A Cool Kaossilator 2 Tip

Today’s post is about music and it’s going to be kind of trivial, but I’m going to do it for at least four reasons. First, this is part of something that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time, in fact from way-back-when when I first started to learn to play guitar. Second, this relates to something I did a post about a few years ago. Third, this is about a new gadget I bought a few days ago and this gadget will be appearing on the blog a lot, I think, in the future. (I actually bought the gadget for Little Plastic Doll, so she can have a real instrument to play in films, but that is going to take a while to happen.) Fourth, most simply, I’m just kind of proud of myself for figuring out this little tip so quickly after buying the gadget—It’s the kind of thing that should have been mentioned in the instruction manual but isn’t because these days instruction manuals are almost always awful.

I haven’t prepared any audio or video to go along with today’s post, but at some point in the future I will have audio and video of this gadget.

I’m talking about this thing. From the Japanese company Korg, this is their second generation Kaossilator, the Kaossilator 2:

One — Why I’m Interested In This Thing

For as long as I’ve been interested in music, I’ve been interested in instruments that can approximate the freedom of whistling: Discrete or absolutely smooth transitions from note to note, total control over dynamics, and easy integration with emotional expression without requiring great manual dexterity.

Fretless string instruments like violins, cellos and various basses come closest to matching these characteristics. I posted a little about this a couple of years ago: In a perfect world I suppose everybody would play the cello. But fretless instruments require exceptional dexterity to play and a good ear. The very best musician I’ve ever known was a studio guitar player who one time played a fretless bass in a Vegas stage show. He said it was wonderfully expressive, possibly the most expressive instrument he ever played, but he simply found it difficult because it required such concentration to play in tune, especially if you needed to play two strings at once and he never attempted to play chords during a live show.

I don’t have a well-trained ear and I’m not physically talented in any way so fretless instruments are not something I’ve ever even considered for myself.

But these days technology is extraordinary and new generations of instruments are possible that couldn’t even have been imagined in the past.

Korg has a whole series of products called the “Kaoss” line that is built around performing on what is called an x-y touchpad. In the photo above, the x-y touchpad is the little square at the bottom of the device.

I’ve been paying attention to this kind of thing for a while, but I never took it too seriously because technology in the music business sort of comes and goes. The traditional stuff sticks around and usually high-tech stuff is just a fad. But since the iPad has become so popular, music companies have been developing amazing tools built around touch-screens so I’ve come to believe that some variation of x-y touchpads will be around for a very long time.

The Kaossilator 2 is a reasonably inexpensive x-y touchpad device that can do a heck of a lot and it runs on batteries so I bought one.

It’s an amazing gadget. First of all, you can experiment with x-y touchpad performing. Second, you can generate all manner of instrumental and synthesizer sounds. Third, you can record what you perform. Fourth, it can play along with you [!] because it contains looping hardware and software and many of the synthesized sounds are patterns. Fifth, it is a sampler, so any new sound you enjoy can be incorporated into all of its existing technology. Sixth, it has reasonably good output that can be routed into the line input of my current keyboards and other technology.

So I bought one.

Also I like the fact that it is small, so Little Plastic Doll can perform on it. And—this is a kind of extra bonus—some of the built in synthesizer sounds are classic so-called ring modulator effects so the little Kaossilator 2, almost all by itself, can pretty much duplicate the entire soundtrack of the movie “Forbidden Planet” [!] if you buckle down and accumulate the effects with a sound-on-sound recorder.

So it’s a very cool little gadget that I think will have a long future in front of it, both here with me and among music fans in general. And Korg even has a “Pro” version of the device so any routines a musician develops on the little gadget can become as elaborate as he or she may want to take them. And, as I said, iPad resources are becoming available that use similar x-y touchpad input so performance skills will have a future, too.


Two — My Kaossilator 2 Tip

The little x-y touchpad is so powerful because it can be defined and re-defined from one performance to the next, from one sound to the next, or in any style for any reason in any way a person may choose to re-define it.

For instance, the melody for that John Lennon demo song, “Free As A Bird,” can be performed simply within a single octave. So an x-y touchpad can be defined to play simply eight notes arranged from left-to-right, and motions up and down can be used to control, say, volume.

On a device such as an iPad where the touchpad is also a display screen it is easy to touch the notes you want.

On the Kaossilator, if you define the pad as two or more octaves everything is very close together. But if you set the pad as a single octave each note is roughly about the width of an adult fingertip.

(I’ve seen people put a marked rubber band around the Kaossilator 2 or a marked hair-band or bracelet or similar band to provide a reminder, visual feedback for where to press.)

But there is a more interesting issue here.

On the little gadget, the Kaossilator 2, you can re-define the x-y touchpad, but only in certain ways.

For instance, you can control the range of the touchpad, one octave, two octaves or more.

You can control the arrangement within the octave. You can have a complete scale. Or certain intervals. Or a chromatic scale. Or other arrangements.

And you can control the root note which appears at the far left of the x-y touchpad.

But real-life practicalities immediately bring up some interesting issues.

For instance I will use the wonderful John Lennon demo song “Free As A Bird” as an example.

In the key of G, the basic melody, the “free as a bird/it’s the next best thing to be” part, is roughly a descending III-II-I sequence, then a V-VI, and back to a III-II-I. So with a G-root, you need to be able to play the notes B-A-G, D-E, B-A-G. The other part, the “whatever happned to” part, is roughly VI-VII-I, and also VII-I-II, so you need a lower E, F#, G and F#, G, A.

So it’s all within an octave, but you need the octave to start at E and go up, in the key of G, to the next higher E.

The Kaossilator 2 doesn’t explicitly do that. If you set the root to E, it defaults to an E-major scale, and you can’t go in and set or reset individual notes.

However the Kaossilator 2 does allow you to set the root and then also re-set what it calls the scale type.


This is a little annoying because many people these days, even many musicians, don’t particularly know much music theory and many musicians don’t want to be, as they might put it, “bothered” with learning music theory.

So those people will have a hard time getting the most fun out of their Kaossilator 2.


However, if a person has some music theory background, they know that if you can set the root to an E and then re-set the scale type to Aeolian, you get the same notes as a G-major scale, but starting at E.

Similarly, if you want the notes of the G-major scale but starting at A, on the Kaossilator 2 you can set the root as A and the scale type as Dorian.

If you set B as the root and the scale type as Phrygian you get the notes of the G-major scale but starting at B.

A C-root as a Lydian scale gives you G-major notes starting at C.

A D-root as a Mixolydian scale gives you G-major notes starting at D.

I’ve mentioned that E-root plus Aeolian gives you the G-major notes starting at E.

Finally an F#-root as a Locrian scale gives you G-major notes starting at F#.

And of course this works for any key. You just pick the I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII note from any key, and match it to the what is normally called the mode for that step, Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian or Locrian.

That gives you the freedom of setting the Kaossilator x-y touchpad to the smallest possible range (for the largest possible finger area to touch) while still giving you the ability to choose which eight notes you want available in the octave.

