or rain or erosion.
In contrast, humans make any of a number of things with nice right angles, including the computer screen you are reading this post on and most the corners of the room where you are reading this. Rectangular two dimensional shapes and rectangular solids show up everywhere in human designs.
One of the reasons for the ubiquity of the 90 degree angle is that we know so much about it. The Pythagorean Theorem is ancient wisdom, sussed out by every civilization worth being called a civilization. There are proofs from the Chinese, the Indians, pre-Colombian American tribes like the Mayans, the ancient Egyptians, the Persians and, of course, the Greeks. There is a nice useful example of a² + b² = c², 3² + 4² = 5². Archeologists has found sticks of length 3 units, 4 units and 5 units in ancient Egyptian ruins, and the best guess is that these were used to make sure walls were perpendicular to the floor and to each other.Of course, vertical meets horizontal is just one way to make two lines perpendicular. In the picture above, all the lines of length c are perpendicular to the ones they touch and parallel to the opposite side of the square.
In three dimensions, perpendicular still exists of course, and in fact it expands a bit. If we are drawing a line on a plane put a point on that line, there is exactly one line perpendicular to it, according to Euclidean geometry. (There is something called non-Euclidean geometry, but it assumes we aren't dealing with a flat plane in general, so we can just leave it be for now.) In three dimensions, mathematicians deal with vectors of the form [x y z], which is a straight line segment from the origin (0, 0, 0) to the point (x, y, z), but stands in for all line segments of the same length pointing in the same direction. Mathematically, orthogonality is most easily represented by the dot product of two vectors. u · v. If u =[a b c] and v =[p q r], then u · v is the sum of the products of the three corresponding entries to the vectors, ap + bq + cr. Two vectors u and v in the same vector space are orthogonal if and only if u · v = 0.In three dimensions, three vectors can be constructed so that each is orthogonal to the other two. The simplest three vectors in three dimensional space that are all orthogonal to each other are
i = [1 0 0]
j = [0 1 0]
k = [0 0 1]
This is called an orthogonal basis for three dimensional space, but it is only one of an infinite set of bases.
Four dimensions or more are much harder to visualize than two dimensions or three, but the idea of orthogonality based on dot products is still the same relatively simple math. Multiply the vectors together element by element and add those products. If the sum is zero, the vectors are orthogonal. Dot products also let us define distance. Take a vector and do the dot product with itself u · u. Since this is the sum of squares, it must be non-negative and unless the vector is the all zero vector, the dot product will be positive. The length of the vector is the square root of the dot product, also known as the magnitude. This is a direct corollary of the Pythagorean Theorem and it works in as many dimensions as you might want to create. Mathematicians even have ways to talk about infinite dimensions, but the ideas of orthogonality and distance remain the same, and both of those ideas come from our basic understanding of perpendicular and the most important discovery we have made about perpendicular line segments, the Pythagorean Theorem.
Next week: continuity, mathematician style.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Google changing gears. Bad for Matty Boy?
According to a story on the Huffington Post, Google is changing their search engine to favor sites that produce original content and downgrade "low quality sites" that do not.
I haven't seen the nuts and bolts of their new method, but that should mean they would favor this site and show less interest in The Other Blog, where I take the headlines from the supermarket gossip rags every week and publish them in a easy to find place that cross references stuff. It's not completely without original content. Sometimes I make jokes I call Extra Bonus Mocking, where I add an allegedly clever quip to the story.
As it stands right now, four people show up at the Other Blog for every one who shows up here. The only consolation I have for this blog is that people who show up here stay a little longer on average, 38 seconds compared to 24 seconds. In any case, we will see if my silly tabloid blog is an example of the sort of thing The Google frowns upon over the next few weeks, and if this "high quality/low quality" split is really targeted at bloggers or not.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Flashback Friday: Creep by Radiohead
I heard an a capella version of Radiohead's Creep this week and the song is now playing in heavy rotation in my brain. I thought some of my readers might enjoy having this song rattle around their heads for awhile, so click on the video and hear the clean version.
Usually I emulate Padre Mickey with a Random 10 on the weekend, but here I am stealing a page from Tengrain's playbook instead because... well, I'm a creep. I still think of this song as being cutting edge alternative, but a kid born when this thing came out could well be finishing his senior year in high school now.
