jomi: playing with perception

The game I’ve been playing all my life. I’m very good at it. When I was little, I had someone who played the game with me. My equal. Sometimes my better and sometimes my easy win. Sometimes my predator and sometimes my prey. On the same side fighting the demons, sometimes attacking, sometimes defending, protecting each other. That other went away. And now she’s back, along with all the he in her who match all the she in me. I love playing with her. It is everything.

The game’s next layer only reveals itself when we arrive at our common destination. We are each there first. I call this a tie, an even count across the dimensions of the playspace. When’s the next game?

This is about statistics but it isn’t about statistics exactly: Bode Miller, speaking about Ted Ligety, noted that Ligety is hurt by equipment changes, that the change in rock angle of skis changed and this enabled a more direct approach to the gates. The interesting point: the change undid a prior change that helped Ligety win because it enabled his style. The effect on overall times is not knowable because the courses are all at least slightly different in setup, in snow, in wind, in sun, in temperature, but if we assume actually remain the same, then what’s happened is a reshuffling of the players, exactly the kind of evolutionary change you expect from a changed context, with the subtlety that the actual changes are little bits of seconds. One of the interesting things about competing to a line is that people approach the line until the differences become insubstantial but repeatable. As in the top skiers tend to win even though they’re only slightly better than the next group. As in races over extensive distance, over big drops in height, and large terrain changes may be settled by a thousandth of a second. So a small action, changing the rocker angle allowed, relatively shifts times within the group of competitive skiers by reasonably small amounts sufficient enough to rewrite much of the list of top skiers.

Listening to 60’s radio, the soundtrack of my early life, I hear the definable 60’s genre so clearly, but I can see how each preserves the essence of the genre from which they came. Each track. Dick Dale and his sped-up Greek dance processed through electric instruments. Petula Clark and her perfect almost lilt – so Julie Andrews – with her night club songs updated by removing the swing, removing the jazz intonations so the effect is more straightforward talking to you instead of performing for you. Simon and Garfunkel singing the Sounds of Silence: what turns that folk tune into a 60’s song? It’s right there in front of me, a slightly rushed pace in the folk part that meets the electric-backed, entirely generic rock arrangement of 1234 that took over starting with its grafting from both white folk and the more acknowledged kinds of black roots music. By kinds of black roots music, I don’t mean the blues. I mean dance hall music, played for families, played for people drinking and dancing. The blues is another genre of roots music. That of course relates to the classic, slower blues but it’s the melding of blues and the tradition of faster dance tunes. This includes waltzes because whites and blacks in America knew the tunes.

But beyond the roll of songs – The Supremes singing about a faithless man, singing about betrayal, taking the torch song and rendering it as the happiest tune, with a touch of archness in the obviously clever rhymes so it all fits together with such craft you can see the 60’s genre’s combining of old forms. That song also brought in elements of gospel cadence, but again smoothed out and sped up. There’s a specific speed. But I don’t want to talk as much about that as this: Donovan doing Atlantis live on The Smothers Brothers Show.

There are many moments in music which preach to you. Most are just songs: an idea rendered in musical form. The idea comes from the right place but it doesn’t speak from that place, which lies deep within, but comes from the higher level of the mind. There were a few performances that dug all the way down. The Beatles doing Hey, Jude was beyond epic because they were so far beyond all the rest that the performance, which was extraordinary, was an expression of the near endless love people had for them, for the guys who had so changed and enriched their lives. Donovan doing Atlantis captured something else: the truth of the story, something that I never otherwise would have heard on the radio with such depth. On radio, especially on the AM radios and car radios of the day, the long ending could sound kind of silly. On record, it was absorbing but it was also part of a record and, frankly, didn’t stand out as being different from The Moody Blues, like Nights in White Satin, except hippy-ish in a different, equally pretentious way.

Aside, Suite: Judy Blues Eyes with its Indian undertones shifting into Mexican influence. Bringing in influences is always part of music. All turned into a 60’s genre piece – who listens to Crosby, Stills & Nash now? It’s like their entire musical genre barely exists. I find pieces of it in the more self-consciously hip retro folk stuff, though that’s more Jack White et al derived. CSN again took folk and rock elements, married them so you can see both clearly. That becomes more country rock through the Allmans and their rock treatment of blues and rhythm and blues, and of course some guys I just can’t think of in the moment.

Back to Atlantis: the way Donovan performed the song live brought a depth of meaning to the repeating chorus because he told us – and you could see the audience listening – a story about this fictional Atlantis and then it becomes a not completely coherent image ‘way down below the ocean, where I wanna be, she may be’. What does that mean? As I heard him do it, as I heard the audience join in, way down below the ocean whe-ere I wanna be she may be I knew it was true. And it seemed like everyone who heard him do it knew it was true too. Way down below the ocean whe-ere I wanna be she may be. Way down below the ocean whe-re I wanna be she may be.

I can say: Atlantis is imaginary, a construct in a story, and it sits between the hemispheres of the real world down below the ocean of everything that is between you and this imaginary realm where you are together, I and you.

Interlude: The Kingston Trio were a big part of my very early listening life. They are almost pre-60’s: they took devotional folk and smoothed and sped it up a bit but the instrumentation and vocal stylings remain more truly folk. Take off a tinge and they could have been the The Byrds. I do this with every song I hear. Worst thing right now: my New Music playlist was filled with Taylor Swift influences, from her vocal intonations to the musical genre she’s creating, except of course with a few exceptions they were clumsily realized. It’s not easy to do what she does. You can imitate her vocal stylings but it’s difficult to comprehend how she fits them to the content and the musical context. And I can’t yet explain in a few words how she sometimes accompanies her voice, sometimes generates an underlying rhythm, sometimes contrasts and other times sweetens: her bag of tricks is vast, and people have trouble realizing how she controls them. And an aside in the interlude: if Taylor Swift were a man, he’d be considered not just a popular artist who used to be a country and country-pop artist but as an innovator and creative genius of the highest order. Always the question in my head for Taylor: how do you like being the girl? The connection I feel toward this person is partly pre-gender, that her voice, as I’ve said, is the voice of the person I’d talk to and play with in my head and then, as I grew older and confined that play more and more, to my room and on top of and under the covers of my bed. That’s not sexual, though it was often playing at romance, because our roles were fairly fluid and the voices would sometimes be the boy and sometimes the girl before one voice ended up as me. I think of this as being under common control and then separating. That brings me back to the song:

Atlantis: the imaginary realm where you and I are together. That’s what I heard: at the bottom of a vast ocean, you have to go very deep to find me. So I did. I went as deep as I could. Why does anyone dive deep? To find the person within. And to realize that person within is not just a you but that it is a multi-dimensional you which comes together in the distance across the CMs lattice to a point not where you are clear and distinct but where the seed of all the dimensions related to you comes into being, where the larger patterns across the lattice invert. Believe it or not, I can describe how this happens and why in formal language. I call it the detonator because it’s what an explosion is made of and why it occurs as it does. And it’s the seed of existence. Under common control back in bed, having shifted from a more shared identity of being together in my head, separating over time as though I am under an ocean and you are under the other side of that ocean, as though I am an Endpoint of a real hemisphere and you are an Endpoint and the path Between is way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be.

I would have felt better about diving deep if the words had been ‘she will be’ but I never had a choice. I do not have within me the ability to succumb to temptation beyond a certain level. My preservation instincts kick in, both actual physical ‘you must stay alive’ instincts and the spiritual and emotional ‘you must stay alive’ instincts. I have always been true to that which guides me, partly because I felt that was truly me speaking to me and partly because I heard the voice as separate from me, as coming from a position that not only had authority over the sometimes pathetic and scared me but which had my interests absolutely at heart in a way no other voice could. One could say it’s funny how the mind works except I know how the mind works across fCM pattern layers and I don’t think it’s funny in the sense it’s unexplainable because I can explain it. Why are some people gay? I just sort of described it: I could have been a girl in a boy or a boy whose voice talked about being attracted to boys. In a few paragraphs below, I’ll sort of described the way killing ‘occurs’, connecting it to the acts of creation and destruction I can explain formally as they come into metaphoric existence.

As my boy self with whatever girl remains in me – quite a lot – separated from the girl self – and that girl self has a ton of boy in it too – stories came to me that explained what happened. Why can’t we be together anymore? Because you looked at yourself while we were playing and you saw yourself in a way that meant we could never become one again. Because I wandered too far and though I came back I could never undo the wandering and each step I’d take only entangled me more and more in my separate aloneness. My head filled with images of an entire family behind a thin sheet of infinitely flexible glass and the more we reached out to touch each other the more that which kept us apart developed and it became harder and harder to find a place where we were almost together. These were the most difficult parts of my early life: being sent on my way in the hope I’d find the way home. And East of Eden he was cast. Into the rising sun, into morning, into this life, into the expectation of death and all the intimations of mortality. Into this journey.

