“Copland’s gentle, jazz-influenced style always falls easily on the ear, and his distinctively ‘American’ sound led to the development of a unique national idiom that has served us well for over half a century…” ~Geoff Kuenning

This is an amazing piece. This is one of the finest pieces there is. I’ve said before that this 25 minutes of music is a greater contribution to the world than every piece of art in MoMA combined. Though wholly inconsequential to my point in this post, I suggest the following exercise to the interested reader.

Load a version of Appalachian Spring onto your music player of choice. Go to the MoMA. Stare at this while you listen.

Vasily Kandinsky. (French, born Russia. 1866-1944). Watercolor (Number 13). (1913) From MoMA site.

Which one moved you? Which one had you thinking about the pastoral scenes of our American past. Which one reminded you of a cheap fishing lure? Which one escorted you through a gamut of orchestral moods, from a calm sonority to a boisterous, brass rendition of the Shaker Melody. Which one escorted you through a gamut of colors in your fifth grade fingerpainting pallete?

Enough nonsense. Why must I bring down one to build up another? (Nothing against Kandinsky, who happened to be the first “artist” I happened upon at the MoMA site.) I’d like to let the music make its own case, but this is a blog. I can do nothing but make comparisons and describe feelings. What I really want is for you, the reader, to take the time to listen.

For fear of copyright infringement if I upload it, I offer a portion of the song in the form of a youtube rendition with passable audio.

I like the description of the piece offered by Peter Gutmann.

“While Billy the Kid and Rodeo made explicit reference to American myth and incorporated actual folk songs, Copland’s musical treatment in Appalachian Spring was far more subtle, as he evokes his sources by distilling their essence into original materials. The sole exception (which, ironically, has emerged as the most popular excerpt) was a section of variations on an obscure but catchy Shaker dance tune, whose humble text not only encapsulates that sect’s philosophy but provides an ideal description of Copland’s outlook and method.”

Subtle is a hard adjective to pull off in a work like Appalachian Spring. The piece feels understated, even with the trumpeting and timpani which repeatedly populate the tune, and it’s never monotonous or stuffy (unlike my writing). Give it a listen. In my not-entirely-uniformed opinion, it is one of the finest pieces of music from the past century.

Picture this: I’m in the shower with a Gibson air guitar. As the water beads off my rockstar shampoo mohawk, Praise Chorus plays in the background,

crimson and clover
over and over
crimson and clover
over and over

The scene you just pictured actually took place. But this is neither here nor there.

I’m not sure when it happened. I used to like Jimmy Eat World like any other band I was into. Then it changed. Jimmy Eat World songs that were three stars soon changed to four stars, then five (I have a neurotic tendency to rate all the music in my burgeoning library). In a music collection which I can only describe as a vast sea of three stars, an island of Jimmy Eat World rose with sudden and volcanic fervor.

Like many, I am a sucker for the songs that soundtracked my younger years (isn’t the old joke that once one turns, 30 he/she stops accepting new music?). I forget when I was first exposed to them. I’d like to think my first wasn’t their catchy-pop single The Middle, but it’s entirely possible (in my defense, I have since acquired all the “Early Stuff” and “B-sides” that class me as a true fan). Yet my infatuation with this band is more than nostalgia. In fact, I can’t really connect the dots about how I got here from there. I like so much of their music with such gusto. Why? Beats me. I just do. They are talented musicians, granted. They rock, granted. But talent and rock alone cannot explain my teenage-heartthrob admiration of the band.

Some things take effort to appreciate. People often form their passions in a conditional way, describing them as “acquired tastes.” Does anyone really love an aged, dry, red wine, without first knowing its lofty pedigree? Do others see in Jackson Pollock’s work something I don’t? I do not wish to question the interests and passion of others, but mention these as examples where concentrated effort precedes appreciation.

Jimmy Eat World plays music that I simply enjoy, sans effort. I don’t have to feign interest like some New York socialite trying to swallow a Wagner opera (sorry Wagner, I don’t get you). So few things in life give us this chance. It’s the opposite of the fake smile we are wont to give when a camera is pointed our way.

