9-11 Conspiracies

I wish to give my $0.02 on my take of the 9-11 tragedy. First of all, there are indeed a lot of questions regarding the tragedy, all legitimate. Such as: the buildings collapsing demolition-style on their foundations, a rare event, in fact an event which has never happened historically with any burning skyscraper. Unless it’s being deliberately demolished. Who would want to demolish the skyscrapers? Who would gain from such demolition? No one has a clear answer, although I feel that the buildings could not have burned in that way, and buildings 1, 2, and 7 all have coincidentally fallen in the same manner, falling straight down as they did on their foundations. It would seem to defy probability, as well as physics.

But was the Government in on it? Could any government seriously keep a secret on something involving thousands of emergency response personnel and many more in the armed forces? Not to mention the CIA (CIA personnel had offices in Building 7), and other branches of government? Anyone remember the conspiracy headed by Nixon into Watergate? How long was that a secret?

But if we simply look at what is obvious, we see things that ought to alarm us. Governments around the world, including the United States government and the Canadian government, have used the spectre of terrorism to scare us into having our rights taken away on many other things, not all having to do with terror. Our police forces which are equipped to fight crime, not terror, have been funded to the hilt and expanded at a time when crime is at the lowest it has been in decades. Should we really be afraid that the next 7-11 bandit could be a terrorist as well?

I don’t think that the Bush government of the day had the skill or competence to pull off a 9-11. What we all must agree to, however, is that they knew how to exploit the opportunity to take away the rights of its citizens, and detain them without warrant or trial. This is a violation of  habeas corpus, a law which is as old as 13th century England. It is a law that protects a person from arbitrary detention by the state. Violate that law, and you have Gitmo in a nutshell.

Keep your eye on the ball, and let’s not get ourselves distracted with the niggly details of 9-11 physics and any associated conspiracy theory, no matter how much that keeps us up at night thinking. The taking away of your rights is more obvious than any falling building. In the end, your rights are what matter more than the event of almost 10 years ago.

In addition, I would also like to add that while we may easily dismiss the “government” conspiracy theory for 9-11, this does not allow us to say that “conspiracy theories” should always be suspect. For that matter, if we say we are against conspiracy theories, then we should be against saying that the “Al-Q’aeda did it”, since that is a conspiracy theory too.

Visits: 94

What is old is new: RPN on the HP 35s Scientific Calculator part 2

I saw the 35s for the first time in a Staples store just this year, though the calculator has been around in University bookstores since 2007. I bought mine on sale, being listed at $99.00 full price. When it came out in 2007, I heard that it came with a zippered pouch to store the calculator in. Mine, supposedly the 2011 model, came with a vinyl pouch that was open, with rather stiff elasticized cloth bands on the sides, making the calculator difficult to actually place in its pouch, especially the first time it was used.  Once in the pouch, it was difficult to take back out of its pouch. The calculator feels light when held in one’s hand. I’m not sure why I noticed that. Somehow I thought it would feel more substantial, given all of the functions and programmability, and the 800 or so memories that it boasts of.

2012 will be the 40th anniversary of the scientific calculator. HP made the world’s first scientific calculator in 1972, and it was an RPN calculator with no algebraic mode. Anyone who has tried to program in a serious way would appreciate that RPN is easier to program for (from the manufacturer’s point of view), because of its reliance on a memory model called “stacks”, which most computer science undergraduates know about, by second year at the latest. While the act of doing things algebraically might seem easier to us humans, programming a calculator to think in terms of human algebra is more difficult than you would think. It takes a computer many more steps, and thus it is much slower than RPN in terms of processor time. It was probably not until the early 1990s that calculators were capable of anything close to human-style algebra, and only recently have processors become so small and fast that the speed of the algorithm is not really as important as it used to be. But human speed might be. To those who take the time to understand how RPN works, and how the 35s implements stacks, RPN is still faster for humans to perform calculations.

Many of the features on the 35s are common on much cheaper calculators: statistics, regression, vectors, mixed fractions, complex numbers, numerical integration, numerical differentiation, a linear solver, and there are much cheaper calculators that can solve single-variable polynomials up to order 3. I own a $5.00 calculator that can solve linear systems in up to 3 unknowns. Also, there are too many features on the “new” HP 35s that are tied up in menus, which is something that turned me off from using TI calculators. The only tangible attraction I can think of for this calculator is likely to be its programming mode. The 35s is among the very few non-graphical calculators around today that one can write programs in.

