Rich Seymour’s stochastic statements.

My Dad was telling me the other night to go look up the articles page on Gene Fields’ GFI website. So I did, here is a link to it. Interesting articles on him working for Fender R&D. Little known fact, he designed the awesome and rare Fender Starcaster guitar… seen here:

courtesy of DK.

The world should always pay attention to a new pedal from Z. Vex. This is his take on a high compression distortion here. That’s just a bunch of video demos of the pedal which has yet to be released.

Speaking of unreleased pedals, this Ping Pong Delay should be coming out from Build Your Own Clone this month (Feb 2008). I don’t quite get if it has a stereo out, though… Which I thought was the point of ping pong delays::

I build the BYOC DOD 440 clone and it rules. It’s a funky envelope filter. They’ve also updated that and put a video up of that too, but you’ll have to find that yourself.

Be well, rock on.

PS Obama won my congressional district!

With a cool video:

Mostly I’ve been blogging on the Clark 8 blog over at MySpace… but… this is still here and it’s nicer. Umm… yeah. So there you go.

I haven’t updated this blog in a while, but I haven’t forgotten about it. There’s always stuff going on, either here [Clark 8] or here (Sounds of Asteroth). Recently I’ve been screen printing t-shirts, gone to a roller derby match (fun! go Laura), gone to tons of shows (Jessie Deluxe, LKN, Wake up incinerate, forcefield on, the soft hands, etc.etc.), done some simulations (NOT ENOUGH!!) and hmm… tried to stay sane. So far it seems to be working.

This may stand as the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard of all year. Perhaps Boston has to stay paranoid since letting those guys onto those jets 5 years ago. “Information at this time suggests that the devices found do not pose a threat to public safety”

Dude… I mean… just judging by places where things blow up all the time, the entire key is that they never look suspicious. Never. Ever. Not to mention the physical size of the devices, about the size of an LP record… how could this possibly pose a threat? There’s no way to shape the charge to do anything if it’s flat.

Did the Boston PD just not have their coffee or something? It sort of sounds like it in the interview. No one in “New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco or Philadelphia.” freaked out. I can just imagine the escalation of this through the ranks must’ve been the most hilarious series of unfortunately dumb events.

Am I supposed to feel safer because a police department can’t understand the difference between contemporary ‘guerrilla’ marketing and terrorism?

Remember right after 9/11 when someone put black boxes with “FEAR” written on them in the NYC subways as their freshman art project? It’s clear the outcome of that noncase that… the Boston PD has one organization to blame for this commuting mishap… themselves. As a note, he did get a community service sentence.

“This has taken a significant toll on our resources.” … Ah… so nutrageous.

And this too:

Photo’s of the construction of one of these light boxes

Well, not so much krumping, at least in public.

But yeah, you know… Same old same old… I have pondered trying to play even more music in lieu of eating or something. It’s sort of worked, more attempts at songcraft, with more people. I have begun to feel that working out tunes by playing solo works the best. While at the same time Clark 8 is sounding better and better, but without any shows that I’ve booked. Need to get on that.

Ok. So let me just start and end this post like this:

“We go forward with trust that the Author of Liberty will guide us through these trying hours. Thank you and good night.” -GWB

Maybe this explains it…

Ok… well, You know, no athiests in foxholes and all that, but umm… couldn’t he have taken at least some guidance from all the people Keith Olbermann mentions at the end of this video?

Also, saw Emperor X, Applied Communications, and Lou Barlow at the smell last night. They were all pretty good. Oh Lou and his love songs though…

Let’s see. I have been working rather heavily this past week. School has started again. USC lost its kicker, and may now lose its coach. I bought a good new bicycle pump. Got a volume pedal for my steel guitar (and some steel guitar knowledge) thanks Dad, a new leatherman thanks Mom (no thanks NTSA), socks (thanks again Mom), and a cast iron wok (thanks John).

Had a great trip back home. Friends and family visits. Saw my boys in Smackdab rock out on Christmas, and got to listen to the Audience practice and hear their upcoming LP in an unmixed state. It rocks. Saw a lot of friends from nearly a decade ago.

Then to continue my east coast jet settin’ I met up with some of the old Columbia squadron to rock out in Allston, MA. That was most excellent, wrote some new tunes and pondered the meaning of life over coffee and donuts.

