Crazy But Able

I’m conservative leaning on some things and liberal leaning on other things. But I’m rapidly coming to a point where I’ll vote for anyone who plans to eliminate the budget deficit. ¹

I don’t want tax cuts. I don’t want more military spending. I don’t want stimulus of any kind. I want LESS SPENDING, and, eventually, MORE TAXES² to get out of the hole we’re in. I mean, doesn’t anyone realize we have to pay this shit back!?

[1]: sadly probably not true, as I wouldn’t vote for a hard core social conservative. I have so many inconsistent³ litmus tests I put on candidates it’s a wonder my head doesn’t explode every time I enter the ballot box.

[2]: more taxes eventually because it’s a bad idea to raise taxes during an economic recession. Also, more taxes because even though I believe we were on the right side of the laffer curve at some point, as of now we need higher taxes to support our current level of spending. Its irresponsible of Republicans (or anyone) to call for more tax cuts without a plan in place to cut spending drastically at this point. We’re already running a massive structural deficit.

[3]: inconsistent from a two party standpoint, of course. Not inconsistent logically.

I know I’m late to this whole Rands in Repose thing but I have to quote this gem from Rands’ post on story culture:

Imagine if Twitter forced you to follow certain people. What if Facebook randomly added folks to your friends list? You know what you’d have? The evening news. Random stories from folks you don’t know and probably don’t trust.

Best. Metaphor. Ever.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution looks at why we can’t buy whatever drugs we want, for whatever reason we want, and comes up with a number of good reasons. This one is huge:

4. Parents cannot be trusted with their children.

I would add 5. Drug interactions!

Tyler hits on all of the practical reasons why it’s a bad idea. I think people should be more suspicious of pharmaceutical drugs on average, especially combinations of pharmaceutical drugs. On the other hand I’m a big fan of self experimentation, so I’m a little torn on this issue.

I’m designing a little voltage controlled synthesizer board, but unfortunately there’s something wrong with my circuit and it literally hurts to listen to. I mean, it sounds pleasant enough, but the harmonics on the edge of the range of hearing are super, super loud. These nearly inaudible harmonics cause extreme ear fatigue, so much that my ears hurt for hours after listening to this for less than 30 seconds.

You may ask why I keep listening to it, well, I’m trying to fix the problem! And I can’t tell if the problem is there until I rewire and try again. Unfortunately by the time my ears hurt it’s already too late, there’s no “hurts a little bit” with this thing which is unfortunate (he says, as he types with a pounding headache).

Filtering the output causes even more oddball harmonic glitches (and loses many of the effects that make this circuit (otherwise) fun to play around with.

This is a project I’ve been working off and on with for months, and I think I’m just going to have to give up with my current schematic and design. Which is a shame because anything else I implement will take a lot more parts and/or a lot more design time.

For what it’s worth, this is the schematic for the core of the VCO: http://www.ecelab.com/circuit-vco-555.htm

The fun bits that I was adding all had to do with control voltage and modifying the control voltage before it hit the 555. In order to tame those harmonics I tried a 100 ohm/1mfd RC filter, I tried lowering the output voltage, I tried a number of other things a few months ago which I don’t even remember but still got ear fatigue after a fairly short amount of time. Ah well.

Last Monday I went to the Julia Nunes concert in Minneapolis. It was awesome!

I threw up a bunch of photos on 8 eyes. I have a bunch more video that I have to sort through; unfortunately I didn’t get the best two songs on video. Boo! Chalk it up to inexperience and bad planning on my part.

One of them was by the opening act (whose name I am blanking on at the moment) who did an amazing version of Crazy by Gnarls Barkley. There’s not a version of that on the youtubes. But I did find a version of the other song:

The band doesn’t quite jell and this version isn’t as good as the version she played at the Cedar. But listen to those vocals!

Been thinking about a quote I heard recently. Don’t remember the exact quote or who it was by, but the gist was “everyone wants to imagine how much fun they would have living in the middle ages, but no one imagines that they would be a serf” or something along those lines.

Someone with more free time should volunteer to be a serf at a renfest (by which I mean, I’d consider it if I had more free time.) I mean, really a serf, bedraggled tunic and excessive deference and all. Would everything be basically cool and fun or would it be like spending a day in the Stanford Prison Experiment?

I mentioned this on Facebook but not here — I finished writing my book! It is about how to make your own macro lenses (for cameras with removable lenses). You probably already know I was working on this book if you’ve been reading this weblog for the past couple of months. (I previously talked about it here and here, and probably elsewhere too.)

This is a SoFoBoMo overtime book — I did a regular SoFoBoMo book and just kept adding to it. It’s $34.95 for a softcover, and somewhat more than that for the two hardcover versions. If you buy one, leave a review!

I know it’s a pretty specific niche. It’s about half how-to-make-your-own-lenses instructional material and half example images. If you want to take a virtual look at the finished product, Blurb has a nice preview available. Right click on the preview to zoom in if you can’t read the words.

Now that I’m done with this one, I’ve started work on the next four. (That’s not a joke, I kind of wish it was.) One of them (the one I started in August) is almost done, one I’ve done a lot of writing in my head but not much on paper, and the other two are just getting started.