danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

Much ado is being made today about the simultaneous release of the newly-remastered Beatles catalog, and the interactive video game, Beatles Rock Band.  I am intrigued by the former, and ambivalent about the latter.

One one hand, Rock Band strikes me as the height of poserdom – another example of the artificial replacing the real in our society.  We don’t play tennis or go bowling anymore; we play Wii Fit.  We don’t play guitar; we play Guitar Hero.  John Lennon and Paul McCartney were introduced to one another on the afternoon of July 6, 1957.  Had the two merely played guitar-shaped pieces of plastic in their bedrooms instead of real guitars, popular music would be quite different today.  When the Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show seven years later, an army of American boys were inspired to pick up their own guitars, start rock bands, and write the rock songs that defined an era.  What if today’s kids are picking up game controllers instead of real instruments?  Wither music?

On the other hand, a segment I heard on the radio last night raised a point I might have otherwise never considered.  A caller to On Point said that he treasures the quality time he has spent playing Rock Band with his children, and that it has helped him feel more connected with them.  They get to know his music, and he gets to know their music.  This got me thinking: what if the millions of parents who felt so upset by rock music in 1964 had instead been able to share the experience with their children?  After all, shaggy hair and suggestive hand-holding talk wasn’t really what bothered parents about the Beatles.  The Beatles were the physical embodiment of the growing divide separating the World War II generation from their kids.

The Beatles are popular enough, and certainly not at risk of being forgotten, even by kids today.  So I don’t think all this hoopla is about introducing a new generation to Lennon-McCartney.  I think, rather, that it might actually be about bonding.  Video games have divided parents and children for more than twenty years.  If Beatles Rock Band can bring them together, things really will have come full circle.

Filed under: Musings, Popular Music, Technology on September 9th, 2009 | No Comments »

I am taking an astronomy lab this semester.  It is supposed to be a one-hour-per-week class, but we meet for two hours every Thursday morning, and a couple hours at night several times throughout the semester.  I don’t know how the university considers that one hour, but they do.  So it was, then, that I felt a little annoyed to have to go out last night at 9:30.  I was looking forward to the looking, but distressed at the prospect of being at school until eleven o’clock, particularly when I had already spent my daytime hours in class and in the waiting room of Town Tire getting an oil change.

But my dismay quickly abated when I arrived at the observatory.  I had been there years before on a Friday night, when the facility is open to the public.  That visit marked the first time I had ever seen the rings of Saturn or the giant spot on Jupiter.  Last night was very clear, and the temperature quite pleasant.  There are only a dozen students in my class, and only eight of them showed up, so we all got plenty of time to use the telescopes.

Two eight inch reflectors were aimed at Albireo, a binary star in Cygnus.  It’s incredible to think that these two individual stars take a hundred thousand years to orbit one another.  We looked at two different objects in the 12 inch reflector.  The first, the Ring Nebula (M57), was a little disappointing.  In all the photos I have ever seen, the nebula appears to be vibrant and colorful, but in person it appears to be no more than a hazy ring.  Dr. Reyes, the director of the UF teaching observatories, told me that the the photos we see of the Ring Nebula are composites, and filter certain wavelengths of light to create beautiful images.  The second object we viewed with the 12 inch telescope was the open cluster M11.  It doesn’t look especially vibrant in photographs, and, to be honest, in person it is even more subtle, seeming at first to be just a hazy speck against the blackness of deep space.  But after staring for a minute or two, my eye began to perceive some of the brighter individual stars in the cluster.

Finally, before I left, I asked one of the graduate students to aim a telescope at Jupiter, since it was so bright in the southern sky.  Through the eight inch reflector (with a 26mm eyepiece), I could see the stripes in the planets atmosphere, and its four Galilean moons.  It was awesome.  It looked pretty much like this photo, but with the moons all to one side in a straight line.

I’m looking forward to our next night lab.

Filed under: School, Technology on September 9th, 2009 | No Comments »

The morning of our second day in Puerto Rico took us to the mountainous interior of the island.  Heading west out of San Juan wasn’t too bad, since all the traffic in the morning comes into the city.  As you drive, the view to the south is one of rugged mountains.  The nearer ones are not so intimidating, but behind them, further inland, is a much more fearsome range.  That was where we were heading.  I’ve written already about the dangerous and unsafe mountain roads.  However awful they are to drive, they lead to interesting places.

Our first stop was the Arecibo Observatory.  Operated by Cornell University, it is one of the largest radio telescopes on Earth.  Pictures don’t do it justice.  It is really enormous.  I seem to recall the tour guide saying something about twenty-five football fields fitting inside.  Astronomers chose this specific location for a few reasons, of which the most significant were the proximity to the equator, and another being the big hole that existed naturally between the surrounding mountains.  The had to do only a little blasting to fit the reflector.  Looking at the different antennas from the rim of the reflector you cannot tell how large anything really is.  But when a man passed in a basket over head, his tiny size gave some indication.  The short film we watched in the visitor center explained that the round sub-reflector suspended high in the air is the size of a three story building.  The pointy antenna next to it is almost a hundred feet long.  Three colossal concrete towers support the cables, and those cables are embedded in massive concrete anchors.  The air at Arecibo was fresh and in the shade I felt so cool and comfortable that if I closed my eyes I could imagine that I was in the North Carolina mountains.

