boats.

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

(If you haven't read The Wind In The Willows...why not?)

If you have Amazon Prime, you have access to the profoundly uneven and weird selection of Prime streaming video. One of its more rewarding options is Cruising The Cut, a homebrewed docuseries by a guy who appears to be some sort of video-making professional, who decides to buy a narrowboat and go spend long stretches traveling England's canal system. It's incredibly soothing (and also seems to be available on YouTube).

I'm not unfamiliar with England, and I grew up around boats, but this whole thing is absolutely wild. I barely know where to start.

• Britain's canal system had 4,000 miles of canal at its peak. There's 2,000 miles of it still.
• His boat is steel, 56 feet  (~17 meters) long. That is a damn big boat. It steers like my high school friend's 1977 Cadillac, which one would ordinarily say "steers like a boat," but.
• Like all narrowboats, it's 6-7 feet wide, and the narrow canals and locks can almost all handle 2 boats at once.
• My sailing adventure was in a boat 42' long, 14' at its widest.
• They run on adorable diesel engines with a usual max speed of 4-6 mph, but the correct speed is 3 mph or less. In the boats I know, this is essentially idling forward.

Navigating open water is a question of compasses, charts, lighthouses, foghorns, island contours, water towers (and GPS, if you're into that sort of thing). There's...not really navigation. It's a canal. It's a highway for boats. There are simple maps, but also posted signs with arrows.

The idea that there's 2,000 miles of waterway that you don't have to navigate and is generally 6' deep or less is just...some idea from another planet.

Much like with a train (at least in the U.S.), the canals are often in a secret world inaccessible or invisible by road. There are quite a lot of sheep, farms, and houses, and in one stretch, downtown London.

An aqueduct that carries a canal over a roadway is not at all a new idea, but it never stops looking weird to me. And then this thing, which is just amazing.

blargh.

The wildfire smoke finally turned around and hit us for a few days. I bought a couple PurpleAir sensors, which was useful, but awkward: they have built-in webservers, but the outdoor sensor actually has two sensors for some reason. And it was a pain to look at the two side-by-side, when that's actually an important comparison.

One of the many nice things about being a computer programmer is that I know how to find the data made available for computer programs to read and process. And one thing that makes me an expert is knowing that while I could go through the work of creating an authorization key to fetch the data from PurpleAir's service, that's silly, because the sensors are right here on the house network.

   "Adc" : 0,

   "DateTime" : "2021/09/01T06:26:33z",

   "Geo" : "PurpleAir-c882",

   "Mem" : 14200,

   "SensorId" : "10:52:1c:44:c0:87",

   "current_dewpoint_f" : 53,

   "current_humidity" : 35,

   "current_temp_f" : 84,

This is quite civilized: the sensor provides this in plain text, and the fields aren't rocket science to figure out. I don't know what Adc is, but I also don't care, because I want temperature, humidity, and the Air Quality Index, which the sensors label pm2.5_aqi. (PM 2.5 overwhelmingly dominates the AQI calculation for our purposes.)

We have data! But data is not information; information comes when you take your data and apply your questions. You can see that just in the screenshots up there: because I'm not an expert, 759 particles/deciliter is not a number that tells me if I should go outside or turn on another air filter. I need the user-friendly AQI for that. Next technical challenge, is that I would like to know...

• when the AQI goes above one or more threshold values,
• when it goes back down,
• the relationship between inside and outside AQI,
• and temperature/humidity/atmospheric pressure, just for fun.

If you've ever done any data processing or visualization—for which you probably used Excel and/or Google Sheets—you have a hint of the challenges, if you want to collect 10 data points, every 2 minutes, store them somewhere, do calculations on them, make them available via a web server, graph them, show the graphs next to each other...it's a pain in the ass. For businesses, it can be thousands or millions of data points, every few seconds. It's so hard that there are many companies you can pay to do it for you. DataDog is one of those. I wrote a 37-line script to send the sensor data out to DataDog, which also lets me set up alerts on it.

If you look at the live version of the charts, you can change the time window, and moving the mouse pointer along any of the charts shows a cursor at the same moment on each other chart, so you can correlate events.

So that's been useful. The wind has turned back for the moment, sending the smoke back to the rest of North America. But it will be back.

loss.

Content Warnings: death, suicide.

the zoo.

I just got another entry in my endless quest for a travel violin. I wouldn't take it gigging, but I'm always on the lookout for something lightweight and durable, easier to, yannow. Travel with. On airplanes particularly. One challenge is getting annoyed with an instrument that has less expressive range than I do; the ultimate answer to that is just to put up with the inconvenience and bring the real violin. It's not like it's a cello or a bass: it fits fine in the overhead compartment. Still, I dream.

