Defying Gravity- Roger McGough.

Roger McGough's poem is deceptive, succinct, and to the point. One of the best poems on this subject I've ever read.


http://in-country-heaven.blogspot.com/2016/05/defying-gravity-roger-mcgough.html

The Greening of Financial Systems

The central banks and the financial structures they support are at risk when climate change is brought into the equation.  Here is what an umbrella organization of those central banks is saying .

https://www.banque-france.fr/en/financial-stability/international-role/network-greening-financial-system/press-events

Day One Entry: Mar 24, 2019

In honor of the 100th birthday of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

When the wreaths of youth weighed heavily upon my form,
threatening to cast me down who knew where,
Lawrence,
like a Divine Wind
blew my wreaths away and
exploded my chains,
and taught me to sing out from my heart,
that deepest part that was hidden so deep,
Sing out the sky until I fall fast
Asleep.

63°F Partly Cloudy
953 Riverchase Pkwy W, Hoover, AL, United States

Sent from my iOS phone.

To Charity or Not to Charity

There are a lot of generous hearted folks who have used their FaceBook birthday celebration to offer you the opportunity for you to give to a charity of their choosing. Their motives seem pure, altruistic and very sweet. From conversations with several folks who do this it seems apparent that they mostly wanted to turn their birthday into something larger than themselves and wanted to “give back” to a community of deserving and needy folks.  This is a laudable perspective and a fresh reversal of a “me first” perspective touted in common culture.

Yet, there are reasons you might hesitate to support a charity with which you may be unfamiliar. Firstly, you may not have a lot of funds to toss around and are struggling to be frugal. Secondly, you may already have favorite charities to which you give money (or goods) every year.  Thirdly, it is possible that the charity is not a good steward of the funds received, and indeed, may run very close to being a fraudulent charity.

This essay will look at the third possibility and try to answer the questions about how to verify a charity, and determine its efficiency. Three organizations that have been involved with verifying, rating, and documenting charities are: Charity Navigator, CharityWatch, and GuideStar. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, and I’m not going to rate these organizations.  I’ve used one of these organizations for around 20 years.

One of the easiest ways to use these organizations to your advantage is to search on a charity that has caught your interest. If the charity has been in business for a while and been filing  F990’s for years then perhaps that charity has been rated. For example, Charity Navigator will only rate a charity that has filed 7 years of F990 forms.  For charities that have not been posting the F990 (required of tax exempt organizations) for years and years, then taking a peek at the F990 that did get filed can give you a window into how the charity is organized structurally and how they spend their money.

In this example of a less than exemplary charity I’m looking at a Native American charity. Before proceeding further I want to say there are some good charities doing excellent work for the Native American communities scattered around the country and I contribute to one of those. However, there are others that are rotten the core.

What criteria should be use to judge a charity? Well, each charity watch organization details the criteria they use and it is worth your time checking that out on their web page. One of the criteria mentioned by folks examining charities is monetary efficiency. That’s just my term for how much of the money taken in actually gets used for the intended recipients. Some writers have suggested that at least 75% of the money go to the recipients with the remaining 25% being allocated to marketing, salaries, infrastructure upkeep and the like. Some very efficient charities actually allocate over 90% of their funds directly to the people in need.

The Native American charity that I’m examining is not going to be named. However, the figures (rounded off) from its most recent F990 will be used.

This charity took $1,200,00 in charitable donations during the year 2016. Approximately half of that,  $620,000 went for marketing expenses paid to an LLC that is essentially one guy (named in other research) who lives and works from his home. An amount near $180,000 was spent on computer expenses and that money was sent to a condo in another state. There was one paid director who received a salary of about $60,000, and an additional $150,000 was spent for salaries and other related expenses.

If you are now wondering how much money is left over for the Native American recipients of the program money, you are not alone. Over one million dollars has been used for “expenses” all to provide just under $200,000 to the programs for the Native American recipients. This is not an efficient charity. Not only that, some might call it a fraudulent charity since it seems designed to provide two people with three fourths of the total funds for the charity.

For this reason I don’t ever contribute to a Charity that I’ve not researched. I recommend that if you are curious about your charity that you do a little detective work first. That kind of work can be quite interesting and a little fun.

