I can't believe I put a huge picture of a cell phone in yesterday's blog. I'll leave it up as a monument to my shame.
Now I will try to answer the great unanswered question: "is every possible combination of half-steps and whole-steps arranged within an octave such that there are 1) seven unique tones in it, 3) no jumps bigger than a whole-step, and 4) no adjacent half-steps, analyzable as a natural minor or melodic minor mode?" I've wondered about this, off and on, for a while, and it might be a fun problem to solve, although I might need some scratch paper and not just a text editor.
Well, maybe I can do it here. I'll draw out three octaves' worth of dots, each dot representing a half-step (36 of them in each line, from c1 - b3), and then put pipes underneath where they correspond to scale tones. Three octaves makes it easier to spot patterns.
My intuition tells me, as it's been telling me for a while, that yes -- every possible combination of half-steps and whole-steps arranged within an octave such that there are seven unique tones in it and no jumps bigger than a whole step must be either a natural minor or melodic minor mode.
So let's draw up possibilities, each one with seven notes in an octave (the easiest condition to meet and see right-off). Then, we can eliminate those that fail the "too big a step" and/or "adjacent half steps" tests. Once we're done, we should be left with only melodic and natural minor modes, 14 in all. I'm sure there's an easier and more elegant way to prove this, but I'm going to use a "brute force" method until I see some definitive patterns.
.................................... ||||||| | 1 2 3 FAIL - too big a jump, many adjacent half-steps .................................... |||||| | | 1 2 3 FAIL - same .................................... ||||| | | | 1 2 3 FAIL - same .................................... |||| | | | | 1 2 3 FAIL - same .................................... ||| | | | | | 1 2 3 FAIL - more than two adjacent half steps .................................... || | | | | ||| | | | | ||| 1 2 3 FAIL - matches above pattern (mode of above scale) .................................... | | | | | ||| 1 2 3 FAIL - same .................................... | || || || || 1 2 3 FAIL - too many notes (a diminished scale) .................................... | | || || | | | || || | | | || || | 1 2 3 PASS - 5th degree melodic minor mode (beginning on the fifth note of a melodic minor scale) .................................... || | | || | || | | || | || | | || | 1 2 3 PASS - phrygian mode (beginning on the fifth note of a natural minor scale) i can see at this point that there are always going to be two half-step intervals, because more will always result in adjacent half steps or more than seven tones, and fewer will always result in jumps of more than a whole step. Remember, we're limited to seven tones. .................................... || || | | | || || | | | || || | | | 1 2 3 PASS - 7th degree melodic minor mode .................................... || | | | | || 1 2 3 FAIL (too many adjacent half-steps. However, see below at the ***) .................................... |||| | | | | 1 2 3 FAIL - too big a jump, many adjacent half-steps .................................... | | | | || || | | | || || | | | || || 1 2 3 PASS - 3rd degree melodic minor mode .................................... || | || | | || | || | | || | || | | | 1 2 3 PASS - locrian mode (2nd degree natural minor mode) ok, I'm right, I think. Not formally proven (i don't have the energy to check every possible combination), but pretty sure. I'm seeing that there are really only two possibilities: a pattern where the pairs of notes seperated by a half step have one note, then two notes, then one note, then two, etc, between them, and a pattern where the pairs of notes seperated by a half-step have three notes, then 0 notes, then 3 notes, then 0 notes, etc, between them. *** but, I did find this weird structure (it passes all of the tests except one: "no more than two adjacent half-steps"): .................................... ||| | | | | ||| | | | | ||| | | | | 1 2 3 i think it's the only case where this can happen (fail all tests except this one). i don't know what you'd call it, but its use would complicate life quite a bit. Of course, it can be "moded" (started on different degrees). i can see, visually, that the only options are melodic minor and natural minor modes. So I can prove it, just because of the way space and fillers work, even though I'm not sure i can put it into words. It has to fit one of two patterns, or else rules get broken. so I'm right! Now, I just have to learn all of the melodic minor modes. They have bizarre names, that I'm not familiar with.
This DEFINITELY, hands-down, wins the award for "blog least interesting to the most people." I found this site, which deals with some fairly involved ear training, including recognizing the melodic minor modes by sound. I'll toot my own horn a bit here and let you know that I identified every melodic minor mode correctly, based on its name and what the intervals were doing. For instance, if I heard a lydian mode with a flattened seventh scale degree, I knew to choose the "lydian b7" option. You could call that same scale a "mixolydian sharp 4," but that option wasn't one of the choices. I am awesome.
Time for another rare deadbarnacle product endorsement (previously featured: crimson editor, and possibly others that I'm forgetting). The lucky recipient this go-around: virgin mobile's cheapest phone and their minute-to-minute plan. For all of you luddite cell phone refuseniks, this is the way to go; companies like verizon and sprint don't aim their plans at the infrequent user.