As Casey Kasem might say but probably never did, from their 1993 album Pablo Honey, here's Radiohead and their song Creep.
Usually I emulate Padre Mickey with a Random 10 on the weekend, but here I am stealing a page from Tengrain's playbook instead because... well, I'm a creep. I still think of this song as being cutting edge alternative, but a kid born when this thing came out could well be finishing his senior year in high school now.
As Casey Kasem might say but probably never did, from their 1993 album Pablo Honey, here's Radiohead and their song Creep.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Something's going on but I don't know what it is. Do I, Mr. Jones?
Since late in 2006, I've been following the price of silver and gold. I haven't had enough money to invest, I just was surprised at how high gold was and decided to pick something to compare it to.If I had been serious about investing, I might have looked at other stuff, like the guys in Michael Lewis' book about the last gigantic crash, The Big Short. But I wasn't nearly as diligent as those guys. The problem that would bring the whole economy down was the bursting of the housing bubble. In effect, I was just watching a few corks bob up and down on the tumultuous sea that was the financial markets.
I'm still watching the corks bob, and I'm here to report they are bobbing in new weird ways I haven't seen before.
The big idea of gold is that is the hedge against bad times, but when everything went to hell in 2008, gold took a hit as well, just not quite as bad as everything else. In 2007, gold seriously outperformed silver, 35% to 17%. In the beginning of 2008, gold was still rising even though anyone watching the financial markets knew there were troubles like never seen before. When the dust settled, gold was up a very modest 1.4% at the end of 2008 while silver had taken a 30% hit.
Since then, both have been rising, but not in lockstep. When silver was at its worst, it would take nearly 80 ounces of silver to equal an ounce of gold, a far cry from the standard exchange rate of 50 to 1. In the past 26 months, the market has decided that silver was underpriced in comparison to gold. In 2009, gold rose 27% and silver rose 50%. In 2010, gold improved by 30% and silver by 83%. Now, silver is at its best position in many years compared to gold, where it only takes 40 ounces of silver to buy a ounce of gold.
This may just be the market finally realizing that silver is actually much more useful than gold, but when I see numbers I've never seen before, I start worrying about a correction.
And then there's the third thing I've been watching, crude oil. It had been trading between $85 and $90 a barrel this year after being in the seventies most of 2010, but now it's sneaking back up to the $100 a barrel range. Smart people are in consensus now it was the financial markets that caused the big crash, but the cost of the life blood of the world's economy can't be ignored. As bad as high unemployment is, high fuel prices are often the cause of stagflation, that dreadful economic effect that means the economy isn't growing but prices rise anyway, a pair of symptoms many useless by still popular economic models says cannot happen at the same time.
I don't know what's the cause of all of this. I don't even know if the numbers I'm looking at are worth a rat's rectum. But I do get the feeling that a new tsunami is coming, and the class warfare we are seeing now is just the start.
A quick reminder of which side I'm on. Class warfare is better than class genocide.
Fight back, y'all.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Separated at Birth or Same Plastic Surgeon?
As I have said before, I'm kinda busy during the week now, so just time for a quick speculation.
Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi doesn't make the news much, but the recent pictures made me think he has to be put on the Rourke Rubber Mask scale, a completely subjective measure I invented to say how far someone is from looking like Mickey Rourke.
I am not the first person to notice this. The "totally looks like" picture is at least a year and a half old, so it's possible both of them look even worse today.
I'd say Gadhafi is about at .85 RRM to .90 RRM, which means Mickey Rourke is still marginally uglier than Qaddafi.
In Mickey's favor, everyone agrees on how to spell his name. (Three spellings taken from Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and CNN.)
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Sing The Changes
I've felt more than the usual push-pull over work, this blog and other social media venues, and life in general over the past few weeks -- issues that I've debated whether I should or should not share in any forum other than conversations and emails with family and friends.
Cindy and I watched "The Social Network" the week before last and afterwards, putting aside questions of how much was fact and how much fiction in the film, we discussed the very real issue of whether social networking, particularly Facebook but to some extent blogs as well, has become a substitute for genuine relationships and the honest expression of emotions.