Saw my friends get married in Philadelphia. It was a beautiful ceremony (short and sweet and at the Penn Museum), good food, a good band, then hanging with the wedding party (100% strangers minus the bride, groom, and parents) singing karaoke, meeting an Iraq vet with battle scars (IEDs do a number to flesh and bone) who’s still hangin’ tough, and enjoying the public transit from the Philadelphia airport.

Got into LA on the 31st and had a great time, ended up at the Echo with some new and old friends… then over to KPFK to chill with Seep (from Rolax records) and Steve of the show Mood 2 Swing till… 5 or something in the AM. Good times, thanks to my LA buds for introducing me to these folks. It’s not often you run into people who know all of the same insane music and loads more. Not to mention create it. Interesting that while KPFK seems like a sort of fly by night operation run by conspiracy theorists, it’s a really nice radio station. I mean, yeah, well you know what I mean. The music’s great and a good portion of the political commentary is reasonable and insightful… but some is just insanity.

So then I really got to business, righted my sleeping schedule and my coworkers and I kicked off our annual Computational Science Workshop. It rocked, I hope the participants enjoyed it because I did, in spite of the major time commitment.

Now back to research and school and music with renewed focus and motivation.

In a word: pizazz.

So, I was pondering the significance of a penny I dropped today and left on the ground as a seepage of cash from the U.S. economy and I thought… how bad would it be if everyone in the US was losing a penny a month:
295,734,134 [people in US] * 12 [pennies / year] = $35,488,096.08 [per year]

So now I see this news (also note: Bush thinks redesigning currency for the blind would cause undue hardship to the vending machine industry now that’s foresight) via bb that the U.S. now has new rules outlawing the melting of pennies (since they are worth more as metal than as coinage, once you get past a certain volume even moreso for nickels). Please note, we live in a world where people get by picking through other people’s garbage, sometimes their neighbor’s garbage, sometimes another country’s garbage…

So back to the point, let’s say you had a scheme to make 12 cents for ever dollar in pennies you melt, off of free energy you get from burning the rubber insulation from thrown out electrical cables. You would have to melt $83,333.34 in pennies to make this crime break even with the maximum fine of $10,000 (this assumes that the 5 year jail time is nothing, because you have crazy time on your hands anyway)… And if you don’t get caught you have $10k. Now I would like to see how this could possibly be true in any way shape or form as it seems that the alloyed center and plated faces of pennies and nickels would be a monster to try and sort out from a stoichiometric standpoint of how do I get a mound of each individual metal in a high enough purity, but at this point you begin to see the absurdity of this legislation in the face of the first monetary guess of the US straight losing $34M in pennies each year.

According to my guesstimate of each man woman and child losing one penny per month in this great country, we have then ~425 people who could do this scheme and perhaps form an underground network of renegade metallurgists starting penny and nickel derived metal suppliers.

Or we could just drop the penny and nickel from currency in general, have their value go up as collectibles in eBayland and we all sit pretty. Or maybe mint a Franklin 18 cent piece for good measure and drop the dime.

Or we could actually get that inflation starts with the whole printing money (in all its various guises) thing that the government likes to do in order to buy stuff on a ‘no money down, no payments till somebody else is in charge’ payment plan that seems to work for just about everyone in the U.S.

Or we could just laugh.

So… first, Scott “Spot” Draves’ work has always enlightened me, but here (google vid) is the first time I’ve seen his work explained for a nearly layman audience… err well a crowd of people who work at Google Inc. So I guess the audience isn’t exactly 1st graders.

Scott Draves first came on my radar with his electric sheep screensaver, which was just so darn cool. His work with Iterated Fractal Systems still blows people’s minds. I see his early images show up on del.icio.us and reddit even though they’re nearly a decade old. His current stuff is higher resolution and even cooler. Watch the video, I think you’ll like it.

Ok, and then, this thing: Miss Russian Army beauty contest which I just stumbled upon randomly looking for a cool mil.ru logo. I could go into depth on the variety of footwear that seems out of place in full combat uniform in the first pic, …but I won’t. I wouldn’t want people thinking I have some sort of fascination with women and guns… … … . Well… uh…