Viraj's Weblog

I just picked up a new Panasonic Viera TC-P50VT25 plasma TV (and sold my old one). This TV has 4 HDMI inputs, and I was able to convert completely from analog (component, vga, etc) to digital.

I have a couple of TV devices:

• Panasonic DMP-BDT100P Blu-ray and 3D player (came with the TV via a Best Buy special)
• Comcast/Motorolla HD Tuner/DVR
• Apple Mac Mini
• Sony Google TV

For audio I have a Bose 3 2 1 DVD system that has optical/SPDIF input for audio and component out for video, but I'm no longer using the video of it.

All of the 4 devices have HDMI and SPDIF/optical output. The TV has an optical output. So what I'm thinking, just plug in all of the devices via HDMI to the TV, then the TV optical output to the Bose for audio. That sounds like it should work, but woe is me. After much money spent on HDMI cables, I found that the new technology is not much of an improvement over old. You just need to spend more money.

First off, after hooking everything up, the picture was amazing. However instantly I noticed an echo effect in the sound output. It turns out both the TV speakers and the Bose system were outputting audio. What seemed strange is the delay/echo effect I could hear. But at this point I didn't pay much attention and went in the TV setup to disable the TV speakers.

Great, so first thing I notice is my Bose says "PCM" on it. This is usually displayed when there is no Dolby signal and it is just doing stereo. That seemed sucky and strange. The movie I was watching was on Comcast HD, and it definitely should be Dolby. I then switched to the Blu-ray player and played a DVD, which I know contains Dolby. Still the Bose said "PCM". Something was wrong.

The next thing I notice is the audio is a bit delayed, say 20-50ms later than the video. I'm very good at noticing this and it was hella annoying. This also explained the echo effect when turning on the TV speakers. The TV speakers were not delayed, but the optical audio was. WTF?

Next began my Google searching. What I found was a forum posting in 2007 indicating that the optical outs of most TVs that have HDMI convert HDMI audio to stereo. WHAT KIND OF GARBAGE IS THAT? If it's digital, why the hell is it doing any conversion on the signal?

At this point the thoughts in my head are all pointing to HDMI copy protection. This is likely the reason the TV doesn't pass through the signal as is, but I can't find any web pages explaining this. I see notes in the Panasonic manual about it doing this, and mention that many other TVs do it as well, but no mention of WHY!

So my next goal was to send the device audio signals directly to the Bose system. However, that system only has one optical input. Luckily, I had my Audio Authority Digital AV switcher. This accepts multiple component and optical inputs and simply lets you switch through them. It is a very simple device which I thought I could get rid of with my new TV. Not so. I kept HDMI for each device plugged into the TV for video, but for audio I connected optical cables for each device to the switcher. The output of the switcher is one optical cable to the Bose.

Voila, the Bose immediately said "Dolby ..." on it for all of my devices (Comcast, Blu-Ray, etc). The audio delay is pretty much gone (though there is still a small amount that is not noticeable).

Lesson learned? The HDMI gods really want you to buy a HDMI receiver, which would replace my switcher. The Audio Authority switcher is simply a bare-bones receiver. It unfortunately still requires me to press the switch whenever I want to change devices, but this for me is better than spending even more money for a receiver. Why doesn't Panasonic (and other TVs with multiple HDMI inputs and one optical out) do what my switcher does? It is sad.

Update: I came across this forum posting which states:

As far as I know, televisions are required by copyright law to disable Dolby Digital and other digital audio signal processing on the audio-out. They can only send 2-channel audio via Optical/Coaxial audio out.

Here are 2 new tracks I worked on in the past weeks:

• A Bit Reduction
• Desire Without End

The 2nd one is the first time I've ever recorded my voice . See if you can find it.

Here is a new track I worked on this weekend. I've found a new technique called midside eq which is a great method for getting tighter sounding bass.

I've been reading Almost Chimpanzee, a rather long book comparing humans to chimpanzees, and notably, their differences. Many books point out similarities, but this one takes a different approach. There are some interesting findings in it. For example, think the flatness of our face helped survival? Consider modern dentistry:

In the mouth, the chimpanzees and humans have the same "dental formula": thirty-two teeth at adulthood, with two incisors, one canine, two premolars, and three molars on each side, top, and bottom. In addition to the famously large canines, the last molars - the wisdom teeth that erupt at adulthood - get much more space in chimpanzees than in humans because chimps have an elongated face. "In humans, before modern dentistry, eruptions and the impaction of wisdom teeth followed by septicemia was a major cause of death," Gagneux said. "There's a huge cost to having shortened the face. You can kill yourself by trying to grow the tooth that defines you as an adult."