Two predilections are at work in social media that seem to undermine interpersonal relationships and the need to communicate simple truths or profound thoughts: first, the compulsion to post regularly one's status on Facebook; and second, the need to post regularly to a blog, lest it become a blog without readers. Both, as the movie seems to conclude, are the antithesis of genuine communication and are at best a poor substitute for the personal sharing of substantive thoughts, ideas, and emotions.
These critiques caused considerable personal introspection last week. We received a call last Sunday morning informing us that a good friend of Kelsey's had died in a rappelling accident in California. Matt was a wonderful young man with an infectious smile and a twinkle in his eye. He had battled some substantial demons in his life and had won; through determination and pain, no doubt, but I wouldn't have put it past Matt to have charmed the Devil himself as well.
The news of Matt's death hit our entire family hard. Kelsey had stayed in touch with Matt and they had gone hiking and rappelling in West Virginia over the Christmas break. Matt had always been exceedingly kind to Ethan, even when it would have been easier to simply treat him as the annoying little brother. They had seen each other at a 5K last year and Matt told Ethan he hoped they'd run into each other again soon. I had only seen Matt twice in the last five years, but for both Cindy and me, Matt's place in our children's lives as they went through middle and high school made the news tough to take and last week a long and emotional one.
During the week I kept my Facebook posting to a minimum and made no direct references either to Matt or to what we were going through as a family. The last thing I wanted to do was to appear to attempt to take ownership of his life, his passing, or the incredible grief that I knew his family was feeling.
After reading an impossibly positive and life-affirming story about Matt last week and then attending a celebration of his life on Saturday at which the warmth, compassion, courage, and caring of those who spoke about Matt was awe inspiring, I decided to post something here about Matt and honor and celebrate his life.
These thoughts aren't very original and are often repeated at times like this. But they are all things that Matt taught us in his too short thoroughly lived life:
Tell those that you love that you love them, sincerely and incessantly.
Enjoy creation, regardless of by Whom or how or why you believe it was created. Preferably in its wildest, most unspoiled and majestic state.
Embrace change.
Be kind to strangers.
Serve the less fortunate.
Play and don't keep score.
Love Life.
And next time, don't change your status, write a letter to a friend. In longhand. Don't "Like" a post. Give the person a call. Don't admire the pictures in someone's photo album. Go take your own.
There were a lot of wonderful quotes that were shared over the past two weeks regarding Matt and the impact that he made on a lot of people. I'm more pop culture than high culture, though, so rather than e.e. cummings or Bertrand Russell I give you some Paul McCartney, in honor of Matt:
Sing your praises
As you're sleeping
Feel the quiet
In the thunder.
Sing the changes
Calling over.
Everybody has a sense of
Childlike wonder.
Cindy and I watched "The Social Network" the week before last and afterwards, putting aside questions of how much was fact and how much fiction in the film, we discussed the very real issue of whether social networking, particularly Facebook but to some extent blogs as well, has become a substitute for genuine relationships and the honest expression of emotions.
Two predilections are at work in social media that seem to undermine interpersonal relationships and the need to communicate simple truths or profound thoughts: first, the compulsion to post regularly one's status on Facebook; and second, the need to post regularly to a blog, lest it become a blog without readers. Both, as the movie seems to conclude, are the antithesis of genuine communication and are at best a poor substitute for the personal sharing of substantive thoughts, ideas, and emotions.
These critiques caused considerable personal introspection last week. We received a call last Sunday morning informing us that a good friend of Kelsey's had died in a rappelling accident in California. Matt was a wonderful young man with an infectious smile and a twinkle in his eye. He had battled some substantial demons in his life and had won; through determination and pain, no doubt, but I wouldn't have put it past Matt to have charmed the Devil himself as well.
The news of Matt's death hit our entire family hard. Kelsey had stayed in touch with Matt and they had gone hiking and rappelling in West Virginia over the Christmas break. Matt had always been exceedingly kind to Ethan, even when it would have been easier to simply treat him as the annoying little brother. They had seen each other at a 5K last year and Matt told Ethan he hoped they'd run into each other again soon. I had only seen Matt twice in the last five years, but for both Cindy and me, Matt's place in our children's lives as they went through middle and high school made the news tough to take and last week a long and emotional one.
