good vibrations

You can listen to my recent piano piece, Valid Concerns for Piano, at my music MySpace. It took this long to post it because I just found the CD it was on in my Flight of the Conchords DVD case. It's hard to believe I hadn't opened it since I got home until now.

I've been trying an Internet marketing thing recently. Basically I spend money to advertise other people's products, and if I sell any then I receive a commission. Nothing sold yet. More updates on this bad idea as events progress. I'm doing it because I paid for something that I thought had to do with getting work doing data entry and word processing online, but the promotional information was deceptive (i.e. a scam). Trying to get my money back, but it seemed interesting enough to give it a shot and try to justify the mistake. (Update: got my money back, except what I've spent on ads.)

Tomorrow I'm going to Ocean City, New Jersey with my mom and Laura for a few days. We'll be back Friday or Saturday, although I think I'll have Internet access in the meantime.

I've been working on teaching myself linear algebra with a textbook and MIT OpenCourseWare. My main goal is to learn it so I can move on to some of the more interesting and fundamental concepts in higher math, since it's a prerequisite for them. Between GEB and other things I've been reading lately related to philosophy and music, it seems like math is a pretty universal doorway into the nature of things, and I am interested in the nature of things. What is real that cannot be known or understood logically? What are the limits? I'd like to know someday. "Only those who are willing to go too far..."

A family of birds occupies the hanging plant in our front doorway every year. This time around I got to see the baby birds in the nest and hear their high-pitched peeps when their parents came with food. We even got to observe the day they learned how to fly: the parents flew in circles near the nest to demonstrate how, and a bird at a time would flap around precariously above the nest for a few seconds until eventually they had all left the nest. They haven't come back.

I think it's interesting that bird parents invest so much in feeding, protecting, and educating their your, considering that the children will not support the parents in their old age or buy them a beach house on the Pacific; they can't give anything back. There is no direct conscious reason for the parents to help their young--it's just instinct. The only direct benefit to the older birds is to get their genes transmitted and the development of DNA continued through them. The main purpose appears to be the preservation and progress of their species, and really the ecosystem at large. In that sense, their lives are gifts to (and of) the universe.

There have been a number of occasions recently where I've stayed up all night (writing, among other things) until it was light outside again. I trekked through the woods in our back yard (which is mostly mud and skunk cabbage) to see the sunrise from the fields on the other side of the woods, where a country club is currently under construction. Since no one's manning the bulldozers at 6 AM, I have acres and acres of open fields and dirt-covered land to myself to enjoy the sounds and sights of the morning. Once recently I came across a deer inside the fence that marks the edge of our back yard. It saw me first and was on its way out by the time I noticed it.

That reminds me of something I read recently about the proverbial question: If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? The simple answer is no, it does not. Sound is a perceptual phenomenon; it's what happens in our brains when certain types of vibrations in the air push against our eardrums. If the question was about whether the trees make any vibrations at all, the answer would be a bit different, although if by 'no one around to hear it' the question means the complete nonexistence of Mind, I would still say the answer is no.

In summary, I like summer and I like outside.

EDIT: Interesting news article: Using parts from the PlayStation 3 (among other things), IBM has built the world's first petaflop supercomputer. That means it can perform a thousand trillion operations per second.

Let me try to give you a picture of how big that number is. In between one hundredth and one tenth of a second, it would perform as many calculations as there are cells in the human body. In four months, it would perform as many calculations as there are grains of sand on every beach and desert on Earth. In about three years, it would perform as many calculations as there are stars in the universe.

To put that in perspective: on a clear night, you can see about 5,000 stars with the naked eye. If they were grains of salt, you could fit them on a tablespoon. If all the stars in the universe were grains of salt, you could fit them in a ball eight miles wide.

And it still can't tell us why Pogs(R) aren't cool anymore. I swear the Collector's Series Puff Pogs I made will be in high demand in a decade or two.