Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I’ve been reading about assorted musical instrument technologies that were old before I was born. I can’t remember how I got started, but the best find this time was the optigan, a 70’s era sample-playback organ that worked by storing the music optically on a disk – sort of like analog film soundtrack, only laid out like a record. Truly funny. I also got interested in the Mellotron – and reading about same – and the Hammond B3. (My ultimate studio would probably have a B3 sitting right next to a Yamaha C7 baby grand. Since I can’t afford either one, I use electronic versions instead). I learned lots of fun things about the innards of the B3 at the Hammond Wiki, including that most B3s (apparently the instruments I’ve played were atypical) have a startup sequence involving holding down a start switch until the tonewheel assembly gets up to speed, and then switching over to the run switch to let the synchronous motor take over. By the way, I still think that Boston’s ‘Walk On’ album is the final word in awesomeness when it comes to the B3. And by the way, yay mechanical tone generators!

I also read about the Ondes Martenot, a rather impressive little synthesizer for it’s day – I especially like their idea of using different speaker configurations with unusual things in front of them (gongs, sympathetic resonators) to change the character of the tone. I drooled a bit over the mighty Wurlitzer theater organ (they just don’t have enough places where a amataur can try these things out!), got a good laugh out of the Wurlitzer side man. (I’ve got to meet this Pea Hix character, if only I can convince him I’m cool enough to be worth hanging out with ;-)), and just generally enjoyed a nice bout of nostalgia for electric instruments that were old before I was born.

Those of you who follow this blog regularly will remember my nostalgia-fests over The Set, a old TV repairman’s successful endeavor to restore the first-ever NTSC TV receiver to operation, and of course my ongoing fascination (some day I’m probably going to buy one) with the CED Videodisc format. For those of you who missed out on that last one, it’s a example of geekery gone wrong at it’s finist – it was a competitor to the VCR that stored video on a disk that was read by a mechanical (or quasi-mechanical, since ideally the pickup never touched the grooves) playback head.

I also, along the way, discovered 8 track heaven, which among other things lists bands that are still releasing their works on 8-track tape. As in those clunky cartridges with a continuous loop tape inside. Oddly tempting, that..

I wonder what interesting bits of nostalgia I’ll come across next? Anyway, thanks to the authors of all those sites for keeping little bits of our geek history alive.

Oh, yeah.. I remember one thing I wanted to whine about: Geocities is shutting down, AOL hometown already has. AOL hometown – what AOL did with the free web pages hosted by all the ISPs that it absorbed in the early 90s – had many thousands of fascinating pages. All gone. AOL pulled the plug with less than a month’s notice. Jason Scott from textfiles.com did a good job of describing the carnage and also suggesting a solution that may help prevent future carnage.

Organ Stop Pizza. I wonder if you can buy the right to play the thing for a few minutes.. 😉

So, after years of begging, grovelling, and whatnot, Lucasfilm is publishing a new Monkey Island game. Well, actually, they’re publishing the original game, remastered, and allowing Telltale Games (those fun guys who brought you Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People With A Really Long Title) to publish a new monkey island game, but anyway, they both seem to have the right voice actors. Hopefully Murray will put in a appearance in the new MI series as well – there are going to be 5 of them, in monthly increments, just like the Strong Bad games. We’ll see if they manage to keep the humor value MI is so famous for – in any case, I’ll definately buy copies. (Among other things, I’ve already mastered the art of getting Telltale Games to run, since I played SBCGFAPWART)

I’ve discovered this since I am for some reason unable to sleep at the moment. It’s getting a bit frustrating.

According to a variety of newspaper sources, including this one, a mob beat and seriously injured a man that police had listed as a possible suspect in a rape case. Nothing bad happened to the crowd – in fact, they were given a reward by the father of the girl.

Even if the man had been found guilty, every member of that mob should have been doing time – it’s not okay to physically attack people. But it’s especially not okay to attack people who haven’t been found guilty, based on the fact that the cops have identified them (probably using some very questionable techniques) as a possible suspect. It terrifies me that the lynch mob isn’t all cooling their heals on assault charges. It says horrible things about the world we live in – including that we don’t actually believe in innocent until proven guilty and we do believe in vigilante justice.

Is there any way that the cops in question can be put in jail for failing to do their jobs?

So, California, having discovered itself broke, refuses to raise taxes (even though the state taxes are hardly what I’d call crippling.. compared to the federal taxes, I don’t even *notice* my state taxes) and instead is turning off everything .. wasting hundreds of thousands of man hours of work in the process – closing parks and letting them decay, turning off welfare, closing prisons, firing the cops and the firefighters.. Remind me again, why aren’t we raising taxes instead? I wouldn’t begrudge California another thousand or two on April 15, and I can’t imagine there are many that would, especially if they kept the wonderful services like nearly-free higher education, free beaches, world-class firefighting service, excellent highway system , and whatnot. Who’s objecting so mightily to them raising taxes? It’s not like they’re using the money to *bomb* people – Especially if they agreed not to use the money for more war-on-drugs sorts of idiocy.

