Author: Robert Elessar

Natural Selection Is Not Goal-Oriented [This is me, “triggered”]

This is a recording I did Monday morning, January 13, 2020, after listening to a podcast and thinking back to an interaction on Facebook dealing with evolution (and an apparent misunderstanding of its character).  It’s a bit longer than some recent recordings.  It may be a bit meandering, since it was firmly “off-the-cuff”, but hopefully it’s interesting enough to hold your attention for about twenty minutes.

Here’s a link to Stephen Jay Gould’s book, Full House, which I mention in my recording.

Here’s a link to Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, a terrific primer on the basics of evolution.

And here’s a link to Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, a groundbreaking explanation of the “gene’s eye view” of evolution by natural selection, and in which he also coined the term “meme”.

 

No Surprises “Karaoke”

This song, from Radiohead’s classic album OK Computer, is probably the number one song that expresses the way I often feel.  I’m not actually at the skill level of doing a cover of it, instrumentally, so I took the original track, used my audio software to “suppress” the vocals*, and then recorded vocals of my own, double-tracking and doing harmony where indicated, before mixing my own “karaoke” version.

If you ever want to hear what my heart/soul/whatever wishes it could say**, this is it.

*I think I lost a lot of the bass and some of the percussion with it, unfortunately.

**I’m not sure why anyone would want to do that, but the song is good, anyway.

The wavefunction, many “worlds”, and Fourier analysis…some light-hearted morning thoughts

Okay, I had a bit of a bee in my bonnet over this subject this morning (this isn’t the first time), and I thought I’d just get my thoughts out and into the digital universe…hopefully to trigger someone else thinking, and maybe to get someone talking to me about the subject, if they’re interested.  Here you go, wherever you are:

Here’s a link to Sean Carrol’s latest book Something Deeply Hidden

Here’s a link to Max Tegmark’s book Our Mathematical Universe

Here’s a link to David Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality

Here’s a link to David Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity

Deep(ish) thoughts on the necessity of suffering and “political scientism”

Here it is.  Rather meandering stuff I came out with yesterday, starting on one topic and then veering semi-naturally to the topic I originally intended cover:

Here’s a link to Yuval Harari’s book, Sapiens

Here’s a link to David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity

Knives Out “karaoke” and “duet”

A while back, I came upon a recording or video someone had posted of the whole instrumental track of the Radiohead song, Knives Out, with everything except vocals.  I was very impressed, and I’d recently bought a copy of the sound-editing program n-Track Studio, so I decided to record a kind of karaoke version of the song with double-tracked vocals by me*.  I’ve never posted it before – I can’t recall where I found the backing track, and I wanted to give the person credit (if anyone out there can help me, I’d appreciate it).  But finally, for reasons that will become clearer, I decided to share it now.  Here is that version:

Then, I think it was a week or two ago, I decided to try something, to kind of live out a virtual fantasy of sorts.  I got the audio of the original Radiohead version of the song, and then, this time using Audacity, I wanted to see if I could combine the two versions without much trouble.

To the credit of the original instrumentalist, I only had to change his tempo less than 1% to match the original song, and didn’t need to change the pitch at all.  It was really impressive (though I did have to clip out his guitar solo and leave the original Radiohead interlude, since he jammed a tiny bit longer than they did on the track).

And here it is, my virtual “duet” with Thom Yorke.  I hope you like it:

*It didn’t hurt that I think this song is both deceptively beautiful and rather dark and troubling in its lyrics.

What Greensleeve is This?

Okay, I set myself a task of learning a fingerpick version of “Greensleeves” on the guitar in time to release for Christmas.  I unfortunately was a bit too optimistic, and didn’t quite have time to get it in really presentable form.  So, to try to cover the sound of various imperfect places, I recorded myself playing it five times and turned it into an “ensemble” recording as if of five guitars playing Greensleeves rather inexpertly.

I submit it for your appraisal, and hopefully your enjoyment.

Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate the holiday!