some ney anban from iran. note the double chanter.
i have a portable chromatic tuner i carry with me all the time. it came with some basic lead batteries, and they eventually ran out. so i modded it for solar energy. an interesting side effect is that since the current is very low, we can actually charge the lead batteries. while some batteries do explode or leak, most can be recharged slowly. this is a risk we can take, since my cells are 75mA only.
materials
any chromatic tuner that runs on batteries
solar cells (i have a bunch of 1V/75mA cells that came from recycled toys, check ebay for that kind of stuff)
a diode that can handle 75mA (almost any diode you find on any scrap electronics from the trash can)
wire, soldering iron, voltmeter and diode meter (if you don’t know which one is the plus and minus)
schematic and pictures
results
it works. you can see the led lighting up in the last pic. looks a bit ugly because the cells aren’t a perfect fit to the tuner’s size, plus i made a board out of newspaper and glue layers to hold it, making it look even worse. that’s about it. considering lead batteries do not have memory, they can be recharged indefinitely. this might sound a bit strange, but as long as they aren’t completely drained, they can be reused over and over again. the main advantage of lithium is that it can be completely drained and still work, plus energy density and weight, but there’s no particular reason not to use these as the chargeable cells in this case. also, the charge voltage is very near the operating voltage (3.3V versus 3V) which means it could work only with sunlight. however, it’s always better to have batteries between the two as they stabilize the voltage.
just a short notice. this saturday is the FEST-i-GAITA 2011 bagpipe festival in lisbon. there will be workshops and documentaries during the day and concerts at night. me and several other students of the bagpipe school will perform to fill in between sets. the video is of the band of the association i’m part of. the line up includes Remi Decker, Volta e Meia and Roncos do Diabo
now that my country has been sold out to the imf and the rich of europe, i think it’s time to look at banksters as a bigger group than just a rich gang. by fabricating doubt about a country that actually has no dramatic problem (like portugal), you get increasing interest and then bailouts. but what is a bailout? should it even be called a bailout?
first of all, if someone offers to buy your bonds at almost 10% interest you could just say no thanks, fuck off. that would be only if a leader would accept standing up against whoever is offering money. but this is not the case. all these countries’ leaders have been weak facing the banksters, that’s why i’m calling them bemperors. let’s see how this works:
create doubt about a country’s economy even though an economy of a country most of the time has little to nothing to do with a country’s deficit (US? huge deficit. japan? huge deficit. who are they kidding?), usually through the media
doubt created makes treasury bonds less trustworthy (what’s a treasury bond? since when are we making money off other countries taxes?), which raises interest rates that the state has to pay investors
country realizes they can’t pay, asks for external help
the bemperor offers some money, but at an insane rate that will take decades to pay, subjecting the country to harsh economic policies that enslave all its citizens to cheap labor and no worker rights, effectively leaving the country at the bemperor’s mercy
so a bailout is not giving anyone money at all. it’s not even helping. it’s making money off the poor as usual. then come the rich european countries and say “yes, we will gladly help, but policy must change and parties of the opposition must stop arguing and help”. what the fuck? i’ll give you some money so now you do as i say? what is this? what’s a sovereign state then? since when can countries dictate what parties should or shouldn’t do? they were elected by the citizens. it’s no outsider’s business to shape national politics. but i digress. obviously that’s what’s happening with my country, and will continue.
what’s happening now is the bemperors taking over of europe. all the media (especially financial media) is saying spain is next. there is no evidence for this, at all, but this is exactly how the game is played. first you discredit a country without any base for it, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy! the way the global economy works, anyone can rig it with the right media machine, since the minds of the investors are as permeable to bullshit as anyone else’s. and though i’m not good at predicting anything, i suspect the propaganda machine will turn on spain next, and leech more money out of it. all hail the bemperors, masters of usury!
it’s alive! the foonki chanter on my transmontana bagpipe. i tuned the drone to this one. sounds really good! check it out! still working on the drones though. i made custom wood pieces to connect all the parts, but it’s hard to make a metal-wood joint completely airtight. every slight leak leads to a lot of air going away and a weird “wind” background noise. anyway, now i can carry this one whenever i can’t play too loud, and can still practice. i used wax for the airtight part. worked ok for the chanter, but for the drones the pressure is very high, so there’s still no result. the plans are at least unison and fifth. maybe soon. i also want to do another chanter in another pitch. this one is in G, i want to practice in Bb minor and C major, so i need at least these two.
i generally don’t do gendered articles (see my previous posts on categories), but this topic has been very interesting to me lately.
more and more data is coming out that demonstrates that in the west females suffer a lot with self-censorship. a good example of this is the fact that a female will have a hard time dealing with the promiscuous nature of our species and instead conjure up elaborate requirements for prospective mates.
one of these requirements is that the candidate must not be desperate for reproduction, because that might mean he is unfit. therefore, dating sites or websites where dating is accepted signal females that the males there are desperate for mating because they can’t get it any other way. this means dating sites in general are flawed in principle. if females favor males that are sexually successful, they will not want to join a website where males have to join it because they are sexually unsuccessful.
so how can a website be a dating site and still attract females? by restricting dating. if a website says “no dating on this website”, it signals females that the males there are (at least in theory) not there for dating and therefore, sexually successful through other means. this allows females to contact males with a good cover, even though they might be just interested in dating.
the best dating website capable of attracting females is a website where dating is forbidden!
let’s see some examples, not just for websites. on CS dating is forbidden, yet females are known to use it as dating very frequently. i personally have been harassed by females on the website, even though i state i do not seek any such encounter. i’ve never been harassed online in any other website, so there is definitely something going on.
being an Erasmus student, for example, is also another widespread, real life, covert dating machine. it provides, again, a good cover for females wanting to try exotic sexual encounters and express their sexuality freely. whenever someone asks what they are doing, they will say “i am in an erasmus exchange”. i’ve been to some of these parties, i’ve met dozens of erasmus students and to put it very bluntly, there are even females keeping a tally on how many different cultures they had sex with. what we have here, again, is a socially sanctioned way of allowing females to express their sexuality with a cover story that prevents their public “slutification”.
why is this important? we are dealing with widespread social misogyny, especially towards sexually promiscuous women. but towards sexually promiscuous men, there is no social effect, because that is considered the standard behaviour. women and therefore forced to go through elaborate ways of finding mates through networks that are not for dating, because of this paradox: a woman cannot be promiscuous, and the mate she’s seeking must not be desperate, two things that dating sites break by definition. so the easiest way is to join the local choir, the local ballroom dancing class, do an erasmus exchange or travel using couchsurfing. whenever someone asks what the female is doing there, there is a cover story. i’m just doing X, where X is completely unrelated to dating. and whenever a male hypothetically joins it, he’s actually just looking to do whatever activity that place was for, and not necessarily hook up.
we all know that this is false. people meet through networks all the time because that’s what life is all about (isn’t it?). be it the network of friends or mutual interests, it is expected that people will hook up or fall in love.
this means that the best networks to meet people are networks that are not designed to meet people and the best networks for dating are networks where it is forbidden. just like the best network for freeloading (CS) is a network where freeloading is not encouraged.
we are so driven by cultural and social definitions that we are willing to do the exact opposite of what it would be expected, exactly because it wasn’t expected. so if you’re starting a dating site, you better name it “just talk” and say dating is forbidden. i’m still amazed at how people are so incredibly skilled at being unintuitive and tortuous in their everyday logic.