So here I am above palm trees so straight and tall
You are smaller, getting smaller
But I still see you

Goodbye Sky Harbor (from A Prayer for Owen Meany)

One of my favorite Jimmy Eat World songs is a 16 minute track called Goodbye Sky Harbor. Most of the song is a minimalist-like repetition of a few guitar chords. It’s probably an unappealing repetitiveness to people without an obsession as deep as mine. In fact, when they play the song live they spare the anxious teenagers the boredom and skip most of the instrumental part.

It’s telling that I can listen to all 16 minutes of the song with genuine interest. This raw appeal is the basis for my irrational love of Jimmy Eat World’s songs. I like the music because it is readily likable. Call it positive feedback: enjoyment for the sake of, and by the hands of, enjoyment.

I think that merits jumping in front of a train. Don’t you?

Hey folks, I thought I’d kick off the return to blogging with this video. This makes me happy and I think you’ll like it too.

I’ll be on vacation for the upcoming week. There will be no blogging in the meantime. Cheers!

Devotees of the blog will know I am a big Weezer fan.  Their new Red Album has shattered my hopes for the band’s future.  The catchy sounding track  Heart Songs tugs extra hard at my patience.

I could write a nice analysis to deconstruct the song.  Nothing tells the story better than the lyrics themselves.  To call this teenage poetry would be a gross insult to teenage poets everywhere.  I’ve seen more respectable verse on myspace comments.

When reading, watch closely for the part where they rhyme “on” with “on,” and also, “on it” with “on it.”

Excerpt from Heart Songs:

Back in 1991 I wasn’t having any fun
’til my roommate said “come on” and put a brand new record on
Had a baby on it, he was naked on it
then I heard the cold words that broke the chains I had up on me
got together with my bros at some rehearsal studios
then we played our first rock show and watched the fanbase start to grow
signed the day
made a record all our own
a song comes on the radio and now people go “This is the song”

Shame, Weezer.  You could be so much more than this.

There is a house listed under the title,

Man i love Dunnelen!!!!!!!!!!

The town is Dunellen, NJ.  How many exclamation points of love do you need to spell the name correctly?

In one legendary experiment, Harvard biologists stuck a rectal thermometer into a cheetah, put the cat on a treadmill, and found that it refused to move once its temperature hit 105 degrees Fahrenheit, even though it was loping well below its top speed. (from Born to Run)

We humans are an interesting species. We are physically outmatched by nearly every species on the planet.  We are comparatively delicate, slow and weak.  A fat dog who sleeps all day in a basket can get on the track and win the 100m in the Olympics.

There’s one thing we do very well, however.  We can run for a long time in a lot of heat.  In fact,  there is growing consensus among scientists that our endurance and prolific ability to sweat were the attributes that bought us the time to grow large brains and get out of the jungle.  Few, if any, animals sweat as well as we do.  Survive the claws and you too can have cheetah for dinner (or Cheetos, as the case may be for many Americans).

I mention this theory as a segue into the insanity that happened yesterday.  I decided to ride my bicycle to Princton and back.  It was about 60 miles of riding, meaning 3-4 hours in the sun, in the middle of the day, with a heat index well over a sane level.  I was not the only masochistic buffoon looking to retrace my evolutionary past yesterday.

In fact, there were a whole lot of us cyclists outside in the nasty heat.  The rest of the east coast was sending out heat advisories and complaining about the walk from the AC’d car to the AC’d grocery store.  Meanwhile, back in carbonland, cyclists are outside trying to one-up eachother in a twisted game of “I’m tougher than you.”

Have Sunday, will train.

I knew my ride would be a sufferfest and I knew I could have done a shorter route at a cooler time of day. I went through 7 bottles of water and didn’t even have to pee when I got home.  The experience was not epic (a term I prefer to use sparingly), but it was very primal.   The brain shuts down.  The digestion shuts down.  The body enters preservation mode.  If mountaineers climb Everst “because it’s there,” cyclists do irrational rides “because we can.”

We no longer have to chase antelope for 3 hours to get dinner, but the mechanisms are still in place.  It feels right to use these mechanisms.  It’s not just about the “you-have-no-idea” smirk you give a co-worker when they ask if it’s “hot enough for ya” outside.  It’s about shedding the modern concept of the body as a passive vessel for the brain.

It’s about shedding the modern concept of the body as a passive vessel for the brain.

I totally made that part up.  It’s really about beating the other suckers at bicycle racing.

See you on the road, suckers.

