ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

If you play a musical instrument and are just getting into jazz music with its improvisation, here's a piece of advice for you. Because not everyone has a good ear and/or a good memory, reading from the music score is still important when you are jamming with others. Also, when you are just starting to dip your toes into jazz, learning music theory is a great help, and for that you need to read music. But having said that, once you are familiar with a song, do try to do away with the score especially at a jazz jam. There are several reasons why you should gradually get to a stage where you can play some jazz standards without looking at sheet music: 1. Jazz jamming depends on spontaneity, and interaction between the players. The surest way to kill the spontaneous element is to look at the score while playing. You should at least be able to play the 'head' [melody] without referring to the score-else don't go up to jam or worse still call the tune. As for the chords, wh...

Fuzzy Logic is the use of Fuzzy Sets to give what its proponents believe is a truer representation of most real world situations. In the real world, things are often not strictly black or white but shades of grey. Unlike computers, humans think in shades of gray also not just Yes/No, Black/White or One/Zero but everything in-between. For example, what does it mean to say the temperature is cool or hot? The areas falling into cool and hot, overlap. Fuzzy Logic applications is widely used in modern consumer appliances with the Japanese engineers as early-adopters and pioneers of Fuzzy Logic controllers for airconditioners , washing machines, rice cookers, cameras, elevators etc. It is only in the last decade that Europe and America have caught up with Fuzzy controllers for automotive, aircraft and machinery components such as for engine performance , brakes and driving control. The first step in the creation of a Fuzzy controller is to draw up the Fuzzy sets. {see middle picture}. This d...

* no distinction is made between 'towns' and 'cities' since it seems to be a meaningless definition. There are towns like Summit, NJ or Madison that deserve to be called cities and cities like Egg Harbor City, NJ that are not even proper towns. Pictures: Nice Towns and Not-So-Nice Towns: From Top: Jamaica, Queens, NYC a poorer neighborhood with many West Indians, Africans and Afro-Americans(2) Saint Augustine, Florida: a touch of Spain in Florida plus history galore (3) Wheeling, West Virginia nice natural scenery on the banks of the Ohio river, but a deserted ex-coal mining town(4) Princeton New Jersey, upper class town centered around the famed Princeton University. Lots of cultural events, good food and beautiful houses. There are nice towns and there are not-so-nice towns in every State. In my travels through 21 States in the South, Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and North-East, I have come across small towns that are depressingly derelict, but also small towns which are rea...

The economy, the stock market and each sector, industry and business all go through cycles of their own. What goes up must come down and vice versa. As an investor, understanding why cycles occur will help you to look at stock prices with an additional perspective. One of the major reasons business cycles exist is because of a very fundamental fact: For physical goods, Supply cannot adjust to Demand instantly. Suppose for example, that there is a sudden surge in demand for a hypothetical brand of shoes called 'Royal Glamour'. At the shoe store level, the stock of shoes will run out and the store will call the shoemaker. The shoemaker will then need to make more shoes and order more leather for that. The leather maker will need to order more hides, the hide supplier will have to kill more cows. And when there are no more cows to kill, they will have to wait till cows reproduce and the calves grow up. In our hypothetical example, Demand for Royal Glamour shoes may have suddenly s...

Of all the cuisines in the world that I have experienced, my favorite is the cuisine of the Indonesian islands. Indonesia is a vast archipelago of 17000 islands stretching 2000 miles and more from New Guinea to Sumatra, from Sulawesi to Kalimantan. The great diversity in people, language, culture brings forth great diversity in cuisine. Nasi Padang is steamed white rice accompanied by a variety of meat, fish and vegetable dishes. 'Nasi' means 'rice' in Indonesian and 'Padang' is a town on the island of Sumatra where this dish is said to have originated. The people of Sumatra, being part of a culturally distinct Riau archipelago are more akin to the Malays of Singapore and Malaysia than to the Javanese and Balinese next door . So Nasi Padang is also a common dish in Singapore and Malaysia. Unfortunately, the standard of Nasi Padang in Singapore has deteriorated so much, that I find most of the stalls serving almost inedible Nasi Padang. No more only sold by smal...

Images (top) self-explanatory from Charles Crowley at http://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/Complexity/index.html (bottom) Stephen Wolfram's four classes of cellular automata illustrating diversity with small initial differences or perturbations. Studies in Chaotic Systems, which are sub-cases of Complex Systems, show four types of movements: (1) movements that eventually become extinct of (2) movements which produce regular cycles (3) movements which grow structurally but the growth is not totally predictable (4) movements which dissolve into utter chaos. It is category 3 that is most interesting as it seems to represent the state which Life in this Universe follows and may explain how interesting, complex systems, such as living things, arise in a world where one of the most fundamental principles is that entropy, that is disorder, always increases. [Second Law of Thermodynamics]. Experiments carried out with Cellular Automata [which are grids created on a computer and populated and all...