Also consider the baculum, which in modern times has been replaced by Viagra:

Gagneux, who specializes in reproduction, noted that chimpanzees have a tiny bone in the penis, the baculum, that is absent in humans. In the Selfish Gene, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggests that human males lost this bone in something akin to the Trench Coat theory of bipedalism. The baculum helps maintain an erection, which makes it useful especially as males age or develop mental problems, diabetes, or neurological complications. But for females selecting a mate, the baculum hides problems. "It is not implausible that, with natural selection refining their diagnostic skills, females could glean all sorts of clues about a male's health, and the robustness of his ability to deal with stress, from the tone and bearing of his penis," writes Dawkins. "But a bone would get in the way!"

Here's a new song I worked on today.

The OS X 10.5 Address Book application has a feature to import contacts from Gmail. However, this means all contacts, including ones without phone numbers. If you've had an email account for a long time, there are going to be all sorts of "contacts" in there, like mailing lists. So I needed to prune away all entries without phone numbers. Turns out in new OS X versions, you can restrict to a group of contacts, but not so in my version.

So I wrote a little AppleScript script to do it. Feel free to try it, but be sure to make an export/backup of your Address Book before you do.

This is a polarizing movie that you either love or hate. I tend to like it very much. It's long and drawn out, trippy in every sense, and will likely make you nauseous. The opening credits make it apparent that those prone to seizures should avoid watching. Much of the movie is filmed from behind someone's head, as if a camera is mounted there. One of Gaspar Noe's previous movies is Irreversible. That movie takes voyeurism to an extreme, and is widely known for a very long and difficult to watch rape scene. One thing about his movies is they are powerful and shocking. Enter the Void is no different. What better way to take voyeurism to another extreme by following someone after he dies.

The movie is set in seedy Japan, and the look is as irreligious as you can imagine. Japan is a world of stimulation and onslaught towards your senses. It's a world that is filled with so much color and neon lights that it looks almost fake. This movie blends a clearly fake set with reality, and sometimes you can't tell the difference. That's really how Japan is! The cinematography is just amazing. The camera flies through the sky and buildings to build up its story. It's a cartoon world with real people and real problems. It is portrays well what Japan looks like to a foreigner, especially the isolation between foreigners and society. But what is this movie about? IMDB's plotline is:

A drug-dealing teen is killed in Japan, after which he reappears as a ghost to watch over his sister.

Ok. Think of it as 2.5 hours of this minus the puking. There are various hints at the beginning of the movie as to what the rest of the movie is going to be about. I will spoil it because I doubt anyone reading this will actually watch the movie: it's about death and reincarnation. There is a dialogue at the beginning about the Tibetan Book of the Dead and 2 people talking about reincarnation. That sets the stage for everything else in the movie. The main character dies quite early. But he has a bond with his sister, and its told through flashbacks. The death of their parents is the one strong foothold in the movie, and it grabs you from the dreamy nature of the rest of the movie.

There is an amazing scene at the end that is a very interesting take on what things must be like just before reincarnation. The camera (and ghost) fly in and out of a Love Hotel. Of course, lots of sex is going on. You think, "wow such depravity". But what's unique is each sexual act gets a almost holy aura to it. It's as if each couple is a gateway into the real world and out of the ghost world. The flying soul chooses one couple to make his entrance. It may be an unwise choice if it ends in abortion. Otherwise, a new life is born. But what's one of the first thing that child experiences? The pain of getting his umbilical cord cut. All life is suffering.

Today at work GM brought in a couple of Chevy Volts for us to test drive. Aside from looking like GM made a parking lot look like a car dealership (helpfully including many other types of cars other than the Volt), the sales pitch was instantly given to us. One of the 'features' is for police to shutdown your car through OnStar. The way it works is, presumably during a car chase, OnStar makes your car flash its lights and honk its horn. The cop then verifies, yes it's the right car. Then comes the kill switch, shutting off acceleration. The salesman was quick to point out that hitting the break automatically could be dangerous, and this is the safer way.

I just read Bruce Schneier's book and I'm already seeing how bad this is. He wrote about it here, here, and here. I encourage you to read those. This is similar to Apple, Sony, or whoever trying to disable their devices remotely. Is this the type of control you want a company to have on a device that you shelled out 41k for?

The salesman then showed on is iPad how customers can go to a website to start their car and unlock it. Yeah that's right, a website. How soon do you think this will be hacked? Imagine someone getting control over every OnStar vehicle with this 'feature'. Oh wait, that was done already.

Granted these are all good intentions, but I'm wondering whether they even considered the security implications. Is the cop always going to be right in shutting down your car? From Schneier:

Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.

The possibilities are endless, and very dangerous. Making this work involves building a nearly flawless hierarchical system of authority. That's a difficult security problem even in its simplest form. Distributing that system among a variety of different devices -- computers, phones, PDAs, cameras, recorders -- with different firmware and manufacturers, is even more difficult. Not to mention delegating different levels of authority to various agencies, enterprises, industries and individuals, and then enforcing the necessary safeguards.

Here is a new song I worked on the past 2 weeks.

Discover has a good article about online privacy. Check it out.

I'm on a roll with the video editing and made a new one for my last song. Check it out.