Obviously this is why Korg gives you the option to change what they call “scale” but most people in the West use the word “mode” to refer to the particular arrangement of half-steps and whole-steps derived from a major scale. And in the West, sadly, many musicians don’t pay much attention to modes anyway.

So it would have been better if Korg had included a section in their instruction sheet describing how you can control the x-y touchpad in this way. But they didn’t. But this is a good tip and maybe it will come in handy for someone.

The “scale” function on the Kaossilator 2 has even more options than the traditional modes, so the more a person knows about music theory the easier it is to make use of the various settings.

I certainly recommend the Korg Kaossilator 2 to anyone looking to experiment with modern high-tech performance techniques. It seems to be able to do a little bit of everything. But like almost everything else, the more you know, I mean really know, the easier technology is to control and have fun with.

The more you know, the more fun you can have.

But that’s also a selling point of a really good gadget like this. Because it can help you learn, too. It teaches you. Because the more you experiment and have fun—if you experiment carefully!—the more you learn.

I love cool gadgets.

Pluto’s Fifth Moon Has No Name (Yet)

It's hard to believe, but the arrival of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at Pluto is just three years away. The logistics of the high-speed flyby, already challenging, just got more complicated: Pluto turns out to have a fifth moon.

Although for now its official designation is S/2012 (134340) 1 — "134340" being the minor-planet number assigned to Pluto — the new find has been nicknamed "P5". (Easier to remember, don't you agree?) Its existence was announced last night by the IAU's Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams

... It's no coincidence that all these moons orbit in the same plane as Pluto's equator. Most likely they formed from debris tossed out when a renegade object struck Pluto long ago. Collisions in this distant region of the solar system are typically so slow that most of the resulting fragments couldn't have reached escape velocity, which is a bit under 1 mile per second for Pluto. So most of it would have stuck around.

But that doesn't automatically lead to satellite formation. Ballistically speaking, any stuff that lingered should just have just fallen back onto Pluto itself. However, tidal interactions among the most massive chunks could have allowed enough of them to remain in orbit to form Charon and the other moons.

Pluto's Moons: Five and Counting

All the moons of Pluto are very small.

Pluto itself is smaller than our Moon.

Pluto itself is smaller than our Moon
but Pluto has five moons and maybe more.

Here on Earth our Moon is often featured
in romantic poetry and love songs.

It must be very romantic out there
with five moons always circling overhead
and the Sun so far away and so dim
that it’s always something like twilight time.

The most romantic thing to do out there
probably would be to point toward the Sun
and then a little way off to the side
and lean up against the person you’re with
and say, “See that bright blue star? That’s the Earth.”

And the five moons of Pluto would circle
around you both as if Pluto itself
were surrounding you and keeping you safe
so that you could lean against each other
and share the romance looking far away.

It must be very romantic out there
by Pluto and the five moons of Pluto
where it’s always something like twilight time
and it’s always so very far away.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


That image comparing the Moon to Pluto
was generated by Wolfram|Alpha by typing:

compare diameter of the moon to diameter of pluto

I’m not sure which is more amazing to me,
that we know so much about this tiny planet so far away,
or that Wolfram|Alpha provides this kind
of wonderful resource to everyone on the web.
It’s all too romantic for words. Almost.




Moonlight Becomes You


Pluto In Magic And Alchemy


The New Horizons Spacecraft As Julia Adams


A Spaceship That Sparks


How Pluto’s First Moon Got Its Name

They Throw Away Desks, Don’t They?

First she threw out the desk where her boyfriend used to sit and work.

In order to drag the desk to the alley by herself she pulled out all the drawers and threw them away. Without the drawers the desk was easy to drag along the floor. When she dragged the desk down the three concrete steps to the back yard one of the desk legs cracked away from the desk but remained stuck to the desktop. The desk then flopped over and scraped along the sidewalk with one leg sticking out to the side.

She smiled looking at the broken desk leg. She remembered that one of her boyfriend’s favorite books was an old novel by Horace McCoy called, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and the central metaphor of the book had been that when a horse breaks a leg it used to be standard practice simply to shoot the horse rather than give it first aid and the story of the novel was about a depressed woman who eventually asks her boyfriend to shoot her because she just can’t get her life together.

She dragged the desk with the broken leg into the alley and shoved it next to the pile of desk drawers.

Looking at the wreckage of the desk with the broken leg, she made a pretend gun by extending her index finger and raising her thumb. She pointed at the desk and said, “Bang! Bang! Bang!” Then she smiled and lifted her index finger to her lips and blew a puff of air at her fingertip as if she was blowing away smoke from a gun barrel.

After she threw out the desk where her boyfriend used to sit and work she vacuumed the rug. Then she stepped back and studied the wall by the corner there next to the south window. Outside through the window, past the back yard, next to the garage she could just see the edge of the pile of desk drawers in the alley.

She looked at the space there by the wall. “I could put a bookcase there,” she thought. “Or a little table with a plant. Or a floor lamp.”

She smiled, thinking, “Or I could put nothing at all there.”

For some reason that made her laugh.

“I’m going to put nothing at all there,” she said, out loud. And she laughed again.

First she threw out the desk. Then she vacuumed. Then she didn’t do anything at all.

Well, she did laugh a little.

She laughed more when she was telling him what happened to the desk.

She made a special point of describing the Horace McCoy part and hung up before he had the chance to say anything.

All he could think of was that the desk was dead and that she never even had heard of Horace McCoy before they started going out.

He blamed himself. But he thought, too, that she would be thinking that he would blame himself and that just would make her laugh harder.

A woman laughing. The wreckage of a dead desk.

And he thought, too, “I am not going to write about this. That really would make her laugh harder.”

The wreckage of a dead desk. A man writing.

A woman laughing.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” at Wikipedia

Mystery Four Thousand Miles From France

The initial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials, including John N. McMahon (then the head of the Office of Technical Service and later the Agency's deputy director), became strong supporters of the program.

In the mid 1970s sponsorship by the CIA was terminated and picked up by the Air Force. In 1979, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which had been providing some taskings to the SRI investigators, was ordered to develop its own program by the Army's chief intelligence officer, General Ed Thompson. CIA operations officers, working from McMahon's office and other offices, also continued to provide taskings to SRI's subjects. (Schnabel 1997, Smith 2005, Atwater 2001)

In 1984, remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle was awarded a legion of merit for determining "150 essential elements of information...producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source".

Unfortunately, the viewers' advice in the "Stargate project" was always so unclear and non-detailed that it has never been used in any intelligence operation.

from “Remote Viewing” at Wikipedia

Somewhere in Russia there might be a spy
a beautiful woman with new age skills
trained in remote viewing able to move
anywhere in space anywhere in time
and when she’s not tasked with politicians
or keeping track of global businessmen
or figuring out why Rome really fell
or why all the dinosaurs really died
maybe in her spare time when she is bored
she looks in to see how I’ve been doing.

“Vadya,” her boss might say, “are you looking
at that dull American guy again?
This is how you waste your time? Not with sports
or scientists? Not with celebrities?”