Dreamtime

Upon awakening this morning these thoughts fell fully formed and flowing like a river.

I will tell you a puzzle. Perhaps it will be a puzzle of delight, one which unwinds its light as you wend you way wistfully through its maze. On the other hand the puzzle may be dimly perceived, perplexing, petulant.

The puzzle may morph a bit with time and effort, but that does not detract from the truths/frights within.

You see, for all of this time you have held a key unknowingly. This key would glitter in the sun and be rendered an object of curiosity , or other times it would lie unseen in a dark drawer.

Your life changes from day to day, from hour to hour and it is pivoting upon your thoughts, your judgements, your preferences, your disgusts. Every turn within your mind stream, conveys a new universe, each fork you choose propels one option closer to non existence and reinforces the other option.

You are the architect of all you survey, and the builder, and the inhabitant of your creation.  You make a world from which you cannot ever escape. Yet, the content and consequences in the world are completely within your power to control. 

Each time you entertain the thought (no matter whose voice is attached to the thought!) that you are suffering, or needy, or failing to achieve, you are laying down the cobblestones in a road on which you are walking.  Your paved path is easier to tread the next time and those thoughts will gain greater speed of transit. You  will have encouraged a habitual thought and made it easier for it to be re born and to carry you within its orbit. 

In a like manner if you carry thoughts of generosity, caring for others and entertaining a willingness to help others you lay down cobblestones to make this journey more predictable, more dependable. 

Each thought you embrace is like a candle. Sheltered from the errant  breeze it provides light for travelling the maze. Yet! There are times it would be better if you blew it out!

For an illumination easing ones path down the cobblestones of despair does you no good. In the dark you can find your way for you are the architect of all you survey. You can pivot on a dime  refuse the illumined path and stride forcefully through the dark toward another path, a better path, a brighter path. 

You can master the puzzle. You can choose the way of light, love, generosity, and peace and smooth over the cobblestones. As you return again and again to this path and bring more construction materials you can add streetlights, cafes, theaters, libraries, and most importantly friends who will be companions on your redemptive journey. Like the Phoenix you arise and fly again, simply because you choose another path.

Cats And Their Body Language

Don't you  wish you could understand what your cat is saying to you?  They are quite intelligent and they really know what they want. How can we eavesdrop into their thoughts and conversation, even if sometimes your cat seems to be talking to themselves?

Well, a true cat lover has posted some clues and based on my 30 year exposure to cats (of multiple breeds) he seems to have hit the nail on the head.

"The Body Language of Cats" is worth reading for entertainment and more importantly educational reasons. You will come to love and enjoy your four legged feline companion more when you are aware of how they are thinking both about the world around them and how they think about you!

SoundCloud post of On A Far Shore

Well this is another experiment in cross media sharing.  I'm going to try to share a SOUNDCLOUD link to a playlist that I created.  In fact all of the cuts on the playlist I created.  Some are ok, one or two might be better than that and several are average or below.  I've got to start somewhere though and here is where it is.

Monolith By the Sea

Test post using soundcloud...

https://soundcloud.com/user-662277008/monolith-by-the-sea

Ten Years After

Approximately ten years ago I commenced my first climate research. This has been spoken of earlier. My experience as an amateur weather enthusiast/observer/forecaster in no way prepared me for the complexities of trying to understand the climate.  That the climate was changing seemed to be intuitive, yet where were the measuring sticks?  What metrics were important to measure changes.

In July of 2008 Stefan Rahmstorf gave a presentation on some relevant datasets. He called it "The 5 Most Important Data Sets of Climate Science".  This past fall, a blog post on Open Mind, revisited those datasets and gave us an update.  You can see the post, graphs and all, here.

The most obvious conclusion to be drawn, whether or not you agree with the choice of these particular 5 datasets is that climate change has continued unabated, and that for the last 10 years the climate scientists nailed in in these 5 datasets. 

Giving

As a child, Christmas was a “magical” time, a time of mystery and dark, a time of expectation and celebration, a time of giving and receiving.

My parents really enjoyed Christmas and enjoyed the part they played for their children. As kids we were always excited with what we were going to receive, especially the surprises along the way. Yet, we were also taught, and learned to enjoy giving as well. The balance was always there. That balance is a gift I treasure to this day.

