Another version of Little Wing - on a Chapman Stick

Funny, but a couple weeks back I posted a live video of Stevie Ray Vaughan playing Little Wing and I just ran across this unique interpretation of the same song on a crazy looking stringed instrument called a Chapman Stick. I'm not exactly sure how the instrument is strung or tuned, but it seems like it's got both bass and guitar strings strung together on the same fretboard. Anyhow I thought this was pretty cool. Bob Culbertson is the musician here.

Afghanistan

I found this perspective interesting.

What the Soviets were saying about Afghanistan 20+ years ago

SRV - Little Wing

Here's a live version of Stevie Ray Vaughan playing Little Wing - my favorite tune that he plays, and probably my all-time favorite guitar instrumental. There are similarities to the studio version, but quite a bit of differences too. This is a cover of a Hendrix tune (there are some cool live versions of Hendrix playing this out on youtube also to give you an idea of how close SRV's interpretation is to Hendrix's).

You can see he has trouble getting his amp to feedback for him in places. At the end it goes into a different song.

There aren't many songs like this one. It's somewhat unique even among SRV's stuff - maybe "Lenny" is the most similar - but there's just not much that sounds like this.

Google Books Project

Click the link to read Google co-founder Sergey Brin's op-ed on the value of Google's controversial proposed online book library for out of print books.

He claims over 10 million books are now out of print and are increasingly difficult to find even in the best stocked libraries. It really is an ambitious project to make knowledge more accessible to everyone - and to prevent some books from being lost forever.

(I've read recent articles that libraries now regularly have to cull the shelves due to space constraints and the increasing volume of new material. Sorry, I don't have a link on that, but read it in NYTimes maybe year or two ago if you're the investigative type. After reading the article I did a search of the local Nashville public library system also and found some of the so-called classics aren't available here either presumably due to similar culling processes over the year. Apparently the many of the classics weren't being requested very often and ended up on the cull piles due to their unpopularity.)

Brin on the agreement with the Author's Guild and Publishers:

This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.

Richard Leo Johnson - Glidepath

I was looking through one of my songwriting books and the name "Richard Leo Johnson - Glidepath" scratched on a page. I sometimes will jot cool things down when I see them - I guess I saw him on a TV show somewhere. For Richard Leo Johnson I wrote down "cool guitar-strum technique - reminds me some of Auten music on cable access." (the Auten mention is probably guitarist D.R. Auten - he's the only D.Auten I can find reference to on the web.)

I looked up a video for Glidepath and here's what I found. I still think it's awesome.


Here's a tune from D.R. Auten I found on youtube I thought was cool.

Thomas Friedman

One of my favorite journalists is Thomas Friedman. To me he has a refreshingly practical common-sense approach to his writing that fits well with his insightful and not-always-obvious observations that strike at the core of issues.

Here his most recent op-ed "Real Men Tax Gas" discusses how we are still unwilling to take steps to reduce our dependence on oil - the one thing that would weaken our enemies the most. The essential crux of his argument: Why are we so willing to send thousands of more young Americans to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan, but so unwilling to seek energy alternatives to oil? And what does that say about us?

There are arguments on both sides of this, and there are certainly valid arguments that it's not all about oil... but Friedman as usual hits on a key point that has gone largely un-addressed.

How We Decide - by Jonah Lehrer

"How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer finally became available at the library (long-long hold list) and I read it over the past few days. I'd requested it so long ago that I forgot about it. I remember seeing the author on C-Span book-TV and must've requested the book and am very glad I did.

"How We Decide" is a popular science book that attempts to summarize many recent neurological experiments that highlight new findings about BRAIN function, coordination, strengths, weaknesses, limitations, and ultimately how we arrive at decisions incorporating input from all the different parts of our brain.

It's full of stories about poker (getting reads on other players), consumer decisions (like buying a car, buying a house, buying jam, using credit cards, how we're manipulated by marketers and retailers), military decisions, airline emergency scenarios, quarterback decisions, stock market bubbles and crashes, rationalization, creativity, autism, and many others.

Key concepts.
- The author and the studies presented attack the prevailing conventional wisdom that humans are primarily rational decision makers. If anything, the research utilizing real-time brain scans seems to indicate that our older emotional brains often make decisions before we're aware of it, and then our conscious mind tends to rationalize those decisions "after the fact".
- The author sees the subconscious and older emotional brain centers as a highly powerful computer that picks and considers alot of things that our conscious mind is unaware of. There's alot of power our "gut" feeling about things - and often if we try to rationalize our gut instinct we end up making more mistakes than just going with our initial impressions.
- There are significant limitations to our conscious rational mind (prefrontal cortex)- and it's far more limited than we realize. It's a small part of the brain's mass and it's really best at coordinating the work of the unconscious mind. (Some of the discussions/research reminds me of the futility of multitasking when we see how small stresses on our conscious mind degrade functionality and decision capacity).

