Do we have direct line-of-sight to neighbor's abode? We will need that for the parabolic/directional loudspeaker.

Yes.

My idol as a kid. Variation 3 is especially difficult. You have to be able say ta ta ka ta ta ka ta ta ka very fast.

I played trumpet as a kid. Fifth and sixth grade. My idol did not play trumpet. I put forth the exact quantity of effort and number of hours of practice one would expect from someone who really did not want to be a trumpet player. Made first trumpet my second year, which would be more impressive except that this was only due to my lack of diligence in being more inept than my fellow students. I quit the day of our last school concert just prior to the concert. I was told by the music teacher that this was a bad idea because there would be consequences because he would fail me. So far, no one has asked for my grade school report cards.

Wait a minute Bruce, during what hours is this guy doing construction/making noise, and during what hours do you think he should be allowed to do it?

He makes noise at all hours. Construction is mainly during the day. Apparently he will be working in his basement this weekend, so the noise should hopefully be minimal.

Nobody is permitted to make any noise that interferes with the quiet enjoyment of my property. That's a written rule.

Heh. I bought my house out in the burbs seven years ago and one benefit is space enough not to hear much from my neighbors. But that space means a big yard to keep, and often enough I'm sleeping on couches downtown too drunk to drive home, uncomfortable for a tall guy. If I had it to do over I think I'd have settled for the older house in the city within walking distance of everything. If noise were a problem, I'd sleep in the basement, maybe put up some insulation. One thing I'd not do is kick out sexy Latina intruders. Anyway, you should move to the country.

Why'd those people have to move to this neighborhood? You'd think it would be too cold for them.

Why do we say that airplanes fly, but don't say that submarines swim?

Obviously you're from out in the country.

Interesting coincidence that three of us played the trumpet (or cornet). I still have the cornet that I played all the way through high school; I started learning to play in the 7th grade I think. A cornet is one of the basic instruments in a marching band. It produces a more brassy sound than a trumpet, a trumpet being mellower in tone. They look very similar but in general a cornet is a bit smaller and shorter in structure than a trumpet. I still have my cornet after all these years, a Conn Director made in Elkhart, Indiana, purchased in about 1966 I think. We used to play a lot of Herb Albert and the TJB as they were very popular then.

Cornet is what I played too.

Exactly. A good player can make the trumpet sound worse than a bad player or even what a novice can do by accident. A badly played trumpet is a good offensive weapon. Almost as good as a tuba. Or a violin.

In grade school we would play the recorder, a cheap plastic instrument with an annoying hollow sound. My dad taught me to produce the same sound by cupping my hands together and blowing through the knuckles of my thumbs, changing the pitch by varying hand position. I got so good at it I could play my hands instead of the recorder in music class.

My dad taught me to play my hands that way too. Having trouble making it work now.

Helps to have a soft hands, or a bit of moisturizer to keep the hands sealed up. Then it's just practice. I just rattled off some Ace of Base.

Andy replaces his band who can't play with real musicians to fool the mayor.

https://www.youtube.com/v/TpY2Z478wr...027&***********

I can, to this very day, do a halfway decent trumpet-y sort of sound using just my upper teeth and lower lip. At worst, just a bit better than a kazoo. I am fairly sure that, if some stupid person were to hand me their brass instrument, that I could still fill it with spittle. I am also fairly sure that the only sounds I could make with such an instrument would be no different than if I exhaled violently through copper tubing found on any plumber's truck.

Entertainingly, I am the only one smart enough out of the three of us to have gotten out of playing an instrument at a young age. A prodigy I was. I discovered that I could play the phonograph at the highest level of skill with nary a nod to practice.

Get a keyboard and make any sound you like. The ideal would be to use the sound effect for elephants and lions when the dog is noisy. Then each time the guy has various persistent noises start playing the fanfare for modern man. Followed by New Orleans band in some funeral. If the guy persists start playing circus music. Then once again when the patterns restart. Always in the same order so as to make the point evident. Anyone who doesnt get it that you have had it with the bs is super thick and deserves to contact the local authorities and find out what are the rules about noise during weekends and evening hours or early am. But skip violence unless threatened, its beneath intelligent beings and ultimately unethical because civilized people should be able to talk to each other directly and prove their points without insulting the others in the process. First you talk. Then you talk some more and then you do the above lol!

