The Youtube algorithm recently led to me listening to Don McLean's "American Pie" for the first time in years. (It was one of the videos where they use one of the AI art apps to illustrate lyric lines.)
Anyway, it occurred to me while listening that it is incredibly well produced. (The amount of attention given to George Martin's role with the Beatles, as well as some other Youtube "making of" content I've watched, is no doubt why such a thought now occurs to me. It would not have when I was younger.)
So I decided to look up who produced it, and it was a guy who isn't famous enough to have a Wiki entry - Ed Freeman.
Nevertheless, my hunch that this song likely had a huge amount of input from the producer seems to be correct. Look here:
Producer Ed Freeman stated that the “American Pie” single is a
combination of 24 different takes of McLean’s voice. This happened
because the singer wasn’t the easiest person to work with, and as such,
multiple takes were taken during the same session on May 26, 1971, with a
live and unedited backing band track.
The producer also stated that even though McLean was a very talented
singer, he was sometimes criticized for singing with the same vocal
inflections, so he decided to be more improvisational. “In my head, I
knew what it was supposed to sound like—I don’t now remember how I
arrived at that, but when I kept asking him to sing it in a certain way,
he wouldn’t do it. He wanted to play with it every time, inserting
slides, melismas and other things that, to my mind, didn’t fit. So we
ended up recording him 24 times on 16-track tape and took different
parts from different takes until I got every word the way I wanted it,
without all the play, and I don’t think Don appreciated that very
much…In Don’s case, I think he was happy with the finished vocal, but he
was not happy with somebody else having that much influence,” said
Freeman. ...
As for the challenges the length of the song brought to the producing
team, Ed Freeman remembers that “it was a complete nightmare to fit an
eight-and-a-half-minute track onto one seven-inch single.” The track had
to be cut in half very carefully and added to both sides of the record.
The final running times were 4:11 minutes for Part One and 4:31minutes
for Part Two.
Don McLean is now 77, and looking haggard. Not sure that he is very likeable in person. But good song that still sounds great when you haven't heard it for years...
* Noah Smith on Twitter seems to be unusually cranky and coming out with some very dubious takes at the moment. Holidaying doesn't seem to do him any good.
* Elon Musk is being nearly universally derided by "blue tick" people at Twitter over his plan to charge them for the privilege. Once again, we have the puzzle - just how smart is this guy? It's pretty clear he has a modest amount of emotional intelligence and a fragile ego (the "pedo" insult for someone rejecting his impractical idea sealed that forever), but in terms of engineering and other problems, is he really just a hyped up latter day monorail salesman who got lucky? That's pretty much the vibe he gives me.
* Everyone on Twitter is also puzzling still about the lack of a convenient and appropriate replacement. Surely it will arise soon, though.
I don't usually like to say anything that suggests I'm dehumanising a politician or celebrity, but that Kari Lake is so intensely smooth-skinned and over-groomed (and video filtered to look like she's beaming in from the soft glow world of 1980's cinematography) that I would not be at all surprised if turns out to be a robot from some Peter Thiel funded lab:
To me she absolutely reeks of manipulative insincerity and artifice to a skin crawling degree. I rank her worse than the appallingly unself-aware dumbness of Marjorie Taylor Greene because she seems to have a degree of intellect that's capable of worse manipulation.
Rarely do I have such a strong feeling from a politician's manner and appearance, but she does it for me (in the worst possible way).
I'm posting this just a little late for Halloween, but the New York Times ran in their lifestyle section last week an article How to Live with a Ghost - about what happens when people think their residence is haunted. It talks about people who have learnt to live with it, whether Americans have to legally disclose that a house is believed to be haunted when selling, and how many people do believe in ghosts.
I recently wrote how dismissive I am of the paranormal investigation cable TV shows, and I have to say that I find a well written, plausible sounding, first hand strange incident is much more convincing than anything I have seen on a TV show with investigators with their "ghostbusting" style equipment. ("Spirit boxes" are just the most ridiculous idea for claiming communication evidence - it's like the perfect way to encourage imagined messages.)