Playing with it a bit, I find that scientific notation seems to work up to 10500, meaning the computation of factorials can go to unheard-of extremes, even going beyond the capacity of an Excel spreadsheet. I was able to find, to several sig figs, the value of 253!, wheras Excel 2007 craps out past 125!. This means that this calculator is particularly powerful for performing permutations (nPr) and combinations (nCr).

I have lost my touch with the use of stacks from my programming days, but it looks like the calculator does a lot of pushing and popping, even in the middle of the stack. In addition, it only seems to perform calculations on the stack 2 at a time, even though the stack can accomodate 4 numbers. When you enter numbers, it’s like “pushing” numbers on to the bottom of the stack. You enter a number, and the stack moves up. If  you enter two numbers then add them, the stack moves down and the result of the addition is entered in the immediate register in the stack, called “x”.  The true implemtnation of this is that, for the registers t, z, y, and x, t gets its number copied to z, z copies to y, and y copies to x. This results in a duplication of t in the stack. If a “+” is pressed when a stack contains the numbers “1 2 3 4”, it adds only 3 and4, then the top 2 registers shift down and the result of adding 3 and 4 is placed in “x”: “1 1 2 7” becomes the resulting stack. The “1” and “2” shift down, but in reality, the memory register values are just copied.

Visits: 113

Microphones

I had decided to do my little contribution to society, and join LibriVox.org, and record a free audio file for them. My biggest problem so far has been microphones. I have an Optimus mike that was purchased 5 years ago, and had hardly been used. I had decided to use it for LibriVox, but my first problem was in finding an adaptor, since the Optimus uses a quarter inch plug, and my sound card has only eighth-inch jacks.

I went to The Source (which used to be Radio Shack), and got two adaptors, one mono and one stereo. The stereo adaptor I purchased fell apart inside the jack, and I almost took the front end of the computer off trying to dislodge it. First, the sheath came off, leaving the bare plug, stripped of its barrel with its bare contacts hanging in the air. With a pair of pliers, I managed to remove the rest of the plug. But when that happened, I noticed that one of the insulators on the plug was stripped off. I checked the package. Made in China. !@*#$ free trade agreements! @!#@$$#$@!! global economy!

I took a chance on the Chinese-made mono plug, and Buddha smiled on me for that one, for it seemed to work fine. Trouble was Windows didn’t know it was there, so I tried the back. That was fine, but the levels were too quiet, even with the Windows levels turned all the way up.

Visits: 73

The Psychology Contrarian II: The Obsession with IQ

At best, these websites present these people as numbers first, people second. To what extent does saying that Marie Curie has an IQ of 190 or so add to or take away from her discovery of radioactivity or her other contributions to Chemistry and Physics to which she literally paid for with her life, all the while fleeing the Nazis? To what extent does Shakespeare’s assigned IQ of 210 add to or take away from his being the most quoted writer in the English Language? And finally, just who is this guy “William Sidis”, and who in the h-e-double-sticks gave him an IQ of 250 to 300?

William Sidis (1898-1944), was an American who had an undergraduate degree at MIT, and then a studied for a law degree at Harvard before he reached 18. By that time he had given occasional lectures to professors. He was portrayed as Will Hunting in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. But Will Hunting was portrayed more as a thug first, intellectual second (it was the reverse in real life). In real life, the psychologist he was to see was his father, Boris Sidis. Now, isn’t that a tad, shall we say, unethical? Exactly what was to be the outcome here? The only way you can be clinically objective about your own son is to not have feelings for your son at all, and doesn’t that defeat the purpose of therapy in a rather deep and profound way? I guess one way to become screwed up is to have issues with your father; and one way to be really screwed up is to have that same father for your therapist. NOOOOOOOO!, I can hear him screaming. Ah, but I digress.

No one doubts that Sidis was a prodigy. But what of the number given to him: 250 – 300, which pretty much isolates him from the rest of humanity (even going back to the dawn of antiquity)  as an intellectual? Is this number even meaningful? Is it legitimate? An IQ like that would make him “smarter” than Leonardo da Vinci, or Michelangelo. Even Albert Einstein had to give the world his special and general relativity theories while chugging along with his meagre 205 IQ.  On this scale, Isaac Newton was an also-ran; and Galileo could be arrogant to the Pope, but like John The Baptist, he should not feel himself fit to tie the sandals of someone on the scale of Good Will Sidis, apparently.