“You’d never guess,” Vadya might say, “what he
is typing on his computer right now!”

“Nobody cares,” her boss might say. “Let’s get
back to that Paris banker and his wife.
We still don’t know what’s happening in France.”

And Vadya might nod and resign herself
to getting back to work but she might look
at me typing one more time wondering
what she was seeing possibly could mean.

I wouldn’t know what she might see could mean
but I’d say, “Hi—Have a good time in France.”

Praying Mantis In A Parking Lot

What do birds know about a store closing?

Change: Sudden, Incomprehensible And Deadly

So what if the neighbors call the cops?
I can explain! I can explain!
Wait till they see
What we’ve caught in our traps
They’ll not be the same after that.
No . . .

Night buggin’
I’m putting on something light
Night buggin’
With that light in your eyes
It’s bright
I brought my great big jar
We could drive off in my car
To find some small cafe
So that Lydia, my dear,
We can go
Night buggin’
All night long

Night Buggin’

That quote from “Night Buggin’” is part of a song written by Canadian zoologist John Acorn. He used to have a great TV show called “John Acorn: The Nature Nut.” He did shows about all manner of natural history, but his own specialty was entomology. He liked bugs. And he was a musician, too, so for every show he would write a song about the topic and the songs were always great. (FYI, ‘night bugging’ is a phrase insect lovers use to describe night expeditions outdoors where they set up a black light against a sheet—or a similar arrangement—and the bright light, including the strong ultraviolet, attracts all manner of insects for observation and collection.)

Entomologists—professional and amateur—can look odd (sheets, black lights, spelunker headlamps) and sometimes people do call the police. This also happens sometimes to sidewalk astronomers.

Simple things can look odd.

John Acorn once described how you can sometimes find water beetles on cars. What happens is water beetles fly around looking for a pond. They look down and see the shiny paint of a car, they see the antenna sticking up like a plant, and the beetle thinks the car is a little pool of water. Bugs have tiny little brains and they often mistake one thing for something else if the general characteristics match.

Simple things can look odd to bugs, too.

John Acorn mentioned that if you collect water beetles from cars, sometimes a car alarm will go off. Acorn said when that happens it’s best to just get out of there. You can try to explain, he said, but it sounds crazy—“I was looking for a water beetle that mistakenly landed on your car thinking it had found a pond”—and even though it is true, it is easier, Acorn said, just to get away from the car and not try to explain to anyone what you were doing.


*


A while ago I took some photographs of a grasshopper in a parking lot.

Too Beautiful To Comprehend

I didn’t know it at the time, but a senior citizen fellow who lives near there was watching me. A few days later when I walked past, he yelled at me. He thought I’d been taking pictures of the buildings or cars and maybe I was getting ready to rob someone. He was all red in the face, really yelling at me. I didn’t bother trying to explain that I was taking pictures for a blog (I doubted he knew what the internet was). I just listened politely for a bit, then nodded, waved and walked away. He was still yelling when I walked away.

Simple things can look odd.

A few days ago I parked in the lot of a big store and after I looked around a bit in the store I walked back to my car. At some point I looked down and saw a beautiful, large praying mantis just walking along the asphalt of the parking lot.

I figured the praying mantis must have been flying along looking for a pond, saw the flat asphalt, maybe sensed heat coming up off the asphalt like heat coming up from shallow warm water, and landed thinking it had found a pond.

It was a busy parking lot so I bent down to shoo the bug away, but the praying mantis wasn’t afraid of me at all. It just kept walking slowly along the asphalt.

I thought, I should get a picture of this.

But then I looked around and thought, Hmmm, this is a busy parking lot. People are going to think I’m nuts, bending down to take a picture of something. Do I want to explain that I’m taking a picture of a bug on the asphalt?

So I didn’t take a picture of the praying mantis.

But I did bend down, very carefully pick up the out-of-place praying mantis, and walk it over to the edge of the parking lot where I could put it on the low branch of a tree so that it wouldn’t get run over.


It has bothered me ever since then that I didn’t take a picture of the praying mantis on the asphalt just because I didn’t want people to think I was weird, bending down to take a picture of a bug in a parking lot.

I feel in my old age I am wimping out, conforming, getting beaten down.


I don’t know. When I tried to shoo the praying mantis out of harm’s way the praying mantis didn’t want to give up its illusion that it had found a pleasant little pond. I had to pick it up and carry it to a tree.

I wanted to take a picture even if it would make me look silly getting the photo, but I didn’t do it. I don’t know if I should feel bad, or if I should feel that maybe that was somehow the universe’s way of gently picking up me and putting me on the low branch of a tree where I couldn’t get in trouble.

I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


A Life Of Illusion (Happy Thanksgiving!)

Watermelon Rain?

In Chicago it is almost summer
but I’m wondering if next winter’s snows
will be colorful watermelon snows.

On Songs For Watermelon Snows

Ever since I learned about the phenomenon of watermelon snow it has sounded very cool to me. I’ve wondered if I’d ever get a chance to see red snow around Chicago.

Now I’m wondering if I might someday get the chance to see watermelon rain.

There is some controversial science going on right now, apparently involving labs all around the world. Some fringe websites have started doing reports on some of the research, but right now to my eyes Wikipedia has the most detailed and trustworthy summary of everything.

Today I’m going to quote from the Wikipedia page, link to one science reporter, and also speculate about this a little myself.

I’m talking about what Wikipedia calls the Red Rain in Kerala.

The Kerala red rain phenomenon was a blood rain (red rain) event that occurred from July 25 to September 23, 2001, when red-coloured rain sporadically fell on the southern Indian state of Kerala. Heavy downpours occurred in which the rain was colored red, staining clothes pink. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. Colored rain had been reported in Kerala as early as 1896 and several times since then.

It was initially thought that the rains were colored by fallout from a hypothetical meteor burst, but a study commissioned by the Government of India concluded that the rains had been colored by airborne spores from locally prolific terrestrial algae.

It was not until early 2006 that the colored rains of Kerala gained widespread attention when the popular media reported that Godfrey Louis and Santhosh Kumar of the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam proposed a controversial hypothesis that the colored particles were extraterrestrial cells.

Red Rain in Kerala at Wikipedia

At a fringe science website called “Earthfiles” well-respected reporter Linda Moulton Howe interviewed one of the scientists from India in her posting: Fluorescence Mystery in Red Rain Cells of Kerala, India.

Linda Moulton Howe’s posting is very interesting and contains a lot of detail. However I’m not going to quote from it because it leaves out some details, too. The scientists from India and elsewhere who are stressing that they have not found any DNA in cells associated with the red rain phenomenon, which are typically believed to be well-understood algae of one kind or another, are passionate believers in a theory called Panspermia, the belief that life is relatively common throughout the cosmos and through various natural processes can travel even interstellar distances. Panspermia is interesting in itself, but I feel it is a whole different topic than the red rain.

