… song stuck in my head please help…

You are in a tavern, ready to begin a new adventure, spinning yarns of your great campaigns throughout the land.

The music in the background plays on as you expound your tales …

So goes the start screen in the tavern in the ancient game “Dungeon Explorer” for the TurboGrafx-16 system. I recently downloaded it for my Wii.

I am stuck. I can’t defeat the hideous “Gutworm” and get past level 2.

Why do you only get five lives split between ALL players? Why do enemies kill you in two seconds? Why do power-ups have barely noticeable side effects? Why is this song stuck in my head? Why do I lose all my potions when I die? Why is this game so frickin’ hard? Why am I writing about this?

Oh well.

The tavern song rules and it gets stuck in my head, especially the melancholy cut time breakdown.

Tavern Song from “Dungeon Explorer”

… the scientific method …

Maybe you learned about it in high school … I don’t know. It’s the way in which most advances in sciences, technology and commercial products are made and I just wanted to go on record and say that I think that it’s missing something.

It goes something like this:

1) Pose a question
2) Compose a hypothesis
3) Experiment and collect data
4) Analyze data
5) Publish your results

This method has been used in some form or another for hundreds and hundreds of years. The progress of human knowledge has has proceeded on and on and now there are countless specialized fields of study. The many branches of science spread out growing new tendrils every day.

This fits with the goal or purpose of the scientific method; to break down observable phenomena into its constituent pieces. The pieces get smaller and smaller until all the ingredients are distilled into primary components.

The problem is … we keep finding small and smaller pieces that make up the universe, and the laws that bind them together become increasingly strange. Our understanding of the universe becomes increasing complex in order to explain the ultimate simplicity - a Grand Unified Theory.

Our knowledge is becoming more compartmentalized, instead of melding together. The scientific method does not allow for creative leaps of intuition or flashes of insight. Instead, it depends upon a rigorously plotted course of action based on experimentally proven data aimed towards a foreseeable end.

Avenues of science come into being, grow, and are sometimes discarded if they don’t fit into the current structure of belief. But so much of science depends upon the ability of the individual to conceptualize something outside the scope of what is believed to be true. I don’t want to venture too much further down the philosophical path … but let me just say this:

Today, scientists are taught the fundamentals of known physics and mathematics, how to follow proper experimental procedure, and how to formalize research findings … ect.. No one teaches you the importance of being creative, how to form conjecture, or how to pursue the unknown in an unorthodox or personal manner.

Maybe you can’t teach these things. Maybe you’re born with that certain “spark of genius”. But I have a feeling that’s what the one group of cavemen was thinking about the other group of cavemen that learned to make fire:

“Wow Thack, that’s great! I would have never thought of that!”

… every job I’ve ever had …

Making my summer 2008 to do list and working on my resume today got me thinking about working.

I’ve had quite a few bad jobs. I started working when I was 16. I was the dishwasher at a restaurant called “Michael’s Italian Steakhouse” in Pullman, Washington. My friend Rafe came to visit me and said I looked like the guy in Poison’s “Nothin’ But a Good Time” video. He was right.

From then on out it has been a non-stop skyrocket to the top for me! I’m right on track to be the next President or maybe a doctor … my new BS in Physics will help out I’m sure.

Here is a list of every job I can remember having. It starts current and goes back to the beginning of my employment history:

1) Computer Lab Assistant
2) High End Audio Sales
3) Radioshack Sales Clerk
4) English Teacher (Portugal)
5) Barista
6) Census Bureau Field Agent
7) Songwriter (Eureka Farm)
8) Assistant at an Electronics Repair Shop
9) Goodwill Donation Attendant
10) Soup Cook
11) Bagel Baker
12) Computer Maintenance
13) Movie Theater Projectionist
14) Radio Station Specialty Music Programmer
15) Movie Theater Ticket sales
16) Cabinetry Shop Hand
17) Singing Telegrams
18) Seafood Fry Cook
19) Dishwasher
20) Janitor

If anyone has any information on other jobs I may have had, please contact me…

why are pop songs always 3 1/2 minutes long?