Then as I became a bit older a new story developed. I started with a science fiction story about a kind of endless war between good and evil and a completely dispossessed soldier, not even a wandering samurai though there are parallels, who somehow survived totally consuming combat to become a specialist in strategic reading of the patterns by which the enemy acts. I sort of remember the moment when the story shifted: the realization there has to be better way to fight the evil than attacking the symptoms of evil, that we should be able to read the symptoms of evil to determine where it will act and how we need to prepare for what it might do. This would allow us to focus our resources more efficiently to gain an advantage. Even if evil learned what we were doing, even if any advantage was temporary, the best choice was pursuing this path because only continuous diagnosing might reveal the evil’s essential abilities and tricks. This story started because I saw Marta Kristen on Lost in Space. If I insert the photo of her, you’d say: she looks like Taylor Swift. Yep. My other big crush was Yvonne Craig – Batgirl on TV – and she looks like Taylor with dark hair (and with different lips, like if you took Marta’s lips and …). Then there was Janet Lynn, the figure skater. But the main one was Judy Robinson (on TV) and it wasn’t because she could act or because would fantasize about her sexually or really in any other way; it was literally that I felt better when I’d see her and each moment she’d be on screen – and not talking because that only distracted me – I would try to fix her image in my head in three dimensions.

The story shifted very quickly to me running a strategy group and then rising to command a new kind of strategy group, one devoted to the highest level readings of the pattern. I reported to High Command. I had a crew. Since the story would iterate and improve, discarding elements that could not remain real – I’ll explain that in a moment – I can’t say exactly how this went but the general idea is that I was told or assigned a new group member, sometimes over my objections – because I don’t like being told what to do – and sometimes through devices, like being given resumes of candidates that I always rejected as part of the process of reviewing candidates and finding the one so spectacular I got angry at being manipulated and demanded to know why I hadn’t been made aware earlier. (The answer is indistinct in my head. It was usually a combination of dismissal, of telling me why I shouldn’t whine, and that she wasn’t ready and they were protecting her until she was ready.)

There’s a weird moment in the story, but first to explain discarding elements: a story is the reduction to real numbers of the complex and imaginary elements that extend into CMs and this graphs as a line associated with an area that encompasses where the thread may go, and some points counted in one iteration are excluded as the algorithm for counting the line becomes more efficient. This, by the way, is how fetishes develop, and that brings up something I was well aware of, that a story can simplify to the point where it counts the story as such a logical whole that it loses the magic, meaning it loses the need to be iterated – kind of sad, isn’t it, to see where logic and the loss of magic intersect?

That weird moment in the story came about because I developed the team characters. They were real ‘people’: though I can’t say what they looked like, I knew the characteristics of their minds and personalities. That was part of my job. And I was really good at my job. So the weird moment is when one of them – I think of him as a kind of blob with acute sensibilities – said to me ‘she looks like you’. The weirdness is that I had no idea what I looked like and thus had no idea if she looked like me. I was completely dispossessed from any ‘actual’ place. I could see how people were – and the command base was very busy – but I could never see me.

Back to Atlantis. I don’t think another song affected me as much and I didn’t much like the album. Candidates from that era? Tom Dooley. Hang down you head, Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry, poor boy you’re going to die. I never cared much for the story words about his crime – and yes, it’s the same story as I Hung My Head (by Sting, performed by Johnny Cash) with the crime of passion turned into a foolish accident – but the statement of mortality is infinitely true. It’s the young Trojan captive about to be killed by Achilles because we all die so why not now and why not by the hand of the near-God for anyone who kills you acts as God. Yes, I have always thought like that, more age appropriately and not as articulately, but I could put myself in Tom’s place except for the bad things he’d done because I’d never do that and yet life can kill you.

Another? Peter, Paul & Mary’s version of I’m Leaving On A Jet Plane, but only some of the words, nearly all in the first and last verse. Each time I hear that song my head fills with an image of a young man leaving to go to war. It’s early morning and he goes in to kiss his little sister goodbye. She stirs for a moment and then goes to sleep but she gets up, walks into the hall, and sees her brother hug his mother and father goodbye at the bottom of the stairs. And then he opens the door. And he’s gone and she goes to the window and watches him get in a taxi. And then she’s sitting at the table and she looks at the place where he would be sitting. It’s sometimes a little boy. It’s sometimes a father leaving. But it’s always a leaving in the deepest sense of leaving: I may never be back and I promise you I’ll try to come home and I promise you I will always love you. It’s the Mudi of leaving.

If you don’t see a consistent theme, you’re not reading. This is me. Always has been. I’ve never controlled it. I’ve been controlled by it. I’m going to take this to a more private level of notes.

I decided to answer a Quora about why Einstein is the greatest scientist:

‘There have been a handful of people who changed how the world is seen. The wrong word in the question is ‘scientist’ because Albert was a great scientist but the category includes every great observer and experimenter, so how do you differentiate between Copernicus and James Clerk Maxwell? If you add in mathematicians, who are scientists, then how do you differentiate between Couchy and Humphrey Davy? It’s as a thinker that Einstein stands above nearly all the rest. Newton takes grief – undeservedly – because his great idea is still undervalued: everything falls. The story of the apple is intentional and deep and Newton almost directly confirms this is how he experienced it: not as an object falling on his head or near him but as an apple, the fruit of knowledge in our association from the Garden of Eden, the fruit of knowing, and he connected in his head the fallen state of an apple on the ground, with the state of it hanging on a tree – and through its development over a summer and back through the history of each tree – with the state of all things, and he took the religious idea, which he was loathe to admit he took, and he saw that all things are indeed ‘fallen’ and that means they literally fall, and that connected to the motion of the planets around the sun, which he saw in an instant explained Kepler. That people still don’t get the profundity of that idea shocks me: everything falls. Absolutely everything falls. So what did Albert do? He didn’t ‘prove Newton wrong’: he in fact proved that Newtonian mechanics in fact works perfectly well except at edges which no one in the 17thC could ever have seen existed. Example: the absurdity of ‘Vulcan’ – not Spock but a presumed planet that would explain the wiggle in the orbit of Mercury. People in the early 20thC actually thought there could be and must be a planet stuck in there though they could never actually see it because they could not comprehend any other explanation except something physical stuck between Mercury and the sun. People have limited imaginations.

Before I talk about Albert, let me mention another form of imagination, that exemplified by Richard Feynman (and I’d say Maxwell and others). That imagination is more, as Richard would often say, the application of the tools you have in your head to a problem and then accepting that what the tools say is true must be true. That is the essence of his silly little drawings: each one represents something that either is or that is happening, a state or a process, and each one can be assigned a value because we’ve measured that existence or that process. He then kept applying that tool so it developed depth: if this happens then that means these other things could have existed and happened and he’d make little drawings of all those possibilities. This builds into layers – it’s important to think of those as layers going within or into existence as though what occurs is made up of multi-layered existences and processes. He couldn’t explain this. He made not being able to explain this a substantial part of his public and teaching persona.

Albert is one of the rare explainers in history. There have been great labelers. My favorite is whoever – in India, I expect – came up with the notation for 0 because that symbol realizes the complexity inherent in the notions of starting and stopping and absence of things. As in, you have 3 cookies and eat 3 cookies so you have 0 cookies. You don’t have 0 everything, just 0 cookies, which implies that not only are you a pig for eating all the cookies but that you’re likely pretty full of cookies and that you had 3 cookies, and so on. Extraordinarily deep concept rendered in a symbol.

What did Albert explain? In his own words: everything is relative. People barely get the meaning of that and it’s been over a century. Albert absolutely believed that everything is relative. He wrote that in his letters. It infuses all his work. Since this comes up often, he takes undeserved grief for not accepting certain essences of quantum mechanics because he could not conceive of a mechanism by which entanglement over distance, meaning beyond the limits of the radiative frame, could occur. Again, people get wrong what he was doing: he wasn’t so much arguing that quantum entanglement could not exist as arguing that if it exists then we need to be extremely careful in describing how and why it can exist so we can then figure out the mechanism by which it does. (As an aside, look up Bell’s Inequality for a really good, simple demonstration.) He was probing for the holes in his own thoughts: if everything is relative, then how do relative changes occur essentially outside the constraints of space-time, outside the limits of radiative existence? I keep saying radiative existence or frame. Again, the importance of this is generally missed: what Albert did by taking c as given was organize the events and processes within any frame so they all have definable pasts, presents and futures. These fit together within a frame. They relate to each other across frames, thus an accelerated frame becomes special relativity and the existence of multiple frames becomes general relativity. Relativity just means relationship of frames. You are riding on a train and you share that frame with the people in your carriage and you go past people who are not in your frame. We all know that. Albert extended this just like Newton did to the limits of existence: everything falls becomes everything falls relative to something else. I’ll explain a bit.