This weekend I wrote a plugin for the Java download manager FreeRapid. It makes it work with Filesonic premium accounts. Check out this page and search for valankar .

Last night I hacked up a video to my Sleepytime song. You will no doubt notice the motif. The sound quality is a little lame on YouTube.

This movie requires a bit of patience to watch, and I'm not sure I would say it's a good movie. It's generally supposed to be about Kurt Cobain. However, one of the very good scenes is this one, which is the main character making some music with various instruments and loopers. It really captures the whole artistic experimentation feel when making music.

Here is a really good episode of This American Life. John Hodgeman's act was interesting. He first asks people their preference of invisibility or ability to fly, then asks what they would do with those powers. It turns out no one really wants to fight crime. Invisible people pretty much would like to spy on people, find out what they really think about them, and other trite nonsense. Flying people would be more ambitious. One said he'd want groupies, because people would love to sleep with someone that can fly. Another would become "Fly to Paris Man".

I heard this On Science podcast and there was an good segment on autism. The written article is here. It tries to describe how autistic people see the world. Temple Grandin was also good movie that attempts to show visually what it must be like to be autistic.

Awhile ago I read a book about the history of psychosurgery. The timing was good because Shutter Island came out shortly afterwards, and one thing I liked about that movie is how true it was to the so-called science of the time. It's sometimes amazing to see how well-educated doctors looked at "diseases" and "cures." I'm sure 50 years from now, people will look upon medical science of today with equivalent horror. It's all relative.

To give an idea, the book describes one look at homosexuality:

The whole presentation reminds me of a time when they used to treat homosexuality by prostatic massage. I recall such a patient who had been treated ... for two years, but he was still homosexual ... As the physician in question was a man of the highest type, I was sure he must attribute some virtue to such treatment, so I asked him how he expected to cure homosexuality by prostatic massage. He thought the massage might rub out the homosexual cells and that they would be replaced by heterosexual cells ...

The book is generally about Walter Freeman, who was widely known for performing lobotomies with an ice pick. Note this person was not even a doctor. He used to do outpatient calls and perform lobotomies in the comfort of your own home. That's how mainstream this became.

Esteemed journals like JAMA talked about lobotomies of course:

An emotional attitude of violent unreasoning opposition to this form of treatment [lobotomy] would be inexcusable. True it is a mutilating operation and it does result in certain defects in personality and behavior. However, much surgery is mutilating in the sense that some ordinary normal tissue is removed in order to achieve a beneficial result ...

Yes, similar to how building muscles involve first causing damage to the muscle to induce a strengthening recuperation right? Actually you can see some of my thoughts on that matter. But really, how did it make crazy people better? Here is an interesting experiment:

There is an obvious change in personality. The monkey loses its preoperative shyness and is less fearful of man. It appears more inquisitive than the normal monkey of the same age. In a large cage with other monkeys of the same size, such an animal shows no grooming behavior or acts of affection towards its companions. In fact, it treats them as it treats inanimate objects and will walk on them, bump into them if they happen to be in the way, and will even sit on them. It will openly eat food in the hand of a companion without being prepared to do battle and appears surprised when it is rebuffed. Such an animal never shows actual hostility to its fellows. It neither fights nor tries to escape when removed from a cage. It acts under all circumstances as though it had lost its "social conscience." ... It is thus evident that following removal of the anterior limbic area, such monkeys lose some of the social fear and anxiety which normally governs their activity and thus lose the ability to accurately forecast the social repercussions of their own actions.

Interestingly, the Catholic church took a cautious approach. As long as the doctors made sure to leave an important part in the brain:

A retreat was held to consider some of the questions raised by lobotomy for the Church and for Catholics in general. It was decided that a person should not be accepted into the priesthood after a lobotomy, and that a lobotomized priest should not hear confessions or administer the sacraments as "here the safer course must be followed." ... Much weight was given ... to an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XII, which implied that an operation that made a Catholic an "automaton" by removing "free will" would be unlawful, but did not object to lobotomy if "free will" was retained, even if there was some diminution of personality. If the soul could survive death, it could probably survive a lobotomy, one member of the Catholic hierarchy observed.

Yes, please leave the "free will" section intact. Lobotomies played a part in politics too, as mentioned by a California neurosurgeon:

The person convicted of a violent crime should have the chance for a corrective operation ... Each violent young criminal incarcerated from 20 years to life costs taxpayers perhaps $100,000. For roughly $6000, society can provide medical treatment which will transform him into a responsible well-adjusted citizen.

If you call within the next 20 minutes, you will receive a second one for free! Lobotomies are of course cheaper than mental institutions. Ever wonder where all the institutions went? There used to be a lot more. Now people who would be considered patients in the past roam society. That's because we have newer "cures".

What I found really interesting in the book is the conversion of lobotomies to today's pharmacological solutions. Actually there was a big debate between the surgical vs the pharmacological. The first was the advent of chlorpromazine. If you will recall, this was mentioned in the movie Shutter Island. This drug, like many, was found by accident:

Chlorpromazine [Thorazine] was inadvertently discovered following experimentation with antimalarial compounds and drugs to prevent surgical shock, and antidepressant drugs were discovered by their unexpected mood-elevating effects on tubercular patients.

