singing in my sleep

If you pin the label songwriter to your list of interests/avocations, you may have been blessed or plagued by a similar phenomenon. It usually only happens to me when I'm low stress, getting a lot of exercise and thus sleeping alot. Now that summer's on the way, my job is a little lower stress and I have more time to exercise and hence dream music. I've had one or two instances in the last year that were enough to rouse me out of bed and roughly record the two concepts.
Here they are:
Dream 1: June 3rd, 3am 2005
Dream 2: April 30th, 5am 2006
What do these have in common? well, for one they're both difficult to 'count'. They are roughly in 4/4 but they repeat in the middle of the phrase. This brings up an interesting point about music. Most of what we hear is in 4/4 and our conscious state is often to create music in this time. But when the semi-conscious takes over, one can be free of the monotonity of common music. pretty cool.

Bicycle Evolution

Yesterday, I spent about 90 minutes in a local bike shop testing some new road bikes. My first reaction was how astonishing bikes have evolved in the last six years since I last bought one. But now in retrospect, I've changed that view. Lookit, no machine requires as much physical human energy and makes such efficient use of it as the bicycle. Exercise equipment will gladly accept your energy but it does little with it - rarely does it even use this to power it's 5-volt intelligence. So I believe we are extremely sensitive to the slight advances in bicycle design since WE are so intimately tied to the energy system.
For example, those funny little shoes you see on those skinny guys clicking about the coffee shop - do you need those to do any serious biking these days? The reason they developed was because most people bike in sneakers that have evolved to absorb (get rid of) the energy transfer to your foot from all that pounding the pavement. The bicycle shoe developed as a reaction in recent years because you want to maximize your energy delivered to the pedals - so your sneakers are working against you here!
Unlike the automobile, efficiency in cycling is directly in-line with speed and racing. As a result, all the design activities in cycling have been towards that single goal: make it more efficient since efficiency is speed. In automotives, this is clearly not the case. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the engineering design that went into Formula-One racing actually help us all have more efficient cars ! (there problaby is a small tie-in but I can't see it now)

Unfortunately, making the cycle more efficient introduces various contradictory sub-goals: make it lighter vs. make it stiffer, or make it comfy vs. make it fast. Furthermore, since buying a bike is like buying a car (a mode of transportation) but also like buying clothing (many complex interfaces with the human body) cycle manufacturers can make the slightest change in a design that seems, from our perspective to seem like a real technological leap. The danger in all this is that the ignorant consumer (even one who hasn't gone in a bike-shop for 6 years) can often be tricked into Formula-One spec'd racing bikes!

Magic Number 3

On this day 5/9/06, I want to discuss the most underrated number, the number 3. Perhaps our nature is to think of the world as in base-10 and base-2 for some strange psychological or biological reasons (10 fingers, and the bi-symmetry of ourselves, left-vs.-right). But through a series of posts I want to talk about base-3, and I'm not the only one. In a wonderfully readable article in American Scientist, the author shows the following graph that indicates that base-3 is optimal! What does that mean? Well, it means that we should be striving to make a computer that runs on Base-3 instead of Base-2. Not only is base-3 best for us (in terms of least headache in writing down numbers and doing simple math on them - yes, easier than our base-10 that we've spent a life time studying), but it also could make computers run much faster and more efficiently.

Here's a great puzzle related to this base-3 business:
"You are given 12 balls and one of them has a weight defect - either heavier or lighter. We don't know which one it is. You are allowed to use a balance pan three times to find the defective ball. What process should you follow?"

click here for the answer.

more on this base-3 stuff later...

Flaming Lips - At War with the Mystics - Review

I was excited to buy the latest Flaming Lips
music (I'm almost exclusively buying my music online these days - my favorite site is Musicmatch - both for its prices and its diversity). Something about the previous release, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, really grabbed me and I wanted more. Given the reviews of War with the Mystics, I was sure that I would see it similar. After a few weeks of listening, I have to say it's not as magical as I hoped.
The Flaming Lips has always been a band that is pivoted on humor, which I think is great. But the more they've veered towards progressive-rock the harder it is to make this work. I was a big prog-rock fan for the longest time - listening to music made in the early 70's. As I became a musician as a teenager, I thought it'd be fun to write and play such music. But, alas other influences pulled me more towards jazz. At any rate, I've realized that playing truly progressive rock or the more specific and stilted prog-rock is more than just sci-fi synth sounds and fantastical titles. Here is a band trying to make a prog-rock album and failing to do so, unlike Radiohead's Hail to the Theif or Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot which are progressive although the both bands would hate to be labeled that way. Yoshimi... was successful at combining both the Flaming Lips usual campiness with truly complex and beautiful music. That album also had more warmth partly due to the smooth bass sounds that appear to be missing on Mystics. They seem to have maintained an edginess on Yoshimi that, like the previously listed bands (Radiohead and Wilco), make it hard to pin the prog-rock label on - even though they deserve it.

Case in point, the title track on Yoshimi (tracks 3 and 4) and ripe with humor and ol'fashioned r'n'r rebellion that ties them to their "she don't use jelly" roots. In comparison on Mystics, tracks like "Free Radicals" builds up an all too-polished spoof of 90's Prince. It's hard to believe the track clocks in at only 3:40 since the simple gtr-riff gets old real quick. The vocals on the album are delivered in the same charming, thin, unassuming Coyne style that pulled our heartstring on "Waitin' for Superman" but somehow there's just too much being said in this album to get the same affect. I don't have the best ear, but the vocals on "Haven't Got a Clue" are simply not in tune. Don't get me wrong - I agree with the political message of the CD, but I was expecting more from the music.

design: part art, part art, part science

I was working with a student today who was writing a paper on whether
design (specifically engineering design) is part art or part science. In
a way, this phrase we use to describe something as an art more than a
science is really simply a colloquialism - and perhaps shouldn't be the
basis for a rigorous study. But, the student is very sharp and really
went into a lot of varied texts to discern an answer.
In the end, I was impressed with his study with the exception of how
"art" is used. When we describe something as an art more than a science,
we mean that it has an intangible element that defies an easy
explanation or way to instruct others. Design is clearly prone to this.
Often experience and intuition are used to determine what's a good idea
over a bad idea. Experience and intuition in design fulfill this
definition of "art." But, further, Design also overlaps with the
definition of art as in the "production of aesthetic object" to quote m-w.com).

So in this way, we can define design fulfilling two separate definitions of art. Also, there is of course the technology in design. How things are made, and the complexity of those objects. So, if you are forced to define engineering design to someone - you can tell them it's part art, part art and part science.