Thank you, Internet. I hope the WWW hangs around long until after we all die; alien civilizations will find it such a treasure trove of amusement.

New Year’s didn’t start out particularly promisingly, but I have simply convinced myself that new years are just a result of the Earth flinging itself weariedly around the Sun one more time, so I refuse to attach any importance to them. If I were the kind of person to make resolutions — or rather, reaffirm the necessity to continue promising myself that I will improve — then these would be my resolutions:

1. Exercise more

2. Eat less

3. Learn more things

4. Continue to attempt to be a badass at everything.

1) has effectively not happened since Dec 31st since I have been too busy coding and then eating dinner ravenously, and 2) vanished when my family sent me an enormous box of 18 brownies which not even a recent collective debauched weekend hangout could diminish. 3) however is looking promising, since I have been completely felled by the awesomeness of Perl hashes. 4) makes for some excellent daydreams, which (unless I suddenly win the Nobel or become a caped vigilante hero) will be all it will amount to.

Still, it’s nice to dream. I have some ideas about what I should call myself, should I somehow acquire vast quantities of spandex and the huge ego that goes with the superhero complex. Right now I’m focusing on getting boots. I figure I’ll work my way upwards.

Not so secretly, however, I wish I could be some kind of travelling science-preacher. The number of cool things that have happened at the end of the year — the LHC thinks it’s found the holy grail of particle physics, someone else invented a way to hide an event in time by pretending it never happened — makes me extremely excited about this year and all the rest.

In other news, however, Thanksgiving consisted of V coming up to see me and us wandering around the Bay, most notably to San Francisco and then Berkeley. There was a lot of storage-unit-ing involved, but never let it be said that V (or the contents of her storage unit) was poor company. As a matter of fact the entire thing grew to be quite an adventure, complete with shady dealings in the seedier side of Berkeley. I ended up seeing more of that fine town than I really expected to.

On the other hand I got some hangers and appalam off her, so it was all good.

A tad more exciting, even if there was less shadiness, was our San Francisco trip. I admit that at first I couldn’t see why the Bay and SF in particular were all that exciting; I mean, it’s all California, yes?

But I think I had to take a good long walk along Haight-Ashbury to convince me that there’s just something wildly persuasive about SF. We went to lunch at a place with Indian pizza, of all things, and it was glorious. The amount of food consumed over the weekend, by the way, has to be seen to be believed. I think I’m still carrying excess poundage around.

Sort of a niche market.

You know the other thing about SF and Haight-Ashbury? It has the best shops — fun and eclectic, but never pretentious, welcoming and kooky. There was the place with lovely scents, knicknacks and accents:

I may have a stationery obsession.

And of course, bookshops. With books you might never have heard of, shelves with defiantly non-mainstream literature, dreamy artwork, random people recommending your next to-do on the literary list.

Couldn't resist the cover. Turned out to be a very good read.

Comic books about heavy topics are my favorite.

Hindu imagery, a la Sita Sings the Blues

The thing about SF is that it’s open, inviting, insane but not self-consciously so. Even on a dreary November afternoon it’s buzzing with people all determined to find and do something cool.

Also, I like its general philosophy:

You could even leave the PB out and the statement would still be true.

Which of these are not real band names?

Defiance, Ohio
Take Two And Call in the Morning
Fries and a Shake
Chicken Monkey Surrogate
Modest Mouse
Limited Protocol Engagement
An Array of the Parameters
Not Unusual Behavior

My “Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan” Pandora station had to be renamed; I think it vaulted past the boundaries of “fusion” into the uncharted territories of aural bewilderment. Still fun to listen to while coding.

But this has led to some distraction. It was a slow day at work (all right, all right, I was slacking off) and I mentioned to V how some bands just had the most incomprehensible names. So I came up with a few and have presented them for your entertainment. I imagine “Fries and a Shake” to be a sort of retro hipster music theme, and I don’t want to think about what Chicken Monkey Surrogate does in its free time not performing to drunken souls.

What are your favorite weird band names?

Blood

In the middle of all this mass hysteria surrounding our favorite red liquid-sucking parasites, I’ve chosen to bring a dose of reality into my life and read a book called Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce. 

I’m mostly kidding, I picked this up almost by accident when I went to the SJ downtown library as I said in another post. But I really have to note down some of the quotes I picked up from the book.