Anyhow - this is an excellent book. The best read I've had in a long time. One of the few books I come across that isn't "padded" with fluff. When it was finished I was actually wishing there was more. There are lots of "Wow!" and "Aha" moments in reading through. I'm going to check out his other books.

Memory

I guess we like to think we remember things, but maybe we mis-remember them better?

I played in a corporate band challenge about 5 months back and recently watched a video of that performance. Alot of the performance was kindof like I remembered, but then there was the judging section at the end (kindof like American Idol) where a panel of local celebs and music industry people evaluated our performance. I sortof remembered the general theme what they said, but on rewatching the video I realize my mind had stored several of the comments quite a bit differently. I think the process of replaying the comments in my head after the performance may have gradually changed my memory of the comments themselves. (Like the game where you line up a bunch of people and whisper a story into one person's ear, and they whisper to their neighbor, and so on.... When you get to the end the story may have changed quite a bit just through the retelling.)

I've seen quite a few studies about how memories of an event can easily evolve over time to become considerably different than what actually occurred, but here's a very interesting study that shows that in some cases you can actually come to believe the exact opposite of something you directly experienced. Here researchers doctored a videotape of test subjects and successfully convinced 40% of them that something happened that didn't. Basically the researchers showed that we can be led to completely abandon real memories and replace them with fake memories. And get this - many of the test subjects were so convinced of the new fake memory that they would say they'd testify that the fake memory was the actual truth...

Night Vision "drops"

I read alot of pop-science related stuff, but for some reason this caught my imagination. Apparently scientists have determined that some deep sea creatures utilize chlorophyll to enhance their vision in extremely low light conditions.

Efforts are underway to see if "drops" can be developed to allow humans to see better at night. The military is particularly interested.

One Way ticket to Mars

Here's an interesting discussion - should a human mission to Mars be a one way trip?

It seems kindof cold to me, but worth reading.

Japan elects new government in landslide

I didn't know they were voting, but Japan had a major overturn in government in recent voting. I love this quote from the NYTimes article:

“This vote is about making a system where parties that fail get kicked out,” said Yoshiyuki Kobayashi, 40, one of the white-collar corporate workers known here as salarymen. “We need to teach politicians to be nervous.”

Sci-Fi at it's best: District 9 movie review

I took today off from work and my wife and I went to the early showing of the Sci-Fi film "District 9". I thoroughly enjoyed this compelling film which is told from a limited point of view but still manages to convey the broader context of the story and world very effectively.

Like the best in sci-fi "District 9" manages to create enough distance between real world issues to create fresh perspective, while at the same time speaking directly to these very real world issues. "District 9" has alot to say about human nature, especially human tribalism, immigration, race, civil liberty, security, torture ... and to a degree speaks to human base responses to fear of the unknown. "District 9" also shows civilization to be a thin and fragile veneer on top of an ugly survivalist biology. Given the opportunity we will seemingly all-to-easily do bad things.

While there's alot of gunfighting in the second half of this film, I credit the writers for not letting this film fall into the rut of becoming a predictable shoot-em-up. Too many sci-fi films create a vivid new world in the first half only to have the second part of the film trudge into a dull blow-stuff-up-and-save-the-world absurdity (or even worse B-grade horror film schlock). "District 9" thankfully does NOT go there. All of the action - and even gore - springs naturally from the storyline. The cast of flawed characters behave appropriately throughout, and seem even at ease with the roles and ugliness inherent in them. The film is thoughtful throughout. Revealing throughout. And it is engaging throughout. The world and movie always feel believable and "real."

The special effects are also incredible. A ton of credit has to go to the actors for pulling off the scenes that have the aliens in them. The alien creatures in this film fit in seemlessly with the landscape and the actors respond appropriately - as if the aliens were actually there.

Bottom Line: I say go watch this movie. If you don't go to the theater at least put this on your Netflix queue.

New Song - rough version - and make the best

Here's a song I've had sitting on my PC for several weeks. It's really pretty rough, but I think the general idea of the song comes through. It's really just a slow strum that I just hummed along to for the longest time - and it might have not even had lyrics, but I put a reference to a verse by Marcus Aurelius near the end.

Here's the song: ...and make the best

Message in a Bottle

I hadn't posted in a while, and thought to track down a video today I remember from high school. I couldn't find the performance of this that I was thinking of, but this shortened acoustic version of "Message in a Bottle" performed by Sting is pretty dang good, so I wanted to post.

The version I was trying to find had Sting just playing this song solo with his bass - at least that's how I remember it - but I can't find that version. This is very good though.



And here is another very good version - apparently way back from 1981.