To apply the apple and its religious connotations, relativity is a quintessentially Jewish statement: as some things fall, other things rise because a fall in one direction is a rise in another. This is Jewish because in Judaism the conception of God is the abstraction of all names and labels and concepts of all the Gods and all the good and harm that occurs through any conception of God – and in the Jewish world the name for God is literally ‘the Name’ because no name suffices. I assume Albert was highly influenced by the imagery of Jacob’s Ladder because that metaphor describes the process by which the layers of creation relate, through a ladder of rungs, meaning frames connected in a line. I sometimes think he spent his life rearranging the rungs of the ladder, imagining he was climbing up it or sliding down really fast. What that means when taken to the physical extreme is everything from the Big Bang – including the TV show – and stuff like black holes, but what it also means is that some things climb except they tend to be really ‘light’ – like the angels using Jacob’s Ladder. If Isaac saw directionality in the influence of one object on another, Albert saw bidirectionality in the relationship of one object to another. As an aside, I would have loved to hear what Albert and Kurt Gödel said to each other about this. Kurt was obsessed with the potential rise of evil: they had both witnessed this. One story is that Albert kept Kurt on track in his citizenship process because Kurt would spin into ways in which the US Constitution could be perverted to allow the rise of a Nazi-like state. Nuts yes, but that nuttiness reflected Kurt’s extraordinarily deep understanding of logical process – so deep he could become untethered from physical limits of logical process – and they both believed that evil was a thing that rose when goodness fell. Think of Yeats and the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem. The connection between religious concepts – as opposed to religious practice – is very deep.

I guess I should mention the current sad state. Albert would be depressed. Why? Because the current generalized belief is that no explanation is possible. I noted that Albert kept questioning but now the idea is that questioning is useless because the answer is no answer is possible. The sad thing is people don’t grasp this is the most prideful thing humans can do: to presume this is the answer just because they can’t imagine one is hubris. It’s worse than the idea that Vulcan must exist because the only explanation is a physical object between Mercury and the sun. I hate to say this but the tinkerer mindset has filtered into the general imagination: we don’t have the tools to figure out an answer, no way to see how we can develop those tools, so therefore the tools don’t exist and the answer therefore doesn’t exist.’

I have been experimenting with doing things while trusting my hands without looking. I reduce the visual overwatch, sometimes completely removing my vision by pointing it elsewhere, sometimes moving the ‘action’ to the periphery while I consciously explore other things in view, meaning I reduce my consciousness and my vision as far as I can without completely removing them from the act being visible. An example is making eggs. I found I make eggs better without looking. My hands know how to break eggs better than my sight plus hands do. I can do many common tasks better when I either remove them from or reduce them in my visual perception. I’ve also found that doing something with one hand while looking also means better eggs – most of the time – because that act of partially looking enables my working hand to complete the parts of that task that require visual oversight without complications. These complications are well meant questions, worries and attempts toward perfection, but they cause interference with the carrying out of the activity. I can now express this across all the ways I’ve developed fCM and fCMd.

When I say eggs, I mean a special thing. My method is to salt the pan and let it warm on low heat, then break in the eggs and let them sit until they show sufficient cloudiness, then stir, let sit some more – heat may be slightly adjusted to speed or slow down and I may move the pan if it looks uneven in cooking – and then stir. Repeat until the eggs start to dry, move around so they don’t form a hard skin, then gently turn to one side, then typically back so the skin is only as thick as necessary to lift and hold. Turn out. This makes eggs that are contained in a roll or half moon shape but which are custardly and salty and molten inside. The best thing I eat regularly. It’s easy to watch too much, to worry them too much. Oh, I forgot: I did this because I got a new non-stick pan and wanted to never use it on high heat or with a fat, just as a non-stick surface. The rest was intuition the first time, then I got worse as I over-watched it, then I let it happen by shifting the visibility to the edges of my conscious visual frame. The hands embody so much of what the brain has learned.

I use this process in boxing as well. The hands know the motions ancients used because they are hands the ancients used just on my body. It’s a process discovering the ancient motions of attack and defense and much of that process is identifying not only when things ‘feel right’ but the body shapes and movements when that occurs. This gets deeply into Hindu: the poses in yoga, the poses attributed to a God, represent specific, often very complicated body arrangements that are epigrams for all the twisting and turning and all the learning and all the pathways it took you to get to that pose. These are reversed in the representations of the Gods so they are the emitters and receivers; they represent all the pathways that come to you and they represent the ends of the pathways you follow.

Many years ago when I considered really writing poetry – so I did and didn’t enjoy doing it – I found the problem in me was that I wanted to write not about my experience but about experience. I grew up in an era when ‘confessional poetry’ was the norm. And it grew out of ‘contemporary poetry’, meaning TS Eliot et al, which abstracted personal experience as though it were freighted with the deepest meanings. Time, gentlemen, time invoked in a pub for last call also echoes MacBeth, echoes existence. And that all seemed only possible if you wrote about yourself and your life. Like Roethke’s only really good poem about his drunken father waltzing with him. Or Robert Lowell talking about his mother. And then it went into McKuen and poetry now became just a bunch of words that may or may not symbolize something or maybe they mean something else because the absence of a word or the space – or the punctuation, thanks e.e. cummings – can mean something, so maybe not writing poetry is actually writing poetry and then you might as well just stay in your room. Or not.

I kind of like Emily Dickinson but her interests were all so narrowly about her specific place and God, and I actually am interested in other places, other times and other things, and particularly in how people experience. So I wrote a few poems like that. One was from the perspective of young men in WWI, meaning those raised to be consumed by the machine gun and artillery shell. One was a Native American young man offering a prayer to the Great Spirit whose eyes watch over him day and night. And one was of a young man knowing he was going to be murdered when the train stopped. I couldn’t make it through the last one in my head. It became too real, like I was watching a movie I was in. With the WWI poem, I could write it at an emotional distance. The other was just a snippet from life so I could physically live it in my mind over and over until the words became clear. I could not live through the last. So I pulled myself off the train.

The only thing harder than poetry is painting. Poetry made me reach the best and worst spots humans can occupy. Painting just fucking wore me out. I’d paint and my eyes would start to devour the image. Very hard to control how hard you think about what you’re making when you’re making something you see in your head. I developed some workarounds – dashing things off, intentionally reducing the emotional and technical palette – but I could see one thing very clearly: to paint to the level I knew inside me I could reach would require a devotion to it that I did not have. Anything else would be cheating. I can’t cheat myself. I ended up solving really difficult problems in part because, when all these temptations were set aside, that was the only one left, the temptation to figure out the answers that have never been figured out. I succumbed to that temptation: forgive me.

In response to an email that suggested the solution to guns is more liberal seats on the Supreme Court, I wrote this:

‘I would expect such a ruling to be very careful. The idea would, I think, need to be that the conception of mass shootings was so completely unknown to the Founders that this form of menace could not be comprehended in an originalist perspective on the 2nd amendment. I’ve never seen this idea advanced in print. I’m unaware of any ruling like that. It is not the same as saying times have changed, because the originalist perspective is that’s why you have a Constitution, because times change and you need to follow the blueprint through changing times. I think it would need to hang on the founding principles of life and liberty, and such basics as ‘preservation of the common good’ and ‘domestic tranquility’ in the Preamble, so the unforeseen events of mass shootings would be deemed to be something the Founders would have accounted for in the 2nd Amendment if they’d been able to foresee them. The argument is fairly strong that the Founders did not believe rights would – not should but would – cause massive loss of life and liberty. I think you can assume that’s true. This would be arguing the Founders would have done something else if they’d been able to foresee the extent of harm done by a largely unfettered right they clearly intended to create. It’s a delicate form of originalist interpretation in which you infer what the Founders would have done because something so dramatically unforeseen happened that the bounds of ‘intent’ need to be redefined in light of the unforeseen having occurred. To be cute about it, this would need to be treated like a ‘tail event’ or black swan event: not as an open invitation to reinterpret the Constitution but as the single example of something so out of line with what the Founders would have intended that we are required to attribute intent to them  that covers what has occurred.

Jonathan’

People like to construct reasons why the Supreme Court held the way they did. Unimportant: they ruled the 2nd Amendment is an individual right. The ruling was a surprise but it exists. The NRA didn’t create it. Supreme Court justices interpret the Constitution, and they are independent thinkers. People like to argue that the 2nd Amendment was related to slavery – which is partly true because the ‘militia’ was argued for partly by southerners fearing slave rebellion – but it doesn’t matter why the 2nd Amendment was written, but that it exists and this is how it has been interpreted. BTW, the Court was tremendously reluctant to take gun cases, which is why the ruling took over 200 years! Again, unimportant except as history.