I’m going to make two assumptions. Firstly, I assume you have driven a car. Secondly, I assume that, at some point as a driver, you have encountered a cyclist on the road who blocked your way.

Before I go any further, let me offer a genuine apology on behalf of my cycling brethren. We truly do not block you on purpose. Furthermore, we are beholden to you, the pilot of a large automobile, to keep our fragile bodies intact. We seek a peaceful coexistence, not war.

I want to use this post to explain some common reasons cyclists ride in the road (a.k.a “take up the lane”). I realize there are some idiot cyclists who ride carelessly and ignore road etiquette. I also realize there are ignorant, small drivers who hate cyclists for no particular reason. Consider this a post for the middle ground. I want to tell you, the average, compassionate American driver why we, the average, compassionate American cyclist, are often forced to take up your driving space.

Sometimes we have no choice

American roads are notoriously bike unfriendly. Sometimes we literally have no place to go except in the road. This can be because there is no shoulder, or because there is no safe lane for the bike to use. If we decide there is no safe way for a car to pass on the left, we will sometimes ride in the lane. This is our way of being visible to drivers. We are saying, “Hey, I know I’m blocking you by being in the lane, but even if I was as far right as possible, we still couldn’t fit side-by-side. I’m just in the lane so that you see me better and don’t crush me against the guard rail.”

Shoulders are often dangerous

Few motorists get to see the true character of the road shoulder. I recommend taking a close look at the shoulder of a well-traveled road, if you have never stopped the car and seen it. Shoulders are often full of glass, ruts, rocks, and assorted debris that wreak havoc on us. Our tires are 23mm wide and contact the road in about a square inch of area. We can be knocked over by hitting a dime-sized rock the wrong way.

Additionally, the shoulder is also home to car doors and unaware pedestrians. We will often take the lane if we see a parked car with a person inside as insurance against being broadsided by their door.

We descend faster than cars

This one is surprising to most drivers: a bicycle can descend faster than cars. We do not go faster on a straight downhill, but the bike can take turns much faster than any 4-wheeled vehicle on the road. I have experienced many times when a driver has passed me around blind turns on a descent, only to feel stupid when I catch them (and pass, if it’s safe) and ride away.

Cyclists also take up the lane for safety reasons when descending. This allows us to pick safe lines through turns and gives us freedom to steer around obstacles at high speed. Again, our 23mm tires at 40 miles/hour afford us little room for error. If we are pinned in the shoulder, we are forced to ride over sand, rocks, and potholes that will pull our wheels right out from under.

We make left turns, too

It’s much more safe for all of us if the bicycle occupies the lane to make a left turn. There’s no way to avoid this and we promise it will only take a moment of your time to let us into the lane to turn. With proper hand signals and reasonable warning, we can usually make lefts without any disruption to your motoring experience.

We are vehicles

The bicycle is a vehicle in the law’s eye. We are legally entitled to use of the road (with certain stipulations) as much as the car you drive. That said, 99% of the cycling community does its best to keep clear of traffic and let cars have free reign. We want you to be happy to share the road with cyclists and (99% of us) actively refrain from provocation, even if treated unfairly.

And what are you to make of that other 1%, the cyclists who disobey traffic laws? I can only offer my apologies on their behalf. You, as a motorist, should feel free to reprimand (in a safe, civil manner) a rider who thinks traffic laws do not apply. I am a racer and so are many of my friends. Racers have big heads and log many hours on the road. This sometimes gives them the impression they are above the rules. I’ll add that honking is not a helpful way to reprimand. We get honked at by any number of gun-totin’, buck-toothed idiots in the course of a ride. Your cause for honking may be legitimate, but too many have cried wolf for a honk to be meaningful. Far more effective would be a rational conversation at a stop light or, if the rider is wearing a jersey, a letter/email to the team/club for which they ride.

Thanks for reading. We cyclists look forward to sharing the road with you this summer and appreciate your patience.

Director’s Commentary:
Recently, we have received numerous complaints about the Fights with Aaron series. There have been calls for more violence, better jokes, extended fight scenes, and graphical depictions of gore. We respond to these inquiries by reminding our audience that Fights with Aaron is not a game. We are not actors trying to make laughs or stage violence. Our fight is very real and very ongoing. We do not apologize should these videos fall short of your saturated Hollywood preconceptions of violence. War is hell, and we have no control over the comedic merit of this ongoing damnation.

