Here I am playing, of all things, my rendition of The Doxology ("Praise God from Whom all blessings flow...") on 12-string.  Okay, that's neither prog nor experimental (I'll say) but it was followed by other stuff that was.

The remarkable photographic skill is from Stu Cameron of progressive rock radio show The Odyssey on The Dividing Line.

(This sounds so much like a classic Fusco Brothers comic: Oooh! I'm so mad I'm going to write a letter to the editor! How do you spell "persnickety"?)

A little background: The historic Varsity Theater on University Avenue in Palo Alto has been a Border's Bookstore for, oh, about a decade or so. Borders has since gone bankrupt and closed all their stores, including this one, so there has been a discussion about what to do with the building. Some would like it to be office space, some would like it back as a theater, some would like it to be retail.

One of the local newspapers, the Palo Alto Daily Post, ran an article and an editorial this week suggesting that those who want to see the Varsity back as a theater should give up because the owner of the building has, correctly, pointed out that the cinima business is not too good right now and there's lots of competition nearby.

So here's my response. The version that was published in the newspaper was edited substantially.

And some intrepid musicians have hacked the keyboard manufacturers' logos to personalize them. Let's take a look at some examples.

Here's one of my favorite musicians, Sigmund Snopek of Milwaukee. You can see how he's tweaked the Roland logo on his keyboard to express his ethnic heritage. Excellent.

And here's Ron Mael of the band Sparks on Saturday Night Live. He's swapped two letters on his Roland keyboard to spell out his first name. Clever.

And finally (here it comes...) here's Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls with her Kurzweil...

Yeah!

Having just done some travelling, I'd like to see some of the presidential candidates get behind this simple proposal:

"Abolish the TSA"

The arguments are compelling:

• TSA screening operations are a word-for-word literal violation of the fourth ammendment.
• Contrary to the fundamental principles of the US government, the TSA has no mechanisms of checks and balances, no mechanisms to limit its power, and no mechanisms for the public to redress greviences.
• TSA policies are completely ineffective. The TSA has never thwarted a terrorist operation, and nobody believes that it ever will.
• Since the TSA security procedures are spec'd, so would be terrorists know exactly what they need to work around to pull something off.
• The TSA costs $8 billion per year. And growing.
• The TSA has been shown to negatively impact general commerce, to be harmful to the airline business, and cause an increase in the use of less appropriate and more dangerous automobile travel as travellers avoid airports.

We still need some form of airplane security, of course, but it should be something that has a chance of being effective.

I'll suggest replacing the TSA with a much simpler system:

"Cops and servicemen fly for free".

This would be a round-robin voucher-based system, with spending limited to 1/10 the current TSA budget. The statistical chance of a police officer or serviceman on any given flight would be pretty high; and the combination of their presence and an alert flying public has a much better chance of taking down any terrorist plan than the TSA ever could.

And right now, with an upcoming election, is the time for candidates to step up. I thing that an "Abolish the TSA" platform would pretty much secure the air traveller vote (maybe about 150 million citizens in the US) at the expense of the TSA worker vote (a little more than 50,000 people).

Harold Edgerton, Death of a Light Bulb, 1936

This is a slightly improved version of a short article I posted on Ricochet a couple days ago called "Incandescent Bulbs Might Not Actually Be Evil".

The topic is the Federal Incandescent Light Bulb Ban, also known as the The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (like it matters what they call these things nowadays). California has a similar law that went into effect at the beginning of this year.

I want to point out how the fundamental premise of this legislation is completely backwards.

The efficiency of a light bulb, regardless of the technology, is the ratio of visible light output to total power consumed. The inefficient part, the power consumed that isn't light, is dissipated as heat. By that metric, flourescent lamps are generally three or four times as efficient as incandescent lamps. And sure enough, flourescent lamps get warm to the touch, and incandescent lamps can be quite hot, and the heat warms the surrounding air.

But... light bulbs are not used in an abstract theoretical vacuum, they operate in people's living environments. The heat energy that a lamp produces is only wasted if it is not of use. If the lamp's heat output contributes to warming the house to the desired temperature, then absolutely none of the heat energy of the lamp is actually wasted.

Given that the average US temperature is around 53 degrees, and that people like their houses at something like 70 degrees, that's 17 degrees worth of temperature increase, over the big average, that incandescent lamps have an opportunity to contribute toward.