To Sequence or Not to Sequence, That is the Question

Last night I took the simplified sheet music for Silent Night over to the synthesizer and powered up the electronics.

First I sat at the midi controller and slowly keyed the notes on the keyboard. I’m not good at reading music and picking out notes,  but before long I’d memorized the first eight notes: G, A, G, E, repeated twice. 

By the way,  this is the C major version.  Then I played those measures a couple more times and darn if I hadn’t memorized it.  That is mind blowing, because I’m “not supposed” to be able to do that.  

Then I sat down with the ER-101 Quad Sequencer and started entering notes.  Two weeks ago I had created a “cheat sheet” for that sequencer showing all of the notes that it could produce (99 of them) and correlated that with an 88 key piano keyboard. Then I added the peculiar notation used by the sequencer and created a matrix with the addition of midi notes.  This “cheat sheet” gave me the confidence to add the first 14 notes of  Silent Night into the sequencer. So I pressed “run”, and I sort of recognized the melody.  There were a few mistakes,  notably (pardon the pun) notes entered in the wrong octave.  Then I played it again and realized I had not entered anything resembling duration.  You see, this song has dotted quarter notes, half notes, eighth notes and other expressions of musical time. 

Adding duration to the notes took twice as long as entering the notes themselves. I understood the relationships between the lengths of the different notes, but had to come up with a quantification of the ratios. This time when I pressed “run” it sounded much more like the hymn. 

I’m still not completely satisfied because I’m not sure my tempo is matching up with the 3/4 time signature. So, I’ll practice my best SWAG (sophisticated wild ass guess) on it and see where it takes me. 

Then, I need to add the remaining 33 notes to complete the song, and set up the correct duration, and perform SWAG  for some of the calculations. 

I am excited about pushing the envelope (pardon the synth pun) on the ER-101. This has come about by a decision made about six weeks ago to dig deep into the basics of what I have.  It involved patching the ultimate basic patch and putting out a YouTube video explaining the patch. Then I pulled aside one module and did an in-depth exploration of the module and put out a YouTube video explaining it.  These explorations are primarily for my sake. I’ve learned over the years that if I study something well enough to explain it then this crosses over into the realm of deeper learning. Preparing to teach something helps me learn it. 

Today I walked past the band stands of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra.  They come to the cafeteria at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama one day a year to play two Christmas concerts.   In between the concerts I dropped by the cafeteria to get a sandwich. As I casually strolled past the double bass lying on the floor I glanced up at the music sheet on the stand. Hah! All of his music is in the bass clef, I never would have even known that two years ago. This journey has been so much fun.

Who knew about this visual illusion, the Shepard's Tables?

I recently came across the Shepard's Tables illusion and was completely flummoxed.  Those tables just "cannot" be the same size.  But they are :)

Check out this link:   http://www.psychologyconcepts.com/shepards-tables-illusion/












not my art..... it was borrowed from:
 http://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/Geometry/Shepard.shtml


Or how about The Dress?  This optical illusion is even more stunning because it is about Color!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress




It is still quite surprising that our perceptions can be “tricked” by reality!

Michael Was Worse Than I Thought

Hurricane Michael, while not directly causing a large number of fatalities, rearranged the landscape for tens of thousands of people and caused effects that will linger for many years.  The category 4 hurricane, which at landfall was only 2mph below category 5 status sent in a storm surge that nearly wiped Mexico Beach off the map. The barely weakening storm wrecked the east side of Panama City and roared north through rural Florida entering Georgia as a category 3 hurricane.  It appears that millions of trees, many of which were planted in pine forests to be harvested, were downed. People were being rescued from their homes for days after the passage of the massive storm.

In one place, that I first came to know and love in the 1990’s, the St. Joseph’s Peninsula, the geography was rearranged.  Hurricane Michael cut through the peninsula in two places, isolating the T. H. Stone Memorial St. Joseph Peninsula State Park.  Satellite imagery released by NOAA on October 11, the day after the impact of hurricane Michael showed the Gulf of Mexico flowing through the channels cut in the land.