Will Sidis, as far as history can tell, is just known for being smart; he didn’t contribute anything, except for this “human thermodynamics/entropy reversal” stuff, which few have heard of. His contribution doesn’t seem as all-encompassing as Einstein or Michelangelo, so having the IQ score alone is nothing to be envious about. Nearly all of those slowpokes who meandered to their historical achievements had to do so while galumphing along with the humble 190-210 IQs that God gave them, if we are to believe the posthumous IQ scores given to them.

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The Psychology Contrarian I: The obsession with IQ

When there are no serious researchers that would place any relevance on our current obsession with IQ and what it measures (indeed, what exactly is it measuring is itself a mystery: does intelligence even have a definition, or am I missing out on something?), I wonder why there are web sites which even go so far as to go back in history, centuries before there were IQ tests or even a field of psychology as we know it, and begin to assign IQs to people like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle, Hypatia, Isaac Newton, and so on, as if we were handing passing out candies, albeit to dead people.

I think IQ is the last bastion of that age where math was taken too seriously, and secret societies were formed out of assigning numbers to strange and abstruse things. The IQ, much like saying “chair = 5”, was and is the last of these to fall. The same care and attention given to assigning numbers to daffodils and planets is being given to historical figures who had never seen, heard of, or taken these tests. It forms an easy method by which we can feel we understand the world without having to go through all the bother of reading of people’s biographies or accomplishments, or knowing anything about them at all. Their entire intellectual and scholastic oeuvre can be summarized in a three-digit number, and that’s all that matters to those of us who are IQ-obsessed.

One such person who was IQ obsessed was Rick Rosner, whose first IQ test was about 150, but repeatedly took more tests such that his IQ was inflated to 170 to 190. He said in an interview that 150 was OK for being the smartest in your high school, but not OK for being the smartest person at a place like Harvard. A 150 IQ just sort of blends in.

Of course, this logic fails because it confuses IQ scores with achievement. There is more to life than smarts; of course we can all do with more of it. The main ingredient, and possibly the most important ingredient leading to achievement and success in life is self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the ability to make manifest the goals you set. Self-efficacy takes focus, determination, and discipline. These are things well within the reach of any average person.

Visits: 125

Crappy Album Covers #329 — Mathematics and album covers

Hey,and I thought I was the only one with a collection of mathematical music. Now, is my time to shine, and make millions! Now, courtesy of Strider’s Records, comes this great collection of mathematical ditties! Using various trigonometric equations, a waveform is fed into a sequencer, where you get the following 16 second hits that will make me obscene piles of money! (Some are up to 18 seconds, for the record)
Get a load of these UFO sounds:

Then, party to “throat-singing” simulations:

And then join the after-party for some warbling simulations:

Then, mellow out to my rendition of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music:

This is an alternative cover for Rick Wakeman’s first-ever recording, Piano Vibrations. It’s here, because of the geometric figure on the cover.

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Crappy Album Covers #328 — Setting high expectations then fighting them …

Here are the Brady Bunch’s Marcia and Peter Brady (for real). Chris Knight and Maureen McCormick got together to make an album some time after the series ended.Maureen did a string of B-movies along with several cameo appearances on television, and was going through a rough time in her career for a couple of decades, but is still acting, and has also written an autobiography about “surviving” having to play Marcia Brady, who had, as a result of the sitcom, become a role model for the perfect all-American daughter.
Cindy Brady is actually on the cover, but the lighting, subject and camera angle were so bad that she changed her name to LenaZavaroni. Actually, Lena is for real (1963-1999), and here she is at age 10 for her 1974 album, “Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me”. She lived for most of her life in Scotland, where she had a strong fan base. She had also performed with Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball while in Hollywood. At age 35 she succumbed to anorexia, a disease she had been fighting against since age 13.

 

Visits: 251

Crappy Album Covers #327 — Already knowing your cover is crappy

I don’t know about you, but this album, by El Tadeo, is being sold by everybody from Napster to Amazon to websites as far-removed as Japan. The reason I am sure it sells so well, is because this is a comedy album with explicit content, which is dull if all you know is English. As you would guess, this album is in Spanish.I guess El Tad expects us all to plop it on our turntable and just let it happen. But I know what’s going on. El Tad is channelling the late John Lennon, who oft times wore a toilet seat around his neck in some of his early concerts. Soon, El Tad will be thinking he is more popular than Jesus. Let’s just pray he doesn’t let this toilet seat thing go to his head … doh! Too late!

The LP was reissued as a CD in 2009. I couldn’t find the year of the original pressing.

