Jonathan Birge

(No parenting posts yet. I’m still getting my head around the idea that some poor kid has me as a father. So, I bring you another rant…)

One phenomenon (of many) about modern culture that really confuses me is the success of budget airlines. Of all the things on which one might want to skimp, I’d assume air travel is not one of them. Hasn’t the thought ever occurred to somebody, as they sit in a lightweight aluminum tube traveling 80% of the speed of sound through the upper atmosphere, “Maybe this should be costing me more than $39 if I know what’s good for me?” Do you really want the people responsible for launching your kids into the stratosphere to be running cash flow negative?

Why isn’t there one airline in the country that charges 50% more to get you there, but which actually does their damn job correctly? They could have decent customer service, and could afford to price their product based on what it takes to fly safely, not decide on price first and then see what they can do with that money.

As a case in point, there have been several regional airline crashes in the past several years that can be traced (at least partly) to poor pilot training and long work schedules. I’d be fine paying extra to fly on a commuter but get a pilot who was as well trained, rested, and paid as one who would normally fly a 747. After all, flying isn’t easier just because there are fewer seats. I can’t imagine I’m alone in this. I also can’t imagine I’m alone in thinking I’d rather get there late than have to have the living shit scared out of me (or worse) by flying through a storm. However, airlines will generally fly right through anything less than a thunderstorm because it saves them the fuel costs of having to divert around (assuming they even have the spare fuel given that they all generally fly with the absolutely minimum required by aviation regulations). And, of course, sometimes they end up flying through more than they bargained.

So, if an airline started up and came out with ads saying “At Birge Airlines, we put safety above all else, and it shows in our prices. We’ll fly around storms even if it doubles our flight time, we carry more fuel than legally required, and if the weather isn’t good anywhere along your route, there’s a good chance you’ll be staying at a hotel on our dime. We’ll get your there late and lighter in the wallet, but we guarantee we’ll get you there safely.”

Wouldn’t you book your next flight with them?

In the latest consumer price index (CPI) report, all seems fine. Core CPI went up 0.1%, suggesting the Fed is succeeding at holding back the evil specter of deflation, which brought down the economy during the Great Depression. But a closer look at the numbers reveals that were it not for the government imposing a huge tax increase on cigarettes, we would’ve had price deflation:

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Falling energy prices offset another big jump in cigarette prices in April, leaving the U.S. consumer price index flat for the month, the Labor Department reported Friday.

With energy prices down 20% since April 2008, the CPI has fallen 0.7% in the past 12 months, the largest decline since 1955. The decline in the consumer price index has sparked concerns at the Federal Reserve and among economists about deflation taking hold in the United States.

However, core inflation – which excludes volatile food and energy prices – has not declined and in fact has accelerated in the past four months, rising 0.3% in April, the biggest increase since July.

The core CPI was boosted in April by a 9.3% increase in tobacco prices as a new federal excise tax to pay for children’s health care kicked in.

Excluding tobacco, the CPI fell 0.1% in April and the core CPI rose 0.1%.

“Inflation is behaving very nicely,” said Bill Hampel, chief economist for the Credit Union National Association. The report was “further evidence that deflation is not going to happen.”

Maybe I’m too cynical, but when the difference between inflation and deflation is a government tax, you have to wonder about the timing of that tax and if there weren’t ancillary motivations behind it.

In previous posts, I’ve talked about the pretention of a lot of modern art, and how most of the effort seems to go into technobabble rationalization of the art, and not the art itself. Well, somebody giving a lecture at the MIT School of Architecture has recently scaled new heights on the tower of babble:

Architecture reimagines how humans inhabit the earth — how they organize themselves spatially and shape their everyday lives. If architecture is viewed as the material alteration of the earth’s surface, it has astronomical consequences: it can alter the very shape of a planet. Come see one way designs develop, through a demonstration of laser cutting in our fablab.