But take this story, which starts the NYT article, as it is easy to imagine as quite disturbing if it happened to me:
On a routine afternoon, Shane Booth, a
photography professor living in Benson, N.C., was folding laundry in his
bedroom, when he was startled by a loud, crashing noise. He stepped out
to find a shattered front window and his dog sitting outside it. He was
confused, how could his dog have jumped through the window with enough
force to break it?
After cleaning up
the glass, Mr. Booth came back to his room, where all of the clothes he
had just folded were scattered and strewn about, he said. “That’s when I
thought, this is actually really scary now,” said Mr. Booth, 45.
A few things it would be good to know, though: has Mr Booth always enjoyed good mental health, and does he also have a mad cat as well as a dog? Was he folding clothes into a basket, and did he tip it over as he ran out of the room? Rarely do reports of odd incidents cover off such obvious matters, which is somewhat disappointing.
Stories of footsteps in unoccupied upstairs rooms are a very common haunting trope, and one that is certainly sometimes capable of mundane explanation. But I also have little doubt that it can be pretty convincingly concerning, in the right circumstances.
Things moved to wildly improbable locations are perhaps harder to explain, unless you sleepwalk. I like this story, though (from comments in the NYT) to a follow up article:
Never believed, just thought here are some things we may not know about
our world/universe.
Then stayed at a hotel (not that old) and woke one night to a the
absolute conviction that someone in the darkness was standing behind me.
I whirled around and clicked the light as fast as I dared....no one.
The large, closet doors were suddenly wide open though. I closed them,
thinking I had perhaps left them like that (knowing full well I never
leave closets open, since childhood). My room door had it's latch on, no
one could have entered.
The next morning, my small camera, charging in it spot, was gone. The
chord was still there. I looked everywhere, called housekeeping asked
about stollen goods, etc...nothing.
Finally, upon packing to leave a couple days later, I pulled out my pair
of floppy-top boots I never wore on that trip-- and out fell my camera
from inside. There was no way it could have fallen into them.
I left bewildered--- and when I mentioned it to the receptionist, he
shrugged in a bored manner--- "Oh room number 225? Yeah, he likes to
move stuff around sometimes."
I chose another room the next time.
OK, nothing particularly convincing about waking up and feeling a presence, as tha's a common feature of sleep paralysis (from which my daughter suffered, so I'm pretty familiar with first hand descriptions.). But if this was the first time you ever had the experience, and it was combined with the camera moving to a weird hiding spot, it would creep you out. (Frustratingly, sleep walking would be a possibility impossible to disprove unless you had the foresight to set up cameras, and who is going to do that before the object is lost?)
Similarly with stories of ghost voices - highly suggestive of something supernatural, but also explicable as convenient auditory hallucinations. This story, for example:
As an engineering major with a strong education in science, I didn’t
believe in the supernatural. But then I lived ten years in a house my
wife insisted was haunted. One day, I was watching my three year old son
while my wife and daughter went shopping. I was surfing the net while
he toddled around the room. Then I zoned out reading an online article.
Then I heard a voice: “where is your son?” I looked around and wondered
where the voice came from. “You need to find him,” the voice said. I
thought that was probably a good idea so I went looking for him and
found the front door open. I went outside and found him toddling down
the driveway toward the street. I raced over and snatched him up. When I
got back inside, I said to the air: “thank you, whoever you are!” Years
later I told that to my wife and after scolding me for my negligence,
told me I’d heard the ghost. And for the epilogue, that son just called
me from college to check in and see how his old dad is doing. I’m still
grateful to that ghost who may very well have saved my son’s life.
The ghost voice that is challenging rather than useful is perhaps less readily explained as the brain talking to itself. I think I wrote here before that the woman in charge of the nursing home my mother lived in until she died told us that she would not work in her (somewhat isolated) office in the old convent building at night, as soon after she started there she had heard a clear voice ask aggressively "who are you?" and felt her hair being flicked, when no one was around.
