ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

* photo shows a collection of jazz archtops, seen through the locked grill door of GuitarsNJazz, a shop in Summit New Jersey, that sells only jazz archtops and jazz guitar amplifiers. If you are a jazz guitar player, I suggest you pay him a visit. He's a great guy and he gives great advice . Fact: 95 % of guitar players own more than one guitar. This is because many guitarists suffer from a disease known in guitar-playing circles as GAS or Guitar Acquisition Syndrome. GAS manifests itself as an itch which can only be temporarily relieved by the purchase of a guitar. Severe cases of GAS can make the patient accumulate more than 100 guitars. GAS has been known to be the cause of broken marriages, financial bankruptcy and unemployment. Nevertheless, there are sound reasons why guitar players have more guitars than drummers have drums, piano players have pianos and sax players have saxaphones. 1. A Steinway sounds different from a Yamaha piano. But A Fender Stratocaster sounds even mor...

The question whether technical analysis [TA] [or 'charting' as referred to by the less initiated] works has been asked many, many times. Countless studies have been done, some of which show that TA does make a significant difference, and some show that TA does not make any difference to investment performance. For more details of such studies, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis . I will use this short article just to recollect my personal experience with TA. For more than a decade, I studied TA, and tried to apply it. I studied all manner of TA from classical charting, to Candlesticks, to the hundreds of Indicators from Moving Averages, to RSI, MACD and the more esoteric ones ones that are constantly being invented. I read about Elliot Waves and Gann Charts, and how some even used astrology to analyse the markets. I delved into Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and all manner of pattern recognition, classification and forecasting techniques to feed the Pric...

During the great Depression of 1929, many railway dining cars were converted to mobile restaurants or 'diners'. Originally catering to blue-collar workers at factory sites, the Diner soon evolved to become a quintessentially American institution evoking images of a home town/ small town meeting/eating place serving typical American fare at a fair price. This is where you brought your girlfriend for a steak and a milk shake and to listen to the juke box, and this is where you met your friends for a chat after work. Or this is where the small-town police officer goes for a quick bite. You can sit at the counter, order your breakfast of two eggs sunny-side up with corned beef hash and coffee, read your newspapers and chat with the cook frying up your meal three feet away. This is also where the single-mother waitress with the stringy blonde hair who is on a first-name basis with every customer confides in you about her latest beau and you left her a big tip as consolation. Diners ...

The purpose of Evolution and Natural Selection is to reward those characteristics in a species that enhance its ability to survive [and penalize those characteristics which are do not contribute to the survival quotient]. So the original giraffe’s neck grew longer and longer as Nature favored those giraffes which had long-neck genes. Because a long neck meant the ability to reach the leaves on the higher branches of the Acacia trees on which the giraffes fed, longer neck giraffes ate more, were healthier, and were more able to find mates. The genes which promoted the long necks were passed on, and over the generations, the necks of giraffes grew longer and longer. In general, animals evolved to have characteristics which enabled them to more successfully find food, find a mate, or adapt to the climate or geographical conditions of their environment. But Dogs are unique in that in they evolved to have characteristics that endeared them more to Man. Of course there were working dogs and ...

Noise can mean much more than 'unwanted' audio signals. Noise can be defined as information that is not useful for your purpose at a certain point in time. It can be audio information, visual information or even olfactory [smell] or gustatory [taste] information. In this sense a frequent encounter with Noise is a part of daily Life. Here are some instances of Noise and how it is filtered: 1. When looking for a location or directions on a map, you have to choose the map with the appropriate scale. If you are traveling from Florida to New Jersey on a non-stop journey, a regional map showing the main highways is the one that is most useful. Detailed maps of each State are not necessary. The small county roads, the streets in each town are all Noise. 2. When getting familiar with a city, it pays to visualize the basic layout of it' s major streets first, and to ignore the rest temporarily. For example, anyone who wants to get to know Manhattan in New York City would first note ...

If, by 'God', you mean an old man with a long white beard, Sitting on a Cloud, then count me out... I have sometimes wondered what it means when people say they believe in God. I, myself believe in a God. But my definition of ‘God’ may be very different from others. When Einstein famously said , “ Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”, religious leaders promptly and gleefully seized upon these words as proof that the greatest brain in the Universe believes in God. However, there are also many other words said by Einstein, which should be mentioned: “ I don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the Universe, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it”. “ I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be anthropomorphic [* i.e. anything that causes God to be moulded in the human image, in my opinion , a result of the vanity of Man: my words]What I see in Nature ...

The type of guitar on which a person plays jazz is usually an Archtop, a big hollow-bodied guitar that gives the fat, mellow tone typical of a jazz guitar. [for picture of an archtop, see my previous article on Eastman:Made-in-China jazz guitars]. Although no one can argue that archtops give a superlative tone for jazz, they do have one problem: feedback. That hollow body is very prone to feedback, and makes an expensive archtop [those with the carved instead of laminated top] become like an uncontrollable thoroughbred horse when playing in a live band situation. Trying to do some inspired playing while that big wooden body is vibrating underneath you, and could at any moment suddenly turn into a howling monster is impossible. Also, archtops are great when you are playing alone or in a very quiet small band setting. At open jamming sessions, in noisy clubs, and playing with drums and horns, archtop tones, though sweet, cannot cut through the noise. A Fender Telecaster, on the other ha...