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Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
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4:12 am - Science and faith
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Someone on Slashdot - that big frat party of nerd posturing and intellectual trolls - recently spouted something to which I felt compelled to reply.
"Science and faith are NOT intrinsically linked. Science and belief ARE. Science and faith are two completely separate things."
Upon re-reading, I felt that my reply was worth keeping around, so I'm pasting it over here:
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I have faith in the mechanisms of the scientific method, since I employ them every day in my working and personal endeavors. I have faith in the advice of my parents and in the character of my spouse, and faith that the universe can be described mathematically, up to a very fine point, beyond which we encounter pure chaos. Faith is not "generally" only applied to spirituality, unless you wish to isolate the word for specific use as a weapon against the virulent forms of spirituality that prey on the weaknesses of everyone stuck in the working class. Using the word that way is like using a hammer to teach piano lessons. In short, if your aim is to eliminate virulent and asinine religious practice, You're Doing It Wrong.
The inanity that Richard Dawkins et al wish to freight the word "faith" with - that it is belief despite a lack of evidence, or belief in spite of evidence - is a deliberate misunderstanding of the religious origins and use of the word. The faithful, those who would call themselves such with conviction, see their faith as a feeling of certainty that rests upon a foundation of what they consider to be very solid "evidence" indeed. To them, the intricate and lively world around them, in totality, constitutes evidence for their faith, as does their very presence in it, therefore no detail in the explanation of it could possibly reverse their conviction. Shout at them all you like that their "faith" is without evidence - they will fail to understand your meaning, and instead respond to your air of self-importance and superiority by calling you an asshole, or at the very least, a heretic.
Try it sometime and see if they don't.
Instead you need to recognize that you're going to have to approach the problem sideways: Do what you can to educate and empower these people, and leave your Us Versus Them faith/science logic sermons in the trash can. They will shed dangerous religion, by and large, just as you apparently have. Beyond that, you should have no quarrel with them anyway. Let them peacefully pray to any deity they like so long as they're smart enough to acknowledge that science is the best approach in matters of medicine, economics, history, etc.
Science and faith ARE intrinsically linked, for most people, one way or the other. Ask people the difference between belief and faith and you will probably just get a lot of head-scratching and shrugs. C'est la vie.
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Now don't get me wrong: I've devoured everything Richard Dawkins has published and own two of his "scarlet letter" t-shirts, which I wear with truculent pride. His explanations of the influence of genes in evolution are top-notch, and he makes a lot of excellent points against organized religion. But his book is written for an audience that does not intersect the group of people he lampoons with his usage of the word "faith". In other words, he is preaching to the choir ... and if he tells a choir that non-musicians are tone-deaf, who in a choir would bother to disagree?
Everyone, atheist or zealot, draws from the well of faith. The atheist just doesn't place any in the construct known as "god".
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| Monday, November 23rd, 2009
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3:29 pm - Bike Party - November 2009
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| Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
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11:22 pm - Halloween DnB Mix
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A few months ago I got into Drum'n'Bass in a big way. Then I found some long-form mixes by an online DJ named "Strepsil", and liked those very much. Then I saw the movie "Trick'r'Treat", and it all collided in my head and I decided to do a long-form Halloween-themed Drum'n'Bass mix. It's 70 minutes long.
Well, Halloween is more of a motif here really ... There is almost no halloween "themed" dnb. But I did my best. :)
AAC version, weighing in around 130MB: Halloween_DnB_Mix-AAC.m4a
Lossless version for you purists, at about 450MB: Halloween_DnB_Mix.m4a (dnb does not compress well)
The full tracklist is embedded in the "lyrics" tag of the file. It's also posted below.
Sometimes people like to listen to mixes without knowing what's coming up next, so they can be surprised. I dig that. I've posted the tracklist at the following link, so you don't see it accidentally.
Tracklist!
Technical notes:
- I like my dnb rather fast and noisy, so the whole set is at 166 bpm.
- All the songs involved in the mix are edited, some quite heavily.
- Some of the intermission bits and sfx are from vinyl and mp3 sources, but all the music is from lossless digital sources.