Wikipedia addresses the DNA issue of the red rain at some length:

Hypothesis' authors – G. Louis and A. Santosh – admitted no explanation on how debris from a meteor could have continued to fall in the same area over a period of two months, despite the changes in climatic conditions and wind pattern spanning over two months. Samples of the red particles were also sent for analysis to Milton Wainwright at Sheffield University and Chandra Wickramasinghe at Cardiff University. Wickramasinghe reported in December 2006 that "work in progress has yielded positive for DNA, however, this identification is not yet fully confirmed, and might be considered equivocal". The absence of DNA is key to Louis and Kumar's hypothesis that the cells were of extraterrestrial origins. The team then reported in 29 August 2010 in the non-peer reviewed physics archive "arxiv.org" that they were able to have these cells "reproduce" when incubated at high pressure saturated steam at 121 °C (autoclaved) for up to two hours. So their conclusion is that these cells reproduced, without DNA, at temperatures higher than any known life form on earth is able to. The cells, however, were unable to reproduce at temperatures that earthly cells do. The team also observed the cells using phase contrast fluorescence microscopy, and they concluded that: "The fluorescence behaviour of the red cells is shown to be in remarkable correspondence with the extended red emission observed in the Red Rectangle Nebula and other galactic and extragalactic dust clouds, suggesting, though not proving an extraterrestrial origin." The controversial conclusion of Louis et al. is the only hypothesis suggesting that these organisms are of extraterrestrial origin.

Regarding the "absence" of DNA, Louis has not reported the use of any standard microbiology growth medium to culture and induce germination and growth of the spores, basing his claim of "biological" growth on light absorption measurements following precipitation by supercritical fluids. Louis' only attempt to stain the spore's DNA was by the use of malachite green, which is generally used to stain bacterial endospores, not algal spores, whose primary function of their cell wall and their impermeability is to ensure its own survival through periods of environmental stress. They are therefore resistant to ultraviolet and gamma radiation, desiccation, lysozyme, temperature, starvation and chemical disinfectants. Visualising algal spore DNA under a light microscope can be difficult due to the impermeability of the highly resistant spore wall to dyes and stains used in normal staining procedures. In order to stain the spores' DNA, which is tightly packed, encapsulated and desiccated, spores must first be cultured in suitable growth medium and temperature in order to induce germination.

Red Rain (Criticism) at Wikipedia

So this is all very interesting stuff. It is on-going research, so findings are coming in a little at a time. And since the topic of Panspermia has become a contentious one, all reports need to be taken with a grain of salt. Some scientists will be tempted to over-state results, some scientists will be tempted to down-play results. But time will tell.


Strange stuff has been falling out of the sky for as long as there has been recorded history, and folklore of “falls” has existed since even before records have been kept. I’ve posted about such things.

Parsimony And Aberrant Forms

I want to mention two thoughts I have on this topic.

The accepted cause of red rain is spores, similar to the cause of watermelon snow. And that makes perfect sense. I don’t feel any strong imperative to disbelieve this.

However, if the scientists from India are correct in their observations of strange characteristics of the cells from the red rain, then it will become reasonable to ask where these strange cells come from.

Scientists who believe in Panspermia have done a lot of speculating about meteor and small comet input into the Earth’s atmosphere as driving causes of interesting terrestrial biology issues. I’m not going to dwell on this belief now, but it is reasonable and carefully thought-out. However it is still an open question if it actually happens.

Believers in Panspermia have to account for why something like red rain seems to recur at specific places. The traditional explanation is that the Earth passes through, for instance, specific debris from fragmented comets as regularly occurring meteor showers and similar passages through specific debris streams may cause red rain. That is reasonable, but it does not explain why specific places on Earth would be singled out. The Earth certainly passes through specific debris streams, but not always with exactly the same planetary orientation.

I’ve always wondered if scientists might be looking in the wrong direction. In fact, in the exactly opposite direction to where they should be looking.

Thomas Gold has written extensively on what he termed the deep, hot biosphere. And, of course, scientists have extensively studied deep ocean hydrothermal vents. The high pressures and high temperatures within the Earth seem to be rich with odd life forms and these life forms are often consistent with the extreme characteristics associated with speculations about life forms that might arrive in comets or meteors.

If odd life forms are venting up from deep within the Earth, the vents may very well be occurring at specific locations, so it would be expected, then, for red rain to fall at one or another location repeatedly.


I personally strongly suspect if the accepted explanation for red rain—algae and spores of some kind—turns out to be false, then the real explanation might require scientists to look inward, to the deep, hot biosphere. (And even if the accepted explanation is true, these interesting algae and other odd life forms may have originated in and be most common in an exotic environment like the deep, hot biosphere, and they may enter our environment predominantly though venting from below. Time and research will tell.)

Hot Red Earth, Cold Blue Jazz

Clouds Want To Be Close To Us


*


There is one other thing I want to mention.

Many people aren’t aware of it, but nanotechnology has actually started to turn up in consumer products. For instance, nano-silver particles are used in some sunscreen products. (And this is happening, it is worth mentioning, as a strange medical condition called Morgellons syndrome is puzzling many healthcare professionals.) If nanotechnology is turning up in consumer products, it is reasonable to wonder what is happening in black ops labs around the world. If strange cells are found replicating without DNA, it is worth remembering that very smart people for many years have been warning about so-called Grey Goo.

Maybe Grey Goo is red.

Change: Sudden, Incomprehensible And Deadly

Today’s post is going to be a little sad. But because the sad part raises some questions that are really interesting to me, I’m going to do the post anyway. I don’t have any photos of the sad part, so you don’t have to worry about looking at the illustration that I use.



The Start

A large store went out-of-business around here a few weeks ago. That’s not too unusual and I expected the only consequence to be having to drive a little farther to buy this or that product.

That change however, the store shutting down, has had a deadly effect on some wildlife here. It’s sad, but at the same time it’s interesting to try to imagine what the wildlife must be thinking about the change.


The Location

This is a Google Maps satellite image, sort of a bird’s-eye view of a major intersection in our suburb, 111th Street at Cicero Avenue. The intersection itself is in the very lower right corner of the photograph. North is up, east is right.

I’ve added some annotations to the image to try to illustrate what I’ll be talking about.

First I’m going to describe the overall scene, then I’ll describe the change and the problem it has caused.

When this photo was taken the green rectangle at the left was a KMart store with its large parking lot to the east. Now this store has closed and the parking lot is deserted. (If you click on the photo it gets a little larger.)

Normal Traffic

One normal traffic pattern around here is to drive east on 111th Street and then make a left turn north onto Cicero. I’ve added a blue line at the bottom of the image to indicate this traffic sequence.

Sometimes the intersection gets backed up. Some drivers turn left off 111th Street and cut through the abandoned parking lot to get on Cicero at the little intersection north of the corner. I’ve added an orange line showing the path cars take when they cut through the empty parking lot. (There is a little road that connects 111th Street along the east side of the parking lot to Cicero. Now that the store is closed and the parking lot is abandoned most cars I’ve seen have ignored that little road and just cut through the empty lot.)


The Problem

For many years the parking lot was filled with cars aligned in rows and columns, and cars traveled through the parking lot slowly.