• Apparently certain citizens with cotton wool for brains decided that they were going to object to blood mixing along racial lines. This i’m sure makes perfect sense when a person not of your color donates blood that saves you when you’re bleeding to death in enemy lines.  But to get to the point, the Red Cross figured that there was no way to separate “black” from “white” blood when it came to albumin (a protein that sucks in liquids and keeps people from going into shock) production  and so banned “black blood” from their production pools.
• After which The New York Times ran indignant articles about how many a Southener remembers being “nursed by a Negro nanny”, and how this is really hypocritical, concluding with ”Sometimes we wonder whether this is really an age of science.”
• “The historical French reverence for blood… would blind many doctors to the virus that tainted it.” One section touches briefly on how the French came to view blood transfusions as almost something spiritual, about how it was a social contract, so much so that when AIDS began to taint batches of it, decades later, the transfusionists found that they just couldn’t refuse prisoners and AIDS sufferers.
• “Everybody used to say that the only blood that was shed [during] Munich was that collected by Janet at the Hammersmith.” Janet Vaughan was a young lady who pioneered blood banks at a time (1938) when as a woman she wasn’t allowed to interact with the patients at her hospital.
• One official commenter, on the philosophy of selling blood vs. collecting it via donations: “Is human blood properly an item of commerce to be peddled like maple syrup?”
• Blood use in America, as the book depicts it a fascinating reflection of the philosophies of the country itself: the world leader in innovation and creation, yet amongst the least-regulated, most patchwork systems of blood distribution. The American Association of Blood Banks and the Red Cross represented opposite ends of a spectrum of beliefs regarding the role of individuals in society — while the AABB thought it made perfect sense to hold individuals accountable for their debts to society, and therefore required repayment in forms of donation or payment, the Red Cross thought blood shouldn’t be paid for because it was the duty of every member of society to give to every other member.

All in all, a fascinating book. I’m just at the rather heartbreaking part where they get into the whole AIDS epidemic, detected initially in hemophiliacs. For some it appears to have been a choice between bleeding out immediately, and dying a slow and painful death by immune system compromise.

Ada And Babbage

Apparently it was Ada Lovelace Day on October 7! I don’t like the idea of reverse-discrimination and I don’t think you should be treated differently if you’re a woman in STEM, but considering that Lady Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, this is pretty cool. The stories and resumes of some of the women on the site are really impressive (what little I’ve gone through).

However, I discovered something even cooler: a web comic about the alternate-universe lives of Lady Lovelace and her mentor, Charles Babbage, as crime solving geniuses.

FABULOUS.

Some notes from the webcomic (seriously, kickass brilliance, who thinks of these things and can I meet them?)

• Lovelace was taught by Mary Somerville, the polymath and only the second woman to be recognized as a Scientist, as well as Augustus De Morgan and George Boole. If those surnames don’t sound familiar, you haven’t taken basic computing.
• “…Mathematics was an extremely eccentric pursuit for a woman in this period, not least because higher study was widely considered to damage women’s bodies by depriving their wombs of blood.”

Turning into my mother

I suspect this won’t be the first time I’m tempted to call something a weekend of geekery. Last weekend consisted of:

– a cloud computing meeting, hosted by eBay

– volunteer orientation at The Tech

– discovering the MLK public library,

all of which was very enjoyable and makes me want to grab people off the street and yell technobabble at them. You’ll be glad to know I refrained, and am instead subjecting the internet to my opinions.

Cloud Computing and the Future: Talk Cloudy to Me!

Decided to archive this (I don’t know if I’d call it blogging) over at my other blog. There are far too many concepts that I’d like to learn, but at least I now have a list of terms to research.

Time to start learning JavaScript.

Orientation at The Tech

The orientation itself was  a little bit of a downer, to be honest. It wasn’t bad per se, but the attendees mostly seemed very, very quiet, no matter what their professed dedication to geeky things was. When we toured the galleries, they seemed rather… sparse of material; I got the sense that there was more space than information.

After two training sessions, I’m glad to report that I was incredibly wrong.