- This marks my first use of Ableton Live. My first impressions: It has excellent rhythm management and too few keyboard shortcuts.
- Post-production was done over in Audition 3 on Vista.
Share and enjoy!
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
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2:52 pm - Prop 13 again!
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A comment by "dave42" on this article is amusing to me.
"[Democracy] can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury." California will either overturn prop13, or it will fold in an economic collapse, with voters all the while insisting prop13 was not the problem. Prop13 might have worked, if it prevented legislators and voters from passing programs that cost money. However, since prop13 was enacted, voters and legislators repeatedly pass costly programs without the ability to pay for them. CA citizens think they can have their services without costs. Consider the current situation the beginning of a lesson in math and accounting.
I find it amusing because it draws attention to the discord between tax revenue and demand for funding. With property taxes fixed low by prop13, legislators didn't just sit back and tighten their belts, they instead started to drum up taxes by other means. So they hiked up income and sales taxes.
Prop13 supporters like to throw around a chart showing how the poor would have to start paying more property tax proportionally if 13 were to be repealed. But for every dollar they save in property tax, they are likely just losing it in sales tax. Where's the chart that shows how the poor are proportionally affected by sales tax?
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| Monday, November 16th, 2009
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1:58 am - A Bike Tour In Four Themes, Theme 2: Curiosity, continued
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| Saturday, November 7th, 2009
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6:06 pm - Where to live... (Or: More obsessing over money.)
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I was recently granted a raise at work. My earning power has now become higher than I honestly expected it to be, and when I first saw the new figure, I had to close my office door, turn off the lights, and sit on the floor quietly for a while, asking myself if I was actually okay with it. Besides meaning a higher paycheck, I felt it also demanded even harder work from me, and I wasn't sure how to react because before the raise - which came as a surprise - I had been actively contemplating the idea of leaving my career entirely and picking up something new, somewhere else. Even going back to school. A higher pay grade made the idea of leaving seem absurd. That was kind of a blow, because I'd grown fond of the idea.
But I also like my job. It already paid well, and now it pays surprisingly well. The hours are perfectly suited to me and the commute is tolerable. The work itself is compelling, and I'm appreciatd for it. The only problem is, there is just so much work to be done - an overwhelming amount of it - and every minute I'm not writing code I feel a little guilty - for keeping flaws around in a system that is my responsibility, a system that my whole department relies on, one that I can always improve to their immediate benefit. The situation brings out the workaholic in me, and strings me along through week after week of time spent indoors in the dark in a meditative state of mind. It's like jazz music - I love it and it's bottomless, but it can't be all there is.
So, I've thought about it some more, and realized that if I'm going to be doing this for the foreseeable future, and in some part for the sake of a large paycheck, then I need to do it in a way that allows a graceful exit. A way that allows me to counteract all this meditative work in one decade with a different way of life in another decade. That means saving money.
Right now I'm renting. The rent is "reasonable" for this area, primarily because La and I have a housemate. We don't really interact with him as a housemate, though, because he has his own entrance, bathroom, fridge, and living area. The size of the house makes it a pretty sweet deal for all of us.
Combined, the rent that the three of us pay is about 2/3 of what a 15-year mortgage payment would be, if we "owned" the house and were making payments on it. (This is assuming current market value, plus 15 percent cash down, and a 5% fixed APR. Pretty standard numbers.) It's also just under the amount we'd pay a month for a 30-year loan on the same percentages. When I studied these numbers, I found an interesting pattern.
For the sake of clarity, let's say the rent is $2000 a month, for the three of us combined. If we stayed here renting for fifteen years, we'd pay out $360,000 in rent. Then we'd walk out of the house, and move on. That's $360,000 paid, for the services rendered by the house.
Now let's say we're paying off a 15-year mortgage, at $3300 a month. Over the course of 15 years, $300 per month of that goes to property tax (1% per year on a $360,000 house in California), about $1000 of that per month is taken out by the bank as interest (more at first, less later, with some defrayed by tax breaks), and the other $2000 goes towards paying off the loan. At the end of fifteen years, we have our $360,000 loan paid off, and we've also paid $234,000 in interest and property tax, which we can consider the cost of "services rendered" by the house, just like renting.