My argument is that the Constitution is a contract, a specific form known generally as a compact, as an agreement among parties. Contract law handles foreseeability: if unforeseeable events happen, then they are fit to what the intent would appear to be in the existing contract, meaning the existing contract is taken as an embodiment of principles. This is how, for example, a trust is reformed. An example is John Paul Getty’s mother’s trust was set up to prevent him from speculating but then over time an unforeseeable event arrived in the form of an offer to purchase that would give the trust shares or other interests along with cash. The trust was only allowed to own bonds of specific governments – some defunct – so the question was whether the goal of the trust to provide would be allowed to take precedence over the literal words and past conduct. The idea was that the beneficiaries would be worse off just because a long dead person didn’t contemplate such a scenario. I see mass casualty gun violence as an unforeseen event which conflict with the premises of the Constitutional contract.

I note that Connecticut’s gun law about assault rifles – here – is fairly comprehensive; it not only lists specific models but restricts the number of features to 1, meaning the cafeteria list of features like folding stock and pistol grip is any 1, so any rifle with any of these features is regulated. I can’t see this law as being Constitutional under Heller unless the Court reinterprets the 2nd Amendment. That’s my point: there needs to be a Constitutional reason why the precedent is refined, one that addresses the originalist concerns and the literal wording.

Updated: I also think the best rationale may be to say that states have the ability to decide gun laws for their own citizens because the unforeseen issue may be seen differently in each state. That would enable Connecticut to maintain gun laws that, as Heller now stands, are not constitutional.

I wrote this to Daring Fireball after John Gruber posted a note about David Pogue’s blind testing of HomePod. I realized this morning I could be clearer or more complete in a relatively few words I’m typing out now. First, the email:

‘I respect David – musician and all – but he doesn’t grasp blind testing. Blind testing has the effect of making individual elements stand out without context. It adds a form of randomness, something statisticians know through ideas like power and the n of iterations. Run a blind test over and over and you may get something useful, like this mortality improvement actually occurs, but you also get a lot of randomness because each iteration approaches randomness for that context. This doesn’t mean the speakers sound the same or that any particular blind ranking of preference is better than another. It means that in a blind test these are typical results when – this is important – the preferences you develop when listening specifically over time is removed. Listening over time is the same as adding power and n iterations statistically: a picture develops that has meaning. Blind testing can be worse than A-B testing because it strips out the meaning that comes with power and iteration. With subjective measures of ‘like’, each path through the choices tends to be the same as any other path within certain limitations. At this point, I can invoke ESP: take away all possible context so there is choice of say 5 colors or shapes and you get results that fluctuate. The difference to ESP is you can’t learn to identify the next shape, meaning the iterations are entirely separate, while there is enough contextual detail in a continuing sound blind test that some people may learn. The interesting thing is this doesn’t mean they learn the best answer, just that they learn an answer. Think of all the studied products that flop and it’s only when they flop that you realize the answer generated by all that market research was wrong, that it was the pathway which for some reason was the one taken. But that gets into the philosophy of statistics in a deep way.

My impression of HomePod is that they’ve done the following: a) they recognized that nearly all people now have learned to listen to music through earphones or headphones, and b) they’ve recreated the earphone/headphone experience for a room. I like to say they’ve moved the ears from earphone to the ear room. The key, I think, is they’ve mastered a big chunk of the algorithms for adjusting relative pitch as loudness changes – since if you make some pitches louder, they sound louder than another pitch made the same amount louder unless you curve the response. They appear to have implemented this largely through a volume slider. I may be wrong – this is intuition – but I think one reason they bought Beats is Beats had actually been attacking this problem well; their headphones were made to match the experience of a listener taking in music at various volumes in various settings. You can hear it: if you turn up Beats, they give you bass but they keep the bass in the right relative arrangement when you turn the volume down. I surmise Dre and Iovine et al would be able to hear that way because that is what they do so well! Beats really was built by music producers instead of audiophiles and engineers.

My take on HomePod is that it now competes with my iPad for best Apple device I’ve ever bought. And the iPad changed my life. (It has become my computer and much more.)

I expect they developed HomePod to be played through your phone because your phone has a perfect volume slider and you can adjust each track and within each track to your liking, as you do with your earphones now. They needed voice, but the ideal listening method is to fiddle with the volume slider. Why? Because they also realized people can listen not only to just about anything but that they listen in playlists of songs and pierces by various artists, each recorded differently, sometimes with wildly different soundstages and dynamics. If I’m listening to St. Matthew’s Passion – Erbarme Dich – then I change the slider slightly when Nirvana comes on.

To connect this to the statistics stuff, the small adjustments you make with the volume slider has the contextual effect of making you believe the music sounds better. This is a well known effect. Think food served in a nice place makes you think the food tastes better. So they built in a way to relate to the device that really is Apple: the more you play with the it, the more connected you feel to it. That is so much of the essence of what Apple does. That is why my X is now competing for best device: they added in  necessary elegance which connects to deeper enjoyment levels that reinforce as I become intuitively efficient with the elegant gestures. Again: Apple’s method of closing the gap between you and your device at work. If you were to blind test volume slider adjustments, you’d get garbage results. And if you were to play a track and pretend to adjust, you could test versions of placebo effect, meaning a real difference in effect or measurement that comes out of no difference in action. The power of context!’

Now the addition: it occurred to me that I can perhaps explain a bit more, given that people have great difficulty with the concept of randomness. At the bottom level of existence, there is a process by which completely random existence maps. The base level is a lattice I label CMs for the ‘C Mechanism structure’, where C stands for counting and choice, constraint and context. This lattice represents existence states across which processes count and choose within the constraint of context. Counting becomes SBE and choice becomes S-PS-2PS, while constraint and context become fCM. The graphical representation is fCMd.

Take a series of SBE lines in a 1-0 relationship so there is a common End if you lay out all the Starts around that End. Now tangle some. How does that happen? If you take an ideal square and pin it along a hypotenuse, all the other lines are longer than the hypotenuse. Think of these as slack and the hypotenuse is in ideal tension. By ideal tension, I mean a state of tension which maintains the hypotenuse across all dimensions. Example is you can’t pull it tighter and tighter because that compresses the square and all the longer lines start to get mashed together. As they mash together, the differences between their paths – which are connected point locations in CMs – become less clear and they can cross over each other. As the square compresses, SBE can run backwards because directionality is connected point locations in CMs and that can become unclear too (as life on this earth daily reminds). That makes a knot. This is the same process as shifting the origin of an ideal circle where the points are either at origin and circumference or at diameter ends.

As an aside, this is why circles have their mystery: they always appear both as an object with a diameter and as an object with an origin and thus a radius. This separates them from the sticks of SBE that connect the dots of CMs. Compared to the sticks, that is who we are: the patterns that appear across layers of stick-connected CMs lattice. I represent as best I can the directional pattern across CMs. This can be described as the side which believes in growth, specifically in nurturing growth, which means application of constraint in the short term to provide the greatest future growth. The other side approaches the issue differently: they reduce the pattern toward the level of CMs, meaning toward points connected by sticks. These two Endpoints form the Mudi of being, meaning the existence of being and the process of being. These align as stacks of x-yR along the zK – i.e., as stacks of planes conceived of as ideal squares or circles along an axis. The zK counts toward more CMs being filled with fCM, meaning with patterns overlaid on the sticks of SBE, and toward just sticks and points of CMs. Complex existence in one direction, and isolated existence in the other. The choice in the other direction is fCM entropic, meaning it reduces all the energy of connection in the pattern layers of fCM toward the lowest possible state visible.

I take this to a level above where the Mudi of being is counted. The directional choice of their side reduces Things to their essence until they disappear and become points at the end of sticks to be used in some other pattern. The directional choice of our side enlarges things so that thing exists in the next pattern. It becomes a choice of forever: do you join the group that wants to reduce your existence to potential, in which you are progressively erased as it shifts into the next pattern, or do you join the group that maximize your existence, in which you connect to pattern that is growing as it shifts to the next pattern. You are and will be a point in CMs, a multi-dimensional Thing, and you have a choice. That choice is always Between the steps of your existence as it iterates in CMs as a line of points. Do you pick the direction that grows or the one that shrinks? Throughout human history, people have joined the one that appears to grow: the movement, the idea, the belief without understanding that relative choice across multi-dimensional identities confuses directionality so what you think is ‘good’ direction is actually ‘bad’. The simplest way I can say this is: when you hurt people, you aren’t nurturing. When you harm, you aren’t nurturing. When you aren’t teaching, you aren’t nurturing. When you aren’t learning, you aren’t nurturing. When you aren’t opening your mind to the other perspective, you aren’t nurturing.

I walked across a field of evenly sized stones to get here. That’s a literal statement.

I got in my car and experienced intense vertigo. I decided that I had to go by the gym to make it home so I’d give working it out a shot. I did that: I realized during an extremely intense partially inverted stretch that I was intimately absorbed in observing all the things I was experiencing, and then I lifted my head and kept trying to count the new view but the depth of field was different so I moved my focus rapidly around without being able to specifically focus on things at the right ‘speed’ for the new field. Got really dizzy really fast. So I was able to phrase the vertigo as a visual field counting mis-match. Thus the Elizabeth Browning quote! I was able to control the vertigo!

