Into That Good Night

Another song is now in the sidebar. Your first Dan Lewis original with lyrics. It is called "Into That Good Night", perhaps. It was all made up today, although the idea has been kicking around for a while. You missed all the fun, like my recording software crashing, and a change of key from C to D.

It is a kind of inversion of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas. You have probably already read this, but here are the words:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My first thought about this was going to be to just sing the lyrics, slightly rearranged and edited. It even has verses and a chorus:

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

And you, my lover, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I had an appropriately mournful tune available.

But at some point, I got a kind of bouncy tune stuck in my head, so I had to turn the lyrics inside out. Here is the new version, which you can hear:

Quiet the lightning, break the curse
Let the storm within disperse

Let meteors fall through other skies
The light is dying in your eyes

And I will go
I will go
Gentle into that good night

Like a madman calmed by familiar hands
The rage will wash away with the sands

For one brief word, I would wait for you still
Send me away, whatever you will

And I will go
I will go
Gentle into that good night

I sing to you, here at our end
Blows the breeze, fades the wind

Dry your tears, leave that sad height
I will bless you into the night

And you will go
You will go
Gentle into that good
And you will go
You will go
Gentle into that good night

Is this a sad song or a happy song? It makes me feel serene, but also a bit like pinin for the fjords. I think the best goodbyes are a mixture of both.

I might go back later on this one for more instruments and voices. It could also probably use some editing. For now, I hope you can enjoy it as it is.

Anywhere.fm

Maybe I am, as usual, the last person to this party. But there is a website called (and located at) anywhere.fm. It is basically an iTunes-style music player that is online. Not only that, but you upload your music (mp3s only), and you can listen to them anywhere you have an internet connection.

Not only that, but you can listen to other people's music collections on a streaming basis (at least, you can fire up their playlists). There are over 10,000,000 songs uploaded and counting.

Is this legal? They seem to think so. They chose to be basically a web radio station and pay the ASCAP and BMI fees for public performance. They don't allow you to download anyone's songs. Depending on how you use the site, you might not have to.

How do they make money? When you hear a song on somebody else's playlist, you see a little shopping cart "buy this song" link. Apparently they get finders' fees when someone does that.

A downer is that there appears to be no search engine, so you can't just get a big list of Beatles songs and just listen to those. Instead, you depend on the other users to organize things for you, as if they were the DJ of their own little radio station. You also don't appear to be able to skip... yes, I just tried it. If you start on a playlist you don't own, you can't randomly skip to the ones you like... you can only skip so many per hour. Of course, you could put every song you own in a separate playlist, exposing them all, but that's no fun.

The last caveat is that the uploading process goes at about 30 K per second at best (I left it on all night, and I've got about 60 songs out of 800-some).

My music is going up at anywhere.fm/mineshaftgap. I'll warn you that there are some isolated swears, and you should probably skip the Green Day and Ozomatli albums if you care about such things. But there's a lot of Radiohead and Beck and Beatles, and all the Switchfoot studio albums and all the Nickel Creek, plus their side projects (except the 1997 Here To There rarity and a lot of Chris Thile's solo stuff). I'll try and get things organized.

Go check it out.

Caption of the day; irony of ironies and all is irony

The White House said that President Bush will veto a bill that would ban the use of waterboarding by the CIA. The president claims such a prohibition will inhibit the collection of information.

Under the headline of the day:

Bush Will Veto Ban On Torture
McCain, Once Tortured Himself, Joins White House To Oppose Bill Prohibiting Waterboarding

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/14/national/main3830691.shtml

This is one of the most editorial articles I have ever read from the AP. An excerpt:

Although President Bush has stated that the United States has not and will not torture people, it has been learned that Mr. Bush himself has authorized the use of waterboarding on detainees (a practice previously prosecuted by the United States as a war crime), and has claimed the authority to do so again in certain circumstances.

Despite military interrogators' assertions that waterboarding and other brands of torture do not produce reliable intelligence, the Bush administration continues to argue that it needs the option of waterboarding when seeking information from recalcitrant prisoners.

Attorney General Mike Mukasey has declined to declare that waterboarding is torture, despite congressional demands during and after his Senate confirmation process, fueling the administration critics' assumption that admitting such would expose administration figures who authorized the practice to criminal prosecution.

The AP newswire called Bush a liar, a torturer, and a criminal, implying that the fact that he's not in jail for a war crime hangs on a technicality (and an Attorney General in his pocket). And that's in a straight news article.

The other day Scalia said that we have to have the debate over torture vs. intelligence, because the terrorists could have a ticking time bomb, etc. It's a huge grey area to him.

This is total crap. I explored it earlier and elsewhere. So I'll turn the mike over to a prominent critic of our torture policies.

Those who argue the necessity of some abuses raise an important dilemma as their most compelling rationale: the ticking-time-bomb scenario. What do we do if we capture a terrorist who we have sound reasons to believe possesses specific knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack?