It's easy to look at these numbers and say, "my gosh, owning is far superior to renting, because it's like paying $1300 in rent instead of $2000! And once it's paid off, it's $300 a month!"
But it's not that simple, really. For one thing, we'd be responsible for all upkeep, large and small. From a busted water heater to a new foundation. And even if we assume that everything works perfectly for fifteen years, there is something more important to consider: If we paid off a 15-year mortgage, we'd then have $360,000 of our money tied up in the value of the house. Is that where we really want $360,000 of our money?
I know, everyone SAYS that real estate values always go up. Even in the face of a huge financial implosion, there are still plenty of people saying, "well, now that the market has corrected, values will only go up ... from now on!" I'd laugh at these people if I didn't detect the obvious undertone of fear in their words. Sure, property values generally trend up. You know what else generally trends up? $360,000 in a savings account. It's called interest, and it's designed to counteract inflation. Will the $360,000 tied into a property do the same? There is no guarantee. If you are depending on the rise in value of your home to outpace the cost of living and hand you a sweet retirement, you're living in a dream that ended last century.
But I'm not here to rail against the tide of real-estate mania, as it swells up for another round. I have another point to make about renting, and about my specific situation. The factor that messes these statistics all up is that there are three of us living here, and the rent is divided three ways between us.
Well, technically, the rent is not quite three ways. La and I pay more than that. But for the sake of simplicity, let's say it's three ways. With our hypothetical numbers, two thirds of $2000 is about $1350 a month.
And there it is. $1350 versus $1300. Now all of a sudden, owning property isn't the clear win it seemed to be. We pay fifty bucks more a month, and in exchange, we don't have to worry about large-scale upkeep, and there are no realtor and bank fees to pay. Sure, after fifteen years, we could own the place, and get locked into a "rent" of $300 a month. (Property tax.) But you know what that means? It means staying here, in polluted, industrial, culture-free San Jose, for fifteen years, and then perpetually.
Ugh.
So if La and I are interested in saving money, and in eventually escaping the rat race, what can we do, that's better than what we're doing now? We have two options to work with - buy and rent. To stay renting and save more money, we'd have to take on another housemate. To buy and save more money, we'd have to buy a house less valuable - smaller and farther away from work - than this house. It's either that, or we become landlords. I have very little interest in becoming a landlord, and dealing with the pressure to recruit strangers to share living space with or face a mortgage payment larger than I can afford. I already have to deal with some of that here, and it's a pain in the ass. I don't even want to do it as a cabal, because the whole thing strikes me as a bit of a Ponzi scheme, after what happened last year.
But in this environment, you're either a renter, a landlord, or an owner. If I don't want to be a renter or a landlord, I have to consider ownership. So we're looking around for places to buy, but we're having a hard time, because of a little personal quirk we both have: We hate debt.
We want to be out of debt as absolutely soon as possible. And neither of us likes the idea of spending fifteen long years in downtown San Jose. What we really want is a place that provides an affordable commute time, and is cheap enough that we can take out a fifteen year loan and make double-payments on the sucker. But that means buying property in the $150,000 range or below. Most anywhere in the world, that would be easy. Around here, it is impossible. Even the houses on the fringe of the valley - beyond my commuting range - with sagging foundations and bad plumbing - are $200,000 or more.
So, we're looking, and hanging in there. We don't want to jump into the hamster wheel of debt but we have to, paradoxically, to save money. Other options have come to mind, but they've been unworkable so far. Put everything in storage and then live out of our van? Buy something up in the boonies and carpool? Cash out our stock and buy a boat in the Berkeley harbor, and live on that? Sell some of our furniture and locate a friendly vegan housemate who doesn't mind a tiny kitchen?
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| Friday, November 6th, 2009
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4:56 am - Debt: What's Wrong With America!! (Wherein I rant about debt)
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What a loaded headline. Now you expect whatever I write to be partisan garbage or a conspiracy theory. Well, what I'm writing about isn't really a conspiracy, more like a systemic problem. From my perspective - as a working-class person trying to find a way into the middle-class - the problem looks pretty big, and pretty obvious. In a word, the problem is debt.