Challenges in beam-formed arrays. Take an emitting source. And take a space with objects in it. Design the best system for the emitting source to communicate information to another source which we treat as reflecting and absorbing information. In other words, you moving around or sitting in a room with furniture and a speaker emitting sound. The best answer is beams that measure the space and shape the sound to fit that space. Since you’re moving around, the beams have to adjust quickly. Take you are standing: the beams find you and adjust the sound using a volume slider that keeps the various cycles sounding the same relative to each other as they increase or decrease. These are not trivial calculations, as anyone who ever tried to locate a pair of stereo speakers in the exact right spot for the exact right volume for that piece of music knows.

As an aside, I think one importance of HomePod is that it has the ability to teach people to enjoy music more by teaching all those who grew up with earphones how to enjoy in a room. It would be my favorite Apple device ever except I’m typing this on my iPad and it completely changed my life. My iPhone is more competitive in the ranking too, now that the X has added elements of necessary elegance. Back to the show …

Back to my equivalence of beam-forming with you locating stereo speakers. When you have a pair of speakers, you know exactly where the music sounds best no matter what’s playing and at what volume. You processed all the experiences of hearing music and mapped that information to the physical space of the room across a number of dimensions: this record sounds best when you sit right here and it’s at this volume unless it’s raining outside because then it needs to be louder except really something else would actually sound better and would be your choice if you had the freedom to pick. That sentence covers a lot of points: it pins spots in the room to specific choice, so if you have no degree of freedom to choose then you map the room this way. That map extends to another level: say you have no degree of freedom over the loudness, that though you prefer another volume all together, then if you have no choice you know it sounds better over there and now you have to consider changing your space, which means you cross over the map back and forth as you evaluate your options. Say you’re a kid. First reaction may be to move away and then you move to a specific spot as you become more aware of what has been making you move away. I said that carefully: you become more aware of stuff that is happening to you. This is true at any age. It fascinates me to watch it occur in children.

As an aside, I could say my journey has been trying to understand the depths and by that I don’t just mean ‘deep ideas’ but also ‘shallow ideas’ because depths is plural of depth. And I needed to understand areas with depths up and out, and then how depth in one direction is also shallowness in the other. That is how I developed the concept of Mudi. It actually comes out of me regularizing – meaning I assign repeatable labels to make a terminology that then becomes shorthand that connects to both words and drawings. I regularized my relationship to the other person in my head. I guess this has become a bit more than an aside. OK, I’ll go there. The other person in my head. Describe her. She’s gorgeous because I see her thinking and it’s beautiful. Messy and excitable and sometimes sad and everything else that I see in me. You may be thinking ‘are you saying you’re a girl?’ The answer is no. I’m male. But there is a female inside me and she’s always been there – in fact, I’d say she’s been in charge of many of my life decisions, including the names of my children. I’m trying to make clear that as the male in my head I talk to the female and we’re not the same. That’s a blunt consequence of my work: a Taylor Field is naturally male-female and female-male when there’s directionality. I can draw it for you. I’ve hesitated to add drawings to my work because I haven’t worked out all the terminology yet. I mean for example stuff like when to use a double-headed arrow versus a double-headed arrow made of two parallel lines. I only figured that out recently: first is for SBE drawings, second covers more situations, from tick-tock clock hands – because they add the layers indicated by the parallel lines – to the directional filling of fCM across the fCMd – by which I mean pattern fills drawings of squares and circles. I think double-headed stick lines for Start-Between-End and pattern filling pathways for fundamental CM in both fCM and fCMd. As a further aside, I see the sticks as separate from us; we as patterned objects move along stick lines in any direction, so the stick people work for both sides, for directions that nurture patterned objects and directions that reduce them. It isn’t because they’re evil. They tell you the truth about the situation without revealing what that means. The decision is always yours and each choice is an acceptance of a road they’ve shown you. They are the revelators. I suppose that when you’re heading into the abyss you might see them as soul-suckers taking away your essence.

And as yet a further aside, the other person in my head is the one I’d draw lines through my mashed potatoes with the tines of my fork, the one who saw each pea and who balanced eating this one or that one or maybe none because they look so cool in a line pretending to be maybe soldiers or maybe they’re dancing or this is the king, no the queen, and these peas are defending her from the fork. The root of my affinity to Taylor Swift is what I hear and see is the other person thinking. The closest that has ever come before? There are moments in Jane Austen when she shows herself and I see how they compare to her care in writing: like when Elizabeth accepts D’Arcy she doesn’t render it directly because she could not reduce the great complexity of that moment to words without losing the complexity. I’m sure she tried writing it as the narrator but she saw that didn’t work. She tried writing some of D’Arcy’s words but they all sounded false because she knew Elizabeth would break. Those pages are her restraint in love because as Elizabeth she could not speak Jane’s heart, and as Jane she could not describe Elizabeth’s feelings. She chose to render Elizabeth as patient in her happiness, allowing D’Arcy to speak words Jane herself never heard outside her head. She shied away at the end from portraying true love. It’s predestined love of two people across the widest possible diameter that separates them in their circle: he half nobility, all but noble himself, incredibly wealthy and at the very top of the gentry, and her half tradesman, one foot in the gentry, with all signs pointing to a drop out of the gentry once her father died. That’s how I see Jane. And bless her for writing Persuasion for Cassandra. What dos Anne say? Something like give a woman credit for loving even when all hope is gone. Can you imagine Cassandra reading that, hearing Jane tell it to her? This is why I went to Chawton, though it feels nearly nothing of her, and to Winchester Cathedral.

There is a moment in The Iliad when young Trojan captives are brought to him and as they beg for their lives he says we all die so why not here and why not now and why not me? This connects across to the Native American expression ‘it is a good day to die’ – attributed to Crazy Horse though I’ve read ideas that it was on old saying or not a saying at all but that it fit the conception of the natives as their way of life faded. It doesn’t actually agree with the little I know about actual debates in tribes. I found an amazing book in the Yale stacks. It was by a white guy raised by a Kansas tribe. He describes 3 basic parties: those who wanted to fight no matter what, better to fight and die than concede or leave; those who thought there could be accommodation; and those who knew more or had heard and feared more about the white men and who believed they were doomed. Each party had parts. The fight group divided, for example, into those who thought the Great Spirit would reward them for fighting with victory, all the way across to those who believed the Great Spirit wanted them to fight just to die. The ideas of the Great Spirit’s intent carried to those who believe they were doomed: did this mean the Great Spirit rejected the red man?

As to Shakespeare, I see him as an almost opposite of Jane, as a visage of the partner in her head: he pouring his nuance into the words on every page and she carefully withholding, carefully delineating emotions and situations. I feel Shakespeare enacts the male side of the emotions a woman feels. He puts dimensions into words as Jane puts dimensions into the characters. Can you say you know Hamlet? He says amazing things but he’s a hot-headed idiot whose inability to control himself ends up destroying the lives of everyone even to the point of the kingdom being taken over. Will wrote men better than women and then he doesn’t portray their inner selves as much as he has them say what the author thinks about inner selves. He was definitely Christian in his thinking. Think how Claudius goes to prayer, confesses his sin and acknowledges he can’t give up the crown and queen he won through murder. All his work is about love: of things, of power, of love so over-powering Romeo and Juliet end up dead by mistake, of love of the making of art about love. I see Jane taking the way Will wrote the ideas as coming through characters and inserting the inner lives that make Elizabeth and Anne and even Fanny Price more real women with real feelings in real situations where they express them as they fit those situations. They are, often to me, two halves of a similar if not same coin.

I can’t compare visual art so easily. How do I say why Caravaggio is so great? And if I talk about comparing ‘ideas’, then I start to describe me, so I’ll stop. I can describe me though: I put lavender bitters in my drinking water. It sort of smells like a gin & tonic and then it tastes like flowers. Those say a lot about me.

Take the song ‘Gorgeous’. I like to say ‘hello gorgeous’ to myself in funny accents. A lot of variations on English but also other language speakers either hearing or saying the words. I do it in a variety of meanings, from louche to what you say when you see a little girl in a princess costume (if you don’t say your majesty – his hand and arm move in a courtly gesture). It can be hello gorgeous to a mourning dove or hello gorgeous to the me I see in the mirror when I’m seeing me not as me but as someone I can say hello gorgeous too. I do a lot of hello gorgeous in a sort of 20’s gangster fashion that becomes more like a robot as I work on it. That’s why when I hear the song I hear myself – and this other in my head – tossing around the meanings. I hear play, sometimes child’s and sometimes adult, sometimes innocent and sometimes romantic and sometimes sexual and always in fun because even the naughty scenarios are play. Hello gorgeous he whispers into her ear. Her eyes twist to see him but he’s behind her and she can’t turn so she submits body and then soul, soul then body, piece by piece, quivering as the sensations flow.

