Enter Phaedra

As long promised but never delivered, here are some photos of my cat Phaedra:

Brutalist architecture

Lest we be blindsided by the onslaught of further developments, here's something to remember: Since October 7, 2023, the United States has spent over $17.9 billion to reduce Gaza to a smoking ruin, forcibly displace its population, and murder over 42,000 people, including over 20,000 women and children. While it's great to see the sitting administration championing their welcome legislative support of women's health domestically, their message is in grave danger of being overshadowed by the vexing question of why taxpayers are continuing to finance a violent and illegal humanitarian catastrophe halfway across the world in which women seem to represent more than half the fatalities. But numbers alone don't tell the whole story.

There can be no adequate explanation as to why Palestinian hospitals, schools and universities have been systematically targeted and destroyed; entire neighborhoods erased and buried in rubble just to smoke out a handful of "militants". There can be no conceivable justification for blowing up whole blocks of apartments - evidently - for fear of what a few might contain. And it should go without saying that under international law, there is no threat that warrants the targeting of defenseless refugees or humanitarian workers. Yet all of these atrocities have been carried out in broad daylight by the state of Israel with only a smattering of disapproval from the chattering classes and the acceptance of much of the political establishment of the United States, who have not only bankrolled the operation but provided weapons and tactical support.   

Enough is enough. End the wars now. Arrest Netanyahu. The evidence is clear: these are the actions of a war criminal. Send him and his co-conspiritors to prison. We've been hearing a lot from politicians about how history will supposedly judge their various contributions. That's awfully rich. Leaving aside the inherent unpredictability of the future for a moment, how exactly does this gaggle of latter-day Neros plan to be remembered as anything more than a pack of unlicensed butchers? We'll have to elect ourselves instead. The future of humanity may well depend on it.  

Perfect Day

 

What appears to be a brand new album from one of the great masters of ambient, cosmic, devotional and meditative music has just been made available for streaming on Al Gromer's channel, among other platforms. 

Not only that but having listened through this several times I have to say it's probably one of the best things I've ever heard from him. No kidding! I just can't recommend it highly enough. What a gorgeous experience.   

A balm for the spirit in these troubled times.

Antisocial media

After all, the idea of following and being followed by people is fundamentally cultish, tendentious, and more than a little frightening. 

"Fit the sound and vision to the pattern of his brainwaves..."

In reality, of course, there is no clear difference between a "pitch" and a "rhythm"; both are subspecies of periodic phenomena related to the physical oscillation of air molecules, electric currents, or other media. In practice the distinction is somewhat provisional and is in principal a perceptual or psychoacoustic effect as opposed to a material property.

By definition a transient must spend at least some of its finite period in the "on" part of the cycle, meaning there can be no such thing as an ideal transient (also known as an ideal pulse), which would have zero duration and thus be infinitely thin. Such transients, although conceivable, would likely escape detection by anyone, and are therefore seldom encountered. 

Pitch and rhythm are really just descriptions applied to collections of detectable transients variously interepreted by brains as being components of (re)cognizeable harmonic or rhythmic structures. The rate of oscillation, along with other cues like harmonic content, determines the mode of interpretation, so that a pitch or frequency is equally a very fast rhythm, and a rhythm is also like a kind of extremely low-frequency pitch or melody.

Blinken lied to Congress about Israel

As we might have expected, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suppressed the findings of two internal reports confirming what was already patently obvious to almost anyone paying attention: Israel deliberately blocked aid shipments to the beleaguered Palestinians trapped in Gaza. Meanwhile, no significant pressure has, to anyone's knowledge, been exerted on the Israeli government to curtail their ongoing genocidal campaign to exterminate the Palestinian population under the pretext of "national security"; apparently Israel's reinvigorated efforts to escalate other conflicts in the Middle East have upstaged their peril. The general consensus being that the wider world, composed as it is of various nations, is in fact significantly less secure than it was at the outset of these machinations, the disconnect between rhetoric and reality on the part of the leaders of the "free world" has scarcely been so stark. 

If the task of defending democratic freedoms must now include, in addition to an illegal 57-year occupation followed by innumerable other breaches of international law during that period, inventing endless excuses for mass murder alongside an unprecedented attack on free speech intended to marginalize, discredit, criminalize and ultimately silence all critics, then like Orwell we must finally conclude that the corruption of language is indeed central to the consolidation and maintenance of the power structure. 

This time, however, we need not imagine the "boot stamping on a human face -- forever." It's here already: it's on every channel, and it wants your campaign donation.    

Spring reverb project taking shape

Here's a peek at the workbench, which is actually supposed to be my dining room table! The mini reverb tanks - one for each channel, as this is going to be a stereo unit - are visible in the extreme upper right:

 

I'm basing the drive and recovery amplifier designs on some extremely helpful suggestions from Elliott Sound Products, whose online project archive is a fantastic internet resource for DIY audio experimenters. Both are simple op-amp circuits with a minimum of external components, so I'm hoping to get a functioning prototype circuit up and running soon.