Putting cutie monsters in a child-style drawing on the cover does not excuse Alphabutt from the overall grossness in concept. Year unkown. Berkeley, California native Kimya Dawson appears to be somewhat of an activist and has at least 6 albums out.

 

Visits: 156

Crappy Album Covers #326 — That’s a switch

80s new-wave reggae/dance superstars The Police released this 1978 single, about suicide, called “Can’t Stand Losing You” (from their debut album Outlandos D’Amour) and featured the well-known lineup of Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland, who all formed respectable music careers in their own right.As you would have guessed, the cover created some controversy, and was banned in some countries in favour of an alternative cover. Probably not their usual party fare …
But, Iggy Pop is usually more likely than The Police to go all psychotic in his performances. But here he is, as light as bubblegum, with his third and last album on the Arista label, called “Party”, released in 1981. Arista wanted him to record one “commercial” album, and they sure got it.Does Iggy Pop need any introduction to you? Would you believe me if I told you that all he did was produce party albums? “No” to both questions? Doesn’t surprise me.

 

Visits: 136

[Media Monday] Collision of cultures

Another in a series of highly-circulated videos. Somewhere off the coast of Ireland in the North Atlantic, a large, fully-armed ship tries to avoid a collision with something on its radar which it thinks is another ship. They make radio contact, and find this smart-alecky Irish dude on the other end. American bravado versus Irish snarkiness. Who wins? This is an ad for the Swedish company Silva Navigation Systems.

Visits: 108

Crappy Album Covers #325 — Christmas Messages you probably don’t want to hear

One knows that Yoko must have been going though a creative slump back in 1991 when Ryko released this EP. It’s hard to fathom who would spend their Christmas putting this one in their CD player.
… Unless, of course, this 2006 Billy Idol album was their only alternative. He should have released this under his birth name, William Broad. Unless he can make “White Christmas” sound like “White Wedding”, it’s probably not going to work out. The track list includes mostly traditional Christmas songs.

 

Visits: 106

Crappy Album Covers #324 — The Horror, the horror …

Some covers are ugly for a reason. This one’s ugly because it’s a bootleg of a live concert in Philadelphia by the Danish heavy metallers Mercyful Fate. Bootlegs normally have substandard covers done by someone who did not understand the fine line between scary and ugly. You can listen to this bootleg for free here. The sound isn’t that bad.
This LP (year unknown) is a sound effects album by the BBC. The cover is probably intended to be a summary of the contents therein.

Visits: 408

[Media Monday] Christmas Drinking

BBC Scotland is here to remind you that if you drink, don’t drive. At least, not with your beer goggles on.

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Strider’s Journal is back on the air

Last weekend, the site was down for two days due to a host of errors, both man-made and computer-generated. For most of this week, until a few moments ago, I was locked out of my site, automatic twittering was disabled, just a mess. Well, I can finally log in, and let’s hope I can clean a few things up.

One of the problems was an erroneous buy tramadol no perscription domain change. Things have been changed back to normal from our end, but it will take a long time (more than a couple of days) for the domain name change to propagate back to the way it was worldwide.

Posting has gone on automatically as expected, in my absence, so at least something was working.

Well, I’m back again. Home sweet home.

Visits: 56

Crappy Album Covers #323 — And remember this Christmas season, Don’t stink and drive

Antonio Fargas‘s claim to fame was his work as police informant Huggy Bear in the 1970s police drama Starsky and Hutch. He also acted in a string of so-called “blaxploitation” movies such as Foxy Brown.

He has appeared in many movies and even had a role as Doc in the now-defunct series “Everbody Hates Chris” as late as 2006.

And, there is this track “It’s Christmas” from the album, showing that some Carribean rhythms are not out of place on a Christmas record:

[mp3t track=”Antonio_Fargas_-_Its_Christmas.mp3″]

No, actually, this is not an album cover, but a picture of the character in question. Click on this, and it links to my source for all this, Wikipedia.

Mr Hankey The Christmas Poo was a South Park character back in 1997 that was a talking and singing poo (are there any other kinds?). The poo would only talk to certain characters. To everyone else, Hankey would just kind of lie there and be … poo.

Imagine having a conversation with Hankey, with passers-by looking at you talking to a poo lying on the sidewalk. Everyone will think you’ve lost it, especially when you try to convince the passer-by that Hankey’s singing to you, too.