Back, believe it or not, to beam forming. I can describe my work as beam forming. Consider my ideal square. Imagine it is your head as Between and S and E are your ears and . Or you pick a diameter of an ideal circle and those points on the circumference are your ears. Now reverse so what you hear is Between the points of your ears. You generate a match when what is Between your ears is what you hear, when your perception of what you hear matches what you are hearing. This counts across dimensions, so if you hear sadness that is because the music conveys sadness.

As yet another aside, a huge change in music has been occurring: the shifting of presentation of emotional content from traditional genre forms to combinations of genres manipulated to convey layers of meaning. Think Proust’s little cookie and how many words he needed to describe the pathways connected to it. There is much genre shifting – like what was mainstream rock has become more country-rock-pop as rock has fractured into its forms. Playing with a genre, sure, but also playing with genres and combining them. Art has been doing this as well: the explorations of space Hockney has done, the weird decorative backgrounds – often clashing – that set contrasting patterns (e.g., Matisse, African woven patterns, etc.) against realism. I actually did a series of things – back when I considered doing visual art – which were panels in which parts of a body were realistically drawn and shaded but isolated in demarcated panels and arranged so they did not flow in regular sequence of hand-arm-shoulder or the like. I also conceived of but had trouble executing – morally and physically – a series in which the attributes would be made of words or images related to the reading of the image itself. I mean for example a girl would be made partly of images of purity and physically descriptive aspects of design while the sexual part would be made partly of sexual imagery. I hoped to convey a more dimensional portrait, one which somewhat unconsciously made you feel different emotions and attractions as you looked. I decided this was too much.

So imagine you have 2 HomePods. How do they do the best sound? The answer is that you have ears and they can beam form to each side of you. How well depends on the accuracy of beam and its ability to shift location. You pick a center point – meaning you assume the Between in both directions matches head to noise – and then you pick 2 points to the side of any center and you make a space which you fill. But how about a chair? Can’t you map the room empty and then focus on what fills it? Yes, and you map the room with what fills it transitorily versus what appears to be solid, same as mapping the room itself. The more transitory the changes, the more the beam needs to form to the space centered on that one point and contained in a circle – or even a square if you just use ears and imagine those rotated 90 degrees. That’s an interesting challenge, isn’t it?

And what are you beaming? It’s the description of the emitter, meaning its information encoded as waves and packets so they generate the best representation of … what? You see the problem: what are you emitting? You can describe what you want in beam form because those are waves of sound that interfere according to the characteristics of the room and the objects in it. The challenge is deciding what you want to emit as your shape. Think of you in the world: you sometimes need to look tough – like you’re walking home in the dark, whether you’re actually afraid or just playing – so you make yourself look bigger or you move with a purpose that to you presents someone no one wants to mess with in a bad way. Or you want to be more attractive. Just look at all the things people do in the belief that makes them more attractive.

How do you beam sound so it is as big or tightly compacted as intended? That’s another layer of intent: the intent of the emitter to beam in accordance with the wishes of others as those wishes are encoded for emission. Because there is encoding – and there always is – there are limits to the accuracy the encoding has to the intent of the encoder. How do you read that intent? There’s a speaker reading digital instructions translated to impulses and emitting noise, and that means the answer is to read the encoded emissions and to emit them as near as possible so the emitter hears back what was emitted as that checks against the encodings. This is done to the accuracy and power of the speaker. When this is done with multiple/e speakers, there are difficulties managing performance. Let’s say you have an encoding that generates a wide and deep sound stage in which elements move to the foreground, to the top, to the back, to the sides, etc. Does it make a big circle around a listener so the listener hears elements as coming from farther away or a tighter circle in which the spatial orientations are preserved? I said it that way to emphasize this challenge is similar to the algorithms for adjusting loudness to maintain relative pitch loudness. You need to reduce the space so it preserves the distances and that involves adjusting volume because closer is perceived as louder and that invokes the pitch adjustment process.

Once you can manipulate spatial rendering, you should then be able to move sounds to the back more so the soundstage appears to envelop you. This means you as listener are oriented in your head to hear what appears to be behind the emitting speaker. That maps to the soundscape differently than you might think: it’s as though you were turned 180 degrees and hearing what the speaker puts out ‘last’ except you aren’t turned 180 degrees – I’m assuming you’re facing it – so you’re hearing a mirror image, which means ‘last’ comes out first. The traditional recording method involves, for example, a needle bouncing up and down on something like wax, and you cast copies that play back the impulses which made the dents. This became digital, but the process remains pushing out waves of sound that have characteristics that relate space location, loudness and other attributes. This makes a soundscape Between you. I’m talking about moving the soundscape so it envelops you, so you can step in and through locations of particular sounds. Imagine how Tali could play with your head if she can actually get to the side and behind you? That would be amazing! And yes, the exclamation point is for excitement. Empowering spatial play. I can barely keep it in.

Beam-forming maps multi-dimensional complexity to physical space. That’s what I do. That pretty much describes me too, thought that’s hard to put into words.

Most of my work is thinking about thoughts. I do this to recover my real thoughts, meaning the layers of thoughts from before I can remember and the layers of thought I set aside or lost contact with as I grew up. And I do this to generate thoughts more in accordance with my true self. Take the ‘And’ at the beginning of the last sentence: I mean ‘I also do this’ referring back to the first sentence in which I think about thoughts, and I mean in reference to the immediately prior sentence. The first reference mean that as I think about thoughts, I generate thoughts more in accordance with my true self. Pretend the second sentence is not there and read the first and third until you see the layers of meaning that run between them. They’re hard to pin down: why true self? Why generate thoughts more in accordance with my true self? What if my true self does a lousy job of thinking? What choice do I have? I can’t think about thoughts in any other way because everything I think is my thought, even when I really feel like I’m pretending as well as I can to be someone else or to think like someone else. Since I must think, what is the best way for me to think? That’s not ‘cogito ergo sum’ because existence of the thinker isn’t the issue; the quality of the thinker’s thoughts is. If you draw a line pointing toward quality, there’s an opposite of everything that is not quality.

I had no idea when I started typing I’d end that paragraph talking about the directionality of existence when mapped to the essential process statement inherent in existence. That is a succinct way of stating what I do as work. I take any existence and map it to its process statements.

A thought about Taylor Swift – Tali, as I refer generally to her here – the sound ‘thing’ I was looking for in her next album after 1989 was that she extend her mastery of simple forms. She can do any form. People don’t realize the extent of her gifts: she can take any form. I wanted to see her mix forms. I knew she could do it because I heard her modulate (with fine control) between forms in Fearless. I wanted to see her – should probably say hear her but that is seeing to me – mix forms within the pop genre within a song. I said that carefully: pop genre forms extend across a wide range, and I wanted to see her mix forms across that breadth. Why? Because that’s a level of affinity with me. Go back to the first paragraph: I have only my thoughts, so the reason I wanted to see her do that matches thoughts in me about how you should mix forms, and thoughts about what that sounds like when done really well. And the reason behind my thoughts is: I think I play like that and I think I am really, really good at modulating between forms across types of jazz, across ethnic musical genres, and so on. I also think I’m really good at playing genre forms I alter to fit my conception of the form instead of replicating the exact, learned form. That level of affinity I’ve written about: she alters the same riffs I do and alters them in a way that sounds exactly right, both instrumentally and vocally. Note I’m not saying I’d do the riffs the exact same way she does but that her choices are all perfectly logical to me. I can see and feel them arranged as thoughts within the riff.

Playing with forms, putting them together, conveys great depth of information because each form carries with it a vast amount of connotation. If I start talking about her growth in vocal command … Just count the voices she uses in any song: some have 6 separate voices, some elaborately and delicately altered, some richened, one as plain as being in a room. And each conveys a character in a role in the story she tells through playing with the forms across all those levels. Ask yourself: have you ever seen or heard that before? The answer is you’ve seen bits and pieces done like that, typically in a story song that shifts between genres, like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. She does this on every song, sometimes being obvious and sometimes with great subtlety.

Beyond that, she plays with your head in other great ways too. Look at the modulations behind the ‘Look what you made me do’ refrain – which repeats twice exactly 1 minute apart at the half minute. First, background noise appears for an instant, is barely there, and quickly fades so you hear her almost naked voice almost unaccompanied. Second, background noise changes but not enough so you can tell what it really is, but it has expanded enough so the point where the voice sounds alone disappears. That point is where her voice drops just enough of the accompaniment so the inevitability of the beat dissipates. Third repeat, the background noise becomes an entire worked out musical bit that not only goes to the end of the song but starts to take over. She grew another piece of music within the song. I run through the possible ways she thought of doing this, and have largely settled on a Start of her wanting her naked voice the first time and then covering it up by adding a layer that started as a bit of noise, became the start of something more specific, and then became the music that was playing in another room which she added to the first like she was turning up the sound levels to combine two different pieces of music that were playing in two different rooms. The combination of the two is the End of that thread. So I run that thread in my head from Start in her room where her naked voice accompanies the rhythm that makes the title refrain and all the meanings that connect to the choices she’s made in styling her voice so it fits exactly the way she made it fit. I then go Between as the sound of the room she’s not in Starts to get larger in the room she started in, literally inserting and underlaying the other room, emerging and submerging, growing in the background until it emerges fully grown. This takes me to the End of her combining the two rooms of music together. She is emerging herself, not as some other room in a string of rooms, but as the combination of the rooms that are her.