I bought a $30 "nokia shorty" phone, virgin mobile's cheapest for sale at "best buy." even though it's the cheapest, I don't think this means it works any less efficiently on their network (picks up a weaker signal). As far as limited functionality, the battery might hold less charge, but that's a non-issue because I also bought a CAR CELL PHONE CHARGER, for another $20.
The only things I'll be missing is snapping and sending pictures, games, laser beams, etc; silly features, especially so if one plans on using the telephone fairly strictly as it was intended (to call people and perhaps, occasionally, to be called by people). Apparently, this is a lost concept, and phones must do everything. Some people like their phone/PDAs, and I suppose I can see the advantage of having your day planner wired to your alarm clock, but my paper datebook seems to function ok (plus I can draw pictures in it).
Again, it's fine to like toys (as if I were the one to dictate what's acceptable behavior and what's not) -- just don't tell me you "need" x-toy for x-reason. "why did you get an SUV?!?" "because I wanted an SUV." "ok." end of discussion, barring "second hand smoke" issues (polluting the air, wasting energy, crumpling little ford escorts like tv dinner trays in fender-benders, etc). But I'm hard-pressed to conceive of ways a networked PDA harms anything but your time-reserve on the planet, unless the radio frequency stops a pacemaker, or something.
Once you get your dorky little grey plastic toy phone, you call virgin mobile (or go to their website) and set it up with the minute-to-minute plan -- this plan is aimed at those of us who spit on cell phones, contracts with corporations and their legal departments, and human contact in general, but want a phone for when our cars break down on the trans-siberian expressway, or to call pizza-ordering customers to ask them where the hell their little dung-hole "montgomery village" ghetto sardine can dwelling is, nestled in the middle of a massive cult compound named something like "windy timber oaks vista," which is comprised of six-foot-wide mailbox-like structures that someone, somewhere, calls "townhomes" with a straight face.
So you get this minute-to-minute plan, according to which you pay 10 cents a minute, deducted from a refillable minute-reserve, the only drawback being that if you don't refill your cache at least once every 90 days, you lose all your leftover minutes, along with your phone number. But since I don't plan on giving the number out under ordinary circumstances, this doomsday-scenario doesn't matter to me.
Really, all you need to get started is the phone itself -- $30, best buy (or target, or other places). They give you a few "starter minutes," I just discovered, so you don't even need to charge it up full of airtime to start off with. Nor do you need, of course, the car charger.
I think my el-cheapo phone does some non-phone things, against my will, such as text messaging (10 cents a receipt), games, etc. It has a speaker phone built in, which is nice when on the road. Geez.
I remember when car phones were things for people riding in limousines. The very first mobile phone I saw consisted of a briefcase slung over the shoulder, and a regular-sized receiver perched on top of it. This was back in the 80s, possibly before some of you were born. I think I'm going to thoroughly enjoy being old, and shocking youngsters with tales of depricated technology. It's going to be especially shocking for my victims because the birth of the personal microprocessor (at least in anywhere near common use) occured during my very conscious memory.
There are terrorist fruit flies in my room, and I have no idea from whence they're being generated. I've searched. I sense conspiracy.
| Question: | Answer: |
| 1. If you could go back and relive one moment or day from your life, without changing anything, what would you re-experience? | kill |
| 2. If you could witness a moment in history, again without changing anything, what would you want to see? | kill |
| 3. If you could talk to a younger version of yourself, what age would you visit and what message would you give? | kill |
| 4. If you could choose one moment that would be guaranteed to happen in your future, what would it be and when would it happen? | blood |
| 5. Pretend you left a time capsule for yourself 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years ago. You just opened it. What three things from your past are you now holding and what age were you when you buried them? | kill |
There's this thing (above -- five questions) called the "Friday five," that's been around for a while, and that is designed to give bloggers with writer's block something to blog about. I think part of my problem lately is that I've been trying to write for readers, as it were, and not for myself. I used to get all snarky and snide, and say "this writing is for me! You have no business reading it!" etc. This is pretty silly, obviously -- it's on the damned web.
I would feel like it was sort of pointless to write anything if it were just on a piece of paper sitting in my drawer (or an un-networked file on my hard drive), and yet at the same time I want to feel free to write whatever I want or feel like writing, without have to go back and correct the grammar and make it interesting or make sure it's properly censored, things that being totally public necessitate.
