Month: October 2005

Mathematics is a Hoax

This thought has been running around in my head for a few weeks: Mathematics is a hoax. It is a man-made construct, a product of wishful thinking on the part of humans who want to be able to measure and define things absoloutely. Certainly mathematics is useful for describing relationships between things, but I’ve noticed that the universe rarely deals with the sorts of perfect geometric forms and numerical certainty that we seem to assume exist. The universe seems defined by curvature rather than straight lines. In fact, I can’t think of any case where nature has produced a straight line, a square, a triangle, a cube. Spheres and ellipticals are the rule, not the exception. Pi is a defining constant, and its depths are infinite, and thus never truly absolute.

I’m not saying this as some grandiloquent denial of the discipline; it’s just one of those ideas in the night that makes me wonder. I also have an irrational distrust of protractors. I still have a hard time figuring out how one starting point can have multiple ending points without the resulting lines being the same line (neither intersecting nor being parallel) for at least a while. I think that’s where the uncertainty starts: curvature. The universe would make so much more sense if it were all straight lines and perfect ratios. I suspect many mathematicians think it is.

Ted Greene (1946-2005)

If there were any one person deserving the title of World’s Greatest Guitar Teacher, Ted Greene was the man. You’ve never heard of him (most guitar players haven’t, either), but any serious guitarist with an interest in chord theory has his own copy of Chord Chemistry, a book of spells that continues to delight and disturb novices and professionals alike. I’ve still really only absorbed the first 10 pages. It’s a cavernous tome of chords, and a standard issue field guide at places like Berklee College of Music. I got my copy from their bookstore at the recommendation of Dream Theater’s John Petrucci.

Try not to giggle at the cover:

Ted died last July, and I only found out yesterday. That gives you an idea of just how un-famous he was. He has very few recordings to his name, but he was one of the hardest working musicians and music teachers in the business. That he died in an apartment in Encino gives you an idea of how little money he made.

Corn Dogs Aplenty, or, October Sunburn

I spent the majority of the weekend at The Arkansas State Fair. Saturday I played 4 shows with Superflux throughout the afternoon and evening. The weather was just about as perfect as you could ask for in October: sunny with a slight chill. I did not fully partake of food and rides that day, so I went back on Sunday with DeLaine and we rode ourselves stupid on various gravity-defying contraptions. After paying $9 to strap ourselves together and be dropped from a crane to swing in the breeze, we were done [1]. I actually got sunburned (sunburnt?).

Sunday evening I took Zoe to Allsop Park. I’ve been neglecting the poor girl all week with three band rehearsals and the fair for two days. I could tell she was lonely; when I was loading up my guitars on Saturday, she hopped in the car and wouldn’t get out. She moved into the front seat and back in an effort to evade me. But I wore her down at Allsop with frisbee and baseball. I’m working on getting her to retrieve the baseball after I’ve batted it some long distance, but I think she has a hard time finding it because it blends in with its surroundings [2]. I need to get a ball in some brightly contrasting color.

Oh, and TJ just sent me some ads for the Utah State Fair. Someone had the brilliant idea to get Napoleon Dynamite and Pedro to do the ad campaign. Click on the official site for Real Player versions of the TV spots, or if you prefer Windows Media, click here.

1.) By the way, totally worth it.
2.) Or maybe she was distracted by all the squirrels. Oh how she loathes the squirrels.

10 Years

Something occurred to me as I was driving home from band rehearsal last night: I started the first version of my website in 1995 at Hendrix, and that was TEN YEARS AGO. The first address was hendrix.edu/homes/stu/mccorkindalect. Sadly the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine didn’t go that deeply into the Hendrix website, and the earliest version they have is from November of 1996, well after my friend Amy Qualls had ceded webmaster duties to Courtney Campbell.

The earliest surviving version of my website in the Wayback Machine’s cache doesn’t show up until 1999, after I graduated and relocated the site to the O.U.R. Co-Op in Harrison, and even then it doesn’t store the graphics so it’s not much to look at. Maybe I’ll go dig up a disk backup of the old, old site to show you just how far we’ve come.

In other news, I installed WordPress for my brother Trey over at mccorkindale.com. Hopefully we can use it to keep up with the goings on in our enormous family.

The Schism of the Popular Mind

Kate Moss was dropped from several contracts because some paparazzo caught her with some booger sugar. Pat Robertson openly advocated the elimination of Venezuela’s leader. What do these two events have in common? Both Kate and Pat were were publicly shamed for doing things that were honest and true to who they are. They were doing things that should surprise no one, yet so many reacted in horror.

A supermodel doing coke? Gasp! Who would have seen that coming? The major surprise here is that more photographers aren’t taking pictures of models and celebrities doing drugs. God knows there are plenty of opportunities, given that the advancements in digital camera technology can make anyone a tabloid photographer for the right price. If one were so inclined, an entire magazine could be dedicated to nothing else. Why was Kate Moss singled out? She practically founded a school of modeling commonly referred to as “heroin chic” and we’re surprised she’s doing coke? Would we feel better if it were actual heroin?

A politically active televangelist suggesting an expedient removal of a controversial foreign president? Heaven forbid. Yes, Pat Robertson is a poobah-level whack job, but he’s allowed to speak his mind. He’s completely correct in that an assassination would be cheaper than a full-scale war. He was chastised by his followers for making a decidedly un-Christian statement, but really, why isn’t advocating a war not worse? The deaths of thousands of troops is OK, but the killing of one important man is not? The public is weird like that. They’ll remind Pat, “thou shalt not kill,” but they won’t say that to the Pentagon.

Why can’t the populace just look at a cokehead model and say, “big deal, who cares?” or a religious pundit and say “that makes sense coming from him?”

Rod Bryan, King of the Promo

I stopped off at Anthro-pop on my way home today to order the new Fiona Apple and King’s X CDs, and to pick up the latest Ho-Hum. As I was browsing through the store, I looked for something by Longwave (on a recommendation from Matt). Nothing in the main racks but I noticed a stack of $3 promotional CDs, and there it was, along with Lyrics Born‘s Later That Day, Owen‘s I Do Perceive, and a couple other random things that just looked cool. All $3 each. This comes on the heels of Sunday night’s discovery of Zero 7‘s Simple Things at Hasting’s in Conway for $4. Yay cheap good music.

“When Are You Going to Get Married?”

As if to illustrate the difference between her temperament and her brother’s, my niece Emily asked me yesterday at church, “When are you going to get married?”

I lamely retorted something about waiting for her schedule to clear, but she just looked at me half confused. The proper comeback materialized (as they so often do) several minutes later: “When are you going to stop being such an impudent urchin?”

I was in Harrison over the weekend to attend a gathering for my brother, Trey, and his fiancee, Elaine, whose wedding is scheduled for November 5. I went to church Sunday morning at St. John’s Episcopal Church, attending my first service in the new chapel, featuring our new minister, Seamus Doyle. I should mention that Seamus is a former Irish Catholic, who left the priesthood to get married, and was later ordained into the Protestant Church. Which, if you think about it, moving from Catholic to Episcopal is the theological equivalent of “one small step for Man, one giant leap for Mankind” given the acrimony that still separates Catholics from Protestants in Ireland.

An added bonus was that Sunday’s service was the annual Blessing of the Animals, wherein members of the congregation bring their pets to church with them. That was a little surreal. Compounding the surrealism was that, given my brother’s impending nuptials, people kept mistaking me for him. I really should go home more often so that people remember what I look like; both my pediatrician and my band director thought I was Trey at first.