Recent Listening Reviewed

Artist (Track Name)

Sun City Girls (Space Prophet Dogon) – Very impressive, experimental sound. Not serious at all however and fun to listen to. Hypnotic guitar lines.

Xhol Caravan (Electric Fun Fair) – This Krautrock band has very free-jazz element, late Faust-esque. Amazing sound really. Tonally very bluesy as well. Impressive. Definitely something I would keep listening to.

Embryo (Tausendfufsler) – Yes, the first band I actually knew beforehand. Very exciting, upbeat, jazzy with proper Krautrock rhythms. The keyboard solo sounds a more productive version of ELP.

Silver Apples (Lovefingers) – Musically sound but too psychedelic for me. Definitely a fine listening though. I think if they were still around I would maybe find their newer material very tempting.

Guru Guru (L. Torro) – Very drawn out but still interesting. Some serious fusion. Jazz listeners would appreciate this one very much. More disciplined version of early Frank Zappa.

The Red Krayola (If “S” Is) – Wow, very interesting. Definitely merits many repeated listens. Very intelligent music, tastefully discordant.

Organisation (Milk Rock) – This predecessor of Kraftwerk clearly produces music as amusing as the successor. Some intricate lines, excellent harmony. Sounds similar to early Can, without the raging vocal.

La Dusseldorf (Rheinita) – Klaus Dinger does his signature beat patterns. Classic Krautrock, very motorik.  But the keyboard line at the end is so… ergh. NEU! always had to put something extra into songs – something which I was not always happy with.

The United States of America (Cloud Song) – Yuk. I’m sorry, but this is not good. Experimental pop? How can pop be experimental – that’s an oxymoron and clearly the music thinks so too. I know the album was a critical success, but this track does not stand up to the standard of tracks from the other bands so far.

Ashra (The Ocean of Tenderness) – Starts with JMJ-esque ambience and it wanders off to new age drivel. Too bad I cannot stand new age. At least JMJ’s music had flair. Really, really spacey.

Brian Eno (Spider And I) – Final Track. The master shows us how to make an ambient music interesting. I have heard two kinds of Brian Eno – one is exciting, surprising, and insightful; the other is calmer and less interesting but still very well composed and delivered. This is of the latter.

Yes

Of course you’re missing something.

The Two Drinks Question

Question: We have one kind of drink in cup A and another kind in cup B. The cups are all same sizes and no cup can hold 100% of both drinks. (If we pour everything into one cup, it will overflow) How do we mix, only using these two cups, such that cup A contains 50% of drink A and 50% of drink B and cup B contains 50% of drink A and 50% of drink B?

The easiest solution occurs if you can actually put both drinks into a cup – then you mix and pour half into the other cup. However, this is not the case.

I did end up proving that this is impossible in finite number of steps. Now suppose we want to mix different drinks (so that cup A contains one mixture and cup B contains another mixture, proportion of those specified) for each cup such that cup A and cup B’s drinks are different. Is this possible?

My intuition, as soon as I typed the question, is that it should be possible as long as it’s not 50/50 (and also under the assumption that cup A and cup B are identical) – but it would be an interesting result if there exists a similar question such that the answer of such question is actually a smaller interval.

Now this is not really mathematically fascinating – but it did challenge my intuition to some degree today thinking about different variations. Think about this: if there are three cups with three different drinks – does it get more complicated?

France Football: Henry Signs for Barça / Valencia for Hamburg at Emirates Cup

France Football is quite a reliable source and they report that Henry has agreed a deal with Barça with Arsenal as only party that now has to say yes/no.

Original article here: http://www.francefootball.fr/FF/breves2007/20070611_153137Dev.html

More to follow. This is the biggest news regarding Henry so far.

Also Valencia will replace Hamburger at Emirates cup, which is good news for me. I was never interested in seeing Hamburger.

I don’t like short people.

I don’t like short people.

They look up to you and they try to smile. It makes them look like some aliens.

I was waiting at a counter at a store and this short woman looked up and smiled at me.

My evil mind thought it was disgusting but I cannot say that here, I mean, then I would cause a controversy.

I appreciate the gesture but it freaked me out. Really. The way they look up and expect you to look down.

So if you are shorter than 6′ please keep your distance.

Arsenal to sign Ángel Di María?

I never believed that Arsenal would sign Ribery. Now it seems that (I stress the word “seems”) he is moving to Bayern.

Malouda seems more probable with reports everywhere saying Malouda will snub Liverpool to join Arsenal – however, always entertaining arsenalshorts.com reckons that we will sign Argentinian Ángel Di María:

From a very reliable sauce, we finally have a story. In the barren, desert formerly known as the Arsenal news round up, we have a rumour, a proper one. Our man ITK has a mate, who actually told the interflap about Denilsons arrival last transfer window, and also called the Baptista transfer before anyone else, so believe what you will.