Wanting to have my cake and eat it, too, essentially -- all the perks of public presentation without any of the consequences. Ideally, the world would be filled with people whom I could trust with reading my writing, in the sense that they're not going to mind that I'm the antichrist and act accordingly. I sometimes fantasize that the world is filled with clones of myself, and how nicely we all would get along, and how smoothly the world would run, except that no one would be any good at anything except writing narcissistic blogs, so perhaps that civilization wouldn't last too long.
So, I think that's been contributing to my not blogging so much -- realizing that I'm performing for some kind of audience. And, even if I say "who cares?" and start writing just for fun, for the hell of it, the way I used to, it still won't be the same, because I know there will be people out there who are reading and thinking "huh...his blogs aren't as interesting as they used to be," and then they navigate away to something like "yahoo games" and forget about me, which maybe would have been the ideal scenario to begin with. I think it might have been better if I'd never gotten ahold of any sort of server log, and had no idea that anyone was reading this thing.
Of course, if I don't want anyone to read this, the solution is simple: don't put it on the web. When I was 16, I started a diary on the computer. It was an wordperfect doc, and got to be something like 250 pages long, until hardware failure caused it to get wiped out. It took me a long while to recover from that. I'm still curious about the sorts of things I wrote in there (it was a long time ago). I think there was a lot about the agonies of the high school social melee, my first girlfriend and how I worshipped her, and perhaps standard-issue teen angst (still going strong).
I remember a friend and I started our computer journals at the same time, and would read bits of them to each other. I have a tendency to go over these old childhood memories of people and their actions, and then re-analyze them. Then, I realize that I had no idea why people did the things they did -- I never considered or contemplated personality-based motives for behavior, something that seems unthinkable now; it's like I wasn't paying attention, or didn't have the tools to pay attention, to what people did..
My willingness, and perhaps ability, to analyze human behavior was not at all developed. Now, if you give me "behavior x," I'll at least pretend to understand the psychological source of and motivation for this behavior. I don't know how much of this is just be being snooty and assuming I'm better than everyone else, as implied by the lofty analysis of a thing in question, but I think to some degree I'm genuinely pretty good at understanding why people do the things they do.
But, I can hear the voices: "EVERYONE THINKS THIS." ok, great...even if the voices are right, and everyone does think they have a good understanding of why people do the things they do (the voices might be right, in this case), my understanding of it is better than yours. Nyeah-nyeah.
At any rate, who cares -- that's not the friggin point. The friggin point is that I didn't analyze or appreciate people I knew when I was little on a very deep level. When I go back and think about the things they did and said, I'm sort of amazed at how smart and interesting everyone was, and how little I appreciated it. I think I might have the problem of not being very "present" during interaction. For instance, if I go over and read an instant messenger conversation I had a few days ago, I'll find that I pick up on all sorts of conversational nuances that I missed -- important pieces of the collaborative conversational tapestry that I just wasn't aware of when they were being woven (sorry about that one -- despite my best efforts, there are occasional lapses in the "no metaphoric imagery" rule).
I think part of this is that I'm so distracted by being present, by being a conscious participant, that I sort of shut off my observer capabilities. I'd like to be able to observe and participate at the same time, but it's difficult to do.
The question is: would I be comfortable writing a journal, carrying it around to all of the different people I know read this blog, saying "look, here's my journal," and waiting while they read it? Probably not. Definitely not. And yet, I'm not hesitating for a second to type up this file, because it appears to me as though I'm in the privacy of my own room, listening to "the swans," isolated from everyone, inside my own writer's head, even though I'm not -- everyone is here, with me, on the internet. It's the most public thing in the world, and everyone can hear my thoughts. It could drive a lesser man mad.
| Question: | Answer: |
| 1. If you could go back and relive one moment or day from your life, without changing anything, what would you re-experience? | it's bad enough that I have to live these moments once. Substituting "could" with "had to": meal of hamburger casserole or related substance, at some point. |
| 2. If you could witness a moment in history, again without changing anything, what would you want to see? | 100,000 years ago, any given familiy group or clan/tribe/whatever. I would like to see what cavemen do when they're just sitting around. Poke each other? Nap? What, exactly? |
| 3. If you could talk to a younger version of yourself, what age would you visit and what message would you give? | pre-zygote: "halt! Return-ye to from whence thou here-to-for hast cometh!" |
| 4. If you could choose one moment that would be guaranteed to happen in your future, what would it be and when would it happen? | corrective and augmentative neurosurgery, before I leave for work today. |
| 5. Pretend you left a time capsule for yourself 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years ago. You just opened it. What three things from your past are you now holding and what age were you when you buried them? | 5: drugs. 10: drugs. 15: drugs. 20: nintendo games. |
No more polished writing! I know I always say this. But I have to just write whatever I want, even if it sucks! Lkjdjs;ldjsl;kjk;skl; saklsj skl;jk; ;