Freeman embraced the coming drug horizon. That's because he considered it equivalent to lobotomy:

Freeman acknowledged that lobotomy was being eclipsed by the new drugs, whose effect he called "chemical lobotomy," and said that this was a "good thing as far as it concerns chronic hospital patients."

Drugs are definitely less scary than ice picks. The rest is history. The number of antipsychotic drugs out there is staggering. In some way they seek to alter the mind. Was Freeman right in equating them chemical lobotomies?

I guess this is a new internet meme.

Just finished the excellent book How Pleasure Works. Here are some interesting quotes.

What kind of pictures would you expect monkeys to like looking at? One is very obvious, the other is not:

In a recent study, male rhesus monkeys were put into an experimental setup where they could choose, by moving their heads, to either receive some sweet fruit juice or to get to look at a picture. There were two sorts of pictures that monkeys would give up the juice for - female hindquarters and the faces of high-status male monkeys. Two major vices - pornography and celebrity worship - are not exclusively human.

Another interesting topic is how we tend to treat pictures as the real thing.

My colleagues and I recently did a series of studies in which we took pictures of people's precious objects - their wedding rings, say - and asked them to cut the pictures up. They were willing to do so, but measures of skin conductance showed that they were in a state of mild anxiety, as if they were destroying the precious things themselves. And if you ask people to throw darts at pictures of babies, they tend to miss.

Then there is the idea of why we like to watch horror films, or gawk at anything where someone is in a bad predicament. It's the same reason why we play-fight:

We are drawn, then, toward worst-case scenarios. The details of the scenarios are often irrelevant. It's not that we enjoy zombie films because we need to prepare for the zombie uprising. We don't have to plan for what to do if we accidentally kill our fathers, or marry our mothers. But even these exotic cases serve as useful practice for bad times, exercising our psyches for when life goes to hell. From this perspective, it's not the zombies that make zombie films so compelling, it is that the theme of the zombies is a clever way to frame stories about being attacked by strangers and betrayed by those we love. This is what attracts us; the brain eating is an optional extra.

And what about chili peppers or other foods no other animal would eat?

.. it is hard to see why we would need to practice eating spicy foods or taking hot baths. These Rozin cases might have a more utilitarian explanation, something along the line of the awful old joke about the guy who was banging his head against the wall; when asked why he was doing it, he said, "It feels so good when I stop." For some of Rozin's examples, the initial pain might be worthwhile because it is outweighed by the later pleasure. We might grow to like the pain of stepping into a hot bath, because it is always followed by the bliss of when the temperature becomes just right.

This girl has some incredible metal guitar playing videos on youtube. I should just give up!

Here is a rock track I just finished. Enjoy!

This is a bit dancy. Check it out.

Got some new music up on Sutros:

• Sleepytime
• Back to Basics

Enjoy!

I just spent a few hours trying to debug my movie vote GWT application failing to render a grid in Safari but working in other browsers. It turned out to be a Safari bug. Sigh...

The past week I've been learning about Clojure, a really neat Lisp language with easy Java interoperability. I've always been a bit turned off by Lisp simply due do it being so esoteric and difficult to find useful libraries to do practical work. Clojure gives you easy access to Java classes so it's much more appealing to me. There is pretty much a Java library out there to do anything you want. After experimenting with it, it makes writing Java code as easy as writing Python.

I wrote a system for doing movie voting, and part of that includes some Python scripts for determining review scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. These seemed like great examples to try in Clojure. Clojure's documentation is rather terse, and it took me awhile to put all the pieces together. There are 2 scripts I made in Clojure: one that determines the Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic URLs for a movie, and another that parses those HTML pages to determine the rating.

Here is the code to find the URLs using Google's Ajax API. Notice how ridiculously small this script is. Even using such libraries in Python results in much more code. What I especially liked is the arrow operator and how simple it was to parse JSON.

Here is the code to parse the HTML and determine the score/rating. What is amazing here is interacting with a Java htmlparser class. That class requires passing in an implementation of a NodeVisitor interface. So when each tag of an HTML page is visited, the NodeVisitor.visitTag is used. Clojure let's you define a proxy, which is your implementation of the interface in Clojure. Look again at how simple it is to traverse the HTML for the right tag.

The latter code also demonstrates the use of Clojure's run-time polymorphism. The method fetch-score is a multimethod that dispatches to the proper function depending on whether the argument url has 'rottentomatoes' or 'metacritic' within it. You can define arbitrary functions that determine how to dispatch to other functions. In this case it's simply based on a regex.

The code is missing some error handling, but in most cases an error results in an empty list that I don't really care about. You can also catch the proper exceptions if needed. The main thing I like about this is how short the code is. It takes awhile to understand Lisp, but it almost feels natural in some ways. Lisp seems to encourage minimal building-block functions and putting them all together, almost like putting together small Unix programs with pipes and filters. It also seems like there is a million ways to do something.