Some people in the article are like me - quite fascinated with the topic, and very open to the possibility of experiencing something personally, but it never happens. About the most puzzling thing that has happened to me overnight is waking up one morning (in my 20's) perfectly reversed in my (single) bed in the dorm style room in which I lived alone: my feet on my pillow, my head at the foot of my bed, and somewhat tangled up in the sheet. Has happened exactly once in my life!
Anyway: in another, somewhat charming story from Singapore, I like the way the government respects, but tries to handle co-operatively, the Chinese tradition of burning joss paper to provide goods to the family deceased. There are incinerators around apartment blocks to allow for this, although it does cause complaints when the smoke and waste interferes with residents. This is such a significant issue that the government news service likes to point out there has been a reduced number of complaints about this year:
I funny it a little amusing that there are public servants there whose job it is to keep track of complaints about burnt offerings to ghosts. Well, more charming, really.
The conspiracy addled brain, once having decided it has spotted a conspiracy, will cling to "there must be a conspiracy of some kind here" regardless of evidence.
Update: The Department of Justice on Monday announced two federal criminal charges against David DePape.
“DePape was charged with attempted kidnapping, and with retaliating
against a federal official by threatening or injuring a family member.”
CNBC reported.
The US government will now control and hide the evidence – and shape the national media narrative.
As to any inconsistencies or changes to the initial reports about the incident - what moron could have missed that this is exactly what happened in the recent Uvalde shooting case, to a spectacular degree. Initial stories often aren't 100% clear, with both journalists and police not always being accurate. Hence, someone made up (then retracted) that the assailant was in his underwear - and millions of conspiracy addled Trumpists will never believe otherwise, as well as the ludicrous elaboration that all stem from that piece of misinformation.
What can be said, I think, is this: Biden and the Democrats got a lot
done, despite very slim majorities. They rolled out vaccines and
therapeutics nationwide but we remain far from finishing the job on
pandemic preparedness. They have run the government in a dignified,
decent way, but we remain far from turning the page on Trump.
I am completely on side with this comment that follows (and I am surprised that there are not more who are upset at the framing):
Paul Phoenix, AZ2h ago
Notice the harm done to the country by op-eds like this one.
It is bad enough the mainstream media has made pro-democracy/anti democracy int just another political horse race issue like taxes or crime or climate change, but now they are asking if the pro democracy party deserves to even be re-elected.
Arguing over granular issues like the prioritizing of BBB components while the Speaker's husband is getting his head bashed in by a Trump motivated supporter (his mental status is a non factor, as is Trump's, it seems), as well as stating openly they will not accept any result of the 2022 elections that does not make them the winner, shows how completely out of touch the media has become in its now out of control false equivalences.
With Musk's disgraceful "I'm just asking questions" style of promoting Right wing conspiracy (you can read all about it at the WAPO - gift link), I'm sure that, more than ever, most of the people I follow on it would be happy to abandon Twitter so as to watch it become a valueless conspiracy sewer like the other failed social media outlets.
Update: Elon really is trying to seal the failure of Twitter in record time -
So, trying to joke his way out of the seriousness of promoting conspiracy mongering from a junk Right wing site by encouraging the Trumpian Right wing that the MSM is full of fake news and can't be trusted. That'll work.
I know that bad news is often a case of out of sight, out of mind, so that you can get some tragedy in some distant country that doesn't register; but it seems this morning was just full of one bad news story after another. The (apparently spontaneous) party crowd crush fatalities in Korea; Putin being a jerk who prioritises winning his culture/land war over people getting fed; Iran promising violence against its citizens; car bombing of the education ministry in Somalia. Not to mention the worry about the state of the USA after mid term elections. (Although I am holding out slight hope that the very high early vote in some areas might be heavily Democrat - it usually is, isn't it?)
