Solipsism Gradient

I can’t quite recall how I got there, but Clifford Pickover‘s Reality Carnival is worth a visit. I’ve got several of Pickover’s books… highly recommended.

There are too many interesting links from Pickover’s pages to lilst here, but one of my favorites is Acme Klein Bottle (custom manifolds; industrial and post-industrial consulting). Be sure to check out their chinese spouting bowls.

Warning: time will behave strangely while you browse these pages. Be sure to warn your family that you may be unavailable for an indefinite period of time.

Yesterday we went to a concert by a local group, Uakti (pronounced whak-tchee), at our local concert hall. Some of their albums are available over Amazon.

This particular concert was to launch their new CD, “Clássico” (no listing for that yet). The album was actually recorded in 1999 but only now it’s been made available. Despite their being based in my city of Belo Horizonte for 25 years this was the first time I managed to see them live. It was an extremely interesting experience. Uakti is a quartet: Marco Antônio Guimarães is the musical director and builds most of the instruments; Paulo Sérgio Santos plays strings, wind instruments and percussion; Artur Andrés Ribeiro plays flutes and percussion; Décio Ramos plays wind instruments and percussion.

This reminds me of the joke that alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, who played with the Dave Brubeck Quartet for many years, used to tell… he said that one day he’d write an autobiography called “How Many Of You Are There In The Quartet?”; that being, he claimed, the most frequent question from his fans. (Here are some more Paul Desmond quotes.) Anyway, since Marco Antônio Guimarães hasn’t played on stage with Uakti for over a decade, only three of the quartet members are usually visible.

Marco is very present, though, as composer, arranger, and constructor of the many dozens of unique instruments that the other Uakti members play. Double marimbas made of hardwood and plate glass are used prominently, as well as many weird contraptions made of PVC tubing, ranging in size from tiny compound flutes to groups of thick 2 meter-long pipes. They also use guitars with unconventional strings and tuning which are used as percussion instruments or stroked by cannibalized bicycle wheels, groups of electrical doorbells glued to boards, surgical tubing stretched over wooden resonators, and so forth. They also play conventional-looking drums, tablas and bongos, but they’re carefully finagled to be in tune with the other instruments. Artur (and sometimes Décio) also play flutes in various sizes, including bass and contrabass.

The music itself is very hard to categorize; it’s not New Age, nor is it really “World Music” (whatever that means). Some of the group’s performances show influences from Brazilian regional music, true. Yesterday they played an extended piece prominently using the modes and musical phrases of the Brazilian northeast; on the other hand, it was listed on the program as “Sonata KV331 in A Major” by Mozart. On other pieces, it’s often hard to list any overt influences. They may use percussion instruments to carry the melody and melodic instruments like the glass marimba to set up the rhythm, then switch this around suddenly. The only American group which sometimes sounds vaguely similar to them is Oregon, although I’m hard pressed to point out specific instances.

It’s a mystery to me why they’re comparatively unknown. It’s very difficult to find their albums here in their native city; most of the ones I have I bought in Canada and Europe. Here’s a long interview with Artur Andrés, and here’s a capsule review of the group.

In all, this is one of my favorite music groups. Very highly recommended. I’ll try to post some photos and album covers tomorrow…

Update: Fixed a mispasted link (to the instruments page).

Here are some photos of Uakti, as I promised a couple of days ago.

Here are the four members of the trio: 😉



from the top left, Marco Antônio Guimarães, Paulo Sérgio Santos, Artur Andrés Ribeiro and Décio Ramos.

Here are some of the instruments built by Marco Antônio; this is the “Grande Pan”, which stands about waist-high; the 13 PVC tubes are hit with foam paddles.



This is the double glass marimba, which is played with several types of mallets, sometimes by two players at the same time:



This is the “Trilobyte”, each of the 10 PVC tubes has a calfskin drumhead, played with hands and fingers:



All these instruments do double duty as melody and percussion instruments. Refer to this Amazon page, many of the tracks have downloadable samples.

I was looking through my e-mail over the weekend. I’ve used Eudora since way back when. Now I’m on version 6.0 and the junk mail feature works quite well, there are only a few spam messages every day which slip through its filter… and it’s even rarer to have a legitimate message considered as spam.

