Works in progress

It ought to be one of the most basic observations of any philosopher worth their salt that the perceptual objects, whether substantive or ideogrammatic, taken to exist outside of ourselves in a manner that is no less real, solid or permanent as the way we are apt to consider those very same selves, do not exist as fully-formed notions taken all at one glance, in a single instant. The permanence and solidity are all illusion. Everything in our perception changes. We survey the realities we inhabit, constantly moving from one perceptual configuration to another along a unique path both forming and informing the instants of our lives, never to be duplicated.

But it does not go nearly far enough to say that the objects of perception are merely perceived, at one time or another, from a variety of angles. It isn't just that we view the same object under many different lights, so to speak, or aspects, in the manner of a Cubist painting, while each perceptible entity remains essentially unchanged underneath the veneer of our peculiar perspective. Doubtless it is true that our perspective is always changing, and it is certainly to the credit of the experimental artists of the early 20th century, like Braque and Picasso, for calling the phenomenon to our attention.

 

                      Georges Braque, 1913, Nature morte (Fruit Dish, Ace of Clubs)

 

Rather it is as if each of our perceptions is, to borrow Duchamp's apt phrase, a readymade, called forth as an object not so much by virtue of what it supposedly "is", underneath it all, in terms of bare essence, but according to the endlessly malleable content of its own immediate subject-hood. It is not the what-it-was-to-be (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) or "quiddity" that determines the essence of things, but the "what-it-IS-to-be": now, in this very moment; an eternally open question that is never completely answered, save perhaps by the inevitable but incomplete erasure of the next perception, the next moment in our existence. 

 

                          Marcel Duchamp, 1917, Fountain

 

And so the "is", the esse, the être, ser, essere, sein, etc., the "to be" in any language, is only ever a turn of phrase, belying the accumulative essence of everything, the geologic mutability of thought. Like islands ever forming and dissolving again under the plastic flow of raw volcanic turbulence, every object or idea, even that of ourselves, is a work in continual progress. We create those works through the process of living our lives, always retaining some parts while discarding others, according to the judgements we enact along the way. We are always the author AND the audience, the subject AND object of that which only appears to persist along our temporal trajectories.

Derrière les yeux verts

Mais mes rêves, ils ne sont pas si vides
Comme ma conscience semble être
J'ai des heures, seulement solitaire
Mon amour est la vengeance qui n'est jamais libre...

The Wizard of Falcon Heights

Today marks the seven-year anniversary of the passing of not only one of my dearest friends, but one of the most remarkable human beings I could ever hope to have met, the likes of which I'm not likely to encounter again.

It was no small achievement, to put it mildly, that an unknown, previously unpublished writer from such a decidedly unfashionable place as Minnesota could have put Progressive Music back on the map after so many years of critical revulsion and outright dismissal by popular culture. Indeed, all the more unlikely that such an endeavor was achieved with the full support and backing of the very same publishing organization that had for decades been so instrumental to the marginalization of musical talent outside the confines of mainstream, commercially-minded taste: Billboard.  

Yet this is precisely what one Bradley Smith of Falcon Heights, Minnesota, managed to achieve. He did so alone, out of a single-minded pursuit of excellence and driven by a passion for sharing the things he loved most with the people around him.  

 

 

Bradley C. Smith was a warm, exceptionally generous and preternaturally gifted individual whose talents often far exceeded the expectations of those who were fortunate enough to make his acquaintance. His was a world all his own making, an enchanted realm of fantasy and intuition, guided by a keenly perceptive sensibility and informed by a formidable intellect that rarely accepted easy answers or shied away from uncomfortable truths. Brad just didn't accept the world as it was presented to him by his culture, his country, his peers and those in positions of power and authority. And his committment to justice and the right to self-determination often put him at odds with some of society's most cherished values and assumptions, much to the consternation of many who knew him. He had a knack for cutting through to reveal the most penetrating insights into the human condition, in all of its banality and corruption, in ways that seemed to transcend the vicissitudes of mortal existence. His was a rare gift, and it was a genuine privilege to have shared his company on so many occasions. 

I will always remember him fondly, and the void left by his absence will sadly remain with me for the remainder of my days. 

Rest in peace, Brad. You will not be forgotten.