These exhibits are packed with information, and they’re a heck of a lot of fun (even if you’re not science-inclined). For instance, Tuesday’s training consisted of us going around to different exhibits and playing around with them, including a gorgeous panoramic view of anywhere on earth with the Google exhibit; messing around with design shapes on a scrolling screen, courtesy of Adobe; trying out the genetics wet lab, inserting jellyfish genes into bacteria; and trying out the clean energy challenge (tiny windmills! solar panels that fit in your palm! triumphant music when you win!)

Just to wrap that all off, yesterday’s training included earthquake simulations (actual earthquake waveforms were used) and scooting around in a jetpack.

One of the best parts is that you can scan your ticket and then visit a site online that saves some of the work you’ve done in the museum — pictures of the earthquake area, photos of your bacteria in the incubator.

I can absolutely see this being a place kids love visiting.  Volunteers really do get an excellent opportunity to interact with guests, get them to learn the science behind the exhibits, see everyone having fun, and even learn from knowledgeable visitors.

Did I say I couldn’t yell technobabble at people off the street? Hah! Spoke too soon.

There’s something rather mischievous and transgressive about hanging around a place after it’s closed. It’s one of the reasons I loved doing backstage work when I was in theater — you learn the secrets of the background work, you get to be a puppetmaster. At the same time, it’s a little bit of freedom, no screaming schoolchildren, just you and the science.

The volunteers  – diverse in both background and age, which is fantastic — seem like a lot of (responsible) fun. I might even make friends! And now I’m thinking of dragging Nl to the after-hours cocktail event; this week’s was PJ-themed, apparently.

The MLK Public Library. 

That acronym just can’t be escaped. The library is rather pretty, what with the towering glass and steel facade, right smack in the middle of downtown SJ and about 5 minutes from the light rail, bless its heart.

Borrowers’ cards are free (YAY) but my temporary card only let me borrow one measly book. I’d wanted to get something recommended by this article on The Browser; as it turns out, it was the interview subject’s book and it’s called Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce. (I do also want to borrow every other book on that list).

It’s been very entertaining so far, so much so that I’ve shoveled down my breakfast while being engrossed in all kinds of gory procedures of the 19th century (although that might just be me). The ingenuity of some of these doctors seems to have been matched only by their utter willful blindness towards the harm of bloodletting. Ever seen a barber’s red-and-white striped sign? The white is for the bandages, and the red’s for blood. Because really, who else would you go to for all your bloodletting needs but your barber?

I shall now leave you with a slideshow of assorted robots. Just for kicks.

Robots Mania

Creek near yoga studio

I don’t know what to think of yoga, objectively, anymore. I thought about the first sentence of this post for a while, trying to figure out the transition of “yoga”, from it being some kind of mystical, magical thing practiced by sadhus in caves all over India, to the sort of exercise that metropolitan career professionals can spend hundreds of dollars a month on (have you seen some of these yoga outfits? Who in hell pays a hundred bucks for pants?) A part of me cringes at the fact that I’m Indian and all I know about yoga can fit into a postage stamp, but another part of me is a bit indignant at the assumption that any one culture should own something that could benefit anyone.

As expected, I was the only desi in the first yoga class I signed up for — gentle Hatha yoga, which later turned out to be a misnomer of epic proportions — and the incredibly toned lady leading the session pronounced nothing the way I’d have expected it to be pronounced. But I couldn’t find any derision in myself; her sincerity, and everyone else’s focus, made phrases like “feel your heart and push it out, out into the sky, while you root yourself through your backside” sound calm and energized, earnest instead of ridiculous. In Vinyasa, apparently, the exercises get progressively harder, with the stretches turning into lunges that morph into feats of muscle strength. Halfway through the Goddess Pose I could feel sweat dripping off me, muscles trembling, the whole shebang. The “gentle” was some kind of euphemism, apparently. Excellent workout, regardless, and the yoga instructor seemed to think I was so into the exercise that I didn’t really need any guidance. I’m looking forward to buying a whole package and going at least once a week.

Hatha yoga is a whole different kettle of fish altogether, far as I can tell. I trekked to the JFK hall (a good thirty minute walk, plenty of exercise in itself), arrived sweatily late and then tried to get into the swing of things. Precision is everything here; a sprightly little Japanese lady walked around correcting our poses and making sure we were placing exactly the right sort of weight on every muscle and bone. I felt like I’d gone to an orthopedic by the end of it, nicely stretched out and limbered up. Perhaps it’s an idea — walk there, stretch, run back?

