New Name for Wabi-Sabi: Dizzy Izzy

when i was a pre-teen, in pre-teen sunday school in the church basement, I had a benevolent lutheran younger mustachioed pastor, named Pastor Luke (bad sentence for too many adjectives). I have always associated him with gentleness and kindness, like a buddhist who travels the middle road. I never asked the question i always wanted to ask, "what is hell like for a modern person?".. I meant could it possibly baroque, gothic, or medieval, with flames and devils? or could it be something more sinister, like being confined to one room, any room, forever!?

yes, i tried to imagine what it would be like to be confined to that sunday school room in the basement of the church, forever, with only some sunday school materials, cartoons, parables, and plain pink plastic chairs around a formica conference table, FOREVER.

i imagined spending a thousand years on one page of a kids songbook, memorizing every strand of wood cellulose in its paper. (yes, and i have read Borges).

or looking at a cracked floor tile for eternity. or a cracked ceiling tile.

i realized, what makes hell heavenous? its all the entropy that you notice, and find pleasure in studying. being confined in a church basement would become pleasurable with the wabi-sabi, or shall i say Dizzy Izzy of it all!

this is why my "system" does not involve measuring often (to the consternation of "m'friends", when i choose to draw a chalk line by eye to the line of the mortar in the wall.

"a castle is built with every wall as two, an inner and an outer. in the interstitial space, there is rubble buried by the mason men, and sometimes bodies are buried there, brought about by sinister political murderings. these "bodies in the walls" are covered in folklore of the castle period, as ghost, or "spirits within the stone and mortar""

Pic versus Atmel

Huge bonking subject. For one, I know a dude named Todd Bailey who has serious homey relationship with Atmel. Also mainy other products suchs as Arduino have been made with Atmel, which is considered to have the more "old-school" style.

Also dudes such as Todd Bailey and Karl Ekdahl will point out the benefits of both, and in the end may frowningly celebrate some virtues of the PIC. The frown is because the PIC is kindof like being in "boy scouts" in that it is somewhat metrosexual.

But bit banging can be implemented in both. Homeys will also say that a true man programs in assembly, running these robot as an extension of ones own intellect. Homeys will also point out that c is great to s-ketchup a design real quick.

I personally have decided to make something wonderful in assembly language. It will be called "Chub-Lisp", and it is an 8 bit computer music language that runs on an embedded...

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Microchip PIC 18F!

Here's the deal. Atmel is really cool especially for being like Spock. I'm sure the data sheets are logical. PIC is like being in Pudding Lane on London, with brick alleyways, the data sheet is long and has its own language.

But learn these winding roads, and use the services of the farrier, the blacksmith. These "meta-silicon" homies will do lots for you for cheap (i.e. in a only few clicks of the tock), like send bytes out USB.

Or Hardware Multiply, which places the PIC18F25J50 in the unique position of running a lot of 8 bit DSP, such as computer music programs! It gives it a unique sound, that starts out with my friend the Muslim Ice Cream man, and his chiptune sound unit, but extends into the wild lands of Computer Music, resonances, pluck, granular synthesis.

A squishable ice cream truck.

4046 vs 74hc4046

Got the COCOQUANTUS boards yesterday and I rushed to the workshop on Bentalou Street to test them out. All in all they work, no mystery parts (like last time), all the parts used are durable, stock items, that really work. Here's a picture of one of the unpopulated boards (populated ones are sitting in the workshop on Bentalou):


One interesting thing that came up: involving the 4046 digital VCO chip. Fansz of Nicolas Collins' book will note this is actually a PLL chip that can do some wonderful things, but note also that I only use this chip for its VCO section, for its unique topology of raw CMOS yields a sweetly symmetrical high frequency square wave. It is worth using this chip for its VCO, rather than homebrewing something, for the moment.

Furthermore, I am not even using it as a VCO, rather as a CCO! You see, I am tying its control-voltage input to pos5volts, and actually modulating its prime current input. Into this feed mine own arp-style exponential current generators and serge-style differential pair modulation inputs.

NOW the problem arose late last night, and I mean late, that the oscillator was able to run at non-relativistic velocities when given a modest control current. I kept upping the timer capacitor, up to almost 1 microfarad (!), and it still would run ssssuuuuppppeeeerrrr fast at the high end, but increasingly slower at the low end. Weird. I am still baffled how the silicon did this, but I did learn the fix, by comparing the old, Texas Instrument datasheet with a newer one, by NXP. What follows are pictures of how the chips respond to control voltages. First, the CD4046, note it is a smooth ramp, limited at its ends:



Now for the 74HC4046, it seems in updating the design for the high speed, 5V HC series, there is now some sort of new behavior above 4.1 volts, that the frequency of the VCO jumps up towards infinity (actually the number is 7Z96051.1 according to the datasheet):

So although I don't know how the silicon actually does this, I could go about creating a solid fix. I was driving VCO too high, it shouldn't be tied to positive 5 volts, but more like 4.1 volts. Resistor divider ipsus solutio est (4.7k 22k).

Still though, worth noting that this chip attempts to do hyper-relativistic speeds, and I noted quite a strange resonance on my oscilloscope as well as extensive interference on the FM band. Perhaps this can have some sort of noise radio usage, a phreaked out oscillator?

Star Trek vs Doctor Who

I shall now turn to an issue not as much talked about as STvsSW (Star Trek vs Star Wars). That is the issue of Star Trek versus Doctor Who.

The Star Trek bridge is a locus of striation. The striation is carried out by "The Federation" through various manuals of style, somewhat like Walt Disney World. Federation issue camcorder, federation issue phaser.

Doctor Who is a nomadic culture. TARDISs are grown, dimensionally out of lambda calculus and black hole energy. The Doctor goes gallivanting, but in a quirky, witty, but polite way, accumulating apprentices and other life such as robot dog. The Master, of course, is equally as wily, and equally as nomadic. He accumulates various weapons and other tricks by stealing them from the cultures he comes across.

Doctor Who has ecountered "Federations" before, such as the Galactic Federation. He has even befriended a space pilot. Has Star Trek ever come accross a Doctor Who before?

The Blue Danube ISZ Computer Music

i get deja vu every time i take an oscilloscope from the passenger seat of my truck.

You see, 2001 is a philm about a computer, and one cannot hear the Blue Danube (with Czech Male Chorus, on classical radio) and not think of outer space computing.

You see, my baby also sits in the passenger seat of my truck, in a car seat; i am comparing my oscilloscope to my baby (sung: "what is the difference between a child and a square wave?"). This OSCILLOSCOPE, the D12 Dual Beam by Tektronix, has violet traces plus green persistant. Hope to see some of it on youtube.