In such an urgent and rare instance, an interrogator might well try extreme measures to extract information that could save lives. Should he do so, and thereby save an American city or prevent another 9/11, authorities and the public would surely take this into account when judging his actions and recognize the extremely dire situation which he confronted. But I don't believe this scenario requires us to write into law an exception to our treaty and moral obligations that would permit cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. To carve out legal exemptions to this basic principle of human rights risks opening the door to abuse as a matter of course, rather than a standard violated truly in extremis. It is far better to embrace a standard that might be violated in extraordinary circumstances than to lower our standards to accommodate a remote contingency, confusing personnel in the field and sending precisely the wrong message abroad about America's purposes and practices.

That sounds pretty convincing, critic of torture. Say, what's your position on waterboarding, while we're at it?

Now, in this war, our liberal notions are put to the test. Americans of good will, all patriots, argue about what is appropriate and necessary to combat this unconventional enemy. Those of us who feel that in this war, as in past wars, Americans should not compromise our values must answer those Americans who believe that a less rigorous application of those values is regrettably necessary to prevail over a uniquely abhorrent and dangerous enemy. Part of our disagreement is definitional. Some view more coercive interrogation tactics as something short of torture but worry that they might be subject to challenge under the "no cruel, inhumane or degrading" standard. Others, including me, believe that both the prohibition on torture and the cruel, inhumane and degrading standard must remain intact. When we relax that standard, it is nearly unavoidable that some objectionable practices will be allowed as something less than torture because they do not risk life and limb or do not cause very serious physical pain.

For instance, there has been considerable press attention to a tactic called "waterboarding," where a prisoner is restrained and blindfolded while an interrogator pours water on his face and into his mouth-causing the prisoner to believe he is being drowned. He isn't, of course; there is no intention to injure him physically. But if you gave people who have suffered abuse as prisoners a choice between a beating and a mock execution, many, including me, would choose a beating. The effects of most beatings heal. The memory of an execution will haunt someone for a very long time and damage his or her psyche in ways that may never heal. In my view, to make someone believe that you are killing him by drowning is no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank. I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture.

Any last thoughts?

The enemies we fight today hold our liberal values in contempt, as they hold in contempt the international conventions that enshrine them. I know that. But we are better than them, and we are stronger for our faith. And we will prevail. It is indispensable to our success in this war that those we ask to fight it know that in the discharge of their dangerous responsibilities to their country they are never expected to forget that they are Americans, and the valiant defenders of a sacred idea of how nations should govern their own affairs and their relations with others--even our enemies.

Those who return to us and those who give their lives for us are entitled to that honor. And those of us who have given them this onerous duty are obliged by our history, and the many terrible sacrifices that have been made in our defense, to make clear to them that they need not risk their or their country's honor to prevail; that they are always--through the violence, chaos and heartache of war, through deprivation and cruelty and loss--they are always, always, Americans, and different, better and stronger than those who would destroy us.

And now, the punchline:

Torture's Terrible Toll
By Senator John McCain
Newsweek
25 November 2005 issue

Godel, Escher, Bach (major geek alert)

This reminds me of that classic Johnny Carson bit, Carnac the Magnificent. The swami, bejeweled and enturbaned, holds up the envelope to his forehead and closes his eyes: "Godel, Escher, Bach". "Girdle Esher Bock" echoes Ed McMahon. He reads the card: "Instructions for a German wedding."

(I tried desperately to come up with a better one than that. It's the Escher that kept getting in the way.)

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. This is actually a book about self-reference, about logic and metalogic, about patterns and fugues, about artificial intelligence, about symbols and interpretations. I haven't read very far yet, but it is already pretty mindblowing. It won a Pulitzer and it hasn't changed since 1979.

Plus this guy told me to read it. About halfway through the blog post, he veers off into stuff about being a programmer and making software that may or may not interest you.

In the preface to the 20th anniversary edition, Hofstadter explains the main idea: things that refer to themselves in some sense examine their own state and are conscious. This self reference, he calls a "strange loop", and suggests that there may be a scale of consciousness based on the amount of introspection that a thing or system does. It's basically a goofy, insightful, jarring 800 page book. With bonus dialogues between Lewis Carroll's Tortoise and Achilles. With digressions on Bach canons. With pictures. Only 100 pages in; I'll tell you how it goes.

I've also been reading lately that the Internet is like a brain. See, for instance, Dimensions of the One Machine. I've read many similar such arguments that seem to conflate hardware density and speed with intelligence, then claim that in the year 2040, due to the consistent doubling of computer power due to Moore's law, we'll have computers with brains that surpass the human mind.

I think these arguments ignore the complex structural differences between the network of neurons and synapses that we have, which are stuporously interconnected, and the logic gates on a computer, which are not. While we're stuck on the x86 architecture (like most home computers nowadays), we will not stumble onto artificial brains.

One thing the Internet does not seem to do much is introspect. The closest thing we have at the moment is probably search. Google is not really the Internet. It is really about the Internet. However, introspection seems to imply a greater sense of feedback and control than Google really does... Google holds up the mirror to the Internet, but then what happens? Really, Google just builds a better mirror.

The feedback at the moment is all coming from the human users.

