I’ve been trying to work out a way of playing the northeastern gaita transmontana in Bb minor and until now i hadn’t found a way. now, thanks to a cheap clark D tin whistle i bought, i managed to make what i call the Transmontano Tin Whistle. all it is is a tin whistle tuned in Bb minor. here is the schematic and measurements.

inner diameter: 14.25 (@0.05mm)

total length: 375mm (Ab)

hole positions (from the top):

133mm Ab

164mm Gb

197mm F

223mm Eb

249mm Db

269mm C

303mm Bb

check out the video to see how it sounds, i think it sounds pretty good! now it’s time to make it pretty. and i guess this time there are no pipes in the video, technically. enjoy!

the swedish säckpipa, i think it’s a first here

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!

i’m trying out the music typesetting (using absjs), here’s a simple song i wrote. i recently discovered that on my C major pipes it is easier to play in D minor than in C minor. so i wrote this one that juggles D minor and F major. it’s a silly folk song, so don’t take it too seriously. below you’ll find the ABC notation. the rendering is done automatically. i’m also pretty shitty at it at the moment, so i added no ornamentations, pipes suck without them. enjoy!

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.

portuguese gaita again. today i’ll be continuing the subject of structure and quantification. this time, i will use our concept of thing directly in the calculation of structure.

we first saw that a thing of layer l , i.e., a thing is made of things. for each thing, its information (quantification of structure), is a function of the arrangement of its constituents, . note this is only true if there is no mutual information between the constituents. if there is, we can just conjure up a higher level “middle layer” that hides this mutual information as a single entity. this makes the structure of a thing of any layer quantifiable and independent of its constituents, only their quantity and arrangement. this means we do not need to know the information of constituents to know the information of a higher level system. this is a bit mind boggling, for sure, but this means our layers are irrelevant for the calculation of information, what matters is the quantity of sub-elements.

how is this relevant? this means that to properly quantify any structure, we can either quantify it in a single layer, just like the real world, or quantify it including explicitly all the information of the parts (as we, sentient beings, define them). if we choose to quantify and include the parts, we get . infinite recursion, just as we would expect from a seemingly fractal definition. what does this lead to? let’s calculate it using induction (philosophers start panicking!).

grouping,

we can now group this beast using sum and product operators. this will only disguise the big beast this is.

let’s hope nobody notices how big these numbers are. it’s obvious it is a divergent series and grows with N.

what this means is that we can expand or contract our “zoom” to define structure at any level and accounting for any layer whatsoever. we’ll need this in the future. for now, let’s let these concepts settle. when structure is quantified over a hierarchy as ours, the quantity always depends on the zoom chosen. this paradoxical result is well known from fractal mathematics. i guessed our structure was fractal, this is the proof. fractals are a consequence of abstraction. for nature, since she is abstraction-less, there is only one value for the structure of the universe: the value for the structure of the universe. nothing like ending a philosophical text with a tautology