Finally!

Yes, finally in my 1131st month,  I've found the way to place scores in my Score page. I have listed all of my extant scores and have uploaded about one-fourth of them. As usual, this all came about rather indirectly. I started writing an ePub in which I hoped to enter all my music with a narrative description of the motivations for each creation. Soon the narrative got too verbose and the audio and video files became too large to be included in an ePub that could be easily shared. On Thanksgiving day, I was complaining to my daughter Sara's husband, Pete LeForge, who is a writer and Publisher, and he suggested uploading the big files to my web page or my Blog. I told him that my audio and some videos were already on my website and my Blog, but that I had not succeeded in uploading to my score page. I had been forced while trying to control placement of audio Links in the ePub, to learn a few basic things about html, so I took another look at my Blog page. After many trials came success, but each time an addition is made 'tiny' errors can bring down the whole page.
To view a score, simply Click on its Title in the List. I have not yet enabled Return buttons, so just click at the top of the Scroll Bar to return to the List. I do not oppose any non-commercial use of these files.

Dimensions & Chapters

I’ve decided to start giving my age in months. I’m now 1130 months old. Before I was aged two years, my age was given in Months. I estimate that I am now within the last two years. So for symmetry’s sake, months. Units of measure are important. In science, one of the first tests applied when trying to derive a new equation is; do the units come out right. So. What am I doing in my 1130th month? Trying to find why Pages.app doesn’t handle Chapter headings correctly when exporting to ePub. I’m trying to write an eBook without having to learn html, but that is not going too well. [This last sentence reminds me, in my childish old age, that as a kid we used to giggle over eliding ‘Is not’ into ‘Is snot’.] Anyway, I finally realize that TITLE and subTitle only appear once in a book, so they should not have an <h> tag. But. Chapter appears many times … so more test files to try and understand. So much to learn and so little time and memory.

Æther Again

In a recent ‘thought experiment’ I demonstrated that if an arrangement of 3 orthogonally arranged sound receivers equidistant from a sound projector were located on a movable platform, that there would be no difference in the received sound whether the platform was in motion, or not. Except. If a pulse of sound was sent [rather than a continuous sound] then differences of arrival times could be measured when the platform was in motion. To reach these findings, I assumed the speed of propagation was constant.  I concluded that absent other means of detecting a medium for sound propagation, that data obtained from experiments totally contained on a moving platform, could not determine the existence of a medium.  The differences in pulse arrival times were due to motion of the receivers during pulse transit period. So. The most fundamental proof that air is a medium for sound propagation is that placing a sound source in a bell jar and pumping the air out results in no sound.  It is difficult to imagine how a similar experiment could be performed on an æther that certainly must consist of an n-dimensional arrangement of sub-neutrino mass that possibly exists ‘everywhere’. Since all Michelson-Morley type experiments involve both source and sensors being on the same moving platform, Earth, I conclude that the technique cannot prove or disprove the presence of an æther. But. Absent proof, can we settle for something that ‘implies’ an æther:  A Constant Speed of Propagation.

Michelson-Morley Once Again

Several years ago I wrote in Musings that we could attribute the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiments to the fact that the experimental setup involved a two-way measurement of light speed. In a simple analogy, this is similar to trying to measure the speed of a river flow by recording the time for a boat to go upstream a known distance and back at a constant speed through the water and only recording the time after the round trip. If either the upstream or the downstream time was recorded, the speed of the medium could be determined. Now, I further speculate that measurements which involve a continuous source of radiation and receivers on the same platform[Earth] cannot detect motion through an æther.  However.  Motion of a platform can be measured using pulsed radiation …if… the radiated pulse travels at a constant speed independent of the motion of the source.  This presents the question: 

Is a constant speed of propagation, independent of source motion, sufficient to prove the presence of a medium?

We Pay the Tariffs

What most of us don’t realize about tariffs is … that we, the consumers of our country, are the ones who pay.  It is a tax on ourselves where, whether by intent or coincidence, it overwhelms any supposed income tax relief. Beyond that, the imposition of improper tariffs have been factors contributing to economic depressions and even civil wars. From the very beginning of our nation our government has used tariffs as a means to encourage and protect local industries and, for the most part, it worked. It allowed small entrepreneurs to grow and compete with long established industries in foreign nations. When administered by the Congress, tariffs often favored some states over others. Finally, in the early 20th Century, Congress handed the power of imposing tariffs to the Executive Branch in order to more nearly serve the needs of the whole country.
I am naive in Economics. So I’ve reached the conclusion that we, the consumers, pay the tariff by a simple thought experiment.  I arbitrarily chose Television sets as an example.  I purchased my 1st TV in 1959, probably a Motorola 19 or 20 inch B&W table model.  The choice of manufacturers at that time were US companies such as RCA, Westinghouse, and Admiral. All of these companies were soon using components supplied by startup Asian companies who had unlimited cheap labor and who, by the 1970’s, had completely forced the US companies out of the TV manufacturing business. So now that all of our TVs are imported, let’s decide to impose a 10% tariff on their price to the US consumer. A friend buys a $1200 Sony TV several months before the tariff is imposed. Now, I purchase the same TV and find that the price is $1300.  Customs collects 10% of the import value of $1000 from the merchant and sends it to the U.S.Treasury. The local merchant adds $200 as his profit to his new cost of $1100 and sells the TV to me for $1300. I have now paid the tariff imposed on Japanese TVs.
Such a tax could greatly benefit our Nation if it were designated to reduce our National Debt … rather than to build some wall …

On Stuttering

Last night, while watching the excellent film, The King’s Speech, I remembered that many years ago I stumbled upon a means of making anyone stutter and thus pointing to one possible cause.  In the film, Albert, Duke of York and 2nd in-line to become King of England, seeks help for his severe stuttering from Lionel Logue, a speech therapist,. In one scene, ‘Bertie’ reads the monologue “To be, or not to be …” perfectly whilst his hearing is blocked with headphones emitting classical music {‘pink noise’ would have been a better choice]. So. What’s going on here?
By the 1960’s most tape recorders used 3 heads in the recording process: an Erase head, a Record head, and finally, a Play head with the tape moving so as to be first erased then recorded. This results in a delay between the time a sound is recorded and when it played back to a listener. In tapes running at a speed of 15 inches/second this would result in a delay of around 100 milliseconds if the heads were separated by 1½ inches.  Speech normally reaches a speaker’s ear in less than a millisecond. If one records their voice while listening to the recording on headphones, they immediately start elongating their words to try to synchronize their speaking with what they hear in the headphones. This soon lapses into uncontrollable stammering. So. A delay in what a speaker hears when s/he speaks can certainly cause stammering. And. When blocking the path of what s/he hears when speaking allows fluent speech, then this implies a hearing delay exists somewhere in the middle or inner ear, or in the brain itself. Finding where the delay occurs may allow finding means to reduce or eliminate the delay. Otherwise, practicing physical techniques for ignoring the delays such as Logue used provides some relief. However. If they had provided King George VI with headphones issuing noise [or possibly ear plugs], he would have produced perfect radio speeches.