A special thanks to Rob, undoubtedly our biggest fan, for finding this bonus cut on youtube, while the fair-weather fans sat idly by their RSS feeds.

I’ve been looking for a new place to call home. The descriptions people post online are amazingly bad. The gold standard seems to be omitting the location, number of bathrooms, salient details, and any piece of information which may be helpful. Check out this sweet pad:

$1800 / 2br - Two bedroom town home for rent (piscataway)

with basement…easy access to rt 287
with pool, tennis courts, gym, party room.
has basement
laundry and dryer and only 2 years old : )

• Location: piscataway
• it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Yesterday was a boring day in lab.  Boring days are the worst.  I need deadlines, goals, and obligations to feel engaged.  When I fail to come up with these self-motivators, I wallow in a pathetic state of vacuous nothingness.  I switch between websites with mindless ease.  Reddit weather reddit craigslist email reddit email reddit email blogs email email. Without goals, I am the human incarnation of entropy.

After hours of boredom and headache, I left lab yesterday and decided, despite the ominous gray clouds, to go riding.  My helmet made my headache worse as I tempo’d down River road in the direction of clear skies.  The clamp on my saddle came loose and allowed my seat to pivot between groin-crushingly uphill and bucking-bronco downhill.

The clouds held their rain as I pedaled hard to escape them.  Cyclists develop a knack for judging distance and cheating rain.  These were slow clouds and I knew I could get out from underneath them. The hills of Watchung were sunny and beckoning.

Pinch flat.

I dismount and remove the rear wheel to change the tube.  On cue, the clouds dump their gray mass upon me.  It’s one of those summer rainstorms that lasts 10 minutes but delivers raindrops the size of quarters.  Everything gets wet as I work a wet tube into a wet, gritty tire inside a wet rear wheel.

It’s surprisingly cold when I remount and get moving.  The front of my legs sting and my feet are anchored in sloshy buckets for shoes.  I have to take my sunglasses off and let the world into my eyes.  Bugs and rocks find my corneas with uncanny fervor. My saddle bends backwards when I hit a bump and forwards when I push down to straighten it.

An hour later I find myself pedaling hard for no reason.  I have no training plan. I have no races to do this year.  Pedaling hard just feels natural.  I turn the watts in that zone that all good coaches tell cyclists to avoid.  I am at 80% intensity.  It’s the low-quality form of intensity that burns out newbies and gives nary the benefits of periodized, interval efforts.

I don’t care.

I melt the stress with frightening ease.  My headache vanishes and I carelessly blow snot on my already filthy self (I have long given up on keeping appearances this day).  The rain amplifies the scent of the plants, replacing the smell of summer asphalt with fragrant sweetness.  A rooster tail chases my rear wheel and provides me with a personal raincloud, even though the rain has ceased.

When home, I bring the bike in the shower with me.  Trails of black soot find their way down the drain. A day of idleness and small misfortune washes down with it.  I sit down to dinner in front of my computer, sans headache.  The choice for dinnertime entertainment comes too easily. Reddit weather reddit craigslist email reddit email reddit email blogs email email…

I was *this close* to not writing a post about this topic. It’s almost too easy. It’s almost like arm wrestling kindergarteners for their lunch money. It is my weakness that I write these posts. I cant let stupidity run free. Must. Attack. Idiots.

from XKCD

The cause for boiling blood? I am speechless that this website made it to the #1 spot on Reddit yesterday. I suppose it’s not surprising considering Reddit is chalk full of anti-pharmaceutical morons.

Why are they morons? They are morons because they bite the hand that feeds them. They whine about big pharma collusion and evil, profiteering, private-sector profiteers. Then they burst an appendix or contract some terminal illness and come crawling to the alters of modern medicine. They become outraged that “we” (the collective “we” of white-coated medicine/pharma researchers) have not cured their niche disease, or that their life-sustaining medicines cost them thousands a year.

Sorry, next year we’ll just skip the $100 million FDA trials and just invent the cure.

Look at the (uncited) table from the crappy website:

I want to throw up when I see a table like this. So what if 32,000 died from prescription drugs? Where are the death rates? It’s called normalization. Why not add grizzly bears to the list? Heck, there’s only 1 or 2 deaths a year from that. Better yet, ASTEROID impact. No human has ever died from an asteroid impact in 2005. Ergo, it poses no threat to our society.