We’re buying it, any road and he reckons that the same mate, has told him, before the end of next week, we’ll be signing Ángel Di María from Argentinean side Rosario Central. Not a lot more than that is known, aside from Gilles Grimando has been in Argentina and has urged Wenger to make a bid. It’s expected that Sir Wenger will make a move for the youngster as soon as he’s back from his Italian holiday…

Now this is, to me at least, more believable. Malouda’s fee is quoted at around £10m – who will he replace? Rosicky? Hleb? Unless Wenger’s greatly misquoted “we could play 4-3-3″ is on his mind, I think this is unlikely. Rosicky is an experienced player who will get better the coming season and Hleb is an integral part of the squad who cost £10m. Please do tell me why we are splashing another £10m. If Malouda DOES get signed by Arsenal, I think we can expect to see some shuffling in the midfield.

But of course, Arsene knows – only thing I know is that Wenger does not pay that much money for a 27-year old backup.

[UPDATE: A Cultured Left Foot reckons that if Malouda does sign he will compete with Rosicky.]

Arsenal Blogs on WordPress

There are 32 teams that are in champions league.

Why are there so many Arsenal posts on WordPress? I’m pleasantly surprised. Not that I pay much attention to them, some of them seem to be worth following up.

Laughable Korean Media: The Stephen Colbert Controversy

I don’t hide the fact that I am a big fan of Stephen Colbert. He seems to be more talented than Jon Stewart and I also believe that he has more variety in his comedy than Steve Carrell, to whom Colbert was an understudy.

In case you don’t know, here’s the summary of what happened:

In 2007, Rain made it to People’s Most Beautiful People list for the first time, in its “First-Time Beauties 2007″ section. In a press release, Rain stated that he was honored to be on the list, and also noted that it will be a great boon to his efforts to raise his public awareness in the United States. Also in 2007, Rain topped Time’s open online poll; however, many believe he was voted in by over-zealous fans that voted others down. As a result, he beat Stephen Colbert by 100,000 votes; Colbert jokingly retaliated by producing a parody of Rain’s music video for “Ways to Avoid the Sun”. The singer was not included in the magazine’s actual list.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_%28singer%29

Korean media reacted badly, quoting from sources calling Colbert to be a racist.

This is an outrage. What Colbert did (videos are available on-line, I will not link it here) was simply a satire. I wonder what would happen if Chris Rock was actually a Korean! I know, setting Chris Rock as limit of comedy is hardly responsible, but people are forgetting few things.

1. Stephen Colbert is in CHARACTER in his show.
2. EVEN IF HE WAS NOT IN CHARACTER, the comedy can be considered perfectly sensitive.
3. Colbert has never crossed the line in terms of tolerance.

I find this bit sad because this shows that Korean public is not yet ready to adapt to a global setting. I know that Koreans were hardly aware of what Colbert actually does, but South Korea is widely considered one of top economies of the world. Taking Colbert’s satire as racism is too naïve at that level, I feel.

I waited a long time for Colbert to react to this and he did so in good manner today. Even Bill O’Reilly was fine with Colbert taking his microwave – why does Korean media always react badly to these things?

I always knew that a big chunk of Korean media (especially print) was just full of illiterate, anti-journalistic people, but this one disappointed me even more.

We can construct it; so it must be true?

I get into a lot of arguments with people.

Being an armchair logician, I notice many mistakes people make, which naturally makes me furious. I am somewhat guilty here too, however, since I use this one a bit – whenever I want to end an argument in an easy way.

EXAMPLE: We can construct an example, so it must be possible, so it must be true somewhere in a perceptively infinite setting.

If you put it like this, it seems obviously false – but people still do it all the time! Listen to this childish conversation:

A: Aliens surely exist.
B: Why?
A: Time is infinite, and everything should be possible during that time.
B: Nonsense.
A: Oh? Then how do humans exist?
B: Do enlighten me.
A: Humans are of such complexity, so universe with its infinite time will produce another kind of intelligent lifeform.

Yes, now I see it’s little different from the original error I wanted to elaborate on, but it does the trick.

Humans are always uncomfortable with the idea of randomness. Although I don’t watch the show, Charlie from NUMB3RS makes good point here:

I believe this sort of behaviour is the general version of what I addressed in the beginning, but I don’t have enough strength to elaborate. Maybe next time.

(In fact, in the video above, Charlie is wrong: A and B both represent raindrops since they occur with same probability. But I think we all get the point here. Also, why is Charlie, a mathematics prof, teaching statistics? The university must surely be very understaffed.)

P=0

Do you sometimes feel that no matter what you had chosen, things would have worked out the same way.

I do.

No matter how hard you try, a piece of paper could never work as a screwdriver.

Only if you’d known before.