The story of the tax assessor-cursed library is as pathetic as is it infuriating. After about two months of living in this rather fantastic city, I finally made the trip to Campbell library, hoping to pick up some of those non-fiction books I’d been intending to read. As unimpressive as the collection was, I found a book on the physics of human motion (or something of the sort), an overview of religion, and a China Mieville book, and had to stop there because I couldn’t possibly carry anything more than that. So I make my way to the front desk, fill out an application form, and stand in the line bouncing eagerly. The librarian takes one look at the street I live in and says, “Oh I’m sorry, that’s always been a contentious spot, I think you belong to San Jose and not Campbell, which means an $80 yearly subscription fee.” I mean, what?! Apparently the post office and the tax assessors’ office have some sort of grudge going on, in which they each fight for dominance of the naming of the burbs, or something, the upshot of which is that even though I live in what is called Campbell, according to the tax people I live in San Jose. I refused to pay the $80 fee, because it was ridiculous and there are about fifteen other libraries — well if not nearby, then at least less than an hour away by public transport. As the weeks pass, however, my resolve weakens. It’s either this or the main San Jose public library, and I’ve gotten far too used to being ten minutes’ walk to my books. Austin’s spoiled me.

Last week I did one of the most interesting things I’ve done in a while — I went to an exhibit at the Tech Musem called Islamic Science Rediscovered, and though the whole thing had a couple political overtones I’m not a huge fan of, I figured it would be interesting to at least take a look. Turns out the $21 fee was entirely worth it; I had a great time, took notes and played with all the playable exhibits. I’m intending to write another separate blog entry about this in my other blog, which still needs a bit of work before it can be public. But I have to say just one thing here: the role of the Middle East in developing science as we know it today is vastly underestimated, as far as I can tell from the (necessarily) limited information available at the exhibit. Which makes the current state of the Middle East even more deplorable, if I think about the scientific heritage they’ve lost.

This weekend will be about as techy: Cloud Computing meetup tomorrow afternoon, which will probably confound me, but hopefully inspire me to look things up as well. Then on Sunday, it’s back to the Tech museum for orientation! Hopefully I shall be a volunteer there soon, helping to mold young minds.

Now that’s a terrifying thought.

Reading through the paper, it doesn’t sound very impressive (but then again which dry scientific paper ever does?) especially because the maximum time they could temporally cloak anything turned out to be 110 ns; in theory, that could go up to 120 microseconds.

The number of sci-fi scenarios that could arise from this literally blow my mind. I was thinking about some of this stuff when I encountered a commenter’s thought that made my ideas far more concrete: this might be new technology, but imagine applying it to the screening of signals. Data is encoded in signals, and you don’t have to make all data vanish for it to have an impact on the veracity or accuracy of your information.

Just think about that for a second.

And after that V asked me what the hell the point of 110 ns as any kind of measure was, because it’s not immediately obvious what that does. So I tried to create a scenario for her.

1. The average PC processor these days operates at about 4 GHz (actually closer to 3.5, but whatever).
2. That means that the period of a single clock cycle is about 0.25 nanoseconds.
3. 110 ns translates into 440 cycles of 0.25 nanoseconds each.
4. Now, consider the number of cycles it would take for a single instruction to execute.

Here’s where I hit a stumbling block. I’m supposed to know this sort of thing because I’m a computer engineering student, apparently, but a) I wasn’t particularly stellar, b) I have the worst memory and c) I’m very software right now. I crowdsourced the question on Facebook and was firmly put in place for asking such a ridiculously wishy-washy thing (my commenter was right, anyway — there are too many things involved in comp arch to every answer a question like that without knowing the entire, exact background).

Incidentally, I believe the DP512 we used in microcontroller classes operates at 16MHz, which is a far less impressive 62 ns clock speed. Not much help there.

But if you want to consider something as basic as a fetch-decode-read-execute, you’re thinking of at least 4 cycles, maybe ten if you factor in subrouting jumping and the different kinds of memory access… I think. I’m probably still simplifying this far too much into uC territory.

Of course now the question is why the hell I’m torturing both myself and others about this piece of technology. And the answer is: possibilities! Sci-fi! I’m not talking about cloaking entire people or underground cities cloaked in time or anything (although that would be fabulous). I’m talking about bits of data just carefully concealed. I swear to god DoD probably had massive funding in this project.