During the week I kept my Facebook posting to a minimum and made no direct references either to Matt or to what we were going through as a family. The last thing I wanted to do was to appear to attempt to take ownership of his life, his passing, or the incredible grief that I knew his family was feeling.
After reading an impossibly positive and life-affirming story about Matt last week and then attending a celebration of his life on Saturday at which the warmth, compassion, courage, and caring of those who spoke about Matt was awe inspiring, I decided to post something here about Matt and honor and celebrate his life.
These thoughts aren't very original and are often repeated at times like this. But they are all things that Matt taught us in his too short thoroughly lived life:
Tell those that you love that you love them, sincerely and incessantly.
Enjoy creation, regardless of by Whom or how or why you believe it was created. Preferably in its wildest, most unspoiled and majestic state.
Embrace change.
Be kind to strangers.
Serve the less fortunate.
Play and don't keep score.
Love Life.
And next time, don't change your status, write a letter to a friend. In longhand. Don't "Like" a post. Give the person a call. Don't admire the pictures in someone's photo album. Go take your own.
There were a lot of wonderful quotes that were shared over the past two weeks regarding Matt and the impact that he made on a lot of people. I'm more pop culture than high culture, though, so rather than e.e. cummings or Bertrand Russell I give you some Paul McCartney, in honor of Matt:
Sing your praises
As you're sleeping
Feel the quiet
In the thunder.
Sing the changes
Calling over.
Everybody has a sense of
Childlike wonder.
Listen to the full Eisley "The Valley" album now
If you pre-ordered the album from Equal Vision, you should have received an email yesterday with a download link (I did, and have been listening to it in iTunes and on my iPod non-stop since).
If you have yet to purchase it, the album is streaming for free on Spin.com. I tried to embed the player here, but haven't quite figured that out yet. Anyway, just follow the link and listen to all 11 songs.
Also, Eisley played in Nashville last night and the show could be watched as it occured on LiveStream. The show is now archived and you can watch it anytime. I was at the Exit/In the last time Eisley played there a few years ago when everyone was kicked out because they were violating fire code.
Lastly, the album is terrific. When I discovered (Moss) Eisley in 2002, I said they had a chance to be as good as Sixpence None the Richer (stylistically similar) if they continued to release LPs frequently and matured. Well this, their 3rd LP, is definitely their best and shows tons of growth. Ironically Eisley is currently sounding like I wish Sixpence did in 2011. Beautiful female harmonies from the three sisters, catchy melodies and great guitar licks. Excellent review here.
Pre-order the vinyl here if you haven't already:
If you have yet to purchase it, the album is streaming for free on Spin.com. I tried to embed the player here, but haven't quite figured that out yet. Anyway, just follow the link and listen to all 11 songs.
Also, Eisley played in Nashville last night and the show could be watched as it occured on LiveStream. The show is now archived and you can watch it anytime. I was at the Exit/In the last time Eisley played there a few years ago when everyone was kicked out because they were violating fire code.
Lastly, the album is terrific. When I discovered (Moss) Eisley in 2002, I said they had a chance to be as good as Sixpence None the Richer (stylistically similar) if they continued to release LPs frequently and matured. Well this, their 3rd LP, is definitely their best and shows tons of growth. Ironically Eisley is currently sounding like I wish Sixpence did in 2011. Beautiful female harmonies from the three sisters, catchy melodies and great guitar licks. Excellent review here.
Pre-order the vinyl here if you haven't already:
Monday, February 21, 2011
Fashion and family.
It was Fashion Week earlier this month in New York City, and one of designers at the Academy of Art University show was none other than my adorable niece Holly Smith-Smith, who you will find out more about if you click the family photos label at the bottom.
She's the cute girl in the big picture.
Okay, I'll play nice. The other woman is a runway model, so she's cute, too. Holly is the cute one in black waving to the crowd.
First rule of thumb at Fashion Week. Models don't wave.
Anyway, there were also write-ups on the show in Kenton magazine, the Blashonista website and a piece about Holly's stuff exclusively in Bobbin Talk, which includes this backstage picture of Holly getting the dresses ready.
I'm so happy she got this opportunity and I send her all my best wishes for future success, which I am sure regular readers will want to second.
Yay, Holly! Yay, hoodies and boobies! Yay, fashion!
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