Speaker For The Diodes - September 21st, 2009

05:25 am - QotD

"Hanging out with people in the funny business has given me a very different perspective on this humor stuff. Listening to them discuss their work strongly reminds me of how different the perspective of being a musician is from being a music fan. To the non-musician music fan, music is magic and mysterious and irrational and affective. Meanwhile, the musicians making that magical, mysterious, irrational, affective stuff are matter-of-factly operationalizing rules for producing the magical, mysterious, irrational, and affective." -- siderea, 2009-08-26

[I would add: Not that one can't be experiencing the magic and affective aspects of music at the same time as one is performing it, but being a musician does give a different perspective on how the magic happens.]

03:39 pm - Things I Think About When I'm Tired

Tried to do too much Friday, which messed up Saturday's plan. Productive day yesterday, but didn't fall asleep until 4:30 this morning, four hours before the guys with jackhammers leaned on my doorbell to get me to move my car. (They didn't turn on the jackhammers until 9:00. And I think they're just finishing up now.) I've gotten a wee bit done since, but mostly sort of blink my eyes a lot and think, "wow, I really need more sleep."

Perrine says I'm the meanest cat-caretaker ever, because I wouldn't open the screen door to let her try to catch the cardinals in the tree out back. The female came closer to taunt Perrine again, after she saw her crouched behind the screen. Cardinals are kinda loud, aren't they?

Was thinking yesterday about different kinds of damage, kinds that can be repaired and ones that require replacement. Was thinking of this because of yet another everyday injury to my largest organ, and how a little bit can heal but the rest has to be replaced. (Fortunately, self-replacement is an inherent feature of that organ, as older bits are being constantly discarded whether they're damaged or not. So getting the damaged area replaced is just a matter of waiting.) Got to thinking about self-healing materials for stuff like outer skins of automobiles, and what would be involved in mimicing the biological processes we take for granted in biological contexts. Ideally any replacement material would be something that could be synthesized from whatever the car used a fuel, so you'd only have to 'feed' it one kind of juice.

Then again, maybe not such a hot approach. If cars shed flakes of carbon-based 'paint' they were constantly growing, that'd be one more form of pollution. Hmm. Still perhaps an interesting enough engineering problem to solve well enough to describe in a science fiction tale, even if not really worth implementing that way in real life.