Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher

Rembrandt, The Young Rembrandt as Democritus the Laughing Philosopher (1628-1629)

According to convention there is sweet and bitter, a hot and a cold, and according to convention there is order. In truth there are atoms and a void.
~Democritus (ca 400 B.C.)

Democritus preached truth without proof more than 2000 years ago. He was forgotten but proven true in the modern age.

Dirty Old Town

I was originally going to post the Pogues' version of this song but this version from the songwriter presented instead. I wrongly had thought that the song was about Dublin but of course it's about Manchester, England. I like the juxtaposition of optimistic love and grimy realism:

All The Young Dudes

More hair-band than glam-rockers, "Mott The Hoople" had a brief shining moment thanks to David Bowie. The lyrics of the previous post reminded me of them:

Man On The Moon

Mott the Hoople and the game of Life (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Andy Kaufman in the wrestling match (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Monopoly, Twenty-one, Checkers, and Chess (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Mister Fred Blassie in a breakfast mess (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Let's play Twister, let's play Risk (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
See you heaven if you make the list (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Now, Andy did you hear about this one?
Tell me, are you locked in the punch?
Andy are you goofing on Elvis? [Hey, baby]
Are we losing touch?
If you believed they put a man on the moon, man on the moon
If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve, then nothing is cool
Moses went walking with the staff of wood (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Newton got beaned by the apple good (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Egypt was troubled by the horrible asp (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Mister Charles Darwin had the gall to ask (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Now Andy did you hear about this one?
Tell me, are you locked in the punch?
Hey, Andy are you goofing on Elvis? [Hey, baby]
Are you having fun?
If you believed they put a man on the moon, man on the moon
If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve, then nothing is cool

Here's a little agit [legend?] for the never-believer (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Here's a little ghost for the offering (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Here's a truck stop instead of Saint Peter's (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Mister Andy Kaufman's gone wrestling (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Now Andy did you hear about this one?
Tell me, are you locked in the punch?
Hey Andy are you goofing on Elvis, hey baby, are we losing touch?
If you believed they put a man on the moon, man on the moon
If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve, then nothing is cool
(Buck, Mills, Stipe)

Catfish Blues (1941)

John Wayne On Liberals

I'm looking for the year on this one. I left a message over on YouTube and hopefully someone will come through.

Money quotes: I always thought I was a liberal.
And: What else would there be in life if you lose optimism?

Chuck D from Public Enemy on John Wayne:

Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me you see, straight up racist that sucker was, simple and plain, mother fuck him and John Wayne.

Taxing Invention

The Leahy-Smith "America Invents Act" takes full effect next week. A little noticed provision of the act which passed through Congress two years ago and is already in effect is Public Law 112-29, sec. 14, 125 Stat. 284. This portion provides that:

(a) IN GENERAL.—For purposes of evaluating an invention under section 102 or 103 of title 35, United States Code, any strategy for reducing, avoiding, or deferring tax liability, whether known or unknown at the time of the invention or application for patent, shall be deemed insufficient to differentiate a claimed invention from the prior art.
(b) DEFINITION.—For purposes of this section, the term ‘‘tax liability’’ refers to any liability for a tax under any Federal, State, or local law, or the law of any foreign jurisdiction, including any statute, rule, regulation, or ordinance that levies, imposes, or assesses such tax liability.
(c) EXCLUSIONS.—This section does not apply to that part of an invention that—
(1) is a method, apparatus, technology, computer program product, or system, that is used solely for preparing a tax or information return or other tax filing, including one that records, transmits, transfers, or organizes data related to such filing; or
(2) is a method, apparatus, technology, computer program product, or system used solely for financial management, to the extent that it is severable from any tax strategy or does not limit the use of any tax strategy by any taxpayer or tax advisor.
(d) RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to imply that other business methods are patentable or that other business method patents are valid.
(e) EFFECTIVE DATE; APPLICABILITY.—This section shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act [Sept. 16, 2011] and shall apply to any patent application that is pending on, or filed on or after, that date, and to any patent that is issued on or after that date.]

So from a patent examiner's perspective, whose job it is to evaluate an invention for novelty and nonobviousness under 35 U.S.C. 102 and 35 U.S.C. 103, any tax strategy will be considered indistinguishable from all other publicly available information that is relevant to a patent’s claim of originality. Tax strategy now belongs on the short—but odd—list of other things unpatentable including laws of nature, scientific principles, human beings, Jerusalem artichokes, and perpetual motion machines.