And when one considers how they are typically used, incandescent lamps operate quite optimally in a typical residential environment:

• Light bulbs are naturally used much more in the shorter daylight hours of the winter when the extra warmth is needed, and less in the longer daylight hours of the summer when the heat is not.
• Likewise on a smaller time scale, light bulbs are naturally used much more at night when the outside temperatures are colder.
• Light bulbs are mostly used in the rooms of the house as those rooms are occupied, while central heating warms the entire house.
• Compared to forced air heating, incandescent lamps provide heat directly into the room without having to go through lossy ductwork under the house.

None of these real life issues is considered with a simple lamp efficiency rating. Depending on the usage details, often switching from incandescent lighting to flourescent lighting, keeping the inside temperature and all other factors the same, will increase residential heating bills. And in many cases even increase the sum of heating and electric bills.

(So an unclear-on-the-concept scenario would be a fellow sitting in a room lit by CFL lamps and using a space heater to keep warm. Another unclear-on-the-concept scenario is one I've actually seen: a local taqueria was set up with a heat lamp warming their chips, except the heat lamp had been replaced by a CFL, so the chips were well lit, but cold. More recently they noticed how silly that looked and swapped the CFL back to a proper heat lamp.)

To be balanced, it needs to be pointed out that in an air conditioned environment incandescent lamps are doubly wasteful; not only is their heat output unwanted, the air conditioning system needs to work that much harder in response. In that situation, flourescents do have a considerable energy efficiency advantage. And in such a case the advantage would be more than the three of four times that the isolated theoretical metric would suggest.

But overall in the US, we do a lot more heating than air conditioning. (I for one don't even have an air conditioner in my house.) So in the majority of cases it appears to me that incandescent lamps are effectively, or close to, zero-waste devices.

This leaves our government in the position of banning inexpensive zero-waste (or close to it) devices in the name of saving energy.

Later...

What's really happening here is demonization. Instead of addressing a given problem in a logical, productive way, it can be more politically profitable to scapegoat an innocent bystander as the enemy, attack that, and then claim y'r saving the freakin' planet.

This is a horrible abuse of congress. Oh, and the sponsor of this legislation is Nick Rahall, Democrat, West Virginia.

Anyway, I've redone the till.com home page, so it looks a little bit more professional. (And uses fancy modern css sprites for the rollover art.)

And I've added an update to my article A New Business Model for the Music Industry. Heh-heh; it turns out that one of my jokes was completely dependent on knowledge of outdated technology.

Here's the update:

Sigh... more than a few readers have written in, telling me they didn't get the joke. I first thought that perhaps I didn't tell it very well, but then I realized that the years have been flying by, and that many music fans reading this may not have ever seen an Automatic Turntable (also called a Record Changer). Automatic Turntables used to be quite popular, and were able to play a stack of vinyl record sides without manual intervention. Wikipedia has some details here.

So two-record sets were often pressed to be played stacked up on an automatic turntable, with sides 1 and 4 on the first disc, and sides 2 and 3 on the second. And the listener would place the records in a stack at the top of a long spindle, play sides 1 and 2 through, flip the pair over, and then play sides 3 and 4 through.

Electric Ladyland was just such an album. So that's the joke; by placing sides 1 and 4 on the first CD, the record label demonstrated both that they didn't understand the sequencing of the original album, and that they didn't understand the playback technology of their product.

Deconstructing this a little more... Some multiple-disc vinyl albums were pressed to be played a disc at a time (sides 1/2 on the first disc, sides 3/4 on the second) and some were pressed to be stacked for automatic turntables (sides 1/4, sides 2/3). In practice, the choice of which to use was dependent on how sequential the flow of the album was. But another consideration was that automatic turntables were generally of inferior quality compared to manual turntables, and didn't treat the discs as gently. And the owner of a manual turntable is faced with a significant amount more labor going from side 1 on disc 1 to side 2 on disc 2 of an album pressed for stack play. So if the record label believed that the target audience was more audiophile oriented or otherwise preferred manual turntables, they might be less likely to press the album stack sequenced.

Alembic has just built a prototype run of active guitar cables. 'Looks impressive.

I published my version of the active cable here over eight years ago:

Don Tillman: FET Preamp Cable

I still use this a lot today, and I still think it'd make a great product. I don't know what specific technology Alembic is using for theirs, but it's very cool to see this and I'm sure they did a great job.

The Alembic cable looks even more like my very original prototype Preamp Cable... Lessee, I have it around here somewhere...

