…from the Strat-Master himself, Jeff Beck, playing Nadia. No, it’s not Christmas-y, but it is soulful.

I love stories like these, about the surprising intelligence of octopuses. Somehow, they never cease to be surprising. Why is that?

I’ve posted my first cover - a version of Secret Journey, by The Police, from Ghost In The Machine. This is one of my favorite songs; the mysticism has always captivated me, and I love the vocal harmonies.

Wikipedia: Secret Journey

By the way, there’s an absolutely amazing demo version on YouTube, complete with an additional verse(!!).

This marks the first time I’ve ever completed a recording of someone else’s music where I felt satisfied with the outcome. It’s also the first time I’ve ever completed a recording with me singing, and felt, if not fully satisfied, at least moderately comfortable with it. I don’t like how the first verse sounds (I must have done 100 takes). The second verse is OK, and the rest of it sounds alright.

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes,
an aeroplane - Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn,
world serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs.
Feed it off an aux speak,, grunt, no, strength,
The ladder starts to clatter with fear fight down height.
Wire in a fire, representing seven games, a government for hire and a combat site.
Left of west and coming in a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck.
Team by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing!
Fine, then.
Uh oh, overflow, population, common food, but it’ll do.
Save yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and the revered and the right - right.
You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

Six o’clock - TV hour. Don’t get caught in foreign towers.
Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn.
Locking in, uniforming, book burning, blood letting.
Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a candle, light a votive. Step down, step down.
Watch your heel crush, crushed. Uh-oh, this means no fear cavalier.
Renegade steer clear! A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies.
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it. (It’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it (It’s time I had some time alone) and I feel fine.
(I feel fine)

It’s the end of the world as we know it. (It’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it. (It’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it (It’s time I had some time alone) and I feel fine.

The other night I dreamt of knives, continental drift divide. Mountains sit in a line
Leonard Bernstein. Leonid Brezhnev. Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs.
Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!
You symbiotic, patriotic, slam book neck, right? Right.

It’s the end of the world as we know it. (It’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it. (It’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it (It’s time I had some time alone) and I feel fine.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it (It’s time I had some time alone) and I feel fine.

It’s the end of the world as we know it. (It’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it. (It’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it (It’s time I had some time alone) and I feel fine.

It’s the end of the world as we know it. (It’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it. (It’s time I had some time alone)
It’s the end of the world as we know it (It’s time I had some time alone) and I feel fine…

REM

It’s also the eel’s ankle, the elephant’s instep, and the snake’s hip.

Rockbox 3.0 is a must-have if you’re dissatisfied with your media player (and it’s worth a try even if you are content).

It’s breathed new life into my Sansa e280 media player, whose firmware has always been just barely tolerable.

Aside from the insane degree of visual customizability, there are many new features that add up to be a vast improvement over the official Sansa firmware.

• play FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and other formats
• games (!?)
• ability to move and delete files without a PC (imagine!)

Even iPod users are finding Rockbox to be an improvement over the much-vaunted Apple functionality. This is truly a high-quality FOSS app, worth checking out!

I thought this was kind of neat - a story about how an African drummer worked out a way for boats to avoid colliding with - and thereby harming - whales.

Collision Detection: African drummer helps develop whale-avoidance system

Yes, I know, it’s a link to another blog. I try not to do this, but some stories are just too interesting to pass up, and I like to give credit where it’s due, since I didn’t find the article on my own.

Hmmm…it’s been awhile. Clearly, this tiny noggin is bereft of meaningful content of late…

At a loss for anything else to say, I’ll resort to bragging. My final achievement of summer vacation this year was to put the last touches on my Epiphone Valve Jr power soak aka The Smooshr.

You’ll never guess what it does.

The writeup is here.

Signs that summer is in high swing (well, in my neck of the woods, anyway):

• Daytime temperatures are 85-95 F
• Humidity is 60-80%; perpetual haze
• Frequent late-afternoon thunderstorms
• Mulberries underfoot everywhere, making a mess, and smelling like cheap homemade wine
• the Cicada killers are out

I’d never heard of cicada killers, but encountered them a few years ago and after some careful Googling, figured out what I was seeing. They’re such neat beasts - the first time you see them, you think jumping Jehoshaphat, those are some huge yellowjackets!. But unlike common yellowjackets, these guys have absolutely no interest in human beings. On my way to work every morning around this time of year, I regularly walk through a swarm of them, buzzing about six inches above the ground in agitated circles and figure-eights. Even as I brush through their midst, they just go about their singleminded, highly-specialized purpose: hunting and eating cicadas.

