Blog

In the practice of music, you have to learn how to critique yourself. This comes in handy in so many parts of life.

Back in the day, the record industry had a role called the "A&R" representative. When I was a kid, the A&R rep was the one who offered the band a record contract. But the history gets wilder.

"A&R" stood for "Artist and Repertoire". The A&R would book a record session, choosing the Artist, and then choosing the Repertoire – telling them what to play.

Before Dylan and The Beatles, there was no expectation or even possibility that artists would choose their own material. Performing artists were seen – at best – as vessels through whom the composition would flow. Less charitably, they were seen as monkeys, who couldn't be trusted to make decisions.

Dylan changed this, somehow scoring one hit record after another with his nasal honk of a voice. The Beatles changed it with their hits, at first by choosing material the A&R reps would never have considered, later by writing oddball songs that suited them perfectly.

Nobody to this day really understands what makes one record hit and another flop. But record companies were forced to admit that performing artists had a better intuition about it.

As the Bible verse says, every day brings both a blessing and a curse. Artists could now choose; but choosing is a terrible responsibility.

A musician has to be honest. When you practice your instrument, you have to learn to listen to yourself critically, and to know your limitations.

As a human being, you are in charge of a work of art called 'your life'. You're the producer, the writer, the costume designer.

You are your own A&R rep. Produce yourself.

Agile software development changed my life.

Agile is very simple, but simple ain't easy. Truly practicing Agile requires dealing with some heavy life questions. Agile gets a bad rap sometimes because people choose to practice it poorly instead of dealing with those.

Everything has an 'opportunity cost'. Choosing to do one thing means you can't do some others.

Tons of others, actually. Life is finite, so there's an infinity of things we won't be able to get to. We are defined at least as much, if not more, by what we choose not to do.

People don't realize with software, they're always asking for something that's never been done before. If you could just use WhatsApp or WordPress or Wikimedia, you'd do that. They want something customized. Maybe someone else has built this particular customization ("I want you to copy feature X"), but I've never done it before.

When you ask for one thing, you're also asking not to do all the other things, at least not right now.

It requires prioritization, which is a form of discipline. Because "not right now" may mean "never". We don't know whether there will be a "later".

Agile is a form of a daily "bucket list". God forbid, if I die tomorrow, what's the most important thing to get done today?

Jack Welch, the CEO of GE, had a saying: "Face reality." This is the essence of Agile. We have a limited number of days on this Earth, and we don't know the number.

Work on the most important thing first, and put the rest of it out of mind. That's Agile.

It's hella challenging to try to live my life that way. But the alternative is to die withimportant work unfinished. That sounds worse.

Facebook has an option for your relationship status that says, "It's complicated." I have a complicated relationship with Christianity. But whether you believe in Christianity or not, it's still an amazing story. And stories are the only way humans learn things, so it contains valuable lessons.

My favorite Bible passage is the one where Jesus makes a mistake. It's a famous one, but no one ever talks about how Jesus got it wrong.

It's late in the afternoon on the second day of the crucifixion. For hours, he has been silent and still. Suddenly, he looks up and pleads to the sky:

"Father… Father, why have you forsaken me?"

In the early years of Christianity, there was intense debate about whether Jesus was the same as God or a separate part, human or divine first. But no one disputed some divine part, or that God intended Jesus to die for the sins of humanity from the beginning.

So that statement, within the story, is not correct. Has God forsaken Jesus? No, he's supposed to suffer and die. Everything is going according to plan.

But as Mick Jagger so perfectly put it, Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt, and pain. Like us.

He makes a mistake. Like us.

What other religion has a mistake as such a prominent feature? Not just in it, but at the most crucial moment?

You could argue that Jesus was perfect in every way, that he intentionally made a mistake in order to demonstrate his humanity. That's still great – maybe even better than human frailty. There have been times in my life when I have chosen not to succeed, in order to benefit someone else who deserved it. Having a power and choosing not to use it is the definition of morality.

More importantly, it doesn't bother God one bit. God still raises him up from the tomb, he still appears to the disciples, he still gets to return in glory at the end of days.

One thing about God, fictional or not, he has to know everything. You can't have true power, under total control, unless you know exactly what the outcome of using it will be.

God knows when you make a mistake. And he's willing to forgive you. If it's not the mistakes, what gets one judged on Judgement Day?

