Speaker For The Diodes - September 28th, 2009

05:25 am - QotD

"Les charmes enchanteux de cette sublime science ne se décèlent dans toute leur beauté qu'à ceux qui ont le courage de l'approfondir. Mais lorsqu'une personne de ce sexe, qui, par nos meurs [sic] et par nos préjugés, doit rencontrer infiniment plus d'obstacles et de difficultés, que les hommes, à se familiariser avec ces recherches épineuses, sait néanmoins franchir ces entraves et pénétrer ce qu'elles ont de plus caché, il faut sans doute, qu'elle ait le plus noble courage, des talents tout à fait extraordinaires, le génie superieur." -- German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss (b. 1777-04-30, d. 1855-02-23), 1807-04-30, in a letter to French mathematician Sophie Germain (b. 1776-04-01, d. 1831-06-27)

"The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal themselves in all their beauty only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it. But when a person of that sex, that, because of our mores and our prejudices, has to encounter infinitely more obstacles and difficulties than men in familiarizing herself with these thorny research problems, nevertheless succeeds in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating their most obscure parts, she must without doubt have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius."

[Quotation and translation both via Wikiquote]

06:38 pm - Saturday Went Well

A quintet of Playford Spice musicians had a wedding gig Saturday. (I think the only other with a blog is silmaril but will link others here if I'm mistaken.) On the whole the gig went well: the groom said good things about us, the bride said lots and lots and lots of good things and repeated most of them a few times, assorted guests said positive things about us with big smiles, and even the caterers chimed in with praise. The biggest frustration was a wee bit of disorganization -- last minute edits to the program, a bit of uncertainty about who else was supposed to perform when, sorting out cues for music during the ceremony, and finding out while we were setting up that we needed half again as much music as we had prepared ... which are really not unusual types of glitches for weddings, nor an unusual number of glitches for any one wedding, so it was neither the most amazingly tightly-organized wedding I've played at nor the most confusingly disorganized. *shrug* (Oh, there was also some confusion and much delay in getting the band fed, but at least the caterers didn't make us eat outside in the rain[1].) The biggest loss was that one of my bungee cords went missing -- not really very high on the catastrophe scale. So: on the whole, it went rather well. I got to play with folks I like but don't see often enough, the people who needed to be happy with us were happy, and there were no disasters to speak of. A good day.

Still, there were lessons to be learned:

• Don't mic an ashiko (nor, I'm guessing, a doumbek?) from the front just because there's already a mic there: the dums just wind up sounding like teks with reverb, not properly lower-pitched dums (or to put it another way, there's no boom in the dum).
• When my pain meds wear off during teardown, the correct response is not, "Well that's okay; I hurt now but didn't have any problems during the performance, and we're almost done here." Rather, it should be, "Oh right, I still have to drive home and unload the car, so I'd better take another dose."
• I could've used about fifteen more minutes of setup time[2]. Ten more minutes, and I would've gotten a proper level set for the bowed psaltrey (we set the level on that mic with a recorder while the psaltrey player was getting dressed); fifteen would've let me connect up to record the whole performance, as well (recording was the lowest priority, so I set it up last ... during a break after we'd started playing).
• I need to bring a different type of earphones. The ones I used let in enough environmental sound that I had trouble telling what I was hearing from the mixer and what I was just directly hearing from next to me on stage. This left me feeling insecure about how good a job I was doing with the mix, and whether I had a good overall volume level for the room, until I got off the stage at one point and a guest immediately complimented us on the sound. *whew*
• Normalizing the per-channel pre-amp gain to -3dB, instead of 0dB as the mixer's user manual directs, works pretty well. (This was something I did in response to maugorn's complaint a few days earlier that I tend to trim the mics too hot coming into the board when I do it by the book.)
• The serpent doesn't need to be close-miked after all -- getting a mic sortakinda close but off-axis is good enough for live (but not really recording-quality).
• When running a mono house mix, I should use the 'left' and 'right' channels as submixes, so I can kill all the mics on stage with one slider while leaving the toast/announcement mic live, instead of zeroing each stage channel and then trying to remember where to set them to when we start playing again. (Need to verify that the "mono sum" output behaves the way I expect for this to work.)
• Folks seemed genuinely surprised that neither the DJ nor the band had a wireless mic to use for toasts/announcements. Fortunately the mic I did put out for that got used entirely from the head table, so the requirement to roam without trailing a cable never came up. (I had put a nice long cable on the toast mic just in case.)
• A surprising(-to me) number of people seem to have, as their first instinct upon picking up a microphone, switching it off if there's a switch on it.