Okay, 'found it. Here's a picture of my original prototype, built, oh I dunno, around 1994 or thereabouts.

The guts of the FET Preamp are inside the plug on the right. It's phantom powered. The little aluminum box contains a 9V battery, and the phantom power circuit. There's a power switch on the side. The output goes to that phone plug epoxied in place, so you can just hang this off a guitar amp input jack. The jack on the side is a second parallel output for a tuner.

(It turns out that this particular package wasn't very good as some guitar amps don't have the physical space for a box dangling off the input jack. I was using this with a Fender Twin Reverb at the time, and that's got a sloping panel. My current Mesa/Boogie Lonestar Special wouldn't work with this at all. And the extra connection to the tuner is sloppy at best. So I dropped this packaging scheme early on and went with the "MXR Box" style approach.)

Note that this is not the same as the Winter Solstice, December 21st, the shortest day of the year, because the oribt of the earth is not circular, it's elliptical, and the earth moves a little faster during the time when it is closer to the sun than when it is further away. Check these out:

Wikipedia: Analemma

Analemma dot com

Sunrise Sunset dot com

Douglas Dodds: Analemma, My Analemma

Wikipedia: Kepler's laws of planetary motion

And in celebration of Analemma Day, and of Johannes Kepler, I got my kids a Kepler Elliptical Orbit Pizza:

The cool thing about a Kepler Elliptical Orbit Pizza is that all the slices are guaranteed to have the same area. (Ba-da-bing.)

Excellent.

With socialized medicine in the news these days, I'd like to draw your attention to these articles which present some important reasons why it's a bad thing. The authors all accomplished individuals with significant experience in and around the fields of medicine and health care.

Dr. Scott Atlas:
10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care

A fascinating, concise, well written and well referenced article explaining why American health care doesn't actually suck like the Obama administration claims it does. Dr. Atlas is a Professor of Radiology at Stanford University Medical Center, and the author of over 100 scientific papers.

Popular Mechanics:
Inventor Dean Kamen Says Healthcare Debate "Backward Looking"

Dean Kamen is the inventor of the Segway, and the guy personally responsible for an awful lot of medical innovations.

Charles Krauthammer:
Health Care Reform: A Better Plan

Dr. Charles Krauthammer's take on health care is simplified down to two points.

John Mackey: The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare,
Eight things we can do to improve health care without adding to the deficit

John Mackey, the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods, offers some, uh, tasty and nourishing ideas.

"Read it all", as they say. These are exceptionally well thought out articles.

There are a lot of recent articles about the "success" of the Cash for Clunkers program, as indicated by the number of applicants and the money being dispersed. But the goal of the program was not to disperse money, but rather to reduce pollution. (Remember? Saving the Earth?) We've seen absolutely no evidence of that. So no, it's not successful.

In the New York Times, Aug 7, 2009, Mathew L. Wald's article Doing the Clunker Calculus, seriously questions the success of the Cash for Clunkers program:

In the Associated Press, Seth Borenstein writes in Cash for Clunkers Effect on Pollution? A Blip how the potential environmental advantages of the Cash for Clunkers program are negligible:

For CNN, August 7, 2009, Peter Valdes-Dapena's article Trucks Win in Cash for Clunkers Game describes how the government's "arcane measurement method" makes the results of the Cash for Clunkers program look better than it actually is:

Of course the New York Times, the Associated Press and CNN are all heavily biased toward Obama, so it's especially surprising that they would let this out.

Always looking for the silver lining, in the Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2009, Kevin Helliker writes The Killer App for Clunkers Breathes Fresh Life Into 'Liquid Glass' and describes how sodium silicate, the chemical used to kill clunker engines, is selling like hotcakes.

More Orwellian Doublespeak

The proper title of the law is the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act of 2009. Now I understand how difficult it can be to make a clever acronym work out work ("CARS", get it?), but the words recycle and save in the title simply do not apply as absolutely nothing is being recycled or saved. It's exactly the opposite; good cars are being destroyed and rendered incapable of being recycled.

Before this legislation, the automobile was the most recycled consumer product in America -- it got repaired when it broke, it got replacement parts when they wore out, it got sold to new owners, several times, and when it was finally junked as a vehicle, the old parts are used to repair other cars, and then the metal is melted down and reused. But this law is, in practice, an anti-recycling law. The car cannot be repaired, it cannot be resold, and the major components (engine, transmission, and related parts) are legally and physically kept from being recycled.