A little later in the article we happen upon this beauty,

Prescription drugs don’t treat diseases; they merely disguise the symptoms, providing care for disease rather than health.

There it is. Nail, meet head. Head, nail. I better take back the claim I made earlier. Researchers don’t just try to treat the disease, they are so crafty they concoct special compounds to disguise the symptoms. My public apology now reads:

Sorry, next year we’ll just skip the $100 million FDA trials and just invent the cure and purposefully invent drugs which sidestep the disease but alleviate your symptoms.

Antibiotics? Just treating the symptoms. Cervical cancer vaccine? You have to pay for that sucker three times before you GAIN IMMUNITY FROM CERVICAL CANCER. That ain’t no treating the disease; that done gone be the sound of big pharma’s hand in my pocket.

Finally,

Dr. Fred Baughman, author of The ADHD Fraud, the pharmaceutical industry is the biggest, most evil drug cartel in history.

Ok, now I’m getting cocky (see how I picked a quote from the article which isn’t even a sentence?). Let’s put aside the validity of big pharma’s cartel status and look at the alternatives,

1. Don’t take prescription drugs (after all, they are just disguising your symptoms, right?)
2. Research, screen, produce and self-medicate with your own drugs (If Meth addicts can make their sauce, surely you too can make your own Cox2 inhibitor!)

Prescription drugs are expensive to develop, largely because the US makes prescription drugs according to strict scientific controls. It’s an unfair assumption that the pharmaceutical industry is withholding cures, charging unfair premiums and killing patients in the name of profit. As with any large body of people, some are corrupt, but most are doing a job as best as possible.

You would do well to remember this fact the next time a prescription drug saves your life.

I’ve been pretty harsh on bloggers lately. Today I happened upon one that is really worth it.

I was clicking through Don’s blogroll, reading Colby Josh’s blog, where Josh has a link to this guy’s site:

http://www.fatcyclist.com/

The author’s wife has breast cancer and months to live. His blog gives an honest, candid narrative of the experience.

She says she’s sorry that I’m not getting out on rides right now. I haven’t told her…that a couple times this week, I’ve left work to go on a ride and then have skipped it so I could get home a little sooner.

I’ll ride more later.

You can read it and feel humbled, or angry, or lucky, or whatever it is his story makes you feel.  I enjoyed reading through the comments and seeing that the web can be a kind, helpful, amazing source of support, as opposed to the usual vortex of name callings, petty insults, and meaningless drama.

Good on ya, internet, and best wishes to fatcyclist and his family.

What’s this? I haven’t even started my ad hominem retort against Don’s post and I already got a jab in. As they say in Street Fighter, “Round one, fight.”

Don is a biomedical engineer. He has been his whole life. Don has his undergraduate degree in BME at Case, which is consistently ranked in the top ten BME programs in the nation. One might say Don has been on the fast track to BME stardom since he spoke his first words at the age of 9.

*ding* Round 2, fight.

Don likes to insult me by lumping me in with physicists. He writes of my ilk,

Nobody ever said physicists are dummies. Awkward, pompous, smelly jerks, maybe, but certainly not dummies.

Here’s the problem with this. You can’t just…well…if you…it’s not fair to… Okay, he’s right. There’s no problem with these claims. Touche, Don.

The rest of Don’s post is cute in an “I fear what I don’t understand” kind of way. He thinks, cutely, that physicists are allowed to set constants =1 whenever they feel like making things easy. For instance, in Don’s magical world of unicorns and rainbows, the equation can be changed to .

This is where Bob Barker would put his hand on Don’s shoulder and ask him to spin the wheel again, because 55 cents just wont get you into the showcase showdown, if you know what I mean.

Don is referring to an old physicist trick of using “natural units” to simplify algebra. The Planck units are the most well known. A glance at the wikipedia page will show there’s a lot more going on than setting everything to unity (the pompous physicist term for the number one). What Don’s “not-at-all-lazy physicists” are doing is to cleverly redefine units so that commonly occuring combinations vanish. Physicists don’t kill constants, guns kill constants.

And so it comes to pass that the climactic climax of Don’s post is nothing more than a pack of sausages wired to a crazy man’s chest.

All fuse, no explosion.

ps. Don smells.