Here’s what I typed to T, while we were discussing the possibilities:

well you’d have a system of signals, but some of them would run through these lenses

and the lenses would turn on and off at random times, so that no one suspected any patterns

so what you’d get is sort of… lost packets, noise?

if you couldn’t record the events i mean

so it would be secret in the sense that you couldn’t record it and it would sound like noise but it would be RIGHT THERE

under your nose!

distributing information!

 …. actually why stop there

if you could mess with the signals propagated through security cameras

then all you get is a series of nonsense images, if anything, through that camera

…..whoa.

it’s an entire system of rewriting history

And what I typed to V:

you could lose valuable calculations within those 440 cycles

by which i’m thinking like… stock market calculations? fluctuations in the market?

i need to ask some comp arc people about this

i mean you don’t even have to lose ALL your data

you just need to lose SOME data

for your final data to totally fail and not make any sense

Of course this is stupidity, in some ways, because it’s not likely they have a portable micro version of these lenses that they can simply insert where they want to. But here’s the thing about sci-fi — you have license to imagine and hope for the future.

Or possibly dread, if we’re talking about a totalitarian system that jacks into records to rewrite history and itself. 1984, guys — doubleplusungood.

Science: it’s like magic, except it works!

In other, almost just-as-startling news, have a look at the Crazy Camouflage Cephalopod:

]]> http://atleastintheory.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/110-nanoseconds-and-the-thing-that-never-was/feed/ 0 atleastintheory http://atleastintheory.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/kangaroo-courts/ http://atleastintheory.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/kangaroo-courts/#comments Mon, 05 Sep 2011 18:41:55 +0000 atleastintheory http://atleastintheory.wordpress.com/?p=675 ]]>

I need to look up the Enki myth and the tower of Babel again.

Man, stuff is so fascinating, how are people even bored?

]]> http://atleastintheory.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/kangaroo-courts/feed/ 0 atleastintheory Eng_Dutch Dutch_German German_Catalan Catalan_Latin Latin_Swahili Swahili_English http://atleastintheory.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/finding-the-answers/ http://atleastintheory.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/finding-the-answers/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 07:24:47 +0000 atleastintheory http://atleastintheory.wordpress.com/?p=687 ]]>

Courtesy write_adam

As is often the case, I was thinking about Richard Dawkins and science and religion while I was doing other, more mundane things, and I had to write some stuff down, especially in the context of this book I’m reading at the moment.

The background is that I saw this article by Dawkins and, logically at least, he says everything I agree with regarding science and creationism in schools. What I don’t agree with is his almost complete dismissal of everything religious, and the unnecessarily biting commentary that goes with it, as though everyone who believed in a god is automatically stupid (I used to be a Dawkins-like atheist, but changed my mind for various reasons I won’t go into here). The point that Dawkins and Dawkins-like people attempt to make a lot of the time is that science and religion are combative, that they can never and should never meet, and that religion and superstition arising from religion retard the progression of logic and science. I’ve come to the reluctant, but possibly less biased, conclusion that this simply isn’t the entire story.

A while ago I wrote an essay that argued that science and religion were really just two different ways of discovering the world, of finding the “right” answers, however you want to qualify that. I wish fervently that I was a student of religious history as well as a dabbler in scientific history, but I’ll work with what I have so far. My theory is that religion was originally constructed as a mythology of where we came from and where we’re going, an inner landscape that was superimposed on reality. To a great extent — and I should be upfront here and say I’m quite firmly agnostic — I believe man made God in his image. But soon religion stop beings a list of arcane rituals conducted in some prehistoric site, and begins to consolidate and solidify itself, becoming a monolith of morality, law and behavior. Soon, the world is viewed primarily through the lens of religion, and you have authorities and systems that perpetuate and maintain the religion. Not only do you believe that the morality espoused by the religion is your way of life, you also believe that the sickness and death of everyday life, the maggots in the food and the stars in the sky, are all reflections of your belief system.

Science, to my mind, is an entirely different way of looking at the world altogether. In The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of its Greatest Inventors, John Gribbin talks about how science’s major contribution was perhaps to human philosophy and perspective, the idea that we are cogs in the grand and awe-inspiring mechanism of Nature (remember science started off as a study of “Natural Philosophy”). You could think of “cogs” as derogatory or sublime, depending on what your view of the world is, but as Gribbin says, “the most important thing that science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special”. Another incredibly important contribution of science is a result of that merciless objectivity: the idea that relentless observation, testing, and experimental rigor are the only things that will prove an idea right, no matter how “elegant” the idea sounds at the start.

