Epistemic Ingemination

Ryan and I went down to the Farmer’s Market at the Triangle yesterday, and bought a couple of one-pound organic grass fed ribeyes, just because. I grilled ‘em over pecan and mesquite w/ corn on the cob, and made some green beans alongside, also from the market. I’m still in afterglow; that steak was one of the three or four best I’ve ever eaten. Yum.

So, I’m off the Kerrville this weekend to do some audio work. If you have XM radio, I’ll be mixing live broadcasts on channel 15 — “The Village” — from 7:00 PM to midnight on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The lineup will be superb; one of my favorites, a band called “Blame Sally” is playing; it’ll be a pleasure to see them again. The Limeliters (!) are going to be there. Terri Hendrix, Bruce Robison, Trout Fishing in America, Ray Wylie… just a whole bunch of my favorites. I’m a very lucky guy to be able to get paid for doing this stuff. (Shh. Don’t tell them that I’d be willing to pay them for the privilege…)

Oh, yeah. I haven’t seen this week’s Chronicle yet, but I am pretty sure that they’ve published my letter to the editor on the new sound ordinance. It’s on their website, anyway. It’s just a cute li’l snarky thing; enjoy.

Finally, for some reason, a wonderful story popped into my head this morning. I searched the archives and found it on a twenty-year-old disk. I’ll leave you with that for now. See you on Monday.

The Fisherman and American Businessman

The American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied only a little while.

The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, but what do you do with the rest of your time?

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, senor.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You Should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But senor, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15-20 years.”

“But what then, senor?”

The American laughed and said that’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.

“Millions, senor? Then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

Go out there and do something kind and unexpected for someone today, okay?

Physorg has a neat article about a new theory of quantum gravity. (I am certain that this excites you very much, right?) Anyway, it basically postulates that there may be quantum level black holes, and that those may in fact be what our elementary particles are made of.

The reason that I think it’s neat is because I came up with a not-incompatible idea of how the universe works about a quarter century ago. I still use it to visualize the Nature of Things. (I also doubt that it’s a unique idea; it too simple not to have been thought of long ago. But I’ve never run across anything quite like it ’til this morning.)

To really simplify, my idea said that spacetime is actually 5 dimensions, one of time, four of space, and that everything that we can see (and much that we cannot) is simply disturbance in that spacetime. Energy would be kind of like ripples on the surface of a pond; matter would be analogous to whirlpools in the pond, and what we see as the laws of physics are complex mode resonances and cancellations between all of ‘em. (For you physics geeks, it’s not same as the old luminiferous aether thing; in my old visualization, the spacetime is the whole shebang. Energy and matter would be, respectively, 3-D linear and 4-D angular/rotational density disturbances in spacetime.)

Ahh, good times. It would be cool if I used to be on the right track, I suppose. Heh.

You’re looking at the new installation; just did the nameservice switch, and it’s propagating ‘cross the net as I write this. I lost a couple of posts due to database backup schedules at the old provider, but that’s nothing to worry about.

More changes here coming soon. Since this is the default www.kirchhof.com page now, I’ll move the old /randy page info up to this. Stuff like that. I am also going to be mucking around with the configuration so that other folks in the family can have their own websites; for example, Ryan wants a blog; that’ll be at ryan.kirchhof.com pretty soon.

Finally, if one of you regulars wants to check and see if comments are working, I’d appreciate it.

They say that things come in threes, but… man.

This week we lost Poodie Locke. We lost Bud Shrake. And we lost Stephen Bruton. Three giants, and all of them genuinely kind human beings. Every one of them by now has been pulled to the head of the line and issued an all-access pass by St. Pete, guaranteed.

If there’s a rock ‘n’ roll heaven, well, that band just added one of the best guitar players that this planet ever produced — and they now have a helluva road manager, too.

And you can be sure that Bud & Ann Richards are sitting at the front table, drinking beer, doing shots of liquor and welcoming everyone who passes by with smiles and open arms.

This just… feels like a much smaller world today.

Went into Walgreen’s again tonight. They were playing “Carry On” by CSN&Y on the store muzac.

I’m now officially “Old.” I’m in the frickin’ Walgreen’s demographic.

I think that Linda Sanchez is a Maroon, and I don’t like her politics.

(That’s neither Severe nor is it Repeated. But it is Hostile.)

I think that Linda Sanchez is a Maroon, and I don’t like her politics.

(That’s Hostile and Repeated.)

I think that she should be spanked.

(That’s Severe.)

I should now be fined big amounts or imprisoned not more than two years, or both, assuming that this is something that we want on the books. Heck, let’s prosecute me under Title 18, Chapter 41.875 USC while we’re at it. I could get life.

Sheesh. Where are we, fellow humans? Will you kindly make some noise about this stuff?

Original link is here.

Oh, good. Later this year, we get to observe D.C.’s most structured and formal of their various Kabuki dances — the Confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice.

We’re probably going to hear a lot about the usual Marbury vs. Madison and Plessy v. Ferguson, and Miranda vs. Arizona, Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, Dred Scott, and even President Nixon vs. the United States & Texas v. Johnson, etc., argumentum ad nauseam.

JFTR, I’d much rather see Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad discussed. Or, rather, its presumption of the Corporation as a legal entity having the same rights as a natural person.

We could use a bit of judicial activism on that one. Just a thought.

Big Magic

When you’re trying to do a gcc make with a standard “configure”, and hoping to get them to do shared libs with each other, on any of apache1/mod_ssl, apache2, openssl, java, resin, ImageMagick, mysql, mm, jikes, gd, jfef, jpeg libs, ghostscript, php5, proftpd, and whatever else — and especially on a Redhat 64 bit EL4 OS — do this:

CFLAGS=”-fPIC” ./configure (etc)

…on all of them. You will be much happier. They’ll be able to talk, and you will not be a tragic person trying to frantically debug things at 5:00 AM on a school night. It’s the Position Independent Code flag. [Management intervenes, explains that the only reason that this post is here is so that some lonely sysadmim will find it on google sometime and save a bunch of time. Management also obviates that "-fpic" is not the same as "-fPIC". And apologizes for the noise.]