The Cricket shows promise, though. Pretty much any violin made specifically for traveling–and there are not many–is based on the pochette, which dance teachers would carry around for accompanying their students. As that article shows, they sounded awful, as a rule, so people have put a little bit of modern knowledge and technology into making them nicer to play and to listen to. You can see this guy's travel and pochette fiddles, and the traveler models have eye-watering prices for something I'd expect to be tramping around with, or even just tossing into cars. (I think he just does them for fun, and for his day job he's a hydrologist or something.)

Magic Fluke is primarily a ukulele company, and this bears some signs of being built for fun by people who don't set up violins for a living, in particular a sharp corner at the top of the fingerboard, right where the hand will hit it every time. I also thought it was sounding quiet, so I repositioned the bridge closer to where it's supposed to be, which was a 10-15x volume increase; but I will bring it to an actual violin guy, who will make it sound its thin, reedy best, and can sand down that corner in a way that will not make it worse (he can even do it symmetrically on each side). I have an extra set of somewhat nicer violin strings, too, which will probably help.

(Solid-body electric violins sound more or less the same no matter the size, free of the heartless physics of sound waves in air; for the same reason, they're better able to sound good across a wider range of frequencies, so 5 or 6 strings require no fancy engineering adaptations. But, like electric guitars, their musical power without their extremely heavy support systems is pretty much zero.)

Here's my current list of instruments:

• Dahlia 5-string violin.
• Cricket Violin by Magic Fluke.
• Cecilio Sparkly Blue Electric Violin. (Marked for deaccession.)
• Fiddlerman Artist Viola.
• Unsatisfactory travel violin, built by a random guy on the Internet.  (Marked for deaccession.)

• 1970s patent-infringing Japanese copy of the classic Martin D-18 guitar.
• Blueridge tenor guitar (4 strings).
• Line 6 Variax Standard. (Electric guitar that emulates the sound of many other guitars.)

• Eastman MD505 mandolin.
• J. Bovier solid-body electric mandolin.
• Large octave mandolin/small Irish bouzouki, by Bigleaf Mandolins. (Marked for replacement.)

I ordered a weird Swedish thing from Sweden, but the guy won't start building it until November, so I really don't think it should count...

beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

I have tinnitus. I've pretty much always had tinnitus, apparently: there's always been these tones ringing when there's no external sound. I assumed everyone heard them, since people talk about what they hear in an anechoic chamber, and there's always been this folk idea of sound just naturally generated by your neurons working or whatever.

My father has tinnitus, a relic of his military service, so to me it was always something that kept you from hearing the beeping of a watch alarm. Nothing dramatic has ever happened to my hearing: no habits of over-loud concerts or headphones, no heedless use of firearms. When I was in grade school, on July 4th down at the beach, I was standing maybe 20 or 30 feet from a detonating M-80 firecracker; while it's given me a lifelong healthy respect for the power of explosions, I don't recall my hearing changing. I had constant awful earaches as a kid, so maybe that's related to the tones? There's also a bunch of somatic stuff that comes with my package of brain wiring, and I'm just learning it still, so this could be in there.

Then, a couple years back, a new, lower tone appeared. Well, says me, that's never happened before. I should go get my hearing checked! The doctor said my ears looked fine, and passed me on to the audio technician for a detailed test.

Now, tinnitus is kind of a shitty phenomenon, because unless you've got one of a sparse handful of uncommon medical conditions, the treatment is basically to deploy coping strategies so it doesn't bother you so much. It would sometimes be maddening as a kid, because I couldn't get away from it. Telling this story to my therapist the other day, I realized that's probably where I developed the habit of falling asleep to music or a tape of old radio shows (Abbott & Costello and Burns & Allen were favorites). It gives my attention something to focus on outside my head, which is pretty much the standard of treatment anyway. Meditation let me further adjust my cognitive response, so when a new tone pops up–there's a type that comes and then fades eventually–I can sort of...embrace and absorb it, I guess. Really, I have no idea what's going on.

Except for the mental experience of it, I don't think the tones have affected my daily life. They don't obviously mask sounds in the environment, or hinder my musicianship, even on instruments like voice and violin, where you can only tune by ear. It mostly comes up when I'm trying to pinpoint a faint sound, and I have to decide if I'm actually hearing the faint sound, or if it's just the tones, or some other auditory hallucination.

You know what plays a bunch of faint sounds for you and tells you to signal if you hear one? Yep. A hearing test.

I was driving the poor woman nuts, I think. I'd be trying to distinguish if there was a sound in the headphones, and she'd say things like "Just press the button if you hear a tone," and my explanation didn't make any sense to her. When it was finally done, she showed me the graph showing the ordinary hearing loss for someone my age. Somewhere in there, she said I had tinnitus.