Debt has taken the place of savings. As a result, we now pay banks interest, instead of banks paying us. That conditon, writ large, is enough to build a brick wall right in the middle of capitalism, bleeding the "middle class" down into the "lower class" for the sake of an "upper class". From credit cards to student loans to mortgages, private citizens are wearing an invisible yoke, tethered to the shareholders of banks, whose power now demonstrably outweighs the federal government. ... And the federal government is also, of course, deeply, perhaps irretrievably, indebted to banks as well.
It's not a conspiracy. That would involve a concerted effort to suppress information. The information isn't suppressed at all, instead it's screamed from the rooftops. It comes rolling out of the television, marching out of magazines, and pouring from the corners of every web page. It's the convenience of debt, offering people access to money they haven't saved.
I don't think there is anyone under 40 years of age who remembers the time when a credit card was considered an emergency device - a tool that a household could use to cover sudden unexpected debt, and hastily pay back afterwards. To the vast majority of people now, a credit card is a kind of inverse wallet. The interest fee is thought of as compensation for the convenience of electronic transactions. (Never mind that the credit card company also makes a percentage of the sale itself from the vendor.)
In June 2009, Bank of America had 150 billion dollars of outstanding credit card debt to collect interest on, at around nine percent. (A couple thousand of that was mine.) As of March 2009, total U.S. revolving consumer debt, made up almost entirely of credit card debt, was $950 billion. The average credit card indebted young adult household now spends nearly 24 percent of its income on debt payments. That means that 24 percent of everything they earn is routed through the credit card transaction system, and is subject to the vendor transaction fee (also known as the "discount rate"). So, ultimately, a little less than 1% of everything that household earns goes to the bank, even before interest comes into the picture.
Consider living without your credit card. I bet you don't even know how. I bet you don't even think it's possible. That should bother you.
Actually, credit cards are a relatively small part of the picture.
Remember when people saved up big hunks of money and then purchased land or homes outright? No, I don't either. Those days were gone almost a hundred years ago. But here in California where I live, if you want to buy property anywhere near where you work, you either need to be a member of the upper class with almost a million dollars cash, or you need to take on a mortgage that will claim a huge chunk of your household income as interest for thirty years - effectively turning you into an indentured servant of bank shareholders for almost your entire adult working life. Your way out of this is to spread the debt amongst your friends and family by living together, or amongst strangers by renting out parts of your property; spread the debt out and down in other words. Either way, the bank gets nearly double its money in the long run, and if you can't hack it, it will take the property and the interest you paid, and you will hit the road.
Sound fair? Like it or not, it's the way things are around here. Land is valued for its earning potential, which is paradoxically not measured by what's in or on the land, but by the industriousness and the influence of the people who wish to occupy it, or who occupy the regions nearby. That's the way it works anywhere near a city. In the country, the value may actually be in the soil ... but take any old cube of dirt in downtown Saratoga and airlift it to a valley in North Dakota, and suddenly it's worth 99 percent less money. The difference is bizarre.
In one way, it makes complete sense, and in another way, it makes absolutely no sense at all. But whether it makes sense is beside the point. The point is this: People need to live somewhere. They need to occupy a minimum of space in order to function, and all their options for satisfying that need fall within the extremes of country and city: They can either live where land is cheap, and earn less money, or they can live where land is expensive, and make more. Rent scales accordingly. Unless you have a huge amount of money up front - enough money to match the perceived value of the land you seek - you will either be paying interest to a bank, or rent to a landowner, who in turn is probably paying interest to a bank.
Around here that's a thousand dollars in interest, or more, every month, ... or more in rent. You will pay that money for occupying space near the building where you generate wealth. The owner of the land you occupy will likely have almost nothing to do with the company that employs you, or the institution where you learned your skills. Yet they will reap massive benefits from your need to occupy space.
This is where La and I are stuck right now. We've got the credit card thing sorted out, but now we need to figure out how to escape the vortex of rent and/or mortgage rates that is sucking even more of our income away from us and into the hands of banks. Buying property around here almost seems like giving up - putting on that 15-year yoke of interest payments voluntarily, so the 2% on top of us - with 95% of the world's wealth - can spend another generation skiing in Switzerland and shopping in Paris. Why let them have it?