Hankey, purportedly, is a reaction to recent moves made by many officials to order the removal of nativity scenes from government buildings. The idea that creators Terry Parker and Matt Stone had, was to represent Jesus as poo. Got you angry for the Lord already, didn’t it? See? It worked!

Apparently, Hankey generated little controversy, probably indicating that no one cared. But actually, someone did care enough in 1998 to nearly file a lawsuit. That lawsuit came from John Kricfalusi, creator of the Ren and Stimpy show. Seems that Parker and Stone stole his idea of a talking poo, because Kricfalusi created the idea of Nutty the Friendly Dump earlier, another talking and singing poo. And so the battle of the poos began in earnest, with each cartoonist fighting for their claim to being the rightful poo creator. But all this misses the point of course. We all create our own poos, and it is the poo within ourselves that we must reckon with. Only when we get our poo together that we find we can go on in life. At least that is what my poo told me. Well, not my real poo, more like my inner poo.

 

Visits: 84

Crappy Album Covers #322 — Pretentious Prog

On a faraway planet, children crawl out of their homes inside of outdoor toilets to greet the Sun God. They call their place the “Houses of the Holey.” 

Led Zeppelin’s 1973 classic “Houses of the Holy” yielded a minor single, D’yer Maker, but it did end up as one of the top 200 albums of all time, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and also won a Grammy in 1974.

The Korean version of this album is a lot crappier where the robot (or whatever it is) is fishing the band members out of a rusty trash barrel (or a busted rooftop, it’s hard to tell). 

This is the album containing the 1977 monster hit “We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions”.

 

Visits: 135

[Media Monday] Bad Day at the Cube Farm

From an uncredited video, heavily circulated over the years. The computer is giving this cube farmhand a hard time, and he finally goes all snakey. Take a look at the fella in the cubicle next to him. Think he is keeping an eye on him for the boss of the cube plantation?

Visits: 37

Crappy Album Covers #321 — From sketchy to artless

Barr is a Swedish group, which released this album with a rather austere and bleak album cover. But the YouTube video below shows that you can’t judge a record by its cover. Barr has had an undeservedly small following, and are relatively unknown internationally. In fact, it gets me into one of my rants where I preach about the fact that popular (top 40) music has only gone to the dogs only because singles are never released of any good music done by musicians with any real skill these days. Just don’t get me started. I can go on all day about it.

“Skogsbo is the place” is a classical/folk album released in 2008 by Barr.

Mystery was a band covered in the last post. Given the choice between adolescent art and a Bryce rendering of geometric and humanoid shapes, it is difficult to wonder which is worse.

This is from their 1992 self-titled debut album.

Here is Barr, doing a track from “Skogsbo is the place”, called Moonfall

Visits: 142

Crappy Album Covers #320 — Painfully Unoriginal

Danish prog rockers Royal Hunt released their sixth album in 2001, called “The Mission”, a nod to Ray Bradbury. 

There isn’t really much to the Bryce rendering, just a knock-off to say that this album is “interesting”, and you’re supposed to listen to it an think about it a lot. It is highly likely that it is a near copy of the album cover below, from an album released a year earlier by Canadian prog rock group “Mystery”.

Royal Hunt’s most recent album is “X”, released earlier this year.

Canadian prog rockers “Mystery” had this design for their 2000 LP, “At The Dawn of a New Millenium”. While I don’t think anyone cares about stealing the jacket design, I am sure it ruffled a few feathers in the Quebec-based group. 

They have borne comparisons to Yes and Journey, and it had been recommended by many in the CAC Blogosphere that if you wanted to get to know their music, this album is actually a great place to start. “Dawn” is actually a compilation of their three albums prior to this one. So, while it doesn’t exactly qualify as a “best of” album, it makes a decent sampler.

As for a comparison to Yes, one of their lead singers, Benoit David, has been touring with Yes as a replacement for Jon Anderson since 2008. He is now an official member of the group. That said, he still had time to release another album with Mystery earlier this year, called “One Among The Living”.

 

Visits: 148

[Media Monday] The Sweater, by Roch Carrier

This is a children’s story by a Quebec-born author named Roch Carrier. A quote from this story reads: “We lived in three places: the school, the Church, and the skating rink. But our real life was on the skating rink.” This quote is seen as striking such a chord in Canadian culture, that it was chosen by the Canadian Mint in 2001 to be placed on the back of our five-dollar bills.

Roch Carrier was brought up as a non-conformist by wearing a Maple Leafs sweater in 1940s rural Quebec.

Here is the story, forever preserved by The National Film Board.

Visits: 180