That last sentence is a bit of a let down, isn’t it? I had no idea the rest of MIT was underachieving so much with their lasers! We really need to step things up. I know there’s folks at MIT using lasers to do mundane things like creating attosecond bursts of X-rays, quantum entangled photons for cryptography, and 3D high resolution medical imaging, but I don’t think any of us are really coming close to the astronomical-planet-surface-altering bar set by the folks in the architecture department. Maybe we should start using them to cut out parts for things like this:

Some of the planet-altering work of the MIT architecture department.

(For the record, this came from the front page of the MIT architecture department’s online portfolio, a collection of the recent work of which they are apparently most proud.)

Is it me, or has the level of Bullshit in the humanities risen to a point that transcends the usual academic norm? I used to believe that every era has its valid place, and progress was always made, but I’m now starting to think that the intellectual charlatans sitting on faculties of art departments around the world may just be the present day equivalent of the Sophists. The more I listen to humanities academics, I’m increasingly convinced that future civilizations will look back on our times as a dark ages for the arts.

Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon, but I hate hate hate April Fool’s Day. You have to put up with no end to stupid press releases from humorless company drones who think it’s the height of cleverness and wit to announce a fake product (oh, you got us again Google!), lame jokes from coworkers, fake news stories, etc. And here’s the worst part of all, the only true joke of April 1st: you know it’s all coming. Doesn’t anybody else see the inherent abject absurdity of a day of scheduled practical jokes? It’s like a suspense story told backwards. Except it lasts all day.

Let’s end this shit, ok? Let’s make next year’s April Fool’s joke be that nobody does anything that day, but secretly plans to really screw somebody in May.

I’d been having such a good time messing with GarageBand, that I decided to buy Logic Express, which is a watered down version of their professional music production software. It’s a remarkable tool. For about $300 you have what amounts to an unlimited rack of instruments at your disposal, including some really rare models of vintage analog synths. One thing that I find fascinating is the fact that in the case of a software synth (as opposed to a sampler, which plays back recordings of actual instruments) you have the most perfect sound quality possible: 24-bit digital all the way from the initial oscillators of the synth through to mastering. Zero nonlinearities, zero noise. Kind like a CD with ‘DDDD’ (digital creation, recording, mixing and mastering). The only way to get any closer to perfect reproduction would be if somebody finally figures out the encoding format of our auditory neurons, so we could tell our brains which frequencies to hear directly. (’DDDDD?’)

In preparation for that day, I made a song with Logic that is composed entirely out of tone generating software synthesizers so that I’d be ready with the first four D’s. (Ok, I think the drum instrument may be sampled.) For example, the initial sound you hear is from an FM synthesizer, sort of what you’d get if you could hack into an old DX-7 and pull the bits directly out of it instead of recording from the analog outputs. This is just about as clean and pure a recording as you’re ever going to experience; the sound you’re hearing has never been anything but abstract information until the moment that information is used to control the most versatile musical instrument of all time: the D/A converter in your computer. (I’m certainly betraying the fact that I’m a much better nerd than musician, but that probably wasn’t ever in doubt.)

The mix still needs a little work, but I’m sick of working on it, so here it is. If anybody wants me to post the original Logic file, let me know. I’ve also included a losslessly compressed file (which is much bigger) for those with iTunes, in case you have really good ears. Please drop a comment if there are any problems with the files. It was mixed on headphones, and will sound much better on the same.

All Electric

All Electric (Lossless)

This is pretty fantastic:

It’s hard to stay mad at YouTube for too long when you find things like this.

A while back I wrote about how the present financial crisis may be the “rock bottom” that precedes better days ahead for the country. A return to our better natures, I hope, and not just a prelude to a collapse. My hope on that front was given a boost when I recently discovered that the forth most searched for phrase on Google was “Going John Galt.”

(For the record, I’m pleased that people are looking into objectivism, not that I think anybody actually should literally “go John Galt” in the sense of quitting their jobs. And I also don’t think objectivism is 100% of the answer, but I think it is a way of thinking we could use a little more of right now.)