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Welcome to my home page. I live in New York, NY and Oak Bluffs, MA; I'm married to Julie; I'm dad to Hazel. I work as a programmer; I have a dog, and she has a web site too.

Thatcher's rants and musings

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As an East-coast urban-dwelling latte-sipping NPR-listening birkenstock-wearing college-educated info-working Volvo-owning non-hunting non-bowling non-veteran effete limousine-liberal ^* snob, I admit to being totally baffled by the flap over Obama's recent comments. Reportedly he told an audience in San Francisco (ooh!) that some voters in rural areas are bitter about being econonically neglected, and vote on the basis of gun rights & religious issues when election time rolls around.

So, three thoughts:

1. Hillary & McCain are falling over themselves to say it shows that Obama is an elitist. Really? The two filthy-rich candidates, whose campaigns have literally been run by Washington corporate lobbyists, think the other guy is an elitist. The half-black dude from Hawaii, raised by a single mom, who spent his time prior to politics organizing job training programs, and didn't finish paying off his student loans until after the age of 40. That guy's an elitist.

2. Are any of these looked-down-upon voters actually offended? I'm sure some patch of astroturf will complain loudly, but to me, it's pretty cool that a candidate actually wants to confront the causes of people's bitterness, instead of distracting them with a bunch of bull, as per usual.

3. Is anybody else appalled that Hillary's taking up the Republican talking point here? McCain I understand, it's still totally ridiculous, but expected. But Hillary? Sheesh.

Anyway, unlike the Wright hoo-hah, this one seems like it could be a political net win for Obama once people are done processing it. Here's Obama's spin on it:

(^* No, I don't really wear birkenstocks or sip lattes, and I've been known to bowl.)

What does MP3 compression sound like? Kind of a stupid question considering that many of us listen to it all the time. But it does have an answer, sort of.

While I was uploading Sinkhole, I tried an experiment. I compressed the albums at 256kbps which, for me, is basically indistinguishable from the original. I took one song's mp3 and loaded it into Audacity (a nice free audio editor). I took the same song's original .wav file and loaded it into a second track in Audacity, parallel to the first. Then I inverted one of the tracks (i.e. reversed the polarity). Then I zoomed way in so I could see individual samples, and found an obvious peak in the audio (a bass drum hit). I slid one of the tracks slightly in time so that the extreme value of the peak was at the exactly same time in both tracks.

Then I played both tracks together. If MP3 were lossless, in theory I would hear nothing -- the two sounds should perfectly cancel each other out, leaving silence.

In practice, MP3 is lossy, and so I heard "what MP3 sounds like". Huh? Yes -- you can think of an MP3 as just the original signal with some junk added. I was listening to the junk.

In other words:

Let A = original audio signal
mp3(x) is the signal x compressed and the decompressed by mp3.
So:
  mp3(A) = A + someJunk  (MP3 is just regular audio with some junk added)
  someJunk = mp3(A) - A  (I isolated the junk)

it contains a snippet of the original so you can hear what it sounds like, followed by someJunk.

To me, it sounds like music blasting extremely loud, and I'm next to some newspaper wrapped around a coffee can full of old screws and nails. The newspaper and stuff rattle in time to the music, but the music is so loud I can't hear the rattling at all unless the music stops suddenly.

OR

Think of MP3 as the original signal with some stuff subtracted. The stuff that's left out is -someJunk.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

My old band, Sinkhole, just released two of our albums under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This pretty much means you can do whatever you want with them, including use songs as background for your intermediate falconry tips video, but more to the point, download and listen to.

Groping For Trout

Core Sample

These two albums are the ones on Ringing Ear Records, the label that we (mostly Jon) ran. We also released two albums on Doctor Strange Records. We're checking with the Doc to see how he feels about us putting those online also. No promises.

"I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences." -- Barack Obama, 2002 full text

Obama is the real deal.

• No incumbent!

• There have been dozens of debates, and nobody is boycotting them.

• Campaign contribution limits have ensured that the non-corporate funded campaigns are competitive.

• http://opensecrets.org lets you check up on where candidates' money comes from -- great!

• Youtube lets you see the pitches of any candidate you want, any time you want.

• The candidate websites are pretty good & informative.

• The blogosphere gets a little incestuous but it does expand the universe of ideas.

Let's hope things stay good for a while.

Good Obama vids

I think Obama is a rhetorical and political genius. He gets the priority straight: inspire emotional motivation before trying to sell policy.

There are lots of good Obama speeches on youtube, but here are a couple representative samples.

On MLK Day at MLK's church, the poetic biblical emotional Obama:

If you don't have a half-hour to watch the whole thing, the best couple of minutes start around 17:45.

At some little community meeting in California back in November, the lower-key wonky Obama:

Part 2:

Here's another wonky speech that gets it right, addressing Planned Parenthood last summer:

rants index: current | 2007 archive | 2006 archive | 2005 archive | 2004 archive | 2003 archive | 2002 archive