Random studio pic of the day

My trusty breadbox 64, painted orange, optimized for music production. Custom retrofitted with dual SIDs, XLR outputs, MSSIAH cartridge with SID2SID board. I added an extra voltage regulator to allow for 6581 and 8580 to run simultaneously on the same machine. Note the 1541 floppy drive (painted blue) peeking out from underneath the table!  

At some point I'll put the filter resonance control back in (that explains the small hole above the keyboard), but I have to find a potentiometer with the right kind of taper. The first one I tried had a response that was so far from linear it just wasn't very useful. Alternatively, I suppose I could adapt it into an external input jack instead :)

The Suncom "Slik Stik" on the right is a vintage joystick that I use with the MSSIAH software in lieu of a mouse. I really need some games for this thing though... I'll get around to that eventually, as soon as I finish my chiptune masterpiece, of course ;) 

Many thanks to Ray at Raymond Computer for hooking me up, and for the excellent manuals he provided also.

Asteroid comfortably glides past Earth, more on the Tongan eruption

For those of you who missed it last week (and that would be literally everyone), a large asteroid passed by Earth on Tuesday, 18 January at a minimum distance of 1.93 million km (1.2 million miles): not close enough for comfort, precisely, but at more than 5 times the distance of the moon, not exactly cause for alarm either.

The asteroid, discovered in 1994 by Robert McNaught and given the catchy name (7482) 1994 PC1, is roughly 1 km (0.6 mi) across and hurtled past our planet at a zippy 19.56 km/s, or 43,754 mph. Definitely not something I'd want to bump into by mistake! But not to worry, as this is calculated to have been the closest approach for at least the next 200 years. 

You can read more about it and watch a video captured by members of the Sociedad de Astronomia del Caribe in Puerto Rico on EarthSky.   

Unfortunately things are not going so well for residents of Tonga at the moment, where the largest volcanic eruption in 30 years has led to shortages of drinking water and food, affecting some 84% of the population. The death toll has also sadly increased to 3 since my initial post. Extensive damage across multiple islands continues to hamper relief efforts by interfering with communications systems and access by air and sea. The force of the explosion has been estimated at more than 500 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Ash and particulates from the eruption have blanketed the entire area, leading to extremely unhealthy conditions which will likely persist for some time. 

In addition, a number of highly unusual atmospheric effects were observed around the time of the explosion: Gravity waves (not to be confused with the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity!) stretching from the surface of the ocean to the ionosphere over a distance of more than 16,000 km and wrapping around the Earth several times produced a set of patterns never before seen by scientists. And according to meteorologist Kevin Hamilton at the University of Hawaii, a phenomenon first predicted by the French mathematician, physicist and astronomer Pierre-Simon de Laplace produced extreme low-frequency perturbations in barometric pressure lasting several minutes across the entire globe. These atmospheric oscillations had been observed previously as a result of nuclear weapons tests and the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883.  

Who knew that the entire planet's atmosphere could resonate like an enormous musical instrument, producing a fundamental pitch too low to be detected by the human ear?? Now that's far out!

I wonder how many octaves below middle C that is? Any guesses? 

Are we living in a simulation?

The short answer, and I think that there is such an answer would be difficult to dispute, is unequivocally "yes!" Each one of us, unless we are currently in a deep sleep or in a coma, is going around with a simulation inside their head right now, including me as I write this post. 

But what exactly do I mean by that?

The complete answer is both simpler than it appears, and more complex. In 2001, during the height of the first wave of what might tentatively be referred to as "post-millenial techno-boosterism", Nick Bostrom published a seminal paper entitled "Are you living in a computer simulation?" An expanded and revised version of this popular and influential thought experiment was subsequently published in 2003 in the journal Philosophical Quarterly. (The somewhat unusual choice of pronoun in the title, "you", is, one is tempted to assume, a not-so-subtle appeal to the superior technological resources of the architects of said simulation, the ostensibly superior intellectual capacity of the paper's author, or both, in comparison with the assumed capabilities of the reader, in addition to its obvious appeal as a rhetorical device).

So what exactly was I saying when I answered so confidently in the affirmative just now in response to this admittedly radical notion? Well, this part is actually quite simple. My simulation, and presumably yours as well, is nothing more nor less than the world as it is presented to us by our individual brains at any given moment. 

There! Satisfied? 

It's ok if you're not. But let us continue.