If the Internet were a giant brain, how could we even interpret its thoughts?

In vaguely related news, Will Wright's intelligent design simulator, Spore, is coming out in September. From cell to civilization to spaceship, the player evolves their creations, then sets out to explore a vast universe. Here is a cool interview with the latest. For earlier posts, see here and here. I've been waiting for this one for a long time.

Caedmon's Call concert last night

Most contemporary Christian music (CCM, a genre with its own magazine) is sour, at least to my uneducated tastebuds. The exceptions are few: Jars of Clay, still rockin it; Switchfoot, world famous, but it's obviously still a Christian band; Jennifer Knapp, before she stopped making music; Ginny Owens, the blind pop pianist; Leigh Nash from Sixpence None The Richer... I'm just about petered out there.

And then there's Caedmon's Call, a group of singer-songwriters with world-music percussion. They've been around for over a decade, and they have a lot of strong music.

The show started with founding member Derek Webb, who went solo a few years ago, but came back recently for the latest Caedmon's Call album and tour, Overdressed. He makes great music about religion, love, politics... His latest album, The Ringing Bell, is not to be missed. He did an hour of music, then a few minutes later the whole band was on stage.

There are eight people in Caedmon's Call now: lead singers Cliff and Danielle Young, singer/songwriters Derek Webb (twelve string) and Andrew Osenga (guitars), drums and percussion by Todd Bragg and Garett Buell, Jeff Miller on bass, and Josh Moore on keyboards etc. They had garbage cans, riffs, organs, big thumpy drums, three and four part harmonies... they've really got it all, this band.

By the end of the three-hour concert, my ears were stuffed, but it was a great time. For some reason, I have a need to write down the setlist... they did something like 34 songs.

One thing Sarah noticed was that nobody would stand up. For the vast majority of the concert, we were sitting down. Once in a while, they'd bang the drums really loud and people would stand and clap and sing along, but not that often. Maybe that's what you get when you do a concert in a church.

Finished Quicksilver; McCain

So, I've been way off the map, stuck in the 17th century with Neal Stephenson. But I finally finished Quicksilver after weeks of reading (maybe more than a month, an eon in my reading life). The phrase "tour de force" gets thrown around a lot these days... "Entertaining"... "Thought provoking..." "Hilarious..." "Absorbing..." "Tales of the ruling class intersect with the exploits of Vagabonds. Lofty science turns into slapstick on a dime. Depressing realism gives way to explosive alchemical experiments." I don't know how to blurb this book. It would probably be rated R or worse as a movie, with sometimes graphic violence and sex. It's everything from beautiful to vulgar. But it's amazing.

Here's McCain vs. McCain, an editorial in a flagship conservative newspaper that came out a few weeks ago. It was a somewhat transparent attempt to prevent McCain from gaining the Republican nomination, in the runup to Super Tuesday. It didn't work, because the Republican field was not strong this time around.

Vince gave a pretty backhanded description of McCain on those lines:

McCain walks a line somewhere between pandering and probity. I actually find this a welcome difference from the complete groveling of the other Republican candidates toward the pop conservative issue of the day.

McCain also contrasts well with President Bush, who shamelessly colors all history and lies profusely without any apparent guilt.

Of the Republicans, McCain is definitely the statesman of the bunch.

This is a dictionary-worthy example of damning with faint praise.

To understand how I feel about McCain, you'll have to take a trip back in time to the 2000 campaign. Ron Suskind, profiling Rove in 2003, puts it about as succinctly as anyone could:

As for the Waterloo of South Carolina, most of the facts are well-known, and among this group of Republicans, what happened has taken on the air of an unsolved crime, a cold case, with Karl Rove being the prime suspect. Bush loyalists, maybe working for the campaign, maybe just representing its interests, claimed in parking-lot handouts and telephone "push polls" and whisper campaigns that McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict, that McCain might be mentally unstable from his captivity in Vietnam, and that the senator had fathered a black child with a prostitute. Callers push-polled members of a South Carolina right-to-life organization and other groups, asking if the black baby might influence their vote. Now here’s the twist, the part that drives McCain admirers insane to this very day: That last rumor took seed because the McCains had done an especially admirable thing. Years back they’d adopted a baby from a Mother Teresa orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget, now eleven years old, waved along with the rest of the McCain brood from stages across the state, a dark-skinned child inadvertently providing a photo op for slander. The attacks were of a level and vitriol that even McCain, who was regularly beaten in captivity, could not ignore. He began to answer the slights, strayed off message about how he would lead the nation if he got the chance, and lost the war for South Carolina. Bush emerged from the showdown upright and victorious . . . and onward he marched.

McCain, having endured these attacks on his family and his reputation, turned around and made common cause with these people, going so far as to say he'd accept campaign advice from Rove this time around... hugging President Bush while hating his guts...

It is only the most personal example of many sellouts by McCain. He is a media darling and is portrayed as a moderate, and he's the Republican nominee. I wonder, though, since we essentially have 3 moderates left in the race, whether people will not vote for the real liberals and moderates instead of the somewhat clouded record of McCain.