I looked at her blankly, and said, "Really? I thought I just had those tones."

She stared at me like I was an idiot (which happens less often than one might reasonably expect), and said, slowly, "If you hear a sound. Which is not coming from the environment. That. Is tinnitus."

And people wonder why I never go to the doctor.

Ironically, I can talk a lot about listening.

I don't really enjoy poetry any more than the average modern American (which is very little indeed), but the Zen teacher Ryushin Paul Haller read this one by Mary Oliver at a retreat long ago, and it stuck:

Praying

It doesn't have to be the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

To listen is to change. We take in words or actions, we try to understand them, we evaluate them. Another person's expression becomes part of our world, our memory. Ourselves. Many times, when we have a hard time listening, we are having a hard time changing. We may not even recognize that there's something in ourselves that we want to stay frozen in place.

Maybe another's words light a fire inside us, sparking zealotry or passion or determination. Or they rub us the wrong way, and our mind rises up in opposition. Maybe our opinion or viewpoint changes as we make space for the ideas and feelings of others.

The most sparse and bare outcome of listening is just to update our understanding of the speaker. Part of being human is that we have a shorthand model of everything and everyone we encounter. It helps us navigate the world. We can get stuck if we forget that the people in our head is not real. Anna and J and I know each other exceptionally well, but we are full of surprises.

Speak, and you change in the telling. Listen, and you change in the hearing.

The changing is the important part.

sometimes archaic technology is fine.

By default, the bowed strings use the same string attachment/adjustment design that every stringed instrument in human history used, until the Industrial Revolution: simple friction pegs, stuck in holes and turned as needed. I imagine this must have been quite an art before precision tools; now you can easily buy a reamer (for the holes) and a...peg...shaving...thing. It's like a pencil sharpener, but shapes the peg's barrel to match the shape the reamer makes in the hole.

Instruments like the guitar and bass quickly converged on geared tuners, because of their greater string tension, but the violin, viola, and cello have kept their friction pegs, on the grounds of being simple, functional, predictable, and lightweight, and being a safe baseline condition for these amazing instruments which can easily last hundreds of years with some care. Attempts at improvement have mostly failed for being too heavy––for the violin and viola, that weight falls at the end of your outstretched arm, like a see-saw, and the extra mass can sometimes inhibit vibration in undesirable ways––or requiring some kind of permanent alteration, like bigger holes, or gluing some kind of bushing into the hole. In the 1800s, you could do that (and more!) to your 300-year old Italian violin and probably no one would care; over time, violins, including almost every Stradivarius, had their neck extended to accommodate changing musical needs. 

(There is exactly one Strad in original condition, called the Messiah, and it lives a sheltered life in the Ashmolean Museum. It gets brought out every so often for virtuosi to play, because sufficiently powerful instruments, for lack of a better term, get crabby and temperamental when they're not played. I've played violins in their crabby state. My acoustic guitar probably qualifies, also.)

Of course, with modern technology, people set to work and designed things that look like regular friction pegs, but actually have complex gearing inside. They're non-invasive to install, and seem to just work. They're in use on at least one Stradivarius. I don't have them, because I'm not proud and I just have fine-tuners on the strings, because the orthodox use of tuning pegs hurts my hand, and heterodox use is just annoying.

ANYWAY.

I was thinking maybe it's time to change the strings, because I've been playing on them non-stop for about 9 months. I've never changed a violin string on a nice instrument before. Easy enough, I look for instructions.

The Internet reminded me that friction pegs do not do their work efficiently without a coating, because they have to do two opposite things:

1. Turn smoothly, with minimal friction, when pulled away from the pegbox.
2. Refuse to turn at all, using the friction between the peg and its holes, when pushed into the pegbox.

The homemade way to do this is with a coating of classroom chalk and a coating of soap (or maybe the other way around), but the most venerable option is W.E. Hill Peg Compound, which has this mind-bending list of ingredients:

• Graphite powder (lubricant)
• Petroleum Jelly (lubricant)
• China clay (sticky)
• Talc (lubricant and sometimes sticky)
• Red Iron Oxide (fancy name for rust: rough and granular)

That's...interesting. The instrument does need it, or at least mine does. I replaced the middle string first, then had to re-do it later, not just because it's the middle string and blocks access to other strings, but I only put the peg dope on one of the two contact surfaces (each peg has one for each wall of the pegbox) and it wouldn't stay remotely in tune.

The effort was worth it, since the violin is now singing and ringing the way it first was, which, I'd mostly forgotten, might be a bit much.

There are, of course, more difficult things to tune: