Just when you think you have everything.....

You know, sometimes not being able to have something makes you want it even more. After 40 years away from the United States, there's a list of things my siblings and I might have missed all that time. The list includes:

1. Pumpernickel bread
2. Ivory soap,
3. Contemporary Christian Music,
4. French's mustard,
5. Freedom

Now, of course, there's a list of things we would all rather we didn't have:

1. Sexual Offenders Lists
2. Tax returns,
3. Snow (unless you ski!)
4. Taxes
5. Dog doo
6. Ill health.

I could go on, but you get the idea. What made me think of all this? I got a nice email today from James Waltz, long time family friend over in New Jersey....

I quote from "When your hut's on fire." 

The only survivor of a shipwreck was washed up on a small, uninhabited 

island. He prayed feverishly for God to rescue him. Every day he scanned the
horizon for help, but none seemed forthcoming. Exhausted, he eventually managed to
build a little hut out of driftwood to protect him from the elements, and
to store his few possessions. One day, after scavenging for food, he arrived
home to find his little hut in flames, with smoke rolling up to the sky. He
felt the worst had happened, and everything was lost. He was stunned with
disbelief, grief, and anger. He cried out, 'God! How could you do this to me?'
Early the next day, he w as awakened by the sound of a ship approaching the
island! It had come to rescue him! 'How did you know I was here?' asked the weary
man of his rescuers. 'We saw your smoke signal,' they replied.

The Moral of This Story:


It's easy to get discouraged when things are going bad, but we shouldn't
lose heart, because God is at work in our lives, even in the midst of our pain
and suffering. Remember that the next time your little hut seems to be burning
to the ground, it just may be a smoke signal that summons the Grace of God.

Who’s life have you touched today?

You know, something somebody said to me last Friday hit home. Full of praise for some safety issue I was dealing with at work he encouraged me never to give up. Is it false humility that made me feel as though nobody was listening? Was it frustration at what seemed like chronic apathy that made me so frustrated that others could not see the point I was trying to make? Well, I never knew until he told me that folks were talking about the issue, were thinking about safety, and indeed were, in many cases, grateful that I had taken on the fight for this particular issue.

The issue, or topic, was the use of satellite tracking in flight. I feel so passionate about survival, knowing that one of the greatest tragedies could be to survive some crash landing only to succumb to the cold or to injuries sustained in that crash only because people could not find you.

The four principles of survival… etched in my thoughts about all this are:

1. Protection
   
2. Location
   
3. Water
   
4. Food
   

So many get confused about survival priorities, worrying unnecessarily about food when you can survive many days without, but will die within minutes if you are not protected against, say, the cold. Item two, LOCATION, is simply the fact that the best way to survive is to get out of the survival situation quickly. In the EMS world we’re “blessed” with the concept of the so called Golden Hour. Yet talking to my EMS aviation colleagues they seem to forget that golden hour applies to them, too, if faced with a survival situation.

So what’s that all got to do with the title, “Who’s life have you touched today?” Until mentioned in a gracious way on Friday, I had felt that nobody listens, nobody cares. Well, friends, lest you forget, people sometimes listen, but rarely say “thank you.”

Well, a big thank you right back at the gentleman who stated he was probably one of the few people who read my blog. Keep reading, my friend… I will never forget our conversation last Friday.

Ah, I don't live in the past, but I used to!

TC and the neighbor's daughter whose name I can't remember, circa 1976 or '77

Singapore Skyline circa 1972

A preposition being a bad word to end a sentence with, here's the latest photograph from a huge batch scanned at Walmart from my collection of transparencies.

From the Sublime to the ridiculous? A weather phenomena!

Greetings dear readers.

I was idly reading the Buffalo office of the National Weather Service text bulletin on today's forecast and quote part of it below...

LOOKING AT A CROSS SECTION FROM NEAR GRAND RAPIDS MICHIGAN TO NEAR
ALBANY...PLACING THE LINE THROUGH MUCH OF OUR FORECAST AREA...I
NOTICED A NOTICEABLE WESTWARD EXTENSION OF MID LEVEL FRONTOGENESIS
DURING THIS 00Z-12Z PERIOD WHICH MAY ALSO EXTEND THE WESTERN EDGE OF
LIGHT SNOW AS FAR WEST AS LAKE ERIE. OF COURSE...THE GFS IS MORE
ROBUST IN SHOWING THIS UPWARD SLOPING FRONTAL BOUNDARY THAN THE
NAM...BUT BOTH MODELS DO SHOW SUFFICIENT FRONTOGENESIS AND MOISTURE
FROM 700MB TO 500MB FOR SNOW TO FORM ALOFT. THE BIG QUESTION IS IF
THE SNOW WILL REACH THE GROUND AS THERE IS A VERY DRY UNDERLYING
LAYER THROUGH WHICH ANY SNOW MUST FALL...MAYBE ALL WILL SUBLIMATE
BEFORE REACHING THE GROUND AND WE`LL JUST HAVE SOME REALLY NICE
VIRGA. IN EITHER CASE...WILL EXTEND CHANCE POPS TO COVER THE REST OF
THE FORECAST AREA FROM THE FINGER LAKES TO THE WESTERN EDGE...40
POPS FOR NOW.

See their web page HERE

Well, there's a couple of words there which I find interesting. You don't often see sublimation mentioned. That is not ridiculous, it's where a solid changes to a gas without going through the liquid state. More often in meteorological discussions it is mentioned in the context of snow lying on the ground disappearing although the temperature is below freezing.

Secondly, there's the mention of virga. That is nothing to do with a little blue pill, it's precipitation that does not reach the ground.