I wonder if, without cicada-killers, we would be overrun by cicadas. Much as I love cicadas, I wouldn’t want to have to deal with a surplus of them…

This morning I was listening to a piece of music that I’ve been looking forward to hearing with geat anticipation. It’s by an ensemble that plays a fairly accessible blend of jazz fusion/rock - exactly the sort of thing I love to listen to most, and what I aspire to play. I discovered them by association with another performer who I really, really like (they’re performing together in the next week).

To my dismay, the first song was a series of 16-bar ‘ideas’ that just emerged, one after another, in a seemingly endless and directionless sequence . While each of these little sections were well executed, and in some cases, quite beautiful in itself, none of these ideas ever repeated or was further embellished. After a couple of minutes my mind grew weary of the perpetual pointlessness of it all.

This experience got me thinking about how I prefer music to be constructed, and how this manner is quite different from the way software is ideally created, at least according to the criteria commonly accepted today. I know this is a matter of taste, and I’m trying to remain objective while still digging out and exposing some underlying, universal principles.

In computer software engineering, there is are a pair of concepts called coupling and cohesion. Coupling is the degree to which different parts of a system are interdependent. Cohesion is a little harder to describe - it is a measure of how orthogonal it is. For those not familiar with programming, a large amount of effort is expended by developers to reduce the amount of computer code that is repeated within a software application. The more code is repeated across multiple components, the lower the level of cohesion. An example would be an application that transfers money between accounts. You would ideally keep a transaction log of all the transfers, and you would want to have a single code module that would do the writing to the log. If you put code to write to the transaction log in several different components, then when it came time to change the format of the transaction log, for example, you’d have to change the code in every place in the application that writes to the log. Making changes to the same code in multiple places is extremely inefficient, error-prone, and increases the time required to test the system adequately.

As usual, Wikipedia has a great summary of these concepts: Coupling, Cohesion.

Software developers strive to decrease coupling (less is better), and increase cohesion (more is better). Together, these two concepts are summarized in terms of orthogonality, which is the degree to which a system can be modified without introducing unintended changes to behavior.

“Orthogonality guarantees that modifying the technical effect produced by a component of a system neither creates nor propagates side effects to other components of the system.” (Wikipedia: Orthogonal)

Systems with low cohesion and high coherence are easier to understand and maintain. Low-cohesion/high-coherence systems are rare; developers blessed with caring for them are better able to respond to changes in system requirements, and the overall cost to the owner of the system is lower. Most systems have more cohesion than one wants, and less coherence than one wants. Software engineers often describe these systems as being ‘monolithic,’ implying that they cannot easily be deconstructed and modified.

In contrast, when thinking about music in terms of coherence and cohesion, it seems to me that musical compositions should be constructed in exactly the opposite manner than software systems. To the extent that there are any ’shoulds’ in music, musical compositions should exhibit great coupling, and very little cohesion. The example I described at the beginning of this post describes what it is like to experience a minimally-coupled and highly-coherent piece of music. The musical mind seeks repetition of some kind within a piece of music, a sense of continuity and direction. A piece that is written like software is disconnected, sounding like a collection of undeveloped ideas.

Being linguistically inclined, I thought it would be interesting to see what the antonym of orthogonal is, and what avenues of thought this word might open up when applied to music. I did some searching, and failed to find a suitable antonym for orthogonal. The dictionary sites I scoured came up with words like ‘irrelevant,’ ‘indirect,’ and ‘parallel,’ none of which remotely begin to summarize the high-cohesion/low-coherence quality I’m looking for in music. If such a word existed, it would be much more convenient than talking about “high-cohesion/low-coherence music.” “Incoherent” definitely means something other than “low-coherence” so that word is definitely out.

Of course, after mulling all this over, I realized that there are exceptions to my “high-cohesion/low-coherence” musical principle. There are sections of some pieces that are jarringly different than those surrounding them, that don’t seem to belong. And there’s plenty of beautiful music that is directionless, even apparently random. Over time, with repeated listening, the mind can ‘learn’ to appreciate pieces like this that seem to ‘break the rules.’ There are also different and more subtle qualities of music that can demonstrate cohesion and coherence that cannot be compared to software. It’s frustrating to try to reason about things like this; this exercise just convinces me further that it’s impossible to evade the subjectivity of music and art.

Nonetheless, in order for a piece to be enjoyable by someone other than the composer and a few oddballs, I think it’s safe to say that it needs some degree of self-similarity.

Whew.

So what else is new?

J.K. Rowling addressed Harvard’s class of 2008 and explained the power of failure.