I'm pretty sure we bought this tiny, one egg size frying pan on a bit of a whim when my daughter was young and thought it cute when she saw it in a kitchen shop:
But...I love it and use it at least three times a week, usually to get an egg cooked for a lunch sandwich quickly and easily and with the quickest clean up possible. It's used on the smallest burner, too, so is very gas efficient.
It's my "life hack of the decade" and it's utility should be on the high school curriculum.
Now: Back to watching how Musk is going to destroy Twitter.
PS: yes, I know the stove needs cleaning. I could try to clean the metal handle of the fry pan too, I suppose. But it is probably 10 years old, I reckon.
That's the problem with America - there is too much reliance on litigation as being the only way for victims of conspiracy mongering to get any justice, and that takes years to get through the courts.
Of course it is too late to change the minds of millions of Trumpists - and this way that disinformation and lies operates is something that evidently is of little concern to the likes of Elon Musk.
Well, that Brittany Higgins aborted trial is a spectacular example of the problems with jury trials. But man, is it causing the angry old reactionary ants of the post-Catallaxy blogs to be very, very upset. (They hate Brittany, and think this is a the biggest injustice since George Pell was convicted - although I still strongly suspect that he and his barrister made a bad, bad decision in not giving evidence in defence. Also: no one ended up nude in an office the next morning in his case, making the circumstances of this allegation significantly different.)
I find it very easy to not be emotionally invested in cases like this, as having a good feeling for why a jury is inclined to decide one way or another (or can't decide) is very hard to do without being an observer in the court. This cautionary concept seems completely novel to many people - and true, this can apply to Lefties as well as to mad angry Rightwingers.
We do seem to be at some sort of peak of hyperbolic culture warring at the moment. Well, I hope it's a peak.
To be fair, an example of this on the Left is to be found by those on Twitter who have gone berserk that the media is not spending all day calling the beating death of a 15 year old aboriginal boy in Perth at the hands of a white guy a racist lynching. Many seem to think the story hasn't been reported at all.
Unlike cases in America of the "white guy shoots random black guy thinking he's the one who broke into the neighbour's house" type, the arrest here was swift and the trial will likely be on pretty soon too. A lengthy sentence is assured.
It is a shocking case, but seems to me to be of a kind that's pretty rare, too. Calm down people.
While I suppose I would generally lean more towards the "experimental secret - probably defence - technology" than "alien surveillance craft" explanation for the current UFO increase, there is at least one aspect of that which gives me major reservations.
That is, if the "craft" are executing extraordinary physics in what they do - like turning on a dime, or pretty much instantaneous acceleration - it would indicate that the technology involved is truly revolutionary, and probably involving "new" physics not taught in text books.
But - wouldn't such new physics be of massive relevance to electricity production? And if so, given the obvious need for a global turn to clean energy in a very short space of time, why would you keep such physics hidden from the broader research community which could be looking at using it for something more useful than a small craft that can do surprising tight turns in the sky?
There is also the matter of how well you can really expect secret programs to remain secret. Big, mysterious triangle craft moving through the night skies (or being seen from an oil rig!) have been around for a good few decades now, and it seems we still have no confirmation that there is a secret hypersonic aircraft - or more dramatically, one that can move slowly and silently. There surely are secret government craft, but how do they manage to keep them officially undisclosed for so long? And really, why keep them secret for so long? I mean, the cutting edge aircraft of the 1960's don't seem to have been kept hidden for so long.
So, yeah, it's all pretty puzzling. It might all turn out to be relatively mundane stuff - but why the secrecy? Cue X Files music...
Seems to me that the highly worrying state of world politics is causing significant distraction from interesting UFO news. Yeah, I know: the media is reporting how NASA is now investigating*, etc, but there are a few stories of pretty recent, intriguing, pilot sightings (over the Pacific Ocean, mainly) which I think would normally attract more attention. They don't sound easily explained either, as Starlink or other rocket launches.
Here's a very short video about it:
The guy who makes an appearance in that report does longer videos about it, but I can't find his channel right now.