The question I’ve always had about Taylor Swift is whether she is what I think she is. I didn’t listen to Reputation for a while because I was afraid the answer would be no, that she’s terrific and amazingly talented and she’ll be a terrific artist for as long as she wants but no, she’s not the best. She is the best. My first words about Reputation were that it’s only not a masterpiece compared to what she will do. Nailed that.

I was mostly afraid Taylor would fail as a person. I absolutely 100% saw the absolute genius within her. I’d always been dimly aware of her genius but I wasn’t convinced of its depth because I could not see the reasons why she made the artistic choices she was making. 1989 made it clear: highest order genius, extraordinary manipulation of form across the album, the highest level of multi-dimensional spatial thinking I’ve ever seen. (Hers was so high, I had to get my own in better shape.) Note I also became aware of how well she has modulated her external life over her lifetime. I traced her history and saw iterations of the same control functions that layer meaning in her voice choices and which determine how much the music should sound like genre and how much not. When I trace, I look for similarities between representations and identify the shared process that generates them. Think data structures and the repeating algorithm behind structures. This enables me to identify how the process that generates each representation is growing or shrinking. 1989 was remarkable. Take the subtlety at the beginning of This Love as she uses the words ‘on and on’ then ‘gone and gone’ to signal changes. First iteration, ‘on and ‘on’ – and I will then – then the voice gets richer, sounding doubled with a slight pitch difference. Second repetition, short rest and the beat starts. She modulates both voice and genre through the song. That’s mature artistry. That told me who she had inside her, but it didn’t tell me who she was going to become.

What is Reputation? It’s the commitment of herself to herself and to the visions she sees and to her thoughts, which she commits to herself she will hold to eternally because she knows they are right, and she will always, always, always stay the little girl who played with the little boy in her room, under the covers, and in her head, because she knows it was and is real and that is who she is and who he is and who they are. It is a level of commitment which melds with conviction. It retains her own fears about herself and what she can and must do to make her visions come true.

This brings me back to thinking about thoughts: how do you know what to do when the only person you trust is really always your own self? You experience all the mistakes you make each day. You may not particularly care about some or even most but you generally notice some and you experience the others as you ignore them. Let’s say you get rid of all those ways of ignoring what you do and think about. Pretend you watch the flow of actions and thoughts as they happen like you’re reading lines of code and watching the execution of that code. I’m trying to bridge the gap Between the observation and layout of thoughts, which I map onto a lattice I call CMs, and the concept that you recover your true self to generate the best layout of thoughts. It has aspects of a purity problem, that the representation of thought at your most natural has patterning that is reflected in all the thought patterns you have now. Purity is directional.

Purity of what? A characteristic of self. Too greedy. Too flighty. Too lazy. Too manic. Too deep. Too self-involved. That last takes me to the difference between what is in me, and all the processes that swirl around inside me, and what I express in the world, from how I look and move, to the signals I send to others about who I am and what I’m capable of. And that means I do something, others react or don’t, and I change or adhere to what I do as that behavior iterates. What is the pattern of my thinking? It reflects me in my own head: the things I think about, the things I push aside, the things I never even visit, the thing I’m afraid to see.

(As an aside, Green Tambourine came on. It’s fascinating to unravel the choices they made that give it a dated quality. Take out and manage differently some of the vocal distortion and it plays more as current. The break needs some work too; it sounds too studio. Easy fixes and it could be closer to a real classic. And HomePod is one of the best things I’ve ever bought: from Bach to an Indian raga, from Goldfrappe to Mel Torme – Too Close for Comfort of all songs – special mention to Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass for I Didn’t Know About You – it makes the room part of my earspace. That’s what you want from the experience of listening, for it to become part of your headspace, to be able to shift background to foreground over and over as you do whatever you are doing.)

What is ‘true’ about the true self? The answer isn’t mysterious: it is what is found in every rendition of the pattern that makes you, that you can see in your inner self and what you can see in your external manifestations. That which is always there is always ‘true’ at the binary, true/false, 1 and 0 level of existence. That ‘true’ can then be read as either true of false as it is processed, so the existence of this truth can be read as saying yes or no, true or false in whatever iteration occurs and across all iterations. I’m happy with that statement.

I need to take a break. Couple of notes. First, this all maps to a lattice and I’m thinking I should call it the ‘lettice’ to distinguish CMs from other lattice forms. And it’s close to a leafy green! I may be getting too cute. I can at least say this literally: thanks for coming after me.

Two points about HomePod I have not seen anywhere. First, on the ‘sound’ issue: it’s meant to replicate the sound of your earphones or headphones, meaning it’s an attempt to fit the way we listen to music now, which is generally through things stuck in your ears, to a room experience. That has meaning for the sound itself I’ll get into below. Second, it’s meant to be fiddled with, meaning the entire discussion that dominates about Siri and voice interface and whether it connects directly to Spotify or whatever service misses the point. This I’ll explain first: you currently listen to your headphones by plugging them into your phone or by turning them on and they either pair instantly with your phone or you select them as the ‘output’ for sound. In Apple Music, you touch the triangle that radiates circles and select the phone or your headphones … and now I select the HomePod. When my music is on now, I adjust the volume track by track because – and this is important so listen: music is now presented to you in playlists like radio without commercials. Even if you select an entire album and play it, you can switch at any time to any other music. I often start one album or playlist and switch and maybe come back. I certainly jump around, sometimes replaying and sometimes skipping. That is not how we listened to music in the recent past. Think about this: you listened like that mostly on radios, meaning not very good sound or sound heard over road noise. At home, you’d listen to an album and then you’d get up and play another – unless you had a stackable record system. With CD’s you could load lots of music, but you still generally played through an album. So the ease of switching, of replaying has changed. What is the best way of fiddling with sound? Your voice? Seriously? How many playlist names do you remember? Do you remember the entire output of a band? Can you tell me which album that song is on? Can you even tell me what that song’s name is without looking up a bit of lyrics first?

I assume that at Apple they have been and are having a long discussion about the relative values of visual versus spoken interfaces. It’s extremely obvious that spoken works well in specific instances: to walk in and say ‘turn on the lights’ is obviously more efficient than digging out a device, opening an app and then making the correct gestures. But to decide what to play out of the universe of things you can play? Your eyes and hands work much better.

Here’s where the experience interfaces with sound. We are used to the way music sounds in our ears. Room speakers don’t do that; they fill a room with sound. We are used to listening to albums recorded and mixed to sound a certain way, so you can adjust the volume for an entire record. But now we hear song after sound that may be recorded with entirely different dynamics and be in different genres. The question – the philosophical issues – is how do you render sound when each song is recorded differently? And what about your personal preferences: maybe you want to hear the rhythm more but it’s recorded slightly behind or beneath the lead? Can you adjust the sound simply and efficiently to help render the sound the way you want to hear it?

Regarding HomePod, Apple made very intelligent decisions about how the soundstage appears in the room and they made it adjustable in the same way that you can adjust your headphones or earphones. This is how I use HomePod: I sit with my phone and airplay the music – which is lossless so I’m not getting worse quality passing it through my phone – and adjust the volume to fit each song. This is subtle: it takes a very light shift up or down in volume to move the soundstage to the point where it feels right for where you are sitting or standing. This makes the HomePod ‘tunable’ in a way I can’t yet exactly explain: they decided to make a soundstage that essentially expands or contracts in more than one dimension. I haven’t spent enough time listening – because I haven’t been alone with it during the work week – to identify those dimensions except in general terms. I hear a method of attenuating highs and midrange to keep a bass sensation when volume drops, which is important because that matches how you want your head/earphones to sound, meaning they clarify the bass so it appears distinct when you’d expect it might start to disappear. This is hard for good stereo speakers to do. I like to describe even very high end speakers as tending to ‘honk’ when they drop below the volume level that best fits that music. All speakers drop frequencies as they move from this vibrating cone to that, as the electrical impulses are managed, etc. The HomePod does too but it manages that very well and allows for subtle adjustments as you listen that make the music come back to life to the extent you need for you at that moment. I’m sure I’ll analyze this more as I use it.