There has got to be some way out.
If I was one of those people who was already in the middle class, and had half a million dollars in cash to work with, I could buy a house outright, here, pay $300 a month property tax on it while I work, fix it up real nice, and then sell the house and bail right out of the situation with an extra $300,000 when I'm done, plus all the rest of my savings wouldn't necessarily have to be stuck in home equity. They could be in stocks, in an IRA, or even just in a damn savings account.
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(20 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, November 2nd, 2009
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7:26 pm - Hlaughalghhgllafgh!
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La is going to be on the east coast for ten days starting this Wednesday. She's cooking me a pile of good food so I won't have to worry about feeding myself, but: I have no idea what to do with myself for this timeframe.
Right now I'm considering the idea of a long multiple-stop bike ride, or a visit down to Los Angeles and Carlsbad, or some combination, but ... no good plans.
Help!
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| Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
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2:42 pm - Cat cat cat cat cat
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With all the geeks I know, I'm suddenly surprised that I have not yet been introduced to a pet cat named "Fuzz Factor".
That is all. Now back to work! :D
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| Saturday, October 17th, 2009
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2:26 am - BIIKKE PAAARTAAAAAY OCTOBER 2009
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| Friday, October 16th, 2009
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3:35 am - PUNK RAWK
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Wig found by La. Lights via mail order. Zipties via Fry's Electronics. Batteries via cabinet drawer.
All ready for Bike Partay!!
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
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1:18 am - A Bike Tour In Four Themes, Theme 2: Curiosity
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| Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
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5:14 am - A Bike Tour In Four Themes, Theme 1: Amusement
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| Sunday, October 11th, 2009
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4:28 am - A bike tour in four themes: Introduction
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A bike tour in four themes:
Amusement, Curiosity, Discomfort, Happiness
Introduction (written on the last day):
I went on vacation to get away from it all and I certainly have. I've also had plenty of time to think about what I'm doing and why, and it's occurred to me that touring by bike, especially alone, is a unique experience, and the way that experience feels depends mostly on how populated the route is. I deliberately chose a route that went through some of the most remote geography that I could find, up to the limits of my gear and carrying capacity. I wanted to get out into the middle of nowhere, and encounter as few people as possible on the way. I tried to make a route like that through California, but all the sparsely populated parts of California are sparse for good reasons. They are all either too steep, too dangerous, or unpaved. One of the reasons I settled on Oregon - the eastern portions especially - was because it appeared to be the flattest and also some of the most remote territory I could find without having to deal with transporting a recumbent bike on the train system. (It is possible to transport a recumbent bike by train, if you disassemble it. However, I was going to be traveling to a place where, once I arrived, I would have no safe way to reassemble it and keep track of all my other luggage at the same time.) But the flatness part turned out to be inaccurate. I've spent eight hours on the bike most days, and probably almost half of that time toiling slowly up hills steep enough to require first gear. Part of the problem is that I didn't survey the area I would be biking through with my own two eyes, and instead I relied on Google Earth, which reports height data correctly but only to a certain granularity. It smoothed the hills right out of most of the terrain I examined.