When recorded media was first introduced, it was a novelty. The Edison Cylider, being the first practical distribution method for recorded sound, never took off.

The 78 rpm record did take off, and thanks to its limitations, pop songs have been limited to about 3:30 in length. You couldn’t fit more than that onto a 78. Record executives, engineers, and producers all knew this. To sell popular music, a song had to fit on one side of a 78.

Musical forms and structures evolved quickly to fill the 3:30 time limit. The verse-chorus-verse formula that still exists today came about so that songs could come to a satisfying conclusion within the time limit of the record.

These limitations were ingrained upon songwriters and arrangers for 40 years.

As technology eliminated the 3:30 barrier for popular music with the LP record and more recently the CD, I often wonder why the time limit remains. I guess old habits are hard to break.

I leave you with a ghost from the past — the original cassette tape format that survived for eight years. I have never seen one of these or even met a person that has heard of this, so don’t expect people to care about your damn ipod 40 years from now.

The Revenge of the Terminal

Terminals RISE!

Thanks to bold new moves in technology by companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google, we may be returning to late the late 1970’s model of computing. Back then, it made sense … now I don’t know.

Back in the day, computers ran off of one central mainframe and a network of terminals that allowed users to access programs, files and data. The monitor and keyboard sitting on your desk would have no “brain” of its own … no stand alone functional capacity. It had to be connected to the network and the mainframe to do anything. Break the connection and the computer is dead.

Memory and processors became cheap and it became possible to give each terminal its own mind. The personal computer came into being as a revolution in nature of computers. My first real home computer was an Atari 800xl. That thing ruled. I remember my step dad would come home with disks filled with games that he had found on some “telephone computer network” called CompuServe.

We all know the internet came along and changed things again. Most people could hardly imagine life without it. Here comes the funny part. If I turn off the internet, I can still write a paper, make a movie, record a song … blah blah blah. My computer still has a mind of its own.

The Macbook Air is a step back towards the “terminal” model of computing. It has no optical drive. It is implicit in its design that you connect to a network to install or update anything. It can still function off the network … but a few generations down the road????

With internet connections getting faster everyday, it won’t be long before many or most software companies only offer their products online. This shift has already taken place in Microsoft and Google. Their core applications are offered as online alternatives to owning software and running it off of your computer. They store the application on a server located … uh … ? They manage the applications you use (Google docs, Microsoft Office …) and update and change it when they please. What happens if you don’t like the new interface? What if your docs get F^ed up when they decide to roll out Google Apps Xtreeme?

Software companies are switching to a subscription based model and I’m not sure it’s good for the consumer. I’m perfectly happy running Microsoft Word 2002. It bugs me that the Hotmail interface has to change every year and I have no control over it. If this starts happening to all my applications &*#$@! the next version of Windows (Windows 7) is rumored to be subscription based.

I was sitting in class listening to a teacher talk about this same thing, but in an optimistic way. He loved that when he corresponded through Gmail, the little ads on the side would offer him products that were relevant to the content of his emails. How could that be a good thing? Has anyone ever clicked on one of those? If I write a paper online using Google Docs, are they going to scan it too and send me junk mail or show me ads that pertain to the content of my paper? Yuck!

All of these companies are working to cover the Earth with wireless connectivity to unify the global network. In theory, you will be able to access your files and software from anywhere, anytime (if the network doesn’t crash - then we’re all hosed). There have been no long term studies that examine how wireless networks affect our health. Lord knows the cell phone companies have been paying out the nose to suppress any negative health related press about their networks. I guess we’ll have to wait until we start sprouting tentacles for anyone to admit there might be a problem. I’m slipping off the topic ….

This is all coming from a paranoid person that lived in a chicken coop.

Just a thought.