Isn't anybody just a little concerned when the title of a piece of legislation is the exact opposite of what it does?

Also, in a similarly crazy Orwellian twist, did you know that the Hummer H3 is on the Cash for Clunkers Eligible New Cars List? I'm not kidding.

And as I mentioned previously, real clunkers, cars manufactured before 1984 are not accepted in the program, while recently manufactured cars are.

This is really sad.

One is that it's easily scammed. Sell your old car, buy a Prius, get $4500, sell the Prius on CraigsList for $1000.00 off list, buy an Escalade for, effectively, $3500.00 off.

Secondly, through some weirdness in the mileage ratings, cars older than 1984 vintage are not actually included in the program. That's right, in typical Orwellian Obama doublespeak, real clunkers are not clunkers, but late model cars are. I was especially disheartened to learn that my very own 2000 Audi A6 Avant is officially considered a "clunker" by the Obama administration.

Third, the program rewards as little as a 1 or 2 mpg improvement in mileage. Given manufacturing variations and individual driving style variations, that is deep in the noise.

Fourth, part of the program involves actually destroying the target vehicle. Yes, that's right, destroying the vehicle. The process is very specific: replace the oil with sodium silicate (aka liquid glass) and run the engine until it overheats and seizes up. Here is how it's done on a late model Volvo S80 in great condition:

YouTube: Volvo Cash for Clunkers Engine Disabling

Unbelievable that a stunningly beautiful work of engineering is destroyed for no reason whatsoever. I mean, you can't help but compare this to burning books, smashing rock'n'roll records, or the Taliban dynamiting the Buddha statues. Does anybody think for a moment this is a good thing?

Here's more:

YouTube: Cash for Clunkers: How to destroy an engine

YouTube: Cash for Clunker Engine Stop, Lynch GM Superstore

Just a reminder: Cash for Clunkers Requires Destroying Perfectly Usable Cars

For some more details, check this out:

Jalopnik's Guild To The Cash For Clunkers Bill

The original idea seems to have come from an article by economist Alan S. Blinder in the New York Times, July 27, 2008, called "A Modest Proposal: Eco-Friendly Stimulus". In it he claims that the program "holds the promise of performing a remarkable public policy trifecta -- stimulating the economy, improving the environment and reducing income inequality all at the same time".

I'm calling bullshit on economist Blinder. Yeah, I know he's got credentials up the yingyang, but this is ridiculous.

First off, the MPG rating on a car has far less environmental impact than how the owner uses the car. A driver employing a high mileage car for a lengthy daily commute will contribute far more pollutants than the driver occasionally hopping around town, even they're using a Hummer. The type of driving, smooth vs. stop-and-go, also has more of an impact. As does the driver's personal habits and the route chosen.

Secondly, the "reducing income inequality" claim (we all know that's code for socialism, but glossing over that for a moment...) is simply untrue. Lower income people, if they own a car at all, generally can't afford a new car, even with a rebate. Also, let's face it, because of a little thing called supply and demand (Could someone explain this to Dr. Blinder?) the retail price of new high mileage cars will likely increase following their demand, making lower mileage cars more affordable to first time buyers.

Thirdly, the stimulation will mostly boost the economy of Toyota and Honda, and not GM, Ford or Chrysler. (I forget, are they still made in this country?)

While I don't have Dr. Blinder's credentials, my own proposal A Modest Proposal to Improve the National Energy Policy is far superior, as it will seriously reduce gasoline pollutants, it costs nothing, and it doesn't involving trashing perfectly good Volvos.

[later addition:]

CNN reports some intersting things here [August 4, 2009, As Buyers Pull Up, 'Clunkers' Program Goes Into Overdrive]:

Got that? "Parked for ages" means that the clunkers were not polluting at all. So in these cases, the Cash for Clunkers program actually increases pollution. I hadn't considered that situation before.

And...

Which runs exactly counter to Dr. Blinder's "income inequality" claim.

Bill Bruford / Ralph Towner
If Summer Had Its Ghosts

Chase
Chase / Ennea / Pure Music

Larry Coryell
Lady Coryell

Jerry Goodman and Jan Hammer
Like Children

Phil Ochs
All the News that's Fit to Sing

By the way, I like CD Universe a lot. They have a very good selection, great prices, and if you check out the top selling listings, their customers seem to have pretty good taste in music.