So in many ways, to me, science is grander, more abstract in scope than religion can be. I’m going to use an analogy here that isn’t very complimentary towards religion (I’m not a fan of organized religion, to be honest) but which I hope doesn’t offend anyone. In my view, religion is the forerunner of human imagination. There are studies that suggest that very young children cannot distinguish between themselves and their mothers or caretakers; when we are grown, we stop seeing things in our image the way we used to when we were children, and begin to explore outside our own boundaries. Religion, to me, is that sort of internal sense of exploration; science is the external.

This is still not to say that religion is inferior to science, or even that the twain shall never main. Actually, that’s my point — without religion, I doubt some of the most famous Western scientists could have even conceived of their greatest theories. There are several examples that Gribbin uses here in his exploration of scientific theories from the 16th to the 18th or so centuries.

Isaac Newton

Newton is, without a doubt, the most interesting example of a man who had one of the most scientific bents of mind ever, but whose soul belonged to religion. The fact is that after he was past 30 or 40, he no longer produced any scientific output; instead, he continued to do fervent work on both theology and alchemy far into his later life. In fact there’s a story somewhere that suggests that the seven colors of the rainbow aren’t, well, actually seven, but that Newton used the number because he believed in its mysticism.

“For Newton and many of his contemporaries,” says Gribbin, “there was still a role for God as the architect of the whole thing.”

Edmond Halley

The man who is most famous for his comet was actually also one of the most inquisitive and clever men of his time. He is even more interesting when you consider what he was up to in his free time: “an investigation into the possible causes of the Biblical Flood, which led him to question the accepted date of the Creation”. The important thing about his comets, in fact, is that they were the final nail in the coffin of the “heavens as immutable” theory, that God had simply painted a vast canvas above our heads, perfect and serene, and then had disappeared off to do other things. Halley was able to track changes in the stars and to predict the arrival of the next comet, decades after he died, as well as estimate the distance to the sun.

John Ray

Ray is a kind of unsung hero, the man behind the publication of some seriously huge tomes on fishes and plants and creepy crawlies. “Although deeply religious, Ray also found it hard to reconcile the Biblical account of the Creation with the evidence of his own eyes,” writes Gribbin, pointing out that as late as 1668 (still around the time that Ray was inspecting fossils) that people still couldn’t believe that maggots did not arise spontaneously from rotten meat, but from egg-laying flies.

The only classification that existed at this time, by the way, was a sort of alphabetical classification, and “included mythical beasts such as the unicorn”. Not exactly scientific.

——

So the interesting thing about these men is, to me, the way they reconciled (or tried to) their spirituality with their scientific pursuits. Of course, you could easily make the case that, religious leanings or not, Newton and Halley and Ray would’ve gone on to have discover and invent just as many things as they did and possibly more. But the sheer presence of a religious background seems to have framed their curiosity. Even now, scientists look for the “most elegant” solution, uncomfortably aware that the case for this isn’t as strong as they’d like it to be. That reminds me of these first scientists, the ones who set out to prove that their elegant religious beliefs were true, and ended up by pushing the barriers of human understanding far more than they could’ve imagined.

—

Some fun scientific things this week, by the way:

Someone discovered a diamond planet.

Someone else used up some serious supercomputing resources to develop the best simulation of galaxy formation to date.

And then of course we have the impossible star.

The light rail, which by the way takes about 15 minutes to get into Downtown, was not at all bad. After a little bumbling I met Nl and we had dinner at a Moroccan restaurant (excellent service, average food), and then hustled ourselves out the door to get to Zoe Keating’s performance. It was a good thing we got there earlier, too. The chair-stealing had started in earnest, and Nl and I carted away a couple from outside an eating establishment which will go unnamed, looking around furtively.

Zoe Keating

Pity the hat dominates the foreground.

Zoe Keating is a lovely performer, not just a wonderful artist. She kept us engaged with her conversation as well as her music; I found her gentle humour lovely and very much in the style of the performance. And the music… so much of it was actually, almost transcendentally, gorgeous.