Really good Frontline about the vaccine war.

Science Friday had a good episode about hospital infections. Here is a site with some steps to reduce infection.

I've been trying to get a harder sound to the music I'm making. Most of my songs generally have soft guitars, with mostly drums beefing things up. I borrowed a friend's Art TubeMP preamp to see if this would help. It did, a little, so I went ahead and bought a Presonus TubePre preamp. In the end though, I'm beginning to think the only way to achieve that hard sound is by using a mic on a really loud sound .

This weekend was a lot of time spent on playing with my borrowed Mackie MS 1202-VLZ mixer (I've learned now that Mackie makes the most awesome mixers). The song I made this weekend used an ART DRX-2100 effects processor (again, borrowed), and I created some strange sounds by looping the guitar effects back to the effects processor. It was a lot of fun, though I think I'm slightly going deaf.

As usual, the song is like 3 songs in one. Usually when I'm inspired I create a few cool hooks, sometimes having nothing to do with each other, and end up putting it all together in a mess. Call it the anti-formula. I also am learning better how to get the sound I want in Ableton. Mixing is a lot of work, with lots of trips back and forth to my car for a listen.

The song is on Sutros.

Probably the best MTV Unplugged I have ever seen: Silversun Pickups.

My latest song. Also on Sutros.

Because I can't always come up with a video for my music, and also since YouTube sound quality is not so great, I've been looking around for some free music sharing sites. I've found one called Sutros that seems pretty cool. I've started to put up my music that's deemed worthy for public consumption. Check it out.

Pretty funny analysis of Linkin Park songs.

Here is a great tutorial on using formant filters in Ableton. These are used to create human voice-like sounds. In general, Tom Cosm has some great teaching videos on Ableton.

I have a lot of songs sitting around as works in progress. It's really hard to go from playing around on the guitar to a full song with all the right sounds. This new song started with some experimental sounds and a very simple bass line. I was trying to get a tight kick and bass sound but things were just not sounding right. Then I woke up this morning thinking, "wait a second, my attack setting on the kick drum compressor is way too high!" Yes, it's sad, but these are the things I lose sleep over. Ableton has a great multi-band compressor that lets you compress different bands like high and low. I also realized that it's useful to have a compressor on the master track too. When you look at the waveform for an unmastered song, there are lots of peaks that come due to sounds falling on top of each other or they are simply in the frequency that you can't hear. Tacking on a limiter to the master track smoothes these peaks out and you are able to increase the overall volume a bit. I still take the approach of trying to get my song at -6db. Then to reduce the variation more I'll tack on a limiter on the master. Poor man's mastering.

Anyhow, this song uses an awesome plugin called Amplitube which has some hard guitar effects. The only problem with this plugin is it eats up CPU. Ableton's "freeze track" feature helps a lot here (essentially resampling the track into an audio file instead of running through the plugin live). About 3:30 into the song I accidentally cut and pasted the tracks shifted down (so the effects were all going to the wrong tracks they were supposed to). But this sounded so good that I kept it and was inspired to double the tempo at the last minute. I give you: Time Crimes. Not the movie, but that's great too.

Here is a really good Frontline on the cheap airline industry.

Here is a new song. I played around with some Ableton distortion effects on this one (notice the static drum track). The song changes quite a bit, probably because I spent weeks on it. Still it's pretty cool.

I wasn't sure what to expect seeing the trailers for Shutter Island portraying a Scorsese movie as a horror. I just knew I had to see it because it was Scorsese.

What made this film even more interesting is that I just read My Lobotomy and Great and Desperate Cures, both excellent books on psychosurgery, or lobotomies to the layman. In Shutter Island, the term 'transorbital lobotomy' is thrown around as if describing a monster. It's set in the 1950's, when indeed such surgery was mainstream even to the point of doctors like Walter Freeman making house calls to do them. I especially liked the reference to there being 2 psychiatry frames of thought during this time: psychosurgery and therapy/pharmacology. You had one camp that felt physical changes were needed to cure people (e.g. lobotomies), and another where it was thought Freudian therapy would work. Freudian therapy soon meshed with pharmacology, and it has been brought up many times whether drug treatment is just a "chemical lobotomy" (quote from Walter Freeman).

The film also mentions Chlorpromazine (Thorazine) which was the first of the pharmacological treatments for mental disorder, making the movie scientifically convincing. That's one thing that that impressed me about this, just how well it was done . I mean, it is Scorsese after all, and you can tell. Most scenes are just perfect in all aspects, from the music, acting, camera work, and overall immersion. I wasn't sure how Scorsese would do dream scenarios, but this movie is impressive how well it conveys hallucinatory drugs and withdrawal. I guess DiCaprio was made to play this ever since Basketball Diaries.