On the other hand, California is apparently not the progressive paradise that I like to think it – they did vote yes on Prop 8. Maybe we should move to New England? 😉

However, all you libertarians, this is your chance to see how the libertarian model actually works out – or doesn’t.  My problem is that I’m libertarian on Federal government, but socialist/green on a state level.

So, my friend Clint is always posting on Facebook about various abuses of power that the police get involved with – and there are quite a lot of these. As most of us know, power corrupts, and carrying around a  gun and a badge seems like a pretty clear case of having some power. After many discussions with Clint and some brain-wracking, I’ve concluded that there is a technological solution that, if it doesn’t eliminate police abuses of power, would at least curtail them somewhat.

Cops should carry video cameras – tiny, unobtrusive, built into their uniforms, badges, or something similar – that stream video in real time over the cellular data networks to their dispatchers and to a DVR. The recorded video should be cryptographically signed such that removing a single frame or series of frames would be a significant challenge. In addition, the dispatcher should have the ability to crank up the res, activate IR illuminators, etc to improve image quality at the cost of bandwidth and cam battery life for cops that are currently actively engaged in some sort of incident i.e. arrest.

This would have several good effects:

1) If a citizen accused a cop of abusing their power, or for some other reason we ended up with a cop vs. citizen debate, there would be a video log of whatever happened that would help decide who was telling the truth

2) Dispatchers could evaluate the current situation of any cop much better than they are able to with a voice channel – they could decide how much backup to send, and what types of units – if a cop were injured and unable to call for backup (i.e. had a heart attack or a stroke) they could see that the cop was down and call the appropriate assistance onto the scene

3) ‘Black screen’ – the video channel would also serve as positive confirmation that dispatch was still in contact with the cop in question, something which isn’t always clear with conventional analog cop-radio equipment. (Of course, by now, they’ve probably gone to digital links everywhere anyway ;-))

All of the technology to do this already exists and is in use in many other industries. With widespread deployment and use of existing data RF nets, these cameras could be extremely cheap – $200ish per cop, plus $50ish per month for the data service is my guess. As the budget crunch is felt, more and more cops may be sent out solo instead of in partnered teams, making communications with dispatch much more important. Also, right now there is a negative feedback circuit going on where the cops are clearly (by news reports) abusing their power more and more, which leads to the citizens being more hostile to the cops because they don’t trust them – which leads to the cops feeling more justified to abuse their power – and so on, and so forth. I think knowing that the cops had video that would be shown to the judge in case of a lawsuit or arrest, and that they were accountable to people besides their cop-structure that seems inclined often to protect them at the cost of citizens, would help the cop-citizen relationship considerably. And I really do think that it would make the cops safer, besides, so aside from the additional cost – which isn’t that large in the grand scheme of things – it seems like a win-win.

Yes, finally, there is a affordable ($20) green laser pointer – for sale at CompGeeks. Also, I just got mine, and I highly doubt this is only a 5mW laser – I have a calibrated 5mW green laser that I paid $500 for, years ago, and this is *way* brighter. I don’t have a power meter, or I’d check it, but by eyeball I’d guess it to be in the 20-30mW range.

Sometimes I get discouraged – I see so many broken things, so many cases of people oppressing other people for profit or “because God told me to”, and I just want to give up and curl up in a little ball and hide.

But, this story reminds me that things are actually getting better. In 1974, race officials tried to bodily remove a runner from the Boston marathon.. because she was a woman. In 1967, you couldn’t marry someone who wasn’t of the same race you were. And in 1920, you couldn’t vote unless you were male.

I look forward to the day when our children, or grandchildren, look back at capitolism the way we look back at slavery – when people are mostly puzzled by our refusal to let gays marry – when people have designed a government that can’t turn on it’s citizens and lock them up for “moral offenses” like recreational drug use – things that don’t hurt anyone else, and in many cases don’t even hurt the offender.

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A thought, by the way, for all of you resisting nationalized health care – a nationalized phone system brought you the transistor. Right now it’s very much not in the economic interests of the powers that be to cure diseases – they can make far more money treating them. But – if you measure in terms of wealth of humanity as a whole, instead of wealth of particular stockholders, clearly every infectious disease known to man should be eradicated. Human health care needs many Xerox parcs, many bell labs – groups of brilliant people who are encouraged to create the best things they can, with the wealth of the race as their primary interest rather than the wealth of a individual company.

So, me and Kayti went to see the Indigo Girls last night. It was at the House Of Blues in Anaheim, and it was neat seeing that many IG fans togeather in one place – it was like a little pocket of sanity in the middle of the repressive right-wing world that is O.C.

Sadly we had to leave before the end, but they did play many favorites including ‘Get out the map’, ‘Shame on you’, ‘The wood song’, ‘Power of two’, ‘KiD fears’, ‘Land of Canaan’,’Hammer and a nail’

Next week: Jimmy Buffet

As you’ll recall, earlier I posted a definition of caughterfy for Google. Now I’m going to help with related keywords, since it’s clearly a irregular verb: That poor cat is suffering from caughterfication, I caughterfied Allie, She caughterfies the cat, He is caugherfying his cat right now, Allie was caughterfied yesterday, Allie will be caughterfied tomorrow.

Coming up next: pronunciation guide. Then I’ll publish a book of 100 cat words. 😉