Perhaps a much more interesting if slightly more intractable question is this: If it is true that some of us are living in a simulation functionally distinct from the one most of us seem to be living in already, how do we know which people are living in which simulation(s)? Or is possible that we all might be living in the SAME "alternative" simulation? Quite unlike the first problem, the response to these considerations is not immediately clear. Part of the trouble, as is so often the case, has to do with the ambiguities of language. What do we really mean when we ask, "do you (or I, or anybody else in particular) live in a simulation?"

The very wording of the question seems to suggest, indeed assume, at least two things:

1.)  There exists some difference between someone who lives in a simulation and someone who doesn't.

2.)  That some of us might live in a simulation, while others do not.

And, possibly also

3.)  That if it is true that at least some of us live in a simulation, the functional characteristics of each alternative simulation are next to identical, whatever their method of implementation.

For a start, it's worth pointing out that there is no known criterion upon which, even in principle, one could distinguish someone living in a simulation from someone who supposedly isn't. All phenomenal or experiential states have at least that in common: that they involve some kind of experience. So using, for instance, something akin to the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, in addition to the fact that we already appear to be embedded in a biological simulation, we might reasonably conclude that assumption (1) is either false or incoherent. Additionally at the present time there is no part of the body, brain or otherwise, that is known to confer the ability to exist, or not, in an alternative simulation of the type proposed in the original thought experiment. After all, as far as we know, every brain we might encounter works in an essentially similar way; unless, of course, we suffer injury or damage as the result of a stroke, or by virtue of a genetic or developmental abnormality. And even in those cases, the basic capacity to experience a phenomenal state of one sort or another tends to remain robust. This, along with the aforementioned improbability of (1), would seem to cast considerable doubt on the practical feasibility of (2). Bostrom handles this by simply assuming, without evidence, that a richly detailed simulation essentially indistinguishable from that produced by our nervous systems could be implemented using some type of alternative hardware, the detailed workings of which have yet to be described. 

Finally, as regards assumption (3), because no mechanism has been proposed by which any alternative simulation might be implemented in such a way that would render it functionally identical with those of our native biology, or indeed those of other discrete simulations, there is no way to know how many of these alternative simulations might be active at any given time, nor any way to determine whether we may or may not be living in one giant "meta-simulation" in which every human being, possibly even other animals as well, take part, or whether only certain groups of humans are actually living in simulations, either as isolated individuals or as component parts of aggregate simulations. So far, the human nervous system is the only structure we've discovered in the entire universe that is capable of implementing, as Bostrom puts it, "human-type experiences." Not even our most advanced artificial intelligence systems have come anywhere close to achieving that which is readily achieved without any effort by ordinary human beings.

An additional complication arises when one considers that the entities responsible for creating or maintaining the proposed alternative simulations, whether human or some other type of being, could themselves be the products of other simulations. If it's "turtles all the way down", there is simply no end to the potential inconsistencies that would be likely to arise regarding such apparently basic features of our universe such as causality, the arrow of time, the historical development of languages and culture, and so on. It would appear unlikely that, given such a vast array of simulaneously active simulations operating on multiple levels, that anything so seemingly coherent as, for instance, the fossil record left behind by the evolution of our early hominid ancestors could have come about by means of an ad-hoc sequence of nested simulations being run at some unspecified date (or dates) far in the future. It's telling that Bostrom devotes a great deal of space in his paper to speculating on the mechanics of "post-human civilizations", but none whatsoever regarding the unavoidably messy historical ramifications of the hypothesis were it actually to be confirmed. 

This brings us to another important point of clarification that must finally be addressed before we can really begin to make sense of the problem at issue: What exactly do we mean by "simulation"? Clearly, the kind of simulation I referred to at the outset of this digression, the simulation on the level of the individual presumed to be generated by the brain, is avowedly NOT the type of simulation referred to in the original thought experiment. What Bostrom had in mind was something very different; something, you might even say, far more sinister. What he obviously meant was that some ill-defined group of human beings might be living in a sort of collective delusion, a fundamental deception regarding the nature of "reality", the supposedly "objective" reality that we hold in common: the type of deception depicted, to pick a prominent example, in the movie "The Matrix": 

 

To put it in a slightly more formal way, the original question is presented as an example of a particular species of radically skeptical assertion about the fundamental nature of the world as it is experienced by human beings. There is a marked similarity in the spirit of the proposal with another radically skeptical thought experiment from the philosophical literature: Descartes' evil demon. In a much-quoted passage, Descartes asked if it was possible that some malign entity or "demon" could be systematically deceiving him as to his fundamental convictions regarding his perceptions of the properties of the external world; that there is such a world outside himself, that his perceptions provide a reliable guide to the various properties of that world, and so on, even regarding the existence of his own body. Or, as Descartes himself put it, 

"I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things."  