I think she can be very accurately described as a one-woman orchestra. She makes music out of her cello, her bow against the wood, and a piece of software that layers sounds with the help of a foot pedal. If I heard her correctly, she writes and tests out her own code for this. It makes the whole thing just — geeky in a way that makes me go starry-eyed. So all the background music — the rhythm, the harmony, the plucked notes, everything — is just Zoe playing, except that she simply puts it together herself.

And the best part? It’s all done in real time.

Watching her play is surreal in made even more surreal because it’s almost as though there are multiple Zoes, spliced out in time. She closes her eyes and just becomes the music, keeping time and tune in some unearthly fashion. Behind her, the sun flamed and set, the night grew colder and… planes descended into SJ airport every few minutes, completely ignored by the crowd.

There is something so wild and elemental about Zoe Keating’s music that it makes you feel like you’re perched on a lonely rock somewhere near the ocean, where the rhythm of the waves somehow transmutes itself into the bone-rumbling bass of the cello.

When Nl and I left at 9, after an hour, we did so very reluctantly.

The Ohio Players

Sadly, I do not have much to say about them. Nl and I wandered over there in time to hear them finishing a really rollicking piece that was still far more jazzy than Keating’s (not that that ever made a jot of difference to us). They started into a feel-good soul piece next, though, and we stayed for part of that.

It was really wonderful to see such a responsive crowd (although the bottles and cups full of not-quite-water that I saw could’ve been contributing to that), swaying in time, dancing with each other, just soaking up the atmosphere. A large percentage of the crowd was black, and I couldn’t help but laugh (internally, I have been assured I look weird doing it out loud) at the thought of what used to be popular in the black community back then in the 40s and what’s popular now.

Nl at this point looked at our map/list and said she wanted to take a look at the Swing Stage or Stompin’ at the Savoy and I was all for it, so we left. But if I get a chance to listen to the Players again, I’ll take it gladly.

Stompin’ at the Savoy

Getting here was a bit of an adventure in itself. The instructions literally said “enter through the parking lot”. We debated for a while whether they meant garage or lot, and then went over to the back of a rather sketchy looking parking lot. Of course, right behind was something called the Theater at San Pedro where we had to ascend a narrow flight to stairs to the real scene. All this was pretty exciting, despite the shirted volunteers out front that obviously made it legit, but then we entered this bar with a stage set up at front, several men and women in tailcoats and spats and evening gowns.

And then we realised this was The Real Deal. People belting out jazz hits like In the Mood, swing-dancing in the space in front of the stage, trumpets and everything in the supporting orchestra!

If I’m not wrong, some of the singers were sort of imitating the more popular singers/styles of the day. The lady in mauve had something of the deep velvety voice of Ella Fitzgerald, and the black gentleman sounded in places like Louis Armstrong. I’m afraid those were the only two I could recognize; none of the others sounded familiar to me at all.

This is the thing about jazz, for me — I can never seem to define what about it attracts me so much. Even in its melancholy it’s self-deprecatingly cheerful; and when it’s all major notes it’s still a wistful, a little longing. Or perhaps it’s the rhythm, or the trumpets, or the air of restrained romance and sensuality.

I don’t think it could’ve been more perfect if I’d imagined it. Such a Prohibitionist era feeling as well — marvelous. I think Nl enjoyed that solid dose of jazz as well, so it was all good.

Bhangra

No, I don’t know what it was doing here either. I think the Jazz Beyond stage was… well, exactly that, a way to showcase some really interesting music (or global music, for that matter) that fit in well with the free-form style that reminds me of jazz in general.

The performance itself lasted a scant ten minutes — the group took more time to teach the audience the moves. I was encumbered by my bag, but it didn’t matter, because it was clear that neither Nl and I were going to be hogging the limelight at any shaadis any time soon. I think I spent far more time laughing than actually dancing.

That changed when the performance became a party. There was a DJ and a live dhol player and the sound reverberated across the neighborhood. We discovered it was incredibly hard not to dance when the music was so ridiculously infectious — and the people just so receptive — so for the first time in my life I ended up dancing without the aid of artificial stimulants.

So a highly successful Friday evening, in short. I can’t think of many other people whom I’d have had as much fun with as with Nl; I’m glad we got a look at a downtown San Jose and even happier that we got to hear some excellent music