The stated public policy is "to keep the ability to interpret the tax law and to implement such interpretation in the public domain, available to all taxpayers and their advisors."  Fair enough. A reasonable person might agree that we shouldn't encourage inventors to come up with ways to cheat on taxes, even if it's within the bounds of the law. But an unintended consequence may be to drive such undesired tax strategies underground and thus less available to the general public. People will always pay good money for novel ways to save on taxes.

The Jeffersonian bargain—the basis for our patent policy—was to reward inventors with a relatively brief window of exclusivity in exchange for full disclosure. Jefferson was utilitarian on this point and wanted to promote and disclose technological innovation rather than to protect inventors’ moral rights to their discoveries.

El Paso Es Pasado

1959 was a special year one for pop music. After Buddy Holly's death and Elvis's hiatus, the initial flood of rock and roll ebbed. An undercurrent of American ballads, surf music, and folk music briefly flourished until the British invaded.

Marty Robbins' ballad tells the story of man who commits a crime of passion. He returns to the scene, still driven by passion and meets justice. The story romanticizes a simpler time when justice was meted out locally. That West is long dead. The East successfully foisted its values and mores. But where does the passion go?

Can't You See?

I missed the 20th anniversary of Toy Caldwell's death (1947-1993). He was an interesting guy: he volunteered for Vietnam (USMC), was wounded and discharged; he waited for his brother's discharge before forming the band. His loving wife, Ab, still maintains a website: link

Conversations with Henry

Henry: I was part of the baby boom you know.

Me: Come on, weren't you too old? [Henry was born in 1915]

Henry: No I mean I helped do it.

Me: Do it?

Henry: What, aren't I "with it" enough?

Me: What are you getting at, Henry?

Henry: All those babies born after the war? That was lust, not love.

Thoughts on Love & Marriage

Shakespeare taught us:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,

...but said nothing about the marriage of two bodies.


John Donne taught away from corporeal love as being true love:

Dull sublunary lovers' love
    —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
    The thing which elemented it.

Then there was the Bard of Hoboken:

Into The Blue Sparkle

This band calls themselves Slacktone and piqued my interest in instrumental surf back in 2000:

Fundamental Inequalities

Equality is a cornerstone of the law, but it's not at all a feature of natural law.

Consider Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle (but not in any deeper sense than the nature of the symbols):

 

On the left, Δχ and Δρ (position and momentum) are physical variables; on the right is a fixed value—i.e., half of ħ, the imponderable Planck constant.

Equations are like sentences with the equal sign being like the verb "to be;" they represent either equality or the more subtle notion of equivalency. Inequalities are also familiar from algebra but an inequality also expresses—more or less—an important direction of inequality. In this case, the observables are greater than or equal to the constants.

Bell's Theorem has been called "the most profound [theorem] in science" and it too reduces to an inequality. There's another: the Clausius Inequality, which embodies the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and which expresses changes in entropy against a value of zero. Comparing all three—without even understanding them—it strikes me that they all specifically pit observables against abstract constants. Is this general?

Samba Per Voi

Deborah linked an older Santana instrumental song called Samba pa' ti (Samba for you):

This was originally from their second vinyl LP called Abraxas (1970), but Carlos Santana carried it forward through the years, reincarnating the song, as the word Abraxas might have hinted at the time.

Sole Sacrifice

Carlos Santana practically invented "Latin Rock" in the 1960's. He had started out as a blues and jazz influenced musician, but in San Francisco he met Latino and African drummers who beat different rhythms. Hanging around the developing hippie scene in San Francisco, he and his band noticed that girls would spontaneously dance in new and interesting ways to the exotic sounding rhythms--usually with much more hip gyration. He and the band liked this from a stage's eye view, and so the fusion stuck.

The band Santana made its national stage debut at Woodstock in 1969. Three successful albums later, the band had begun to fray, with Carlos wanting to move more towards jazz. Caravanserai (1972) was the last Santana album that I liked. Half the band left him afterwards and later formed the core of the band Journey.

A favorite track from Caravanserai, called Waves Within:

My Funny Valentine

What I Like About You

Pretty unusual for a drummer to sing lead:

Drinkin' Again

Bleak House

A bleak song for a bleak season which will end. 

The Dead Of Winter