                - René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy 

Many other examples of radically skeptical arguments are to be found throughout history, from Zhuangzi to Nagarjuna to Plato's Cave. The trouble is that whereas philosophers like these often made effective use of such devices as footholds in order to scale further philosophical heights, Bostrom seems rather disturbingly committed to the actual truth of his proposition. While he does refrain from arguing directly that anyone IS living in a simulation at any point in the paper, you could certainly be forgiven for coming to precisely that conclusion over the course of the entire argument! In fact the intensely probabilistic approach employed in support of his premise could almost be viewed as a kind of "smokescreen" for what might easily be interpreted as a strong desire on the part of the author that the truth of the notion somehow obtains. 

In short, it appears Bostrom and many of his followers really believe their own brand of b.s., a rather untenable position in the service of advancing a supposedly "skeptical" argument. Indeed, it may prove ultimately rather difficult to defend the assertion that the so-called "simulation hypothesis" is a species of skeptical argument, resting, as it does, on so many unjustified beliefs and unproveable assumptions. The more one examines the issue, the more it actually begins to resemble an exercise not in skepticism, but rather in credulous optimism about the future capabilities of advanced societies and high technology. 

And despite the fact that Bostrom himself is not a physicist, it is also, I believe, a good example of a particular type of cognitive bias that many contemporary physical scientists tend to exhibit in their thinking about matters philosophical, a bias which both tends to distort their thinking in ways that fly in the face of sound reasoning and often causes them to, as it were, "reinvent the wheel" and attempt to take philosophical ideas already extant out of context in order to reformulate them in ways that are compatible with whatever postition or idea they wish to promote, no matter how implausible.

This last point is a theme which I will no doubt revisit in subsequent posts, so watch for that. And of course, feel free to comment as I realize this is still an ongoing debate, and not one that is likely to be definitively resolved any time soon! I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

"The Good Is The Enemy Of The Great"

 

 

"Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in
my early life because professionals seemed to know everything - not to mention they
got paid for it. Later I discovered after working for a while that professionalism itself
was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is diminishing
risks. So if you want to get your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to
deal with transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if you needed
brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool around and invent a new way of
connecting your nerve endings. Please do it in the way that has worked in the past.
Unfortunately in our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word because it is
misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine
calling someone a creative? Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring
way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear
why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than
anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for
that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are
professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a
lifetime aspiration is a limited goal."

            - Milton Glaser, from part of an AIGA talk in London, November 2001

...Or is it?

Whatever there is there, there it is.

A note about Hawaii

As a somewhat brief aside, it should be mentioned that not all volcanic islands are formed from arc-trench complexes, as I described in my previous post. Perhaps the most famous counterexample is the Hawaiian islands, which were not formed near any plate boundary. In fact, the closest one is some 3,200 km (1,988 mi) distant! So how did these islands, part of a group of mostly extinct volcanoes known collectively as the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain, actually form?  

In 1963, the Canadian geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson put forward a theory to explain it. His idea, later expanded upon by other researchers, was that deep below the Earth's crust, in the semisolid middle layer known as the mantle, hot plumes or superheated bubbles of caramel-like silicate slowly rise toward the asthenosphere (the uppermost region of the mantle), originating from the core-mantle boundary some 2,900 km below the planet's surface. These plumes of upwelling material rise at the same time as slabs of lithosphere are subducted or pulled under towards the lower mantle in a process called "mantle convection".  