The Warzone website contains lots of interesting stuff from FAA records about unidentified aircraft, and drones, around the USA, too. See this post, for one. Or just search "unidentified aircraft" or "UFO" in their search bar. (Of course, the massive market in private drone ownership would be behind much of the recent upsurge in UFO "sightings" - but there is something bigger going on, it seems.)
Update: Oh, I see now that I search his name that the guy who did a long video that I can't find on the pilot sightings is a "paranormal researcher" who has made whole TV series about it, and claims his own sightings too. I have to downgrade his credibility. But still, recordings from pilots puzzling over what they are seeing are strong evidence.
* The people chosen seem to not come with any "baggage" as to prior speculative claims about UFOs, as far as I can tell.
...that Petra has a sister "city" in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia, that has only recently opened to tourists. It includes eye catching structures like these:
This has been circulated on Twitter a lot recently, and it almost looks like a parody of The Entitled Upper Class Twit who Was Born to Rule from Monty Python. But it's real!
It just continues to gobsmack me that key figures in Republican leadership (and ordinary party members who would prefer Trump to go) are silent on the massive personal harm and harassment that comes from the lies and conspiracy spread by Trump, his followers, and the pandering Right wing media. It's just such extraordinarily immoral and cowardly behaviour - and to be honest, it's cowardly of journalists to not confront the leadership about this at every opportunity.
Gee, one of the (increasingly rare) good reads from Slate - an account of the American conspiracy belief in the Illuminati - and how remarkably similar it is to modern conspiracy belief.
Morse unspooled a bizarre conspiracy theory alleging that a shadowy
cabal of villains called the “Illuminati,” an offshoot of the
Freemasons, were aiming to destroy everything that Americans held dear.
This group of philosopher zealots, according to Morse, had “secretly
extended its branches through a great part of Europe, and even into
America.” Their goal was to abolish Christianity, private property, and
nearly every foundation of good order around the world. According to
Morse, they opposed marriage, encouraged people to explore all kinds of
“sensual pleasures,” and proposed a “promiscuous intercourse among the
sexes.” Just a few masks short of a Stanley Kubrick film, Morse’s story of the Illuminati played upon the darkest nightmares of the nation’s many devout Christians.
Morse told his congregation that the Illuminati hoped to infect the
people of America through a kind of cultural warfare. They were
spreading their doctrines by worming their way in among “reading and
debating societies, the reviewers, journalists or editors of newspapers
and other periodical publications, the booksellers and post-masters” and
infiltrating all “literary, civil and religious institutions.” The most
prominent Illuminatus named by Morse was Thomas Paine, whose radical
pamphlet The Age of Reason (published in installments in 1794, 1795, and 1807) had caused a political stir in the United States.
If
the Illuminati were beginning to corrupt the United States, according
to Morse, they had gone much further already in Europe. The evil
society’s greatest triumph to date, Morse wrote, was its recent work to
hatch the French Revolution and disguise it as a mild, moderate event
following the model of the American Revolution. With France’s increasing
radicalism, anticlericalism, and disorder, it seemed obvious to Morse
that the French Jacobins, the political faction that seized control of
the nation in 1792, were simply Illuminati by another name.
That is extraordinarily similar to the types of conspiracy mongering the modern American Right (and their nutty Australian acolytes) believe now. Indeed, towards the end of the article it notes:
The names and characters change over time, but the basic template has
remained remarkably durable over the centuries: A small, yet nearly
omnipotent, group of amoral globalist elites secretly directs world
events. This paranoid vision has persevered in large part because it
helps their believers to make sense of a rapidly changing world. The
faceless structural forces remaking our present—such as globalization,
accelerating inequality, deindustrialization, racial justice movements,
and cultural fragmentation—require explanation.
The article explains, by the way, that the reason the Illuminati conspiracy took off so well was that it was seen as an explanation as to why the French Revolution had gone off the rails.
But it just seems a significant chunk of Americans have always, for odd reason, been especially prone to paranoid conspiracy beliefs.