Scorsese's films all include some kind of meditation on violence. It's not so much that he glorifies it, but he portrays it as a human disease that we all suffer from. There's a short dialogue between two people that realize this in the film, and you can't help but think it is the director's view on the human condition expressed in a few sentences.

The unrealistic part of the movie is the idea that an institution would work so hard during this era to cure someone without resorting to the quick-fix lobotomy. A masterful plan is made to cure a patient, and it is unconvincing that such a plan would ever really be employed. In those days, an ice pick through the eye socket was much less expensive.

And that ice pick does come, after all, glimmering in the sun. There is a good quote at the end, "Is it better to die a good man or live life as a monster?"

Another interesting quote from Eating Animals spoken by a factory farmer. This is perhaps the best argument for factory farms I've heard:

I've told you the drawbacks because I'm trying to be up-front with you. But in fact, we've got a tremendous system. Is it perfect? No. No system is perfect. And if you find someone who tells you he has a perfect way to feed billions and billions of people, well, you should take a careful look. You hear about free-range eggs and grass-fed cattle, and all of that's good. I think it's a good direction. But it ain't gonna feed the world. Never. You simply can't feed billions of people free-range eggs. And when you hear people talking about small farming as a model, I call that the Marie Antoinette syndrome: if they can't afford bread, let them eat cake. High-yield farming has allowed everyone to eat. Think about that. If we go away from it, it may improve the welfare of the animal, it may even be better for the environment, but I don't want to go back to China in 1918. I'm talking about starving people.

Granted, it's a bit one-sided. Of course people could stop eating meat, but the idea of feeding billions any type of food that they can afford is going to result in large-scale factories of some sort. Quality is going to suffer, and problems like long-term effects of genetic engineering of foods will arise, but to feed the population of the world, family farms likely won't cut it. It's a huge demand for cheap food, and that demand grows with the population.

Do you think family farms are going to sustain a world of ten billion?

Step your mind into a crowded elevator, an elevator so crowded you cannot turn around without bumping into (and aggravating) your neighbor. The elevator is so crowded you are often held aloft. This is a kind of blessing, as the slanted floor is made of wire, which cuts into your feet.

After some time, those in the elevator will lose their ability to work in the interest of the group. Some will become violent; others will go mad. A few, deprived of food and hope, will become cannibalistic.

There is no respite, no relief. No elevator repairman is coming. The doors will open once, at the end of your life, for your journey to the only place worse (see: PROCESSING).

The quote could be talking about overpopulation, but it's referring to the use of 'battery cages' by chicken farmers. I'm reading Eating Animals, a wittily written book on, well, eating animals.

Another good quote about KFC:

Formerly signifying Kentucky Fried Chicken, now signifying nothing, KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other in history.

Heh, reminds me of an old KFC commercial, where Kernel Sanders tries to cater to 'urban' audiences by yelling "Booyah!"

Here is a new song. I spent almost the whole weekend on it and got some blisters in the process.

The drums are created using Addictive Drums with my electronic drum set, which has some excellent drum samples. MIDI drums are nice because you can easily correct errors. However, I found when doing rolls and such, it's hard to get the analog feel.

I spent a lot of time trying to get the bass right, and I think I created about 8 different versions I had to dump to my ipod and then listen to in my car. My car has a crappy stereo, but it's where I listen to most of my music. If it doesn't sound good there, I need to improve it. The first versions had really bad bass that killed my speakers. The plain drums lacked kick, so I added an 808 kick, but the mix of that and the real drum kick was too much. So I put a compressor on the 808 kick, which sidechains from the real drum kick. This makes the drum kick lower the volume of the 808 kick for a few microseconds. Then I added a compressor to the bassline, using input from the 808 kick. That lets the 808 quickly bring down the volume of the bassline. So the real drum kick compresses the 808 kick which compresses bassline .

I've found the real time spent in all of this is getting it sounding right. Mastering is definitely an art.

The video for this song will be a collection of time lapse videos. Be sure to keep an eye on my YouTube channel!

Really interesting interview on Democracy Now about addiction. I will have to read some of his books. A quote:

Now, the hungry ghost realm, the creatures in it are depicted as people with large empty bellies, small mouths and scrawny thin necks. They can never get enough satisfaction. They can never fill their bellies. They’re always hungry, always empty, always seeking it from the outside. That speaks to a part of us that I have and everybody in our society has, where we want satisfaction from the outside, where we’re empty, where we want to be soothed by something in the short term, but we can never feel that or fulfill that insatiety from the outside. The addicts are in that realm all the time. Most of us are in that realm some of the time. And my point really is, is that there’s no clear distinction between the identified addict and the rest of us. There’s just a continuum in which we all may be found. They’re on it, because they’ve suffered a lot more than most of us.

Insurance companies require doctors to write codes for patients for reimbursement purposes. Turns out this medical coding occupation is set to grow enormously in the coming years.

This American Life had a good episode on the health industry and coding. Turns out there is a medical code for spacecraft injury too.