Most of us in fact have some idea of the process of convection, even we don't happen to own, say, a convection oven: the humble lava lamp. This simple yet absorbing objet d'art is famously composed of a glass envelope containing blobs of wax whose relative density fluctuates as a result of the application of heat from the bulb at the base of the lamp:

While the analogy is only approximate, the movement of material under the Earth's crust or lithosphere follows a roughly similar pattern. When blobs of hotter material, known as diapirs, contact the crust, "hot spots" of volcanic activity on the Earth's surface often result. And because the chunks of lithosphere are contantly moving like giant conveyor belts relative to the generally slower-moving plumes rising from below, chains of volcanoes form not only next to plate boundaries but also many other places where the crust becomes softer and more ductile from the heat and pressure spreading out underneath. This is the type of process that geophysicists think produced the Hawaiian islands which, as we must remember, are really just one segment of a long chain of undersea volcanoes, or seamounts, that over time accumulated enough material to breach the surface. The chain itself, consisting of at least 80 distinct volcanoes, is almost unimaginably vast, stretching 6,200 km (3,900 mi) from the active Lōʻihi seamount southeast of the island of Hawaii, all the way across the Pacific to the Aleutian trench off the east coast of Russia: 

 

Other notable examples of geologically active areas found to be driven by hotspots are situated at Yellowstone National Park in the United States, in Iceland, and on the island of Réunion. 

Actually, it's a bit more complicated than this. It turns out that the Hawaiian-Emperor chain is not precisely a paradigmatic example of the original stationary hotspot theory, where something resembling a straight pipe or conduit supplies a single location with a continuous flow of magma. More recent research indicates that mantle plumes don't remain in fixed locations; instead they tend to wander about slightly over geologic scales of time. The arc, or in this case, the "boomerang"-like shape of the resulting volcanic chain can therefore be caused by the movement of the plume underneath as well as the motion of the plate sliding over it.  

In addition there has been an ongoing debate for some time over whether the mantle plume theory is even fundamentally correct as an explanation for volcanism. A number of interrelated competing hypotheses, generally referred to as "plate theory", have been put forward over the past couple of decades. Nevertheless, despite the relative novelty of the idea, a great deal of evidence has since accumulated in favor of the existence of mantle plumes and their instrumental role in driving volcanic activity and plate tectonics. 

It seems that for the first time, scientists are finally getting tantalizingly close to understanding the geodynamics of the planetary system as a whole: a truly remarkable achievement, considering that almost nothing was known about any of this at the turn of the previous century!

Coltrane's Majesty (2 hour mix)

For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I'm proud to present this two-hour program of essential selections from the catalog of John Coltrane, whose music I feel best represents and embodies Dr. King's message of justice and nonviolent resistance in pursuit of dignity & equality for all human beings.

While concentrating mainly on the classic Quartet era, I've included a couple of forays into his earlier collaborative work as a sideman, plus some of his innovative later material that pushed the boundaries of improvisation and tonality itself. Finally, the mix concludes with two contributions from Alice Coltrane, who among others has carried Trane's legacy far into the future across boundaries of time, space, and musical language. That legacy is still keenly felt today, and Coltrane's impact on the world of music will reverberate for many more decades.

A "one-in-1000-year event"

Hunga Tonga: now there's a name you don't hear every day!

On 14 January 2022, the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai violently exploded, sending clouds of ash 20 km (that's 12 miles!) into the stratosphere in what has been described as the largest volcanic eruption on Earth in 30 years. The ash plume, clearly visible from space, temporarily blotted out the sun in Nuku'alofa, Tonga's capitol city on the main island of Tongatapu, and sent tsunami waves tumbling across the Pacific Ocean.  

 

 

Dramatic flashes of volcanic lightning were captured in photos:

 

 

Shockwaves were heard distinctly in New Zealand, more than 2,000 km (1,200 mi) away, where residents across the country reported hearing a loud boom around 7 pm Saturday. There were even reports of the noise being detected as far away as Alaska, more than 9,000 km (5,800 mi) distant! The tsunami waves generated by the event traveled as far and wide as Australia, Fiji, Japan, and even the North American coast where, among other effects, a parking lot near the Upper Harbor in Santa Cruz was flooded.