So in summary, I haven’t read a single review of HomePod that remotely touches how it really is meant to function or why. And thinking about this, even for a few minutes, leads me to think about what HomePod means: it’s Apple’s way of bringing the way you listen to music in your ears to your ambient environment. I assume Apple developed HomePod to solve this problem and because they saw solving that problem as a key part of their mission’s core values. I also assume the explosion in Alexa use meant they began to question more deeply the need to intertwine the voice element. The actual voice element in listening to music is mostly a replication of the controls on your earphones: tap 3 times to replay the song, 2 times to skip, stop, start, louder, softer. And of course you can say those commands too. They’ve added in the Siri voice control for reminders, etc. I assume because they saw more value in that interface because of Alexa’s success, but the gist of the product is music and the better interface for that is your phone. I see no reason why Apple would need to build other services into HomePod. I would not be surprised if they didn’t develop this with the possibility that it would be a speaker device only, one that acted as a sound output for your phone. Logic says you should have voice because maybe someone is calling from the other room so you want to tell HomePod to stop or maybe someone is at the door and your phone isn’t next to you or maybe your cooking and your hands are covered in grease. So voice adds utility but shouldn’t be thought of as the main interface because the needs of music playback are best suited to you seeing your choices and then adjusting the sound track by track.

As an aside, it disheartens me to see so many intelligent people so completely miss the point of something as blunt as a speaker put out by a company that put music into your ears. Why are intelligent people sidetracked by gossip level discussion like ‘does it support ….?’ without questioning whether that’s even a sensible topic to discuss? Did you ever try to pick an album to play? You scanned the shelf of records to see what’s there – maybe yours, maybe some stranger’s. You used your eyes and fingers. That’s the quickest way to make a decision. You don’t imagine all the records in the world and then choose. You flick your eyes and possibly your fingers over the Brazilian samba, slide on to the Tom Waits, stop for second at Iron Maiden, pull out a Brandenberg Concerto recording and consider whether that fits the mood, notice the complete Nirvana collection, and then you hone in on your choices. Corcavado? When was the last time I listened to early Neil Diamond? All with your eyes being stimulated to see what fits the mood. Or you think ‘I want to hear something soft and maybe experimental for the background’, so you flip to playlists on your phone and consider a few, maybe sample this one or that one. You think about some Reich or Glass or maybe someone you’ve never heard before. Apple gets this. Even though there’s a vast history of Apple thinking through things, people are drawn to think about gossip level stuff instead of asking themselves ‘what is Apple’s thought process in this design?’ They did in fact think about all this stuff. You should think about it too!

I haven’t talked about ‘quality’. It’s good. It isn’t perfect. An example is Taylor Swift’s Reputation is so advanced in its manipulation of the soundscape, meaning she layers individual pieces so specifically across and into the space that it’s really hard to replicate without direct input into your ears. Another example is ColdPlay: in earphones there is more separation across. HomePod does better at capturing the depth rather than the width of their soundstage. I think a second HomePod could do wonders: if the software is configured properly, two could make a big and deep soundstage. Then HomePod starts to recreate the space you have or should have in your head when you listen.

It’s an intuition, not a firm conclusion, that one reason Apple bought Beats is they decided Beats had either solved a listening problem or that Beats’ solution matched Apple’s ideas for the solution. The problem: people can now listen to a dizzying variety of music and they do that directly to their ears so how do you make that sound good across the range of people and across the range of what they can now hear? In my memory, Apple’s earphones, including the in ear ones, did a decent job. I now have BeatsX and they are extremely similar but better, and they are better in the way I’ve described: they do a good job across the types of music, so I can change the volume, often by a just a bit, to bring out what I want to hear in that particular music and genre. I can do that within a song. I was listening to The Killers Sam’s Town this afternoon at the gym because I wanted to hear highly arranged music with a lot of parts and energy. I realized (again) how the BeatsX respond to slight volume changes, bringing up the midrange, reducing the bass so it fits into the quieter sound, all keeping the same soundstage. I’ve had a number of decent – costly but not super-expensive head and earphones – and BeatsX does the best job of managing across the songs and genres. Other earphones have done better at some things and some genres but Apple needs to provide ears for lots of ears! This intuition makes sense to me because the Beats creators are actual super-talented and dedicated music producers and I expect that guys of that quality think about things like this. For some reason, there’s an assumption that Beats was just about the bass; it’s about the experience of listening to music the way you want. And there’s the assumption Apple hasn’t provided or even offered the ‘best’ earphones when the reality is more, I’d say, they need to provide for lots of ears hearing lots of music. In terms of buying Beats, what better argument that these are the right guys than that they approach the listening end with a solution that fits Apple’s needs?

I sometimes refer to tempering. Remember, a piano is not perfectly tuned: the individual keys are all off a few cycles. If you tune a piano perfectly in some keys, it will become very obviously out of tune in others. The compromise is equal tempering, meaning equally not perfect. That’s the essence of what I’d call now the Beats and HomePod solution.

Update: I’ve been listening to classical and jazz. This is confirming my intuition – meaning increases my belief in it – because the sound is as described and is tunable by simple volume adjustment. This is particularly telling with classical – both old and modern – because the dynamics run from total silence to big crashing sound, and often individually voiced nuance is the reason you are listening to that piece. Since I can bring up and down what I want to hear, this says to me Apple (and my intuition about Beats) have developed the sense of a volume slider as it relates to the various experiences one might have listening to music. This isn’t the same as total accuracy or precision, but is adjustment of the soundscape so various elements work at various loudnesses. Decisions go into this. They always have if you remember anything about ‘old’ speakers and how they ‘crossover’ between tweeters and woofers, meaning how they direct the electrical impulses to make sound that, to the speaker maker’s ears, renders music with appropriate accuracy, detail, energy, warmth, and all the other characteristics we associate with music. Apple and Beats have come to this solution, one I believe is based on the headphone/earphone experience and the ability to adjust a volume slider between and during any song. The idea, I assume, comes both from production and from DJ’ing because the end product is a mix with a certain volume level made of individual pieces with their individual volume levels. There is a tactile sense to mixing with sliders so they match your ears.

Also, as I may have noted, I’ve read a blind test and was disappointed by the lack of understanding of how context works. We know food and drink taste differently based on expectations communicated by the mood, by the room, and by the moment. Sound is of course the same. When you blind test, you are creating a context of individual elements. These elements don’t reflect well your actual preferences because those are shaped by the interaction of elements, meaning by a larger context than this element sounds this way in this test. A blind test is good for seeing whether this or that actual physical thing has a different, better, or worse result. Like you feed this and that happens. Even then, the results can be misleading because an effect may appear larger or smaller unless you do enough iterations to generate sensible power for your conclusions. To end this: HomePod is great. Apple has figured out how to transform your earphones into your ear room space. And they’ve done that in part by creating a volume slider which adjusts the soundstage across a wide variety of music.

Another update: found that what I’m hearing with the loudness slider may be based on implementation of the Fletcher-Munson loudness compensation to even out or temper the changes in volume of pitches so the same number of cycles jump in one pitch as another pitch doesn’t sound louder in the first than in the second. That is the volume slider. I think a tuned version of that is at the the heart. The other part is something I noticed and then realized it was the beam forming: if you stand where the room has a wall or some partial divider, you tend to get the exact right mix but if you move to another spot, the mix may be off, and then it is good in another nearby spot. Some of this I assume is the beaming of sound: the wave sent out is compared to the wave coming back and that is done in sectors around the room. I’ve noticed though that this effect can be transitory, both with or without volume slider adjustment, which makes me wonder about the sensing it does and the extent to which it can and does adjust to your physical presence. I’ve also noticed part of the effect is due to my orientation: something that sounds great if I’m turned to the left doesn’t sound as good to my right because my ears hear music at slightly different ‘temperatures’, just as my eyes see bluer left and redder right. With my eyes, that gives me excellent and precise color vision: I can tell minute shade differences and can carry the differences across the reflectivity of the surface and the brightness of the environment. I can do this with sound too: highly acute hearing. Never had great absolute pitch, mostly because I never sat down and learned how to sing and hear the half steps in my head so the entire scale would count up and down. Really good relative pitch. This also applies to something as basic as effort and involvement: my left ear gets fatigued by stuff because my right ear and that part of the brain aren’t sharing the load. But the effect I’m describing is more that I sit down and hear more to my left or right, and that affects how I think about the reproduction of the music that’s reaching me. One more good reason to be in shape: you need to adjust your posture as you listen.

I’m listening now to Lazaretto by Jack White. I saw him and Meg twice. His work has advanced true to how he started: deeper and more creative explorations of some specific genres run through a ‘hip’ filter, which I mean in the best way that he pulls out of a genre what is hip now and what was really hip in it back when it was new. He pulls out the essence of blues, rockabilly, mountain folk, and some others. I sometimes feel disconnected from him in a way now that I didn’t feel before. The voice used to convey a sense that this was him, though ‘him’ was always stylized. Take a favorite Now, Mary. Country, folk, touched by rock and not only in the instrumentation but the violence of the guitar, like he pulled the essence of that lick as a rock lick and shifted it just enough to fit into a country rooted song. Maybe it’s just that the work sometimes feels less pure and too fussy or overloaded with instruments. He used to just make noise for loud parts: see The Big 3 Killed My Baby. I don’t only analyze Taylor Swift.