Month: September 2024

I remember the very first time I heard the David Essex song Rock On on the radio. I was completely transfixed by the beautifully desolate sound of that track — it was like listening to the spectral ghost of rock and roll.

I couldn’t get enough of it. Every time through, it just kept getting better. Especially that bass line.

It was only later that I learned that I was mainly responding to an innovative double-tracked bass guitar arrangement. The deep silences around it left that doubled bass guitar nearly all by itself — with plenty of room to create a haunted and elegiac space.

And just today, in honor of the great Herbie Flowers, who passed a just few days ago at the age of 86, I have been playing Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side on repeat.

Every time through, it just keeps getting better. Especially that bass line.

So here’s a thought experiment:

There are about 16,000 square miles of highway in the United States. I know that because I looked it up.

To fully power the United States with solar energy, it would take about 22,000 square miles of solar collectors. I know that because I looked it up.

If we cover all of those highways with solar collectors, they could provide more than two thirds of our nation’s electrical power needs.

Like I said, just a thought.

To compute in “The Cloud” sounds to me rather eerie
And there is something about it that makes me feel leery
Instead you might call it The Fog, not The Cloud
Now see how that sounds when you say it aloud
You may find that it gives you a more faithful take
By making it clear that the whole thing’s opaque

This week Tucker Carlson brought a guest onto his podcast, whom he introduced as “perhaps the greatest historian of our day.” The guest then proceded to tell everyone that Hitler was really an ok guy, Jews were never exterminated by the Nazis, and in fact WWII was the fault of Winston Churchill, who was a raging maniac.

Does that make Tucker Carlson a Holocaust denier?

Elon Musk tweeted about the interview, and said that the guest speaker made some good points. A while later Musk deleted the tweet, implicitly denying that he’d ever supported it. Does that make Musk a Holocaust denier denier?

While the White House forcefully condemn the podcast, the Republican candidate for President said nothing. But Vance, his running mate, mostly just said that he doesn’t believe in cancelling people because of who they choose to hang out with.

So I guess in his book it was perfectly ok for Elon Musk to tweet and then untweet support for Nazi revisionism.

Does that make Vance a Holocaust denier denier denier?

Today’s post is in honor of the great Robert M. Pirsig, who would have turned ninety six today.

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I’m looking for the truth, and it goes away.” –R.M.P.

Youth culture represents the perfect human contradiction. When you are young, your particular generation influences the large culture enormously, but only for a short time.

Whether bobbysoxer, beatnik, hippie, emocore, Swiftie or whatever, there is a brief moment in history when your group of young people holds center stage in the culture. And then history moves on.

The cultural dominance you have in your youth is the most ephemeral of superpowers, gone before it has hardly begun. And yet youth culture itself is immortal.

Even in ancient times young people were making an impression. Just check out what Socrates said about the youth of his day, according to Plato.

Since then, the power of youth to make their presence felt has not diminished. I suspect it never will.

When I was a kid I saw Yellow Submarine and loved it. Spending time with my beloved Beatles as animated characters with magical powers was super fun.

But then at some point I found out that the voices of John, Paul, George and Ringo were not actually performed by John, Paul, George and Ringo, but rather by hired actors. The Fab Four had nothing at all to do with the movie other than having supplied the songs it was based on and then appearing briefly over the closing credits.

Learning this felt like a betrayal. Somebody was impersonating my favorite music group, without really having made it clear that it was all a mere impersonation.

I now realize that this was a harbinger of the future. As generative AI becomes mature, we are going to see a lot more of this kind of thing — except this time in live action.

Beloved popular figures will license their voice and appearance to surrogates. We will gradually find ourselves seeing and hearing less of the real thing, and more of the imitation.

Eventually, the only objections will come from senior citizens who remember the old days, when people actually played themselves. Young folks who grow up with this won’t understand what those old codgers are going on about.

autumn dances in
hot angry summer storms off
winter’s cold smile waits

I am trying to work out details of a mixed reality tabletop set-up that I’m designing. As part of that process, I am building a version of it as a 3D model on my computer.

Today I found myself looking at items in the real world, and creating rough models of those same objects in the virtual world. I’m not trying to replicate reality here — I’m just trying to represent parts of it as simple proxies.

There is a kind of head-spinning hall of mirrors aspect to this process. I am looking at my laptop screen while typing on it to create a version of the very screen and keyboard that I am looking at, and even of the table that my laptop computer is sitting on.

At some point in this hall of mirrors the real and the virtual can start to get all jumbled up in my mind. I’m not sure that this is entirely a bad thing — maybe it just means that it’s all working.

I have recently come to understand that everything is an instrument. This includes your house or apartment, your office, your financial assets, the hours in your day.

If you do nothing, and those assets just sit there, then you are losing a little every day. But if you look at them with fresh eyes and ask “What can I do with this?” then the possibilities are endless.

Think of where you want to get to. Then every morning, ask yourself how you can use whatever you have to help you to get there.

You might just surprise yourself.