As often happens in some parking lots, large flocks of seagulls have made themselves at home on the asphalt. The seagulls, over the course of years, became accustomed to parking lot traffic. Slow moving cars traveling and parking in rows and columns.

The red arrow is the area where flocks of seagulls spend their day.

Now the traffic flow has completely and radically changed. And from the seagulls’ point of view, the change was sudden and incomprehensible—what do birds know about a store closing?

Now cars are speeding through the abandoned parking lot along diagonals that totally ignore the rows and columns the birds learned over the course of years. And the drivers, in a hurry along their shortcut, are not paying any attention to the birds.

So birds are getting hit and smashed.


Thinking About This

The birds don’t know anything about the store closing. Birds, of course, don’t even know—I guess—what a store is or what a car is.

All these seagulls know is that after years of behaving one way all of a sudden cars are behaving in a completely different way.

However that is seagulls think about cars in their seagull mind-space.

So it’s sad for the poor birds. I’m guessing that over time they will learn to avoid the south end of the parking lot entirely.

But what an interesting situation!

I mean, I wonder how much of life is like this for human beings?

There must be things happening around us in reality that we don’t understand at all, or even can’t understand. (Things as foreign to our human mind as “stores” and “parking lots” and “cars” are to a seagull’s understanding of reality.)

Seagulls can’t understand stores/parking lots/cars but nonetheless seagulls can interact with stores/parking lots/cars by making some kind of seagull mental accommodation to reality and simply learning whatever they can learn and shaping their behavior appropriately.

And for long lengths of time (many seagull generations in fact) the kinds of things seagulls can learn—for instance car-things move slowly and line up in rows and columns—function as useful seagull knowledge allowing the birds to shape their behavior to live peacefully in the parking-lot-place.

But then the store closes. An essentially trivial human event. But it is presumably incomprehensible to seagulls and suddenly everything the seagulls ever knew about car-things has become useless knowledge, or even misleading and deadly knowledge.

How much of this kind of thing happens to human beings?

There must be things happening around us in reality that we don’t understand at all, or even can’t understand. (Things as foreign to our human mind as “stores” and “parking lots” and “cars” are to a seagull’s understanding of reality.)

How many times do we get hurt or even killed because some aspect of reality completely beyond our comprehension changed in some essentially simple way that is nonetheless beyond our understanding and then we go about our normal behavior and find ourselves getting knocked about or smashed in ways that never happened to us before, or never happened to earlier generations before?

What an interesting thought!

It’s very tempting—isn’t it?—to say, well, humans are capable of abstract thought. We can make up labels for concepts that are on the fringe of our understanding and then think about those labels and create new concepts grouping them in appropriate ways so that the very scope of our thinking expands. Our ability to think abstract thoughts lets us interact with reality in a way seagulls can’t.

But is any of that true?

I mean “true” in a meaningful way!

Our very word “abstract” and our concept of “abstraction” as a process are just labels for descriptions of how we perceive our human mind to work. A seagull may have equally grandiose labels describing how the seagull mind works. The seagull is still, nonetheless, just one existent within a vast reality.

Does our thinking really give us a transcendental mechanism to see beyond the very mechanism of our self?

Or are we living within a reality as vast and as ultimately incomprehensible to us as a store-place and its parking-lot-place full of car-things are to seagulls?

Is our concept of “understanding” just a label to describe something which in a seagull we would characterize as “some kind of seagull mental accommodation to reality” that may or may not be useful?



I’m very sorry those poor birds are getting hurt. But this has given me a lot to think about!

Machines Of Rapacious Hate

The last time we had a power outage
at first I didn’t even notice it.

I had been sitting at my computer
writing, typing, for a couple of hours.

It had gotten dark outside but inside
I had the lights out. I enjoy writing
sometimes just by light from my computer.

At some point I stood up and looked around.

I looked out my window and saw nothing.

I mean nothing. I thought condensation
had fogged the glass but when I looked closely
I didn’t see any condensation.

When I looked more closely at the distance
I saw buildings, street lights and power lines
silhouetted—dark shapes against dark clouds.

Then I looked more closely around my room.

The four seven-segment displays were dark
on my plug-in clock. The little red lights
on my TV and DVD player
were dark. I realized power was out.

My computer was bright and working fine
because it’s a laptop. The battery
functions as an uninterruptible
power supply when the power line fails.

When I looked closely at my computer
I saw that the little power icon
didn’t display the power-cord symbol.

My computer had taken care of me.

It had let me write, it had let me think,
even as the rest of the world broke down.

I moused-over and changed the power mode,
switching to what’s called ‘power-saver’ mode
to make things easier for my machine.

Power came back in about half an hour.

My laptop’s battery hadn’t run down.



*



I’ve been thinking of that power outage because it was a pleasant moment for me with technology. Lately, however, I’ve been unable to stop thinking about a story I read in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago about a kind of technology I don’t like at all.

I like gadgets. I like computers. Computers and gadgets of all kinds have made my life better in more ways, I’m sure, than I’m even aware of. I’ve written a lot about gadgets and my affection for them.

A few days ago I read a story about a kind of gadget I’ve never really liked at all. And my simple dislike has turned into a kind of active hatred. It’s hard for me even to talk about this business. I’m just going to write a couple of quick paragraphs, then put in a link to the story. I recommend everyone click over and read the story.

So-called “book readers”—things like the Kindle and Nook and others—keep track of how a person reads. Not just what a person reads. But whether a person skips around. What page a person stops reading. What a person searches for and highlights within a book. Even other things.

Publishers and ‘writers’ use this data to plan future books.

Writers, soon, will be people who simply put together the kinds of words and sentences this or that demographic of readers want to read. I’ve understood, of course, that the business of corporate publishing had completely changed writing. But I never realized just how completely the coupling of corporate publishing and modern technology had reduced the profession of writing to something like prostitution with words.

Whatever the reader wants to read. However the reader wants to read it.

Prostitution with words.

For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.

The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.

Publishing has lagged far behind the rest of the entertainment industry when it comes to measuring consumers' tastes and habits. TV producers relentlessly test new shows through focus groups; movie studios run films through a battery of tests and retool them based on viewers' reactions. But in publishing, reader satisfaction has largely been gauged by sales data and reviews—metrics that offer a postmortem measure of success but can't shape or predict a hit. That's beginning to change as publishers and booksellers start to embrace big data, and more tech companies turn their sights on publishing.

Barnes & Noble, which accounts for 25% to 30% of the e-book market through its Nook e-reader, has recently started studying customers' digital reading behavior. Data collected from Nooks reveals, for example, how far readers get in particular books, how quickly they read and how readers of particular genres engage with books. Jim Hilt, the company's vice president of e-books, says the company is starting to share their insights with publishers to help them create books that better hold people's attention.

from “Your E-Book Is Reading You”

Digital-book publishers and retailers now know more about their readers than ever before. How that's changing the experience of reading.

by Alexandra Alter
in the Wall Street Journal, 6/29/12

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Machines Of Loving Grace


What Is Electric Sugar?