The other problem is that I thought I would be able to go up shallow hills with no trouble at all, but I underestimated the drag that all of this hardware creates on the bike. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything I could do about it. I went through my packing list many times, and aside from one pair of ski gloves and a couple of pairs of shorts, there wasn't anything that I could have left out. I had to carry at least this much weight if I wanted to camp, and I had to be able to camp if I was going to travel through wilderness. Speaking of camping, I've very much enjoyed the seven days that I was able to camp. The sites have been lovely. The gear has worked well, too. The tent is easy to set up, the sleeping bag is warm and roomy enough, and the mattress is easy to deploy. But the tent, bag, and mattress are very large items. They occupy the whole back half of the bicycle, with just a little space remaining for laundry and a spare tire. Combined, they also weigh more than everything else I brought, so I'm riding with at least double my usual weight. The consequence of this is that I spend a long time crawling up hills that I am interested in for significantly less time than it takes to climb them. It's also a problem when I'm going down the only paved road, and roads that branch off it may lead to interesting things, but they're all gravel or dirt and would be brutal on my tires. So I'm very disinclined to actually explore these side roads, and I just keep trucking along instead. But despite the weight, I actually made excellent time. In addition to being ridiculously comfortable, the recumbent bike also carries the weight of luggage much better than an upright bike. None of it is on the handlebars, and most of it is lower to the ground. The only downside is the additional sun exposure you get from being in a reclined position. I spent two weeks riding through desert, and discovered that sunburn is much more the problem than the heat is. If I have almost all of my body covered by thin cloth, I can keep cool by dumping water on myself and letting the constant breeze created by the motion of my bike evaporate the water. I actually end up cooler than if I was standing around in shorts and no shirt. In the town of Christmas Valley I bought a pair of glove liners that cover my hands, and so the sunburn on my hands was a temporary thing, but the burns on my nose and cheeks got pretty severe, and I had to tear up one of my spare shirts to make a second, heavier bandanna for my face. But seriously, I should have expected this, because I am deliberately biking through desert, and during the hottest time of year, and I'm doing it during a time when the UV exposure is bad enough for the weather service to publish a health alert about it. I budgeted 30 miles a day maximum for most days, and it turns out that even with all these hills in the way I can actually pedal the bike for a full eight hours, and take myself fifty miles or more, provided I take time to stretch, and lie flat on the ground every once in a while. Of course I have to be careful lying on the ground because every time a car comes by the driver gets worried that I have passed out in the heat. So, in practice, I can lay down for about ten minutes average, and then when I hear a car approaching, I have to get up and act like I'm rearranging my luggage, because if I don't, they'll stop and I'll feel bad for making them stop and they'll feel silly for stopping, and yadda yadda. One time I was just leaning against the wheel and didn't bother getting up, and sure enough the car stopped. I had to thank and compliment them for stopping. The last thing I want to do is erode their willingness to help, since it might save my life one day. In summary, it was a lot easier than I expected, and a lot of fun. Would I do this again? Definitely. If I had the time, I would do it every couple of months. Not this exact route again, but something like it. Or something longer.
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3:58 am - This has been bothering me for days
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La and I began buying stock on the employee purchase plan the second I got my job at Apple. Two hundred bucks was automatically taken out of every paycheck I received, and placed in a fund which was then used to purchase stock. We began doing that because we had good feelings about how the company was going to perform over a long haul - years at least.
A week or so ago I was sitting at my desk thinking about this, and about the hatchet-job that the deregulated loan and stock markets have just done on the economy, and a question popped into my head. I have been unable to find a good answer for it so far. The question is this:
Why is ANYONE allowed to purchase stock in a company for ANY amount of time LESS than a year?
We have a stock market system that is basically a gambling house, stuffed with cons and shills and day-traders, clawing at public perception for the sake of a one-week purchase window, doing nothing but sucking money out of the system. This is almost entirely because they can buy stock and sell it in a matter of days, even minutes. That is not enough time for a company's real-world fortunes to grow or shrink; not even enough time for the brokers involved to get their damned facts straight. It makes absolutely no sense at all. I want to know why stock purchases aren't always, ALWAYS locked in for a year at least, allowing the company you purchased stock from to actually do something with the money, and if you want to sell earlier than that you should be allowed to receive ONLY the money you put back in, or less.
There are early-withdrawal penalties on all kinds of financial transactions. Why the hell aren't there any on stock trading?
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, October 10th, 2009
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7:20 pm - Happy fishaversary fishie-la!
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Seven years since we met. You have filled those seven years with light and purpose. You are my best friend and my beloved. I travel, and I have my time alone, but those times are only as sweet as they are because of how they begin and end: A contemplative walk in the woods is a different thing, when you can finish it by stepping back onto the porch of your warm, shining house; a very different thing from a walk in the woods that ends in a cold night on the forest floor. Even nine-hundred miles away on the seat of a bicycle, with nothing between me and the world but shorts and a helmet, I have felt the warmth of you and our home, glowing in my mind, making me more than I am. A part of our team. An agent for your vision of the world as well as my own.
