Them old futilities.

buy Virginia Is For Hoverers (Part 2) here: store

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Here’s a new thing!  Not done yet!

Here’s an old tape demo:

Here’s something old but less old:

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Text fun questions to 801-6-TEXT-CM (801-683-9826)! Include your first name.

Who is ‘sarah’ in the song ‘sarah and the fabric of reality’? My friend thinks its sarah palin. – Anonymous

Your friend is exactly right.

JK.  But they might be on to something.  I think it works.

Sarah And The Fabric Of Reality (mp3)

Sarah meant a lot to me
Sarah meant a lot to me
Sarah meant a lot to me
But she’s just a freak on a rock out in space
And I’m a brain inside a man
Much too affected by the plan
To ever really understand it
I see through the window of a fish-to-frog
And frog-to-ape
I change my shape
Outside, inside, where’s my god?

Albert meant a lot to me
Hawking meant a lot to me
Dawkins meant a lot to me
But they say Sarah, she ain’t nothing but scum
But I know this to be a lie
‘Cause she can look into the sky
And she can start to understand it
Her brain is a mobile of the sun and moon
Behind her face
Is all of space and time
That’s why, there’s my god

I want to live forever, shouldn’t be too long now.

An attractive lady told me once that she thinks She-Wolf is actually about the Twilight series.  Apparently it works down to the specific names.

Hey you should do a Christmas song. – Anonymous

Oops a bit late this year.  Now I have 12 months to make the best Christmas song EVER

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I’ve been writing lots of new songs!  Trying to find time to demo them.

Here’s a short clip of one new song called Poor Places:

Here’s an old demo.  Nice and whiny, how we like ‘em.

Here are some ridiculous instrumental tracks I found from years and years ago:

We’re in the taint of the holidays!!  Happy Taint!

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Send me a text about anything at 8016-TEXT CM, or (801) 683-9826.

Will the phenomenon of quantum entanglement someday facilitate communication at speeds that exceed the speed of light? -Jason

The speed of light is like, crazy.  It’s a weird thing.  It’s not like some kind of wave moving through a gas.  It’s a fundamental limit on the way electromagnetic radiation, space, and time work.  It’s not even some random arbitrary limit, either.  It makes sense in sort of a practical way.  Einstein’s General and Special Relativity explains it, and I don’t really truly understand it yet, but I’ve been reading a lot on it lately.  It’s an elegant theory, short and sweet, and almost infinitely profound.  All of the sudden, space and time are just two sides of the same coin.  Energy and matter are just two sides of the same coin.  Heads and tails are just two sides of the same coin.

By the way, nothing is immune to the speed of light, including information.  You could never ever get information to someone on another planet faster than sending them a little Morse code message with a flashlight (also, radio waves or any kind of electromagnetic radiation).

Jason’s question, though, is whether we can use quantum entanglement to somehow cheat the speed of light.  Physics discoveries of late (not even that recent, but people are just now starting to buy it) seem to imply that quantum particles, photons of light, notably, interact with photons from alternate universes.  It sounds like sci-fi but most physicist are starting to lean towards the Multiverse Theory, or Everett Multiple Worlds Model, or whatever it’s called.  It should be noted, however, that most physicists are huge fans of the show Quantum Leap.  By the way, if I had to go on a dinner date with a man, I would maybe choose Scott Bakula.  Hey did I tell you I went on a dinner date with Hugh Jackman, another nerd-god?  Well I’ll tell you about it sometime but now I’m kind of off-topic here.

Here’s the problem, Jason.  Let’s not beat around the bush any longer.  Let’s say, Jason, you encrypted a message “80085″ on a quantum calculator.  You could be standing in Dijibouti and I could be here in New York, although we would have already broke the record for distance between entangled particles, as they are extremely difficult to keep fresh.  We could both observe the same quantum filtering process simultaneously, which is pretty cool.  But even so, by the time I called you up and said, “Dude, that was so funny, it looked like you spelled “BOOBS”, our communication would be well within c (the speed of light).  Well, what if I had a quantum telephone?

Unfortunately, it’s all in vain anyway, because the way quantum entanglement works is that I wouldn’t know how to decode my calculator’s output without comparing my data to yours, which would require some form of classical communication.  Although, as far as my understanding goes, faster-than-light communication is still an open-ended question.  But, keep in mind, if you can send information faster-than-light, then you can send matter faster-than-light, and you would also be able to travel through time.  And you can also jump into alternate universes where Earth is populated by only women.  Wasn’t that an episode?  Anyway, the hopeful nerd in me thinks it all theoretically possible, but it will be a tough nut to crack for the wheelchair guys.

To tour? market? Or produce? What is most important? -Annonymous

To produce.  Marketing music and touring with music are two things that are becoming obsolete maybe.  Well, maybe not even obsolete, just obnoxious and uninteresting.  I’m about one step away from putting together a studio in Virginia and producing as much music as humanly possible until I die.  Oh, before I forget, there’s a show on Monday at The Living Room and it should be fun. Get there at 7.

Thanks for the questions.  Send me a text about anything at 8016-TEXT CM, or (801) 683-9826.  Include your first name!

sorry I have two new jobs.  Life sucks.  Good luck.

Here are some ol’ songs:

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I recently heard a great physics lecture that suggested “a good explanation is one that can’t be varied.”  For example, if I say Zeus made the world, I can change an almost infinite amount of details about it and it has the same explanatory power.  I can say he wears a hat or a beard, or he made the world in one day or one year, and it has the same explanatory power.  Good explanations, on the other hand, for example, the Big Bang Theory, have variables in which the smallest fractions of change are argued over for decades, as the smallest discrepancies in numbers changes the explanatory power.  When Kepler found the orbit of Mars to be elliptical rather than circular, it was a matter of mere millimeters of difference in (Earth’s) observation.

Anyway, I think the same concept works for art.  I hear so much music and see so much “art” on the internet now that at first glance it all seems relevant.  In fact, it seems hyper-relevant.  It’s polished and perfect, or ironically-grungy and virtually raw, or pseudo-honest.  But why do I still listen to David Bazan or Tom Petty over (insert trending internet band here)?  I think I’ve found the answer.  Good art, like good science, is not arbitrary.  Rimsky-Korsakov poured over single lines of melody for his whole life.  Hemingway distilled prose to it’s molecular level in a meaningful way.  When I see eye-candy or hear ear-candy I often find that I’m reveling at the state of aesthetic technology over the meaning or beauty of the work.  It’s easy to confuse the two.  But a simple test you can perform; how often do you go back to it?  Could you change a color here and there, a reverb effect, a drum part or bassline, without changing the power of the piece?