Cockroaches From Space Redux


Once There Were Other Worlds


La Seule Chose Que Je Peux Faire


A Fun Offering To The World Gadget


I Can’t Sleep In My Kitchen

Iterations And Interruptions To World Domination

“Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.”

Benoit Mandelbrot
quoted in Wild Randomness

Over the weekend I returned some books
to a library south of here. While there
I spent some time sitting at a table
with a clipboard and a calculator.

Someone said, “What the hell are you doing?”

I said, “Calculating. Taking some notes.
Making sure all my evil schemes compute.”

“It’s the twenty-first century,” she said.
“Don’t evil geniuses use computers?”

I shrugged. “They just use whatever they need.”

She pointed at my TI-89
Titanium calculator. “Is that
the evil genius equivalent of
a singer with an acoustic guitar?
An evil genius acoustic holdout?”

As I tried to think of something to say,
she laughed and added, “It is kind of cool
in—I guess—a retro-geek kind of way.”

So over the weekend I got to play
the evil genius and the hippie girl.

My world domination plans got pushed back
a little, but looking around the world
it doesn’t look like the world used its time
any more constructively than I did.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


I’m Standing At A Broken Window


I’m Thinking Of A Room With A Calculator


Beautiful Impossible Math Thing



Aberrant Forms


Songs For Hippies Don’t Scare The Pigeons



Love Sonnet With Piano Wreckage And Worms

Models Of Mind, And Grammar

Okay, so yesterday I wrote this sentence:

I would have liked to attend that party.

I didn’t give it a second thought as I wrote yesterday’s post, however today it occurred to me that the sentence might cause some people to frown. I don’t know. I think some people might say I should have written: I would have liked to have attended that party.

I’m going to put up a quote from a couple of linguists discussing something similar in a bit, but first I’ve got a couple of little things to set up the quote.

First of all, read these two sentences:

I would have liked to attend that party.

I would have enjoyed that party.

The second is obviously correct. The first makes some people frown.

It appears to be a brain thing. Different people, different minds, respond to the same words differently.

Some people will read the first sentence and the meaning will group itself like this:

(I) (would have) (liked to attend) (that party).

Everything fits. The three words “liked to attend” group naturally together into a complex verb arrangement that is past tense because of the ending on “liked.” And the fact that the three words can be easily replaced by the single word “enjoyed” appears to support this approach to grammar.

But that seems silly to some people who naturally, to them, group the meaning something like this and see a mismatch of tenses between “would have” and “to attend:”

(I) (would have liked) (to attend) (that party).


There are different kinds of people in the world. Different kinds of minds.


Here’s another image from “Spider-Man 2.” Mary Jane Watson and Peter Parker are arguing because Peter is trying to talk Mary Jane out of marrying the astronaut. Peter says he and Mary Jane have unfinished business with each other. Mary Jane laughs and says they can’t have any unfinished business because they’ve never started anything together. Then they have this exchange:

PETER: “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

MARY JANE: “Of course you don’t. Because you complicate things.”

There are different kinds of people in the world. Different kinds of minds.

This is one of those things that used to worry me. Now I just think people should be true to themselves.

If what some other people call “complications” seem right to a person, then I think that person should go with what seems right to him or her, not what other people think. And, of course, if a person prefers what they think of as “simple” things, then by all means they shouldn’t try to make things complicated to please anyone else.


Here are a couple of scientists discussing grammar and mind:

Sandy loves to walk with Chris
Dale cheats Chris
Chris yells at Dale


What Is a Word?

How accurate is it to think of the three structural elements of these sentences as subject, verb, and object? Of course, from the point of view of conventional grammars, the designation “verb” certainly does not include things as complex as loves to walk with.

In sentences like Chris yells at Dale or Sandy looks for Dana or Dale swims behind Sandy, schoolbook grammars have traditionally grouped the last two words as a prepositional phrase rather than grouping the middle two words as some kind of complex verb form. But these three cases somehow feel different to many people.

With yells at, one can argue either way. The traditional view is that the at introduces a prepositional phrases answering where Chris’s action is directed, and yells, by itself, is that action. However, because one can easily believe that yells at has a one-word synonym in many languages—for example, scolds in English—one could plausibly argue that its two-word status in this sentence is more an artifact of word choice than any indication about the underlying grammatical structure of the sentence.


Grammar as a Model of Mind

The argument might go as follows: to have grammatical names and categories just for the sake of having them seems pretty uninteresting.

Grammatical categories matter only when we believe that they are not purely arbitrary, that they really help us describe, for example, something about how brains process language. It seems unlikely that the rules that live in our brains distinguish between Chris yells at Dale and Chris scolds Dale. A model of mind that treats these two very differently seems unnecessarily complex.

Like yells at, looks for can feel like a single unit, though some traditional grammars would argue otherwise. It is not difficult even in English to find one-word synonyms for looks for and yells at, and it is easy to believe that in some languages the most common way of expressing these ideas uses only one word. However, swims behind seems too specific to have its own special word in any language except perhaps a Dolphin’s language. Follows specifies the relationship between the subject and object but doesn’t say whether they are swimming, driving, or walking. Swims, by itself, specifies the kind of locomotion but not a relationship with another swimmer. The same distinction can be made between house boat and light switch, which can feel like single objects (even though there are other kinds of boats and switches), and green sock, which generates no such feeling.

The difference is important. For one thing, which is more certain to you: that house boat is not house-boat or that green sock is not green-sock? What about greenhouse?

The choices of list items one makes ... can become a rich source of material for analyzing what are meaningful categories in a model of mind.

E. Paul Goldenberg
Wallace Feurzeig
writing in “Exploring Language with Logo”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


A Spider-Man Note


Computers, Language And The Goblin Universe



The Question For Frankenstein’s Friend


The Other Way Of Making A Frankenstein’s Monster


Return To The Other Way Of Making A Frankenstein’s Monster



Halloween On An Inclined Plane

Seven-Segment Displays

A seven-segment display, or seven-segment indicator, is a form of electronic display device for displaying decimal numerals that is an alternative to the more complex dot-matrix displays. Seven-segment displays are widely used in digital clocks, electronic meters, and other electronic devices for displaying numerical information.

The idea of the seven-segment display is quite old. In 1910, for example, a seven-segment display illuminated by incandescent bulbs was used on a power-plant boiler room signal panel.

Seven-segment display at Wikipedia

Two years ago seven-segment displays
turned a hundred years old and I missed it
if anybody threw them a party.

I would have liked to attend that party.

I once learned to program a controller
using assembly language programming
that would translate a binary value
within the digit range zero-to-nine
(0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110,111, 1000, 1001)
to illuminate the proper segments
on a classic seven-segment display.

It was an academic exercise
but seven-segment displays still exist
outside academia in the world.

This is an amazing technology.

Before there were light-emitting diodes
plain light bulbs made seven-segment displays.

Now there are high-density bit-mapped screens
of organic light-emitting diodes
displaying type faces that simulate
the look of a seven-segment display.

This abstract technology will exist
within three physical generations
of nuts-and-bolts hardware reality.