I have loved “The Emerald Coast” for my entire life, even when folks called it “The Redneck Rivera”. The kitschy outdoor games, the beautiful bay, the unparalleled Gulf of Mexico with its sugar sand beaches have been an enduring part of my life.

If you can, please contribute to a verified charity that will endeavor to reduce the suffering of the folks along hurricane Michael’s path of destruction. The citizens of the Emerald Coast and those living inland who are digging out of the destruction will be grateful.

I've Got a Bad Feeling About Michael

I've got a bad feeling about Michael.  This hurricane popped up from a tropical gumbo where it stewed for a few days without any defined characteristics. Then, BOOM, this hurricane forms and it is tracking toward our beloved Florida Gulf Coast. The amount of shear (not so much) and warm waters (quite a bit) and approaching cold front are forecast to move Michael to the Florida Gulf Coast in less than two days.  It might "bomb" and explode in intensity bringing it onshore as a Category 3 hurricane.

I don't normally blog about this sort of thing, but there is a feeling deep in the pit of my stomach that this might be the worst hurricane to hit Panama City in my lifetime. I really hope this is not the case.

Prayers, crossed fingers and hopes - "please, no!"

Stay tuned...

Who Knew About Auditory Illusions?

My friend O.Z. Hall passed this on the Birmingham Electronic Music group’s FaceBook page today. This is quite an intriguing experiment, one that you can do alone which will cause you no discomfort.



“While working on some deep learning related audio projects I came upon an interesting

auditory illusion that shows how our brain associates memorized phrases with auditory stimuli. Below is a sound generated by randomly stimulating a neural net that was pretrained on approximately 1000 recordings of brass sounds (both single notes and entire musical phrases). The resulting “drone” is totally uniform and has no temporal development at all (in the sense that there would be individual notes present in that mixture). If you first listen to the audio file it just sounds chaotic and maybe a bit disharmonic, nothing to see here, move along. But wait! Try running the file in the background for several minutes in a loop and you will notice that it appears as if there are suddenly notes, even entire melodies emerging from the mix. ” 1

http://blogs.zynaptiq.com/bernsee/evoked-melodies-in-auditory-illusion/



1. Quoted from his blog post: Stephan Bernsee’s Blog , August 31, 2018

Tonight’s Modular Synthesis Update

Well, this won’t be a daily feature but tonight there was some success in areas that needed it.

The DLD was patched to handle two Mother32s who were sequenced by the GRP R24.  Bingo! Each synth was running through a separate channel of delay simultaneously with its own custom delay time.  This not only worked beautifully but sounded great.

Later, using some radical off the wall patching the tELHARMONIC began to sing in a voice never heard before.  This patch will need documentation because most previous efforts to play this module ended in non excitement.

Lastly the TimeFactor was tested with each channel separately and it puts out beautiful delays as well. So it appears that four voices can be delayed separately.

The next goal will be to take existing stand alone VCOs and run them through one or the other of the delay paths.  The first test along this line using the ER-101 was not impressive. I’m sure that somewhere my technique went off the rails. 😀

The Weather So Far in 2018

It’s been a very busy year. One of the consequences of that busyness is that I’ve neglected to track the weather as close as I prefer. Tonight I ran through the F6 from the Birmingham National Weather Service (NWS) station.  The F6 is more widely known as the PRELIMINARY LOCAL CLIMATOLOGICAL DATA form.  The data in these forms are in all CAPS for some reason. One day I’ll look into why that is the case. Anyway, as I was saying, my investigations into the first nine months F6 forms and my comparison to the current Climate Normals yielded some interesting “headlines” for this years weather. 

First a small digression to provide a salient definition. “Climate Normals” are the current 30 year average of weather for each month of the year. The current Climate Normals are comprised of the averages from the years 1981-2010.  Every ten years the NWS puts out a new dataset. In the year 2021 they will deliver the next range of years for Climate Normals: 1991-2020. 

These Climate Normals are precisely what climate is: a thirty year average of thousands of weather measurements at the Birmingham NWS station. Every NWS station utilizes a set of data from which they derive their own Climata Normals. Using the Climate Normals and comparing them to our current year’s weather is the motivation behind this evening’s blog post. 