I have to say I've met one of the forecasters from Buffalo NWS office, David Sage. He gave a truly fabulous lecture on thunderstorms at an FAA sponsored "Wings" event some years ago. I was impressed by his passion for the subject, his ability to pass on vital information to the pilot community, and above all his wonderful use of English. Look for his name on the text page linked above! Send him an email.....

Cheers.

A Hard Day's Night

You could see the compassion, concern, and love on everyone’s face last night.

Well, last night’s events were hard on us all, because the patient was “family.” He was a law enforcement officer, with family in the same profession. The family, in the widest possible sense, was everyone involved, from the first responders on scene, many of whom knew him, to his own relatives and loved ones.

He was taken to a local hospital and prepared for flight. He passed away despite all the efforts to save him.

You know, events like these make us all feel deep emotions. God created us in His image and commanded us to love one another. When I see so many effected by the events of last night, so many caring people, so much effort and love, I thank God for the blessing and the curse of that love.

The old cliché that “Love Hurts” is true and is the curse part of the gift of love. You could see the hurt on the faces of the crew who carried out CPR for most of the flight. You could tell that the nurses, the helpers, the doctors, the radiographers, the chaplain, the cleaner, the firemen, the policemen, and even the patient in the next bed were all at one with the patient, hoping and praying for the best.

That it was not to be is simply in the hands of God. It reminds us of our own mortality. We feel a profound sense of loss. That loss of someone I didn’t even know cannot compare to the loss felt by the family and loved ones, but is no less painful.

So I ask myself once again, “Why do I do this job?” Well, I know that it’s the same motivation and care that everyone I met last night feels. We are all driven by the same desire, to make a difference. Sometimes we do, sometimes we cannot, but we would all feel defeated, insignificant, a failure if we didn’t try.

I thank God for this patient’s life, for the dedication and motivation shown last night, and ask that He support us all in this work. I also ask Him to comfort the bereaved as well as the caregivers.

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What makes music your favorite? An essay on musical taste.

Greetings those few readers that I attract.

As I was listening to music on my computer via the internet I was tempted to ask myself, "Why do I like one song more than another?" It's almost impossible to answer, so difficult that I cannot even begin. There's rhythm, or if you like the back beat, usually drums and/or bass line. There's melody, a catchy tune that you can't get out of your head. Sometimes it's as simple as the lyrics... one of my favorite musicians is Sting, whose melody lines are not catchy at all, but whose words ring out so often. As an aside, I remember seeing him being interviewed, I think it was on MTV, and was asked what young people thought of all his religion. To paraphrase his answer he said that while church was discredited God was not.

I digress....

Back to the point or points... another example I like is 12/4 time signature. It's simply uplifting, makes you want to dance, and I don't dance, don't ask me....

So imagine my joy at being directed to Pandora.com by a friend. You will see "my" stations listed on the right. How are those created? Simply by seeding your initial station with a song or artist you like, and those clever people at Pandora have spend thousands of hours classifying music in what they call genomes and supply you with similar music on your station. Sounds delightfully simple, but to be honest is as massive an undertaking, in my humble opinion, as the mapping of the human genome. That scientific miracle was said to have been impossible in my lifetime and yet it has happened.

If Tim Westergren, the founder of the music genome project, reads this I hope he takes heart. I believe their map is as incomplete as the human genome was ten years ago. There's simply not enough definitions, enough genres, enough detail at this time. It is, I believe, for this reason that I get music I don't like on my stations at times. That's no problem as I simply pop over to the open web page and click the thumbs down button. They politely apologize and go on to the next song. (Makes me giggle the way they are so polite! Nice!)

Here's an example of the detail of the song I am listening to as I write. The song, You Are, sung by Ron Kenoly, has been detailed at Pandora as follows:

r & b influences
acoustic rhythm piano
call and answer vocal harmony (Antiphony)
extensive vamping
mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation
paired vocal harmony
a vocal-centric aesthetic
major key tonality
string section beds
acoustic rhythm guitars
subtle use of fender rhodes
vocal duets
upbeat lyrics

(That took some fiddling to cut and paste! For the geeks amongst you, I had to switch to "Edit HTML" to strip out the formatting.... what a pain!)

Ok, so do I like the song, yes, perhaps 6 out of 10. So I went back to Pandora and searched for one of my top favorites of this genre to see what they'd written. It's the Lion and the Lamb by Crystal Lewis. They say:

& b influences
major key tonality
melodic songwriting
an emotional female lead vocal performance
a smooth female lead vocal
electric pianos
subtle use of strings
upbeat lyrics

Note the similarities with the definition above. To be fair to Pandora, the above are summaries of their attributes. They say: 

Q: How many attributes or "genes" are there in the Music Genome?

There are just shy of 400 musical attributes in the Music Genome Project.

When you ask the Pandora Tuner "why is this song playing?" what gets displayed is just a summary of the information used by the Music Genome.

Even two songs that show identical answers to "why is this song playing?" still have countless differences that the Music Genome uses when it matches music based on each of those songs.

These attribute summaries are intended to provide some interesting insight into the musicological elements of a song -- without getting into dozens of individual attributes for each element.

---
For an explanation of the most common summary elements, please see FAQ Section 6D, beginning with:
http://blog.pandora.com/faq/#92

To close this short essay, let me recommend the following if you're interested:

Q: How can I find out more about music theory and structure?

We're creating an audio and video series called Pandora Presents... that explores in more detail some widely used musical features. To listen, check out: http://blog.pandora.com/podcast

Happy Listening