I don’t celebrate my own birthday but
I would have liked to attend that party
celebrating seven-segment displays
two years ago reaching the hundred mark.

If we’re abstract technology ourselves
maybe in one or another design
of nuts-and-bolts hardware reality
I can help them celebrate two hundred.

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“Sexy As The Dead Bridges”


No Doubts About The Party


Is This A Junkyard Church

A Spider-Man Note

Look, a brilliant mad scientist has a beautiful woman chained to a post:

Of course, that’s Alfred Molina as Dr. Otto Octavius and that’s Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson, from Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 2.” In that scene, Mary Jane is chained to a post, but in fact she is yelling at Dr. Ock:

“You got what you needed for your little science project now let me go!”

That’s my favorite scene of all the Spider-Man movies I’ve watched over the years.

I strongly suspect that’s the kind of luck I’d have if I were a brilliant mad scientist with a beautiful woman chained to a post. Instead of her being impressed by my brilliance and instead of her being intimidated by my scientific prowess, probably she would just yell at me and belittle whatever great experiment I had in progress.

The reason I’m thinking of this is because just recently—in an internet sort of way—a woman yelled at some people who were talking about Spider-Man and I was among those getting yelled at.

Here’s why some people were talking about Spider-Man.

Yesterday Sony Pictures released a new Spider-Man movie, “The Amazing Spider-Man.” This has gotten a lot of attention from movie buffs for at least two reasons. First, this movie is what’s called a ‘re-boot.’ The filmmakers have gone back and started with the very first Spider-Man story, the so-called ‘origin’ story, even though it was only ten years ago that director Sam Raimi started his Spider-Man trilogy with his version of the origin story. Secondly, this movie was made by an entirely different group of filmmakers and they tell the story with an entirely different tone than Sam Raimi used.

So some film buffs are taking sides and arguing about if it was a good idea and which films are better and which filmmakers are better and just about everything else.

I liked the new Spider-Man movie a lot. There was no one great scene like Mary Jane Watson yelling at Dr. Ock, but overall I liked the new film much better than any of the old films.

Anyway, however, this is the kind of stuff that film buffs can argue about forever and sometimes, not to engage in stereotyping or anything, sometimes women lose patience with guys arguing about stuff like this. Here’s what happened recently:

So “Hannah” wasn’t impressed with everyone’s Spider-Man erudition and cinema sensitivity and passion for their beliefs.

There was a time in my life—and not really all too long ago—when I would have worried about upsetting “Hannah.” I would have worried about upsetting her, and I would have worried about being too involved with movies to begin with.

It doesn’t bug me anymore. Neither part of that. So I’ve either grown, or just gotten comfortably numb. Or some combination.

Now I just replied to her comment with that little joke.

Spider-Man is sometimes considered the most existential of the popular Marvel characters. Works for me.

Lucy Thought It Was Just Odd Dreams

Thinking shaped into words or images
or songs I strongly suspect can create
passages between worlds. Between places
where thought happens. Is that what distance is?
Is distance the difference between thoughts,
the amount or a quality of change
between thoughts, the direction of a change?

(Do we travel these passages without
noticing because our bodies don't move?)

Passages Between Worlds

“Phones don’t judge us,” she said. “They just help us.
When I want to talk to my friend my phone
connects us and I can talk to my friend.
My phone doesn’t ask me if I’m lonely
and it doesn’t tell me I shouldn’t be.
When I want to talk to my friend my phone
connects us and I can talk to my friend.”

“Help us?” I asked. “What if our phones eat us?”

She just looked at me and she said nothing.

“Think about it,” I said. “In Dracula
when the monster was attacking Lucy
she never knew she was under attack.
Dracula took a little of her blood
each night. Lucy thought it was just odd dreams.
What if our phones are monsters smart monsters
that eat us—not our bodies but our selves—
a bit at a time so we don’t notice?”

She said, “You are not going to make me
afraid of my phone.” And as it happened
right that second her phone buzzed in her hand.
She looked down smiled and then looked up at me.
“I’m going to take this and I don’t care
if you think I’m rude or ignoring you.”

I shrugged pointed and said, “The part of you
that was polite must have gotten eaten.”

She stuck out her tongue then answered her phone.

“Enjoy your dinner,” I said. I pointed
at her hand. “I was talking to your phone.”

She stuck out her tongue again then started
to tell her friend what I had been saying.

I left them there. Her. Her friend. And their phones.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Poor Lucy Falling To Pieces


Saving Lucy



Bird Calls (A Sunday Post)


Ten Thirteen Unanswered Questions #2


Exerting Agency, Liminal Entities And Scripts

“Underwear Distance Of Love” (Reprise)

I don’t have much for today, but today will be a kind of traditional blog post in that for the most part I’ll just be describing something that happened over the weekend.

RUBBER LIZARD (as a Taylor Swift fan): “So I hear you’re playing stadium venues now.”

LITTLE PLASTIC DOLL (as Taylor Swift): “Yes, yes, I have pyrotechnics and aerialists and everything! I’m like a young and attractive version of David Lee Roth.”

RUBBER LIZARD (as a Taylor Swift fan): “That’s a scary thought.”

The Underwear Distance Of Love: A Puppet Show

I’ve been thinking about high-profile pop music for the last couple of days because of something that happened over the weekend. I’ll get to that in a second, but first I saw in the news a few minutes ago that Van Halen has canceled most of their summer tour. Here’s a picture and the story as reported by Rolling Stone. David Lee Roth is the guy on the left:

After postponing all tour dates after June 26th, Van Halen has now canceled those shows, reports Pollstar.com. The band has not announced the cancelations on their site, but Pollstar notes many of the tour dates after June 26th are listed in red as canceled on Ticketmaster, including tour stops in Baltimore, Detroit, Memphis, Sacramento and Milwaukee. Refunds are reportedly available at the point of sale.

Back in May, the band announced the postponement of all their tour dates following their June 26th show in New Orleans. Sources told Rolling Stone the band was fighting and the members "hate each other." David Lee Roth later released a video insisting the band was getting along fine, saying, "We bit off way more than we could chew," with Eddie Van Halen offering a similar explanation in an interview last month.

Van Halen Cancels Postponed Tour Dates

I have no idea what was going on behind the scenes. It’s my understanding, however, that when a big group cancels established dates it means they weren’t selling enough tickets to make it worthwhile to move the show to that venue. Of course with the history between David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen this might have been caused by a fight. But I will say that when I’ve tried to bring up the subject of Van Halen touring in conversations almost everyone just says either “Who?” or “Are they still alive?”

Perhaps David Lee Roth could open for Taylor Swift on her next tour.


*


Okay, anyway, I was thinking about high-profile pop music all weekend because late Friday I was in some store and the music system played some pleasant sounding song and, as I was absently listening, I realized it was something about birds. When I paid more attention I realized it was the so-called “Beatles” version of John Lennon’s song “Free as a Bird.”

It’s an okay version—I guess—and it has an okay video to go along with it. The story behind it is that when the Beatles “Anthology” project was getting put together the surviving Beatles—or their advisers, whatever—came up with the idea of doing some “new” Beatles music for the release. So one person or another asked Yoko for a tape of one or two John Lennon songs they could use to dub over. Yoko supplied a cassette tape of John doing a couple of demos recorded at his New York apartment.