Even so, I usually skip through the junk folder every day or so to see if something important slipped through… most of my correspondents know well enough that they shouldn’t send me HTML mail or .doc attachments, but sometimes they forget. This time, I found a message from somebody who shall remain nameless… the text (in Portuguese) said something like:

Hey Ima student at <Clueless University> and my prof told us to write about Massintoch Computer I hear your the great Masintosh guru here. Can you write me the HISTORI and about IMPORTANCE of Macintoch Computer and what does Appel mean anyway? I need 3 pages for tomorrow please this is IMPORTANT.

Hah.

Well, I’m not famous enough to get more than a few of those every year, but this time it reminded me of a few other, much more famous, recipients of this sort of thing. The canonical page is, of course, the Titanium Cranium Awards page, written by John Walker, the guy who founded AutoDesk and wrote the first version of AutoCAD. Here’s a sample of what John has to put up with:

From clueless @ aol.com Thu Oct 26 00:58:50 1995

Subject: PICTURES?

Hi, I need some pictures Science, and you guys have the article but do you have the pictures to go with it! Please write me back today, if not even now to confirm this! This information is needed to me today, so please could write me back today, or RIGHT NOW-right now would help me a lot, if you guys could!

and:

From clueless @ college.ac.jp Thu Nov 16 12:38:39 1995

Subject: Cross country dividend – retained earnings comparitive survey

Dear Kevin:

I need data on dividend payments and retained earnings

relative net income for about 100- 500 corporations

listed on each of the major stock markets; London, New

York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, ect.

Do you know if or where this kind of data might be

found on the web?

(John comments:)

I am deeply moved by your need, as well as your unwillingness to do your own research.

and, best of all:

From: clueless @ slic.com

Subject: Help with regents project

Date: Sun, 11 May 1997 22:26:30 -0400

To whom this may concern:

Hi! My name is Moonflower Clueless. I would like to ask you a few

questions about constellations and their movements. I am doing

constellations for my earth science regents project. I chose to do the

constellation of Orion. I was wondering if you could answer or try to help

me understand constellations a little better, so here are some questions:

1) How do the stars move as the earth rotates and revolves?

2) What are stars and constellations made up of?

3) If the stars are always in the sky, than why can we only see them at night?

4) What does the magnitude of a star mean?

5) Are constellations grouped?

6) Are the constellations all the same age. If not, what are the youngest

and oldest?

7) How do you figure out how to measure the angle of Orion on your own sketches?

Thank you for reading my letter. I hope to see a response soon. I have one more

question? Can you try to get me some pictures and or data of Orion.

Sincerely,

Moonflower Clueless

P.S. I would like a response A.S.A.P., please.

(John comments:)

If I do your homework, do I get your diploma?

By a coincidence, over the weekend I also was rereading Janis Ian‘s excellent website, and stumbled upon one of her articles I hadn’t seen before: Silly Questions to Artists. It seems that in-person questions can be even sillier than e-mail… here’s a sample:

BY FANS:

Would you have dinner with me after the show so I can invite my school/family/friends to meet you? I don’t have any money, you’ll have to pay.

Would you come home with me after the show so I can introduce you to my family/see what you look like in regular clothes/sleep with you?

Why aren’t you more famous? I would be.

Did you watch our high school football game during the show?

Don’t you remember me? I met you after the show in Phoenix in 1978. I was in the front row.

How much is that fifteen dollar CD? (Usually said standing in front of the price sign.)

Can you lend me some money to buy your stuff, I’ll send you a check next month.

Could you send me a cassette of your last show so I can see if I want to go to one?

These are on my list of pages to reread when I need a laugh…

Posted by taliesin’s log:
taliesin’s log linked to this post

More than a touch of Tibet

After seeing The Kid on to her train at the end of our weekend, I needed music to ease the ache of goodbye and switched on the iPod.

This is a digital Tibetan prayer wheel with the prayer/mantra “Om Mani Padme Hum” written in Tibetan script:

By the way, I tried writing this here in HTML-escaped Unicode:

?????????????

(this is &#3840;&#3928;&#3918;&#3954;&#3924;&#3921;&#4008;&#3962;&#3943;&#3957;&#3971;&#3860;, if you’re interested), but Safari and other browsers decompose the sub- and superscripts. Internet Explorer for the Mac just renders garbage. This forum software doesn’t currently support UTF-8, which I suppose would work correctly…

Update: UTF-8 doesn’t work either, although it makes the characters show up correctly in Safari’s “View Source” window.

Update 2: Everything works fine now in Safari 5.1. It’s been years since I checked this, of course (August 4th, 2011).