Our next stop that day was to be the caverns in Camuy, but we arrived to find that all the tickets had been sold for the day.  We decided to head instead to the nearby Caguana Ceremonial Ball Courts.  The Taíno lived here in pre-Hispanic times, and left petroglyphs which are on display and are fascinating.  Now, a cynical person might say, “well sure, this place is interesting, but while the Taíno were drawing on these stones, the French were building the cathedral at Riems“.  That may be so, smart guy, but as Jared Diamond points out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, geography and technology are crucial to the development of any society.  Europeans lived in the most fertile place in the world, had horses and access to almost unlimited resources.  The indigenous people of the Caribbean had to cope with frequent hurricanes, occasional earthquakes, land that was far too rugged to sustain substantial populations through agriculture.  The ball courts at Caguana are fascinating, and you could see how the stones surrounding them were brought up from the river running through the canyon below.  All around the site were enormous Ceiba trees, which were easily over a hundred feet tall, with massive trunks that dwarf a man. The park was practically deserted, and the weather was lovely.

The drive back to San Juan gave me another opportunity to experience awe and terror, as I passed gorgeous scenery, and treacherous driving conditions.  At one point, a convoy of ambulances approached from behind with lights flashing.  I moved over to allow them to pass, but they didn’t go any faster than anyone else.  I concluded that emergency vehicles in Puerto Rico must always just travel with flashing lights.  Meanwhile, when I did hear a police siren, I looked around expecting to find a patrol car.  Rather, I discovered a motorcyclist and his girlfriend, using a police siren to attract attention.

We joined our friend Maggie, who lives in Puerto Rico, for dinner at a restaurant with a cool Egyptian theme.  At the conclusion of the meal, a belly-dancing girl came out and entertained everyone.  I can see why that custom is so popular.

It was after ten o’clock when we arrived back at our hotel, and I was ultra tired.  The next day we would explore San Juan.

Filed under: History, Technology, Travel on August 30th, 2009 | No Comments »

The miracle of our modern age is video on demand.

Filed under: Popular Music, Technology on July 27th, 2009 | No Comments »

Earlier this year, I purchased a Fender ’65 Reissue Twin Reverb guitar amplifier from my local independent music store, Lipham’s.  I not only got a great deal, but I was glad to support local business, particularly one that’s been around for so long.  I’m not saying that Lipham Music is the best store in history–their selection is fairly modest, and they seem to be stocking many more Chinese-made instruments these days–but they do sell Fender and Martin guitars, and, what’s more, they’ve outlast most of the other shops in town.

Last night, after dinner, Miriam and I went somewhere I haven’t been in a long, long time: Best Buy.  I used to go there a lot in days of yore, especially back when HDTV was just being introduced, and I was eager to see what it looked like.  Their service was always lousy (not as lousy as Circuit City, of course), and just about everything I ever bought there broke within two years, but they’ve always had a lot of stock.  Last night, I discovered a new department in an area where CRT televisions were once displayed.  Best Buy now sells musical instruments.  They have drums, keyboards, DJ equipment, and guitars, including Fender and Gibson.

A number of things bother me about this.  First, I don’t think their staff cares about these instruments, since I found every guitar grossly out of tune.  Second, their prices were absurd.  The same Twin Reverb I bought for $899 at Lipham’s was marked $1,699 at Best Buy.  Maybe that’s what they’re going for elsewhere, but it just seemed extreme to me.  Finally, I think musical instruments are just Best Buy’s latest passing fancy.  That’s what troubles me most.  In a worst-case scenario, here’s what I imagine occurring:

1. Lipham Music loses sales to Best Buy.  There are only so many new electric guitars and amplifiers–particularly higher-end models–that will sell each week in Gainesville.  If Lipham loses those sales, it could hurt them significantly.  Lipham’s closes.
2. Musical instruments make up so little of Best Buy’s bottom line that they give up on the endeavor.
3. Gainesville has no music store.  Since Best Buy’s decision is made at the national level, they don’t care that Gainesville is left with nothing.

I don’t know how likely this scenario is.  I may just be paranoid.  But I know that I’d never get a deal on an amp at Best Buy like I did at Lipham’s, and Best Buy doesn’t have the tradition of heritage that Lipham’s does.  After all, a little more than ten years ago, the Best Buy was a Montgomery Ward.  Lipham’s has been in business for fifty years.  But these are hard times.

I hope they can weather the storm.

Filed under: Gainesville, Rantings, Technology on May 30th, 2009 | No Comments »