The cassette tape included Lennon’s demo of “Free as a Bird” with him singing and accompanying himself on piano. It’s from around 1977, recorded very simply, just on a single-track cassette.

George Martin—again, for one reason or another—declined the job of producing the over-dub sessions so Paul and the rest hired Jeff Lynne and Lynne took the cassette tape of Lennon’s demo and used 1995 state-of-the-art recording tools to cut it up and add to it and enhance it. So they added drum parts and guitar parts and bass parts and a new verse and lots of new vocals.

Without George Martin’s participation and without—of course!—John being there in real life it’s hard to call it a Beatles song. But it is a “Beatles” song. It kind of sounds like an homage to the Beatles by some studio band, but, nonetheless, it’s all the real people.

After I heard that playing over the store’s music system, I came home and went to YouTube and listened to the actual, real, John Lennon demo. I’m not a mad fan of Lennon’s so I don’t know the intricate details here, but there are supposed to be two versions of his “Free as a Bird” demo that fans have circulated, both with him playing piano, both sounding similar. There are rumors of a third demo of the song with John playing guitar. I’ve never heard that guitar version. I would like to hear it, if anyone knows where it might be found.

Because I love the John Lennon demo with him playing piano.

To me this is what music is all about. One person playing and singing something they wrote.


And I can’t really imagine anything more beautiful than Lennon’s demo of “Free as a Bird.”


It doesn’t seem to matter at all that he isn’t a great piano player. It doesn’t seem to matter at all that his voice isn’t perfect. It doesn’t seem to matter at all that the recording is very low fidelity.

The music is there. The song is there. I think of it as one of the most beautiful recordings I’ve ever heard in my life.

I wanted to have these two versions here at the blog because this seems to be the modern world in a nutshell. There are incredible artists out there making beautiful music. But the beautiful stuff usually is simply called a “demo” and then it gets slathered over with so-called production values and turned into high-profile pop music.

I like the demo stuff infinitely better than the pop stuff.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Folklore Of The Carnivore: Taylor Swift



Buying The Beatles Forever


Japanese Train Stations Forever

2012 2nd Quarter Index

June 2012


Friday, June 29, 2012 -- Two Women And Lightning Cat

Thursday, June 28, 2012 -- The Real Atlantis And French (Movie) Terror

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 -- Monsters—From Microsecond To Microsecond

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 -- The North Pole Or Someone’s Garden

Monday, June 25, 2012 -- “Indestructible And Ungraspable”


Friday, June 22, 2012 -- Looking Closely At An Old Tradition

Thursday, June 21, 2012 -- “People Born Illuminated”

Wednesday, June 20, 2012 -- A Consequence Of Puppets

Tuesday, June 19, 2012 -- Two Telescopes

Monday, June 18, 2012 -- Cracks In The Ruin As A Rune


Friday, June 15, 2012 -- A Squirrel And A Donut For Ever And Ever

Thursday, June 14, 2012 -- Day For Night: Nouveaux Oreillers

Wednesday, June 13, 2012 -- “If The World Should Stop Revolving”

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 -- Monsters Got My Pillows

Monday, June 11, 2012 -- If A Telescope Could See A Song


Friday, June 8, 2012 -- Soft Gadgets In Marigold Space

Thursday, June 7, 2012 -- I’ll Remember: The Flagon With The Dragon

Wednesday, June 6, 2012 -- Unstable Designs That Burn Up

Tuesday, June 5, 2012 -- On Songs For Watermelon Snows

Monday, June 4, 2012 -- “Naturally, In Interviews Of The Time”


Friday, June 1, 2012 -- Gadget-Nature: French Musicians As Landscape



May 2012


Thursday, May 31, 2012 -- Untold Stories About Stories Untold

Wednesday, May 30, 2012 -- The Transit Of Venus

Tuesday, May 29, 2012 -- Preliminary Notes For A Space Opera

Monday, May 28, 2012 -- On Picking Out A Piece Of The Sky


Friday, May 25, 2012 -- Friday In Paris Before It All Starts

Thursday, May 24, 2012 -- “I’m Against It”

Wednesday, May 23, 2012 -- Clouds Want To Be Close To Us

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 -- The Moon And Venus Beyond The Fox Point

Monday, May 21, 2012 -- Drawings Stay Flat Falling Into Reality


Friday, May 18, 2012 -- A Sail Away Thing

Thursday, May 17, 2012 -- Mandy Moore In Traffic

Wednesday, May 16, 2012 -- Machines Of Loving Grace

Tuesday, May 15, 2012 -- Forbidden Planet: An Introduction

Monday, May 14, 2012 -- Celebrity-Talk, And The Epistemology Of Hippie


Friday, May 11, 2012 -- On The Edges Of A Dawn Chorus

Thursday, May 10, 2012 -- Some People Believe Monsters Don’t Exist

Wednesday, May 9, 2012 -- Lost Images Of Lost Landscapes

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 -- It Shall Be So Madness Must Unwatched Go

Monday, May 7, 2012 -- Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’ Ends In Disaster


Friday, May 4, 2012 -- It’s A Photograph And This

Thursday, May 3, 2012 -- The Sign From Arby’s At Night In The Rain

Wednesday, May 2, 2012 -- Ephemera And Antiphony

Tuesday, May 1, 2012 -- If I Walk Through I Think



April 2012


Monday, April 30, 2012 -- Distorted By The Classical Mess


Friday, April 27, 2012 -- The Librarian Not In The Drawing

Thursday, April 26, 2012 -- The Moon Miranda (A Note)

Wednesday, April 25, 2012 -- A Process Of Passages

Tuesday, April 24, 2012 -- Prospero I Know At The End

Monday, April 23, 2012 -- Sweet Talking Rocks


Friday, April 20, 2012 -- Songs A Husband Heard

Thursday, April 19, 2012 -- To Make A Song To Sing About Walls

Wednesday, April 18, 2012 -- Miranda And Miranda And Miranda

Tuesday, April 17, 2012 -- Atlantis Blue: Afterward

Monday, April 16, 2012 -- “Sweet Judy Blue Dress” — Atlantis Blue


Friday, April 13, 2012 -- The Mad Scientist And The Dawn Chorus

Thursday, April 12, 2012 -- Everything Is Out Of Order

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 -- Remembering A Loch Ness Photo

Tuesday, April 10, 2012 -- Psychrophiles In Watermelon Snow

Monday, April 9, 2012 -- A Shattered Chessboard


Friday, April 6, 2012 -- Memory Studies As A Flourishing Field

Thursday, April 5, 2012 -- Waiting For Clouds

Wednesday, April 4, 2012 -- The Most Famous Bedroom In Art?

Tuesday, April 3, 2012 -- Waking Up (Not) Lost In Space

Monday, April 2, 2012 -- “S” Is For “Sparrow”


Sunday, April 1, 2012 -- 2012 1st Quarter Index