Some losers are beyond inconsiderate. Its an international thing. My parents have same problems. Some people are misanthrope creation operators...they exist to probe the origins of war and never heard of Nash equilibrium of civilized societies trying to avoid precisely this;



ie breaking the contract.



Ps: As for the frugality/thriftiness whatever thing, the ultimate commodity is time. I am not gonna sit and waste time that i can use it to change my income generating condition and make thousands in order to save hundreds from optimal purchases. But when you are constrained by reality you can at least play close to optimal, thats all. Its game theory equilibrium against facking money culture and idiotic consumerism (keep thinking the a for u is a typo lol ). I do not exist to make some aholes rich.

Why do physicists think they have the monopoly on reality? Is it because they got the nukes?

Physicists just design and test the nukes. They don't gottem. The military has them and the politicians decide to use them, which has only happened once (two bombs were dropped). This is true in all counties that have nuclear weapons.

As for a monopoly on reality physicist are way down on that list. Farmers, Sheepherders, Bartenders, Philosophers, and Auto Mechanics are the top five. Physicists just break into the top ten in the reality circus. Probably just below Cowboys that have the number 9 spot. I will let others fill in #'s 6,7, and just add that the Jesuits' come in at number 8, squeaking by the Cowboys by just a whisper.

Not this physicist. I am, and will prove soon why, at the top of the list of reality whisperers (even if reality in the emergent sense) and know exactly what the f i am talking about regarding the future of society. If you guys think this planet has a chance without physicists and not even mathematicians alone (although they need them to help solve or imagine better the hard real life problems they think so they are not certainly below and will include in fact all scientists) at the top of decision making, then you are about to find out how wrong you are in a few decades. This system right now with the current joke for leadership (politicians, armies, lobbies and companies) and the basic idiotic structure of good luck with growth and progress if it fits some ahole's self serving illusion dream, this mockery of "freedom" unscientifically designed capitalism, the perfect follow up edition to tyranny 1.0, is marching towards the mother of all catastrophes. Politicians and armies worldwide and money culture itself are collectively unable to fight the war that is starting. They are in fact the very enemy, the creators and enablers of problems and addictions...

It might help Zeno to know that i have in my family tree and childhood memories, farmers, sheepherders, hunters and high spirit hardcore distillers as well. There is no ivory tower here.

The combined brains of SMP people when seriously not trolling are orders of magnitude better than the current system.

Monopoly on Reality Circus: Top Ten

Farmers
Sheepherders
Bartenders
Philosophers
Auto Mechanics
Mathematicians
Surveyors
Jesuits
Cowboys
Physicists


Didn't want to leave anything to chance on this so finished it up and it is the official SMP list.

Seriously now the basic idea about Physics is that it deals with reality and modeling nature and its scientists are aware of the complexity but also embrace by nature the optimism in resolving problems historically. And yet Physics is not abstract enough as Math and at least in the best of times wants to deal with the real world (forget the whatever current situation in theory). As a result of understanding how it all works (to a decent degree anyway while still having a ton of open questions) it embraces those that know better in each field and asks them to help. So people that get how the universe works, how math plays a role in it and technology can be used without creating more problems, are definitely better equipped to offer solutions than politicians with amateurish education at best.

Its all effectively a game of numbers and interactions and anticipation of future problems. Do you think politicians get what is going on beyond a narrow self serving local interest friends and lobbies viewpoint? Does Religion get it? Do the economists get it? Do companies get it beyond their own profit? Why then all these employ so many physicists for the hard functions/jobs? Oh but lets not allow them to think more than the slave jobs or design the jobs themselves and select priorities...They are ok to optimize and solve local problems, just not the big problem. YES SUPER LOL!

Eventually its all about ENERGY. You go ahead an tell me physicists do not get Energy. Oh but politicians and companies do get it, sure. They understand pollution, climate change, the human condition, quality of life metrics, they are not prejudiced at all and sold out to 100 interests.