Here's to you, fishiela! Here's to you, and the amazing things you are, and have been, and will be. I'd kiss you on your brain, but that would be messy. I'll kiss you on your lips instead. And on other bits.
Hee hee hee!
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, October 9th, 2009
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4:14 am - A neat thing I learned today
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It's all down to a simple molecular process, happening a trillion times over inside your body:
This process, in a nutshell, is why long-distance bicyclists don't stand up in their pedals, and never attempt to "power their way up" a hill. If you have, say, 2000 calories of food percolating in your body and you need to ride as far as you can, burning those 2000 calories in a breathless rush will get you 30 miles -- but burning them aerobically will get you 90 miles or more.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Friday, September 25th, 2009
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4:44 am - Faxanadu Soundtrack
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A while ago I got interested in obtaining a high-quality version of the music to the old Nintendo game Faxanadu. I searched high and low, but could only find some crappy MP3s. I considered the idea of using an emulator to make mathematically "perfect" emulations of the sound chip in the NES, but once I realized that Mr. Beatings actually had a physical copy of the game, I could go right to the source, and sample the hardware itself. So I did. Weird Stuff had an old NES sitting in a back room, and they sold it to me for twenty bucks. Then I got ahold of directions for modding it to produce "stereo" sound - or at least, to separate the sounds that the Nintendo could create into two separate channels. So I cracked open the case and soldered some wires. Then I hooked this Franken-Box up to a tiny television set and my firewire audio box, and started playing Faxanadu. Having the raw audio wasn't enough, though. I wanted it to be a good listen, and I wanted to personalize it a little. So I applied some sneaky stereo imagery filtering to the audio tracks, and took a low-pass version of the bassline and doubled it down an octave. I threw in some in-game sound effects. Then I "remixed" two of the tracks, by dropping in some old Braindead Monkeys loops. I also took pictures of the mod process, and the game on the little television screen, and turned those into track-by-track "album art". The result is available in full, below. Note that these are 48Khz lossless encodings (downsampled from 96Khz). They can't be burned to an audio CD without being downsampled to 44, but they will play on any computer, and any decent portable audio player made in the last six years or so, including all iPods. Altogether this release is about 20 minutes long. NES games weren't known for long soundtracks. Let me know what you think!
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, September 24th, 2009
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4:51 pm - Spoooooky Sampling
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I left my iPod at home accidentally, so I did a quick web search and found a bunch of hip-hop mixes.
"DJ Martial Flaw" made a mix called "Death Poetry" several years back and posted it online. Buried in the middle you can hear someone say "Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
It sounded familiar, so I googled it. Yep, it's from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
About an hour later the mix was finished and I was sitting around in silence. I opened iTunes on my work computer to see if there was anything there, and found a rip of DJ Toasty's "7 Inches of Toast". So I started that.
About an hour later I reach track 30 of the mix. Its ten seconds long, and it's Ferris Bueller. He says:
"Yep. I said it before and I'll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
What is it with today?!
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
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12:33 am - Fun with hybrids and math
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Sierra Autocars offers a "certified" used 2006 Honda Accord, with 35,000 miles on it, for $14,000.
This vehicle gets 29mpg average between highway and city driving.
Sierra Autocars also offers a brand new 2009 Honda Civic Hybrid, with 0 miles on it, for $24,320.
This vehicle gets 43mpg average.
(Sierra does not offer "used" hybrids. No one does.)
Purchased outright (with no loan and interest payments), the used Accord costs $10,320 less than the new hybrid.
The hybrid goes 43 miles on one gallon of gas. To go 43 miles in the used Accord, it would take approximately 1.5 gallons of gas. A gallon of gas costs about $3.20.
So if you bought the Accord instead of the hybrid, you would lose $1.60 for every 43 miles you drove.
How far would you need to drive the Accord before you burn through the money you saved up front?
$10320 price difference, divided by $1.60, times 43 miles, equals 277,350 miles.
So you'd have to drive the accord 277,350 miles, or until the odometer reads 312,350, before the Accord becomes a poorer deal.
I don't think hybrid vehicles will be in my life for the next couple of years.
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(14 comments | comment on this)
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