It hasn't been a very productive week for me, but not totally unproductive either. You can see the improved font selections -- Atkinson HyperLegible Next and Merriweather -- on HyperSpace Express. There's not really all that much to see, it still needs some improvements, and it took me too long to get around to. But it's something.

In my partial defense, CSS is a very deep rabbit-hole, and I am easily distracted. Especially if I can frame it as something I can use.

Music. I didn't publish an s4s post yesterday, but I meant to, because I ran across The music of dying stars -- head over to the Zwicky Transient Facility's Sonify the Cosmos page for more information, a combined sonification and visualization, and an interview. You can make your own.

I this is not the first time I've used a sonification as my s4s. Maybe not even the second, depending on whether you count The Songs of Pando.

In other news, Pope Leo XIII cared for the poor, fought for labor union rights. He was against Socialism and Laissez Faire Capitalism. What influence Leo XIV will have on the way the US is going remains to be seen, but the fact that his first homily as pope has apparently upset some MAGAts gives reason for hope.

I could use some hope right now.

( Notes & links, as usual )

So the idea of "spirituality" has been in my mind, and to some extent in my journal, where I wrote "Is looking up at the night sky a spiritual practice?" I was remembering, in particular, the night N, Colleen and I came back to the house on Whidbey Island one night not too long after we'd bought the place -- the sky was spectacularly clear, and for a long while we all just looked up and got lost in the depths of it.

Songs came up in my discussion with EG yesterday, in a somewhat different context, and afterward I thought about what songs inspire the kind of awe and grandeur that those stars did.

The first song I thought of was Don Simpson's Ship of Stone. The second was Dave Carter's When I Go. The third was also by Dave Carter -- Lord of the Buffalo. Which I haven't done as a s4s, so I'll just link to Tracy Grammer's cover of it.

(You can also find considerably rougher versions by Kaleidofolk at Or-E-Con 2, 2022 and Lookingglass Folk at Conflikt 2012. Not necessarily recommended unless you're a completist.)

Radiation therapy can lead one down some pretty weird rabbit-holes. I was rummaging around trying to find out why treatment dosage is measured in cGray. Why 1/100 of a Gray? (I note in passing that a Gray is 0ne joule per kilogram.) Well, it turns out that the outdated CGS unit of radiation dosage was the Rad, equal to 100 ergs per gram, and it's equal to 0.01Gy. So the field of radiation therapy goes back a long way, and everyone was used to using rads, so they just kept the numbers and renamed the unit. Besides, it means nobody has to worry about where to put the decimal point -- my prescription, which is fairly typical, is 7000cGy spread over 28 individual 250cGy zaps.

One thing leads to another, so I followed things like radiation poisoning, radioactive waste, and a Timeline of the far future, which somehow wound up at Ray cats. To quote the article,

A ray cat[a] is a proposed kind of cat that would be genetically engineered to change appearance in the presence of nuclear radiation. Philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri originated the idea of a "living radiation detector"[1] in 1984 as a proposed long-time nuclear waste warning message that could be understood 10,000 years in the future...

But how do you ensure that people ten millennia in the future will know why their cats suddenly changed color, and what to do about it? Well, you could make a nursery rhyme about it, and give it a really catchy tune,... The result is titled "10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)". I'm not sure it's catchy enough to do the job, but it is pretty catchy.

See also, Raycats and earworms: How scientists are using colour-changing cats and nursery rhymes to warn future generations of nuclear danger - CityAM, The Cat Went Over Radioactive Mountain | Method, and the podcast Ten Thousand Years - Episode 114 of 99% Invisible (which has the song in it).

...

To change the subject almost completely, but still sort of related, the folks giving radiation treatments at the UW medical center provide background music via Spotify (to keep you from being bored during the prep and treatment, which takes some 20 minutes on a good day.) Naturally I told them to search Spotify for "filk".

The treatment only runs for the last few minutes; the rest is the techs adjusting your position and orientation so that the markers in your prostate line up within a millimeter or so of where they were the last time. So they were still in the room when Paper Pings came on and I was able to say, as calmly as I could, "I wrote that."

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Well, music-adjacent, anyway. Hatnote Listen to Wikipedia is an audio-visual rendering of the Wikipedia edit stream. Scroll down for more information. (This page has more detail.)

Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site, punctuated by a string swell.

Note: when you follow the link to the page, you won't hear anything -- it's muted. To unmute it, click on the volume-control slider in the upper right of the header (to the left of the "about" link -- it has rather low-contrast). Click close to it's left-hand (quite) end and adjust the volume from there.

If you've been reading this blog for a while you may have noticed that Songs for Saturday, in addition to having a highly irregular schedule (only 102 entries since I started the tag in 2011), occasionally strays away from the usual run of music-with-vocals that most people consider "songs". But I don't think I've ever strayed quite this far, though that's only because I haven't tagged whale songs or the chirp and ringdown of colliding black holes. Let me fix that.

So with a tip of the hat to ysabetwordsmith, here is The Sweet Song Of The Pando, The Largest Tree On Earth. (Ysabet actually pointed to this NPR article: Eavesdropping on Pando, one of the largest trees in the world. Pando is an aspen clone, spreading over more than 100 acres (43 hectares), with 47,000 tree-like stems growing from a single root system.

I'll get to black holes and whales eventually.

So, earlier in the week I linked to a song, Children Of Darkness by Richard Fariña (as sung with his wife Mimi) -- you'll find the lyrics under the cut, as well as at the link.

Here's another version, sung by Mimi's sister, Joan Baez. Not sure how I feel about the orchestration, but...