Physicists do not have a monopoly on reality. All scientists are needed. And its still true that many insiders in all sciences and academic institutions are removed from real world issues and prove also selfish and narrow minded. They have become also politicians. True. But not the best of them. At the best of times when they are like some Feynman for example they can not only connect and empathize with the average human out there but be trusted that they will care enough to never betray their fellow citizens and are so self aware that they will never do the mistake to think they can do everything alone instead of some united coordinated manner that all people eventually help define the system and its qualities. They are confident and optimistic but not arrogant about it because ultimately their work is full of unsolved hard problems and they cannot afford to be naive.

Physics teaches you to never give up, that life is hard, most problems are not trivial, that eventually its all beautiful and uniting but in order to get there you have to earn it first and deserve the breakthrough. It teaches you to see more...

Space is about energy? Geometry is about energy?

All very reductionist. Your views at least appear to accord with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

You better believe it space/geometry is about energy/mass (ie GR field equations).

But of course you need energy to develop math even the very abstract kind. This fact is actually so impressive that if you follow the advancement of math and sciences, the proliferation of knowledge in general and our usage of energy they go hand in hand. Science and technology require a lot of energy and when they have it they develop even more of themselves, by enabling more people to participate with higher intensity and information processing. Each time mankind managed to experience an energy production/consumption breakout, great things happened. Animals, machines, fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, fusion soon etc. Imagine if we had fusion by now. If fusion research was a priority everything would be cheaper and all nuclear waste would be safe and reprocessed to stable isotopes. Why would they (futurists, astrophysicists etc) characterize a civilization (ie Kardashev scale) by how much energy it controls? Information and energy define us. But information is energy also.

Pretty soon our emissions in infrared will skyrocket as observed from far away. Instead of reflecting light back in space (albedo) as we used to, we will be converting a lot of it it to heat (byproduct of energy production from solar radiation capture and usage) and emitting it that way instead. Global warming of another kind you better believe it lol. And of course that game has its limits before we destroy environment, even without the CO2 problem! This is why we will go to space eventually, because what we need to do cannot be supported by earth without severe consequences for this paradise of life. How much energy do computers use today worldwide to support our information civilization? How far can this game go here on this system? Who better than physicists understand where this game we play is going and how dangerous it can get?


Physic as you noted is the mother of all sciences. It cant replace the others which exist independently because of severe complexity, until finally they are all united when the knowledge/origins gaps are bridged. Still of course nobody human can know them all but AI will eventually! Can you imagine the decision advantages of a transhuman intelligence that knows all sciences and has access to all information produced about them? Until then in reality from all scientists, physicists on average, at least the great ones, know the best all around mathematics outside mathematicians. Exceptions on occasion will exist of course but we are talking top averages here. So they can guide model building for society by using the results of all fields, seeing essentially math and opportunities for such model building everywhere.

I will never presume that a physicist can replace a specialist in any field, but i am very confident an average decent physicist can faster than most others get into the core issues of that field and understand them at some decent level, offering often even creative ideas/suggestions for further projects. At the same time of course its also naive to imagine that suddenly a good physicist is advanced in biology or economics etc just by superficially studying what is trendy there, and allow themselves the illusion of control without spending a decade or two in it studying it properly. You need fundamental education in each field in order to be able to spot the really important concepts and make the connections. People in other areas of science are not less intelligent or creative. At least not at the top level where they are all very good. But i bet physicists are generally up there.

It is childish to turn this into a battle between sciences for leadership. In my mind there is only one science. Its purpose is to unite everything eventually. Yes indeed chemistry is physics and biology is chemistry and abiogenesis is a physics game ultimately. But these are games physics couldn't originally handle. Not before unification.

You cannot use physics to describe societies without help from specialists, but you can draw a lot from physics understanding how to model them and notice universal patterns even, that may offer insight. Will we ever be able to use pure physics to model the brain function (like many bodies problem lol)? Well outside the fact that all exists and operates as it does due to natural laws, that physics studies, the vast complexity of it all leaves only hope to supercomputers and AI.