Planet Money had a really good episode on bill collectors. I thought the most important thing the collector said was that after speaking with so many people he felt that most don't understand the concept of compound interest.

Here is a good explanation.

Another good quote from Genetic Rounds:

It was not because I'm a brilliant diagnostician or because I'm a sensitive listener that I happened to make the diagnosis of acute intermittent porphyria in Nicole and her mother (a diagnosis that was ultimately confirmed through the demonstration of a deficiency of the enzyme uroporphyrinogen I synthase in the girl's red blood cells). Had I seen this family one year before, I'm sure I would have failed, just like the dozen other specialists who had seen Nicole in the past. No, in the case of Nicole Ludlow, I was able to come up with the correct diagnosis simply through dumb luck: the Ludlows and I had managed to run into each other in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

Dumb luck is an important factor in the lives of clinical geneticists. Dumb luck and hunches, and a little bit of knowledge of weird rare facts, are pretty much all that keep me in business.

The author gives a harrowing story about an infant born with a debilitating disease, to its possible association with vampires:

... After repeated exposure to light, people with CEP [congenital erythropoietic porphyria] become more and more disfigured: their skin becomes covered with scars, and some areas on their scalp lack hair whereas some areas on their skin sprout hair indiscrimately.

Interestingly, it is the presence of these clinical features that has led some medical historians to speculate that individuals with CEP served as the origin of the legend of the vampire, an ancient myth that is present in a large number of diverse cultures. Vampires are portrayed as deceased individuals who find themselves rejected by the hallowed earth of cemeteries because they have been cursed in some way. Unable to achieve a state of peace in their own graves, they metamorphosize into the undead or the living dead, trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead. Hideously ugly and constantly in need of sustenance, vampires are destined to walk the earth after dark, looking to feed on the blood of the innocent.

Now consider individuals with CEP. Because the porphyrins in their bloodstream result in photosensitivity, these people's faces are scarred. And because of the photosensitivity, coupled with their psychological sensitivity, they learn early in life to leave their homes only at night. Finally, because of the deposition of the abnormal red porphyrins in the structure of their teeth, people with CEP develop erythrodontia (literally, "red teeth"), giving the uninformed the impression that they have been drinking blood. It's not difficult to understand how, in an age when superstition and ignorance ruled, the birth of an infant with CEP might have led to the beginning of a tale of the undead that ultimately grew into today's legend.

He goes on:

It's never difficult to figure out when Edwin has been admitted to the hospital: he's the one in the room in which the shades have been drawn, the lights have been turned out, and the light switch has been taped into the off position. In his hospital crib, Edwin lies behind an orange Plexiglas sheet that blocks out most of the wavelengths of light that would prove most harmful to his skin. Because of the careful precautions taken by his parents, Edwin's skin is not terribly scarred at this point. But how can a child live like this? How can he grow and develop, make friends, go to school, and live in society with a condition that allows him to exist outside his home only in the dark?

However, the postscript to this story has a happy ending. Through a bone marrow transplant this boy was eventually cured.

I'm reading another fascinating book called Genetic Rounds about a medical geneticist's experiences. In one chapter, the author describes a mother who comes in with her baby, Jarett, suddenly not wanting to eat any more and whose body is becoming floppy. The discussion steers towards his sibling, Shadow, and her oatmeal breakfast:

"We let her use honey," she replied. "Never more than one or two teaspoons."

"Refined honey?" I asked, again knowing the answer before I asked the question.

"Of course not," the mother replied, repeating that angry look. "The refining process strips the honey of all its natural goodness. We allow only pure, unrefined honey in our house. Everything we put into our bodies is pure and natural. That's why our family has always been so healthy."

I continued: "Ms. Fox, we have to do some tests, but I think Jarrett's going to be okay. I'm pretty sure he's got botulism."

The doctor then imagines a scenario where the older sibling spoonfeeds her little baby brother some honey-laced oatmeal. A possibility. He then goes on:

Like Ms. Fox, most Americans believe that when applied to foods, terms like pure and natural are synonymous with healthy and nutritious. Although this thinking may be accurate for many foods, in the case of honey, eating it in its natural state can lead to serous disease or even death. Because of the environment in which it's produced, unprocessed honey often contains spores of Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium that causes botulism. In most humans, the presence of these spores presents no significant problem: the environment of the stomach and intestinal tracts of older children and adults readily destroys the toxin. But in children under one year of age, infants whose intestinal tracts are still immature, the presence of the toxin, which can survive its stay in the gut unscathed, spells big trouble: after traveling through the gut's lining and entering the bloodstream, the spores are carried throughout the body, where they bind to peripheral nerves and thus prevent them from being able to carry messages from the central nervous system to the muscles. Within hours of ingesting even tiny amounts of contaminated honey, these previously healthy infants become profoundly floppy, lethargic, and placid, unable to smile or cry or suck. If the dose of spores is large enough, every muscle, including those involved in breathing, becomes paralyzed. If not recognized quickly, affected infants may simply stop breathing, suffering respiratory failure so severe that death occurs within minutes.