I like both versions, but with a preference for the Fariñas'. It's a weird little song, but it fits my mood and the times. Unfortunately. I'd much rather sing cheerful songs in happy times, but that isn't what's happening right now. Another song that's been in my mind lately is Bob Dylan's Desolation Row. Same kind of thing. When things are bad I want a song that resonates with the mood rather than fighting it. (That's related to the standard advice for talking to someone who's depressed or grieving. And the joke that goes: They told me, cheer up -- things could be worse. So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse.)

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Since I got confused and ran this week's "Done Since..." post yesterday, I think I'll overcompensate and post an "s4s" post as "Songs for Sunday". (It wouldn't be the first time for either of those, although it may well be the first time I've done both in the same week.) And besides, this isn't really about songs.

Anyway, this week's rabbit hole started with an article on Aeon.co called either "The pharaoh’s trumpet", or "What King Tut's treasures reveal about daily life in ancient Egypt", depending on whether you look at the page's H1 tag or its title. In any case, last Sunday was the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. Among the lesser treasures there were a pair of trumpets, one made of gilded bronze, and one of silver. The article embeds a video, Tutankhamun's Trumpets played after 3000+ Years. I'll wait while you go and listen.

Which led me to Wikipedia, to find out why they were called "trumpets rather than bugles. There, I learned that "bugle" typically refers to the military signaling device, which is limited to the five notes of the "bugle scale", corresponding to the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth harmonics of the horn's fundamental. In the key of C these would be C, G, C, E, and G. You'll note that the 2nd and 4th harmonics are an octave apart, as are the 3rd and 6th.

That led me to the Natural trumpet, on which by going up to the 16th harmonic a skilled player can play an entire chromatic scale by bending, or "lipping", the 7th, 11th, 13th, and 14th harmonics to bring them into tune. Modern trumpets and other brass instruments use valves, of course, which side-tracked me for a while into looking up the difference between piston and rotary valves.

From there I started getting into the difference between "just intonation", which uses pure whole-number ratios, Pythagorean tuning, and the modern equal temperament system, which divides the octave into 12 equal semitones with a ratio of 2^-12 (the 12^th root of 2) between them. Just temperament is used primarily by a capella groups and string quartets.

After that I started getting into modes, diatonic (and other) scales, and some of the more arcane places music theory has gone in the last hundred years or so. I think things beyond that point are mostly of interest to academic music theorists -- mathematicians and physicists got off this bus around the harmonic series.

Kaleidofolk had a good rehearsal this afternoon -- I finally got most of the tech to cooperate. But it turned out that the recording I got off of Zoom was 32kHz mono. I can see why they'd want to do that, but grump anyway. I will try several other things tomorrow morning. The concert's at 2:30.

Anyway, the real s4s post this week will be "Songs for Sunday", tomorrow.

So this will be a rather quick s4s, because I've been rather lazy today, and also we had a KF practice session. The lazyness mainly manifested itself as watching a lot of YouTube videos. Fortunately for this series, most of those videos -- all the ones that weren't math-related, in fact -- were from Talis Kimberley's - YouTube channel which consists mostly of sessions recorded in Talis's kitchen over the last two years or so.

They are wonderful, Talis is a fantastic (in several senses) songwriter and singer, and you should go watch them (and of course listen to them).

Strange week. No disasters, and some success -- mainly my short concert at FK-NO 3 (the third virtual FilKONtario) -- but also some computer weirdness, fighting with WordPress (I may need a bigger hammer), a completely flipped schedule, and an unexpectedly large amount of ?emotional? something-or-other.

I didn't practice nearly as much as I should have for my concert set, but it was (barely) enough. The set was 15 minutes, which I figured (correctly) would be about all I'd be capable of. I'm pretty sure most of the emotional weirdness came from the setlist:

1. Wheelin'
2. The River
3. Eyes Like the Morning

I mentioned in my introduction that "Eyes Like the Morning" probably doesn't need a trigger warning for anyone but me. (I could have been wrong about that. Feel free to correct me in the comments.) On top of that, I've had For Amy (CW: major character death) as my top earworm for the week, which doesn't help.

Oh, yeah -- some of the week's weirdness was due to the fact that in the process for setting up my lair for N's new fosterling, m's friend k, to quarantine in for the week, I somehow managed to leave my main laptop, Sable, behind on my desk. Oops! Fortunately I have spares, because I seem to be the household's default destination for unloved laptops. I hauled out Raven, which normally lives in the bedroom. After which I discovered that the passwords file hadn't been synced in at least a couple of months. (No, I have no idea how that came about. Distraction?) Fortunately one can set WordPress passwords from the command line, and I'd already set up SSH to the server.

Also around computers, one of my older Thinkpads, Sherman, has been acting strangely -- quite possibly either a corrupted hard drive. Bad memory is also a possibility, though it passed the test I ran on it. Meanwhile smartd on Raven has also been complaining, which implies that its rotating rust drive is dying, so I'm in the process of setting up a new SSD for it. Terabyte SSDs are cheap!

I've been making modest progress toward modernizing the markup in GoingSideways.blog so that I can take advantage of the recent editing improvements in WordPress editing. Because the WPBakery page builder is a miserable editing environment for me, and the way it does layout (with "shortcodes", and if you don't know what that implies be thankful) makes it difficult to switch to some more modern editing environment. I think I have everything updated except the home page at this point. I may need a bigger hammer for that.

And oh, right -- there was also the dentist appointment Thursday, getting a crown replaced. (I think it was a replacement, anyway.) The technology for that process has improved amazingly since the last century, but making the new crown on the spot means an extra 45 minutes or so sitting around reading my phone. (Beats driving an hour and a half each way to the follow-up appointment for getting the lab-made crown installed, so I'm not complaining at all.)

( Notes & links, as usual )