This week's Youtube from Sabine Hossenfelder finally deals with a quantum interpretation that has has always appealed to me, but attracted little attention - John Cramer's transaction interpretation. (You can search his name in my sidebar search and find past posts about it).
One thing I'm not sure about, though: Sabine's attitude to it seems to be "well, no harm in imagining that this is what happens, if that makes you happy, but I'm just sticking to the simpler Copenhagen interpretation." I thought the problem with the Copenhagen interpretation was it was more like a refusal to speculate on what is "really" happening with the wave function. In that sense, Cramer's idea seems to at least offer something to fill in a gap.
One other thing I have been meaning to note. I didn't realise until she did a video on it that the "quantum eraser" experiments were the subject of debate as to what they really show. Sabine's debunking video seemed pretty convincing that they were not showing retrocausation in any sense.
However, while browsing arXiv last week, I noticed a paper that proposed a different version of the experiment which raises more of a "mystery" than the former versions:
Considering the delayed-choice quantum eraser using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a nonsymmetric beam splitter, we explicitly demonstrate that it shares exactly the same formal structure with the EPR-Bohm experiment. Therefore, the effect of quantum erasure can be understood in terms of the standard EPR correlation. Nevertheless, the quantum eraser still raises a conceptual issue beyond the standard EPR paradox, if counterfactual reasoning is taken into account. Furthermore, the quantum eraser experiments can be classified into two major categories: the entanglement quantum eraser and the Scully-Drühl-type quantum eraser. These two types are formally equivalent to each other, but conceptually the latter presents a "mystery" more prominent than the former. In the Scully-Drühl-type quantum eraser, the statement that the which-way information can be influenced by the delayed-choice measurement is not purely a consequence of counterfactual reasoning but bears some factual significance. Accordingly, it makes good sense to say that the "record" of the which-way information is "erased" if the potentiality to yield a conclusive outcome that discriminates the record is eliminated by the delayed-choice measurement. We also reconsider the quantum eraser in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), making clear the conceptual merits and demerits of the MWI.
The author acknowledges the debate over the correct interpretation of the previous experiment:
Ever since the idea of quantum erasure was proposed, its interpretation and implication have been a subject of fierce controversy that continues to today [6–13] with divided opinions ranging from “a magnificat affront to our conventional notions of space and time” [14] to “an experiment that has caused no end of confusion” [15]. Particularly, by analogy to the the EPR–Bohm experiment [16, 17], Kastner argued that the quantum eraser neither erases nor delays any information, and does not present any mystery beyond the standard EPR correlation [12]. Later on, by considering a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which conveys the core idea of the quantum eraser more elegantly than a double-slit experiment, Qureshi further elaborated on the analogy between the quantum eraser and the EPR-Bohm experiment and claimed that there is no retrocausal effect whatsoever [13].
So, I take it from this that Sabine H is correct that you don't have to interpret it as retrocausation, but I would like her to comment on the different set up which this author claims does re-introduce "mystery".
Perry answers that question in the book, which Flatiron will publish on
Nov. 1, by starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking
and drug use. His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018 that
included pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support,
two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen
stomach surgeries, and the realization that, by the time he was 49, he
had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober
living facilities. ...
The book is full of painful revelations, including one about
short-lived, alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction, and another in which
Perry describes carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his
jeans pocket. (He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell
out, he writes: “Yes, all of them.”)
Kind of hard to believe that line about how long he had been in "sober living facilities" - 24 years? - could be right.
I never cared much for "Friends" - it was a vastly overrated show if you ask me - but I guess it's nice to know that the other actors did care about his addiction problems to confront him sometimes.
The article notes that he was making $1 million an episode at the peak of his sitcom days - and it ran for 10 years! I guess part of the problem with being a super rich addict is that you never have the economic incentive to get clean because you can't afford the drugs.
Anyway, money doesn't buy happiness, as we all know. But I still have bought a ticket for this week's Powerball $160 million dollar jackpot. If I win, I might finally migrate the blog off Blogger! Haha.