Think twice about so-called natural foods.

I'm not a big fan of the various medical TV shows, but I do like books written by doctors. Recently I read Something For the Pain, a really good account of one doctor's experiences in the ER.

Here are some quotes I like. This one is about dealing with drunks:

But other drunks, the ones who've gotten in fights or wrecks trying to outrun the cops, are combative, angry, dangerous people. And we all know that the same guy who spits at you through bloody lips and calls you motherfucker will be sober when he sues you if there's a bad outcome in his care. In court, his face will be freshly shaved, his hair carefully combed. He'll be contrite for having been intoxicated. His lawyer will be baffled by the way doctors let him injure himself while he was incapacitated.

To let hostility show is a failure. A failure of boundaries, a failure of self-control. If you counted on human compassion to keep you from smacking one of these guys, you'd be in trouble by the third day on the job. And if you let them get to you to the point where it shows, you have no business being an ER doc.

And he goes on later about making the decision to send to rehab or not:

If I had my way, we'd just total up the costs: rehab, trauma, and medical care. Then tax alcohol sales accordingly. Let the cost of a six-pack or a bottle of wine reflect the true cost to society. Use the money to pay for rehab. But I don't have my way. I'm just the guy who has to ask an alcoholic or a crack addict if he has insurance.

The type of patients in the ER of course vary quite a bit:

The polar symmetry of the two cases struck me, and I hesitated before picking up the next chart. I went to the bathroom, and splashed my face. They lady with the head bleed was going to the ICU, stuck on a respirator, not quite dead, not quite alive. I thought about the teenaged girl with the tiny fetus being squeezed out by the thick fist of her uterus. Of course, this fetus was doomed, just like the woman with the head bleed. The cells may have still been physiologically active, the mitochondria still as busy as the pistons in the engines of the Titanic, the heart still pumping furiously, but futily. For both the forty-three-year-old with the brainful of blood and the tiny fetus, death was only on hold.

Here is a great long talk on Ableton and a cool MIDI device he made. A quote from him on Ableton's site:

What are your weaknesses as a musician?

I cannot play an instrument. I cannot remember melodies. I cannot sing. I have bad timing. I know way too little about counterpoint. I am just someone who is addicted to sound and who under any circumstances wants to create music with electronic instruments. This is what has kept me doing it for almost 20 years.

Today I was stuck with a bad sore throat and did some practicing with Ableton. This software constantly amazes me, and there is just so much to learn in it.

I found a great collection of Ableton articles on proper leveling and such. Here is my first attempt to follow the strategies from those articles, mainly keeping the master track at -6dB. The melody is pretty simple, but I use lots of effects and loud drums. It seems most of the music I make really is just a few bars of a melody looped over and over again, slowly building up with more noise. Call it the Bolero effect . I read somewhere that Ravel was possibly going insane when he wrote that.

Oh, this is an AAC/M4A file. Hope you can play it.

This weekend I drove up to the Brava Theater in the Mission district to check out a hiphop and Jewish folklore interpretation of Dante's Inferno. It was a small independent theatre so I wasn't expecting much, but was pretty blown away by the performance. It's basically a retelling of Dante's story modernized and interspersed with musical breaks. There was a beat boxer, a flute player (also the storyteller), a cellist, and a drummer. A really strange combination, and all made a great band. The beat boxing and cello playing was really amazing. The cello player had a loop sampler, and he did a solo where he would overdub track on track of himself playing to create an amazing mix of cello playing. It was really beautiful. For someone to do that live on stage without flaws is pretty incredible.

The beat boxer spent about 10 minutes showing off his skills in a solo and he too was extremely talented. The best part with him was a scene where he was a bouncer at a nightclub for birds (there are very strange things in this story, though I'm pretty sure the bird was from Dante). He'd do the thumping bass with a microphone to his throat as if the door to the nightclub was closed. Every time he'd let someone in, the music would come out blaring. The way the whole band transitioned in and out of this with the abrupt volume changes was so cool. Oh and there was a beat boxer and drummer battle which just has to be seen to be believed.

They are performing for a month. If you are in town, definitely go check it out. It was a cheap $20, and for this show I would have spent more.

Excellent interview with Atul Gawande on improving health care. Having doctors go through a checklist decreases mortality by almost 50%. Such a simple strategy taken from the airline industry. A quote:

DR. ATUL GAWANDE: Well, in all of my writing, I’m interested in where the individual meets systems. And in medicine, what I’ve noticed as a surgeon is that we have become overwhelmed by complexity. We have trouble getting things right, because the volume of knowledge we’ve created in science has overwhelmed our ability as individuals to follow through. And we’ve seen ideas like “use a checklist” as a sign of weakness. We’ve not gone where aviation has gone in embracing these kinds of ideas. But for people on the receiving ends of care, they see the gaps, they see things falling through. And we’ve been slow to embrace some of these very simple ideas.