Anyway, the idea is that simply by downloading one of these images to your hard drive, the drive’s spinning will cause the prayer to be repeated and you will gain the appropriate blessings. Indeed, simply by viewing this on your browser it will be stored in the browser cache or virtual memory file and therefore spin several thousand times per minute.

Should a census researcher come to our house today, I would declare myself as a Buddhist – both because it’s true in a certain sense and to skew the results a little. I have read several books about Tibetan buddhism and have visited the Karmê Chöling meditation center in Vermont. I found that although their emphasis on tradition and ritual didn’t work well for me, it’s certainly beneficial for many people. I myself am more inclined towards the less formal Zen and Taoistic aspects of Buddhism.

There’s a very appropriate Zen saying that says, more or less, “in the hands of the wrong person, the right means will work in the wrong way”. In other words, the benefits of a digital prayer wheel will accrue only to those who already are aware of, and aligned with, the traditional Tibetan practices.

Should you be interested in Tibetan Buddhism I can highly recommend Chögyam Trungpa‘s books Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and Transcending Madness, among others. (The Karmê Chöling center is led by Trungpa’s son, Sakyong Mipham.)

Thanks to Boing Boing and Caio’s 42 for the link.

The ever-interesting J-Walk Blog writes about a site which features, you guessed it, Young Coconuts:

I guess all of the coconuts I’ve eaten have been old coconuts.

Indeed, all coconuts I’ve seen in the US are old (ripe) coconuts – they’re usually sold with the hard brown shell exposed, have relatively little milky-white water, and the white flesh inside is about 10 mm thick. The site talks at some length about the superior virtues of “young” coconuts and then directs you to look for them at an Asian or Mexican market. Failing that, they offer to ship coconuts in from Thailand.

Here’s a picture from the site:

They apparently whittle the coconut down to a candle-like shape before shipping. Here in Brazil you usually buy what they call “green” coconuts, as shown in the background above. Also, from the picture I deduce that their coconuts are older than we’re used to here; green coconuts have even less flesh than those, often it’s just a millimeter-thick layer of transparent jelly. But the water is very abundant and completely transparent.

Their prices are of course outrageous: US$7.99 for one, US$46.99 for a case of nine… we pay between US$0.17 and US$0.30 each at the local fruit market. This already has a few thousand Km shipping (by truck) built in, as they usually come from the north-east coast.

Jon Udell points at an Ars Technica article called The Nigerian SCO Connection:

DEAR SIR/MADAM:

I AM MR. DARL MCBRIDE CURRENTLY SERVING AS THE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SCO GROUP, FORMERLY KNOWN AS CALDERA SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL, IN LINDON, UTAH, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I KNOW THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOUR BECAUSE WE HAVE HAD NO PREVIOUS COMMUNICATIONS OR BUSINESS DEALINGS BEFORE NOW.

MY ASSOCIATES HAVE RECENTLY MADE CLAIM TO COMPUTER SOFTWARES WORTH AN ESTIMATED $1 BILLION U.S. DOLLARS. I AM WRITING TO YOU IN CONFIDENCE BECAUSE WE URGENTLY REQUIRE YOUR ASSISTANCE TO OBTAIN THESE FUNDS.

…

…THEREFORE IT IS OUR RESPECTFUL SUGGESTION, THAT YOU MAY BE IMMEDIATELY A PARTY TO THIS ENTERPRISE, BEFORE OTHERS ACCEPT THESE LUCRATIVE TERMS, THAT YOU SEND US THE NUMBER OF A BANKING ACCOUNT WHERE WE CAN WITHDRAW FUNDS OF A SUITABLE AMOUNT TO GUARANTEE YOUR PARTICIPATION IN THIS ENTERPRISE. AS AN ALTERNATIVE YOU MAY SEND US THE NUMBER AND EXPIRATION DATE OF YOUR MAJOR CREDIT CARD, OR YOU MAY SEND TO US A SIGNED CHECK FROM YOUR BANKING ACCOUNT PAYABLE TO “SCO GROUP” AND WITH THE AMOUNT LEFT BLANK FOR US TO CONVENIENTLY SUPPLY.

They stopped short of using the Nigerian fractured syntax, unfortunately.

If you have no idea why this is funny, here are some news articles about SCO.

I think it’s about 10 years since my company received what we believe to be one of the first Nigerian scam letters to make its way into Brazil… by snail-mail, yet! Unfortunately I didn’t keep it. At the time their standard tale about hidden funds was quite plausible and I remember one of my partners seriously arguing for answering the letter.