( a digression about mixers )

And though I didn't get any good recordings (as I said, 'twasn't a priority), I've a couple more thoughts after listening to what I did manage to record:

• I should play mandolin more often. As much as I still really want a mandola (viola-sized/tuned version of the mandolin), I find I like the sound of the mandolin more than I thought I did.
• I should definitely strum on mandolin more often.
• I need to work more on my breathing.
• Even though the sackbut pointed at a recorder mic did produce some clipping (I forgot to turn that channel down before the fanfare), it still sounded okay -- I think the sound going directly from the instrument into the room may have been more audible than the copy coming out the speakers anyhow.
• When it's amplified enough to be heard, the oud boosts the "medievalishness" of the blend, coming across like a sort of agressive lute (which is fitting, since a lute can reasonably be thought of as a softer, fretted oud). But I should have boosted the bass a little on it, as the low notes, which sounded plenty loud to me while I was playing, seem to get lost. (I played the oud into my recorder mic, from a greater distance than the recorders. In hindsight, I should've tried putting the condenser from the 12-string on it and seen whether I could get away with the coil pickup I usually use on the 6-string (which I didn't bring to this gig) in the 12-string[3]. But that would've pushed us back up to nine channels -- including the mic out on the floor for toasts and announcements -- and I would've had to cable the spare mixer into the setup ... which I was prepared to do -- I can turn these two 8-channel mixers into one 13-channel mixer very quickly, or a 16-channel mixer with a little more trouble -- but it's just as well that we got by on eight channels even though the spare deck was powered up and ready just in case.[4])
• I need to write a story in which one character has an excuse to warn another about a third, saying, "She's dangerous with that recorder, man. She'll break your heart with a well-timed trill."

So: Saturday went well except for having been stupid about pain meds toward the end and having unloading the van at home be more difficult that it had to be, as a result. Then yesterday was a pretty much lost day, as I'd pretty much expected (I'd planned to visit my mother if able, but wasn't counting on being able ... the vicious headache[5] was a surprise, but the muscle and joint pain and general fatigue were not). I finally resorted to inhaled theophylline[6] to deal with the headache and a mild bout of athsma, which helped a lot, and today has been an ordinary everything-hurts day instead of an exceptional everything-hurts day. Getting to rehearsal tonight is unlikely but I haven't entirely given up on the idea yet since I'm doing so much better than yesterday -- this is a codeine-might-work level of pain, today, if I time it right. But I'm still definitely feeling the after-effects of Saturday's effort and Sunday's migraine.

I can wish for a body that didn't take so long to recover from a day like Saturday, but Saturday itself was good.

---

( footnotes (and a question about headache terminology )

10:40 pm - Desire

the-nita linked to yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day. As soon as I read the description, I knew exactly which photo it was.

Ouch.

You see, I'm an acrophile. Have been for a while -- likely longer than I've known the word. And a bit of a space buff. And in 1984 I could still afford subscriptions to Science News and Astronomy -- I don't remember which of those I first saw that photo in, but I do remember the moment I turned the page and saw it (printed as a full-page bleed, IIRC).

My heart stopped. A lump formed in my throat. And I discovered for the first time that envy could be experienced as physical pain. Oh, I'd wanted to be an astronaut before, but never as strongly as after seeing that photo. Even now, when I see or hear the name McCandless, my mind is filled with this image.

Even without the acrophilia and the envy, it's a beautiful photo on multiple levels. And it has lots and lots of room for each viewer to project her or his own issues into. For me, the photo seems to whisper several things at once ...

... but while it's whispering all those other meanings, it's shouting into my brain, "Want. To. Be. There. Dammit. Exclamation. Point." My throat tightens up and I hear my own voice whining, "No fair -- I wanna be there -- when's my turn?"

Bruce McCandless, un-fucking-tethered, a hundred meters from the Space Shuttle that hauled him into orbit. First untethered space walk. (The APoD page mentions that Robert Stewart also got to do that the same day, but McCandless' name is the one I always remember because he's the one in the photo.) No mechanical connection to the spacecraft, nor to the planet; no tether, no ladder, no mountain, just ... floating ... in ... space ... with a maneuvering jet, and gravity and Newton's laws of motion. Not standing on anything, not even being held up by aerodynamics: alone outside the atmosphere. Spacecraft within reach using the maneuvering pack, but no physical contact. I'm not sure why the distinction between being inside a spacecraft that's in freefall and being outside in just a spacesuit in freefall feels so important, but it matters to me, at least as I imagine both situations. Probably because even though each is a sealed, pressurized container, one registers as "clothes" and the other as "vehicle". Oh, I'd dearly love to get into orbit -- or farther -- in a spacecraft, and even that would be a dream come true. But to go EVA, to see no walls around me, nor anything that could count as a floor, whichever way I look, to gaze down upon the Earth or out toward the stars, no ground under my feet, no railing, no window, just empty space between me and anything else; that would be one hell of a trip.

I know that for some people these ideas evoke terror or even moderate discomfort rather than desire. I do not know whether or not there is anyone for whom this image evokes indifference. I understand my own reaction, of course, and I understand the folks who'd find it scary. I have trouble imagining anyone not being moved enough to notice one way or the other.

---

A couple years after that photo came out, I was in a car with co-workers, hearing on the radio that that shuttle disintegrated just after launch. When someone asked, "If you were offered a ride on the next one, would you go?", that photo of McCandless was firmly in my mind's eye as I blurted, "Oh yeah, I'd still go -- I'd be scared, but I'd sure as hell go." Many times over the years that image has leapt to mind. And every single time, it's accompanied by strong pangs of "I. Want. To. Be. There."

I don't know which is worse, imagining and desiring that experience, or having experiened it and being back on Earth again. But you know, I'd love a chance to find out firsthand.

I know that's never going to happen. I'll have to settle for movies and photos and stories and my own imagination, like almost everybody else. And try to scratch that itch by looking down from tall buildings, mountains, trees, and aeroplanes from time to time.

And still, every time I see that photo on a page or on a screen, every time anything reminds me of it and it pops into my head, I'll be thinking, "If only ..."