The first “headline” this data produces is: “The Month of February is Missing from Calendar Year 2018”.  Well, my calendar has February in it, and so does yours, so what does this headline mean? It’s actually quite simple. If you take the average highs and lows for this year’s February they are almost identical to the average highs and lows for the month of March found in the Climate Normals. This year’s weather just skipped the February temperatures and went from January to March temperatures.   And since this year’s March was just barely warmer then the March of the Climate Normals, this year we got double the fun!  Two month’s of March weather. 

The second “headline” this year is that the May-September period was hotter than the Climate Normals. This extended warm spell started out wet (6.98” in May) but ended up dryer than normal. July only saw 1.81” of rain at the bottom of the rain gauge. 

The third “headline” this year is that the weather in September was a clone of August.  So, this year we got two month’s of August weather, and that was following a July that was noticeably hotter than the Climate Normal.  As a matter of fact this year’s September was warmer than this year’s August! 

The fourth “headline” this year is a continuation of the last one.  “September is Hotter than the Normal July”.  Now everyone around here knows that July is the hottest month of the year. August is the second hottest month, followed by June. This year’s September’s temperatures were as hot as or hotter than the Climate Normal July. What we are saying here is that you could be more miserably 
hot this September than you could in the vast majority of the thirty year’s month of July (1981-2010).   Wow, that is hot!

The year is not over yet!  We just started the fourth quarter on October 1st so I’ll have to return to this topic in January for a look back at any future “headlines”. Until then, keep your eye on the sky. 

Celestial Cruze

I’m not sure why this last piece of music has entranced me.  It’s not the most beautiful, not the most danceable, not even the most ambient piece I’ve recorded.  It resonates with me on an existential level and repudiates my conscious efforts to produce anything along the lines of Berlin School space music. There are no atmospheric cloud banks of sequencers pulsating at different tempos and timbres. The soft and sweeping violin pads are not to be found in this sound scape.

This piece is in a unique way a piece of me.  The drones expanding and contracting interrupted after a length of time with struck notes sounding like a gigantic collection of piano strings connected to a steel I-beam. Sound, echo, and silence feature and fulminate in a sometimes turbid, other times timid embrace.

This piece is not recorded to any media other than video, and hence is both a live performance never to be repeated, and a recording that cannot be edited later to correct errors or oversights.

Living and breathing, sounding and resounding, starting and finishing. From the depths of deep dark notes to high pitched three to five octave leaps and sweeps, this piece moves slowly toward its denouement.

Celestial Cruze:

https://youtu.be/APwvIlXyf0g

The Seven Sisters in a Veil of Snow

This is how you know that you've waited too late to take a ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  I'm standing on the shore of Lake Tomahawk in Black Mountain, North Carolina looking north at the Seven Sisters mountain range. An early snow fall has covered the high elevations above 4,500' and rendered the parkway closed at that point. We were blessed with abundant sunshine in the valley below the peaks and even caught a rainbow on that chilly day in October 2017.

Arwen and her Pre Brush Communion

Arwen is by far and away the single most responsive cat we’ve had the pleasure of living with.  We’ve had a cat (only one at a time) for the past 37 years. The first two were Siamese, Arwen is mostly Maine Coon. She does not have papers to detail her bloodline, she was a rescue cat.  Her obvious and striking gratitude in being adopted was obvious from the first hour she connected with Debbie. The entire crowd in attendance (Debbie’s surprise birthday party) were amazed at how fast the two bonded.

Arwen has demonstrated to me, on hundreds of separate occasions that her command of the English language is far more sophisticated than expected. She picks up and responds to subtle conversations that Debbie and I have. Her daily expectation of her ritualistic grooming is delightful to see, and at times exasperating because typically my arrival from work coincides with her desire to receive the brush.  She knows she cannot get brushed until we “meet and greet”.  This ritual is played out every afternoon at some point in time between 4:30 and 5:30.  She awaits my movement to sit upon the ottoman. Once seated she comes up to me and rubs against my legs for dozens of times.  I’ll rub her as she passes by, or twirl her tail. She continues circling back in elaborate figure eights across the den floor and swipes both legs coming from the left. Then, in a mirror image of the previous maneuver she swipes from the right side. After some minutes of this slow motion activity she heads over toward the brush.

——- to be continued.