The volcano, located about 62 km (39 mi) north of Tongatapu, has been periodically erupting since December of last year. But what's especially fascinating is that this is just the latest iteration of a Pacific island saga that has literally been running for thousands of years. A volcanic eruption that began in late 2014 created a new, isolated third island between the twin islands of Hunga Tonga and adjacent Hunga Ha'apai. Both islands lie on the rim of the caldera of the "highly unstable" volcano that just erupted, which rises some 1800 meters off the surrounding sea floor. In addition to wiping out the local vegetation, the 2014-2015 event approximately doubled the size of Hunga Ha'apai, and over time the new crater-shaped island in the middle connected up with it. Eventually so much material had been thrust up above sea level that a land bridge had joined them all together to create one giant island, the now-defunct island of Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai:

 

Note the dendritic erosion patterns, known as "rilling", on the surface of the volcanic deposits:

 

But it seems that thanks to the latest massive eruption, Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha'apai are now once again separate islands! (It's unclear why this photo is labeled "pre-eruption", as by 3:25 pm on January 15 the event was already well underway).

 

 

Fortunately, the short-lived island was virtually uninhabitable, so no locals were injured or lost any valuable real estate. However, several species of flowers and birds might indeed be genuinely upset about the loss. And, tragically, two people have drowned in Peru as the result of 2 m (6.5 ft) tsunami swells.

So why are these undersea eruptions so violent? 

Volcanic activity in the Earth's crust is closely associated with subduction zones, boundary regions where heavier tectonic plates are subsumed (or "subducted") beneath lighter plates, a process which typically occurs at the convergent area between heavy, dense oceanic crust, known as the oceanic lithosphere, and lighter continental crust. This is why, for example, Mt. St. Helens is located near the boundary between the largely sub-aquatic Juan de Fuca and the continental North American plates. But because subduction zones are places where the Earth's crust literally sinks into the mantle underneath, the majority of plate boundaries are entirely submerged, resulting in deep oceanic trenches along which volcanic arcs often form. It's no coincidence, then, that the Tonga archipelago was formed in close proximity to the Tonga Trench, second in depth only to the famous Mariana trench, over 10,000 m (35,000 ft) deep. Here, the Pacific plate is mutually subducted with the neighboring Indo-Australian plate. Volcanic arcs are usually found around 200 km from such an oceanic trench. 

Whereas in a more typical, "slow-burn" eruption undersea jets of molten magma are steadily released into the water, giving it time to cool down thanks to an enveloping layer of steam, sometimes pockets of hot volcanic gas form pressurized bubbles underneath the rocky substrata. When these bubbles burst, the surrounding seawater reacts violently with the magma, something "akin to weapons-grade chemical explosions" according to Shane Cronin, professor of volcanology at the University of Auckland. In what researchers call a "fuel-coolant interaction", the magma is torn apart in a chain reaction-like sequence as the hotter inner material is continuously exposed to the cold sea water. Studies indicate that the last such large-scale explosion at Hunga occurred around 1100 CE, rendering the timing of the present event hardly surprising.  

In fact the entire region is dotted with underwater volcanoes. The nearby undersea volcano Fonuafo‘ou, formerly known as Falcon Island, is another hotbed of geological activity, with known eruptions having occurred there in 1877, 1885-86, 1894, 1921, 1927, 1928, 1933 and 1936, often creating temporary land masses that subsequently collapsed and vanished beneath the waves. According to Volcano Live, Fonuafo‘ou is now some 17 m (56 ft) underwater.       

It's incredible to think that we owe the existence of all land masses on our planet to this ceaseless pyroclastic activity. We are the products of a vast geochemical dynamo fueled by the energy of matter itself. And it's a stark reminder that what we take to be solid ground beneath our feet is, to borrow a famous quote from Star Wars, "not entirely stable". It is instead constantly renewing and rearranging itself, a process as old as time itself, and one that will undoubtedly continue long after we're gone.

Random studio pic of the day

 

Eh, yes, that IS a Korg Nanokontrol 2 sitting on top of my ancient Roland MC-300. Turns out it's a perfect fit! 

Good thing Korg finally got around to releasing a Windows 10 driver for it... It was sadly out of commission for a while before then. 

And what on Earth, you may well ask, do you still use a Jaz drive for?? Good question. But, for the answer I'm afraid you'll just have to wait for another installment of this series.

I sincerely hope nobody loses any sleep on this account.

Glass Onion

A break in the clouds

suddenly you can see for miles

the landscape of thought revolves

slowly, about itself


a gray fuzzy orb suspended

in the velvet void


The onions next to the potatoes

the one rough, the other smooth

the skin of the planet's surface

unpeeled