C.S. Lewis proposed that Hell is not a prison, where God banishes the unworthy. Instead, the damned are there by choice – because they refuse to admit their mistake.

In my life, I've found this true. I will forgive anyone who sincerely asks for it, and encourage others to do the same. But those who don't ask, I see them continue on in their own hell. Continuing to suffer.

God knows why you made that mistake, the details, the backstory leading up to it. That's why God forgives – he knows you're not a bad person.

Jesus was wrong. No one is ever forsaken. You're eternally forgiven – you just have to admit you need it.

God loves you because you're not perfect.

American Fight Song

I’m an American and we like to fight
In the streets all day, between the sheets at night
Might makes right, baby there’s no spite
I’m an American and we like to fight

The world’s got their football, but there’s not enough fighting
We came up with our own game, martial blitz like lightning
Everybody loves it, both the left and the right wing
Don’t look too hard for any kind of insight thing

I’m an American and we like to fight
I’m an American and we like to fight

Some of us fight for personal glory
Others fight for freedom from fear and from worry
Some just enjoy getting bloody and gory
Me, I know no other way, simply my life story

I’m an American and we like to fight
I’m an American and we like to fight
We're all American and we like to fight
I’m an American and we like to fight
Yeah

Rock music is a sub-genre of jazz. Jazz for punks.

These terms, jazz and punk, have taken on different meanings over the years. But musicians know terms, genre labels, definitions are not the same thing as the music they refer to. Let's look at some examples.

In 1966, two bands found out they were using the name "The Warlocks", one in NY and one in SF. Both had long hair, dressed all in black, and played acid-fuzz blues drones.

They changed their names, respectively, to the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead.

The Velvets and the Dead had a lot more in common back then than you might think. The Velvets' first gig outside of NYC was opening for the Allman Brothers. And the Dead played a series of gigs with Miles Davis as he started to enter his dark electric period.

All of these bands had strong bassists who treated their instrument as a lead as often as support. And all of them also set themselves apart from mainstream society. That's not a coincidence.

Punk eventually came to refer to an aesthetic and a genre, but at first it was an insult. Like Dirty Harry's famous line, "Do you feel lucky, punk?"

Jazz began as the music of outsiders – first created by blacks in New Orleans who had received classical music training, when a change in the law forbade them from playing for white audiences. They mixed their classical knowledge with the traditional styles and came up with something no one knew what to do with.

The outsider element and mixing of cultures persisted. Ritchie Valens introduced latin elements to rock'n'roll with "La Bamba" – featuring the legendary bassist Carole Kaye. Later Kira Roessler, wearing an evening gown, played tough but intellectual bass for hardcore punks Black Flag (also well-documented Grateful Dead fans).

God gave rock 'n' roll to everyone. All the weirdo misfit black punks. Even the bassists.

I believe in the paradox of love: love is weakness which makes us strong.

Get hurt, and then try again.

I say believe, because like the existence of God or UFOs, love can't really be proven. There's no experiment we can perform (yet?) to determine whether or not love exists.

Evidence surrounds us though. Look at some phrases so common, we never question them:

Ignorance is bliss, and knowledge is power. What you don't know won't hurt you, until you learn a painful lesson, but whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

To gain any ability – book smarts or street smarts, physical strength or spiritual strength – requires subjecting yourself to discomfort. The discomfort of admitting you don't know, of admitting your limitations.

When you love something, it hurts you in a way that helps. Exercise only improves fitness through controlled damage. Kids need to risk getting hurt in order to grow healthy. To improve as a software developer, you have to honestly examine your shortcomings, and change your practice. To play guitar, you've gotta build callouses.

It's change, really. Change is risky and uncomfortable, but it's essential to growth.

You don't always try the same thing. To love yourself, you gotta risk losing others, if they're not committed to growing with you.

Love is risk. Love is discomfort.

Get hurt, and try again.

No time in human history has been more uncertain than the present. And yet, there's never been a safer time to live.

There are fewer active armed conflicts – groups of people killing each other – right now, than at any time in human history. In the US, violent crime is at a 50 year low. Globally, people are surviving and thriving like never before. Infant mortality continues to trend down, literacy up, per capita income, all up worldwide.

People move today like they never have before. Humanity worldwide is in the midst of a great migration, from the countryside to the city.

The internet has changed society in ways we're only beginning to understand. More uncertainty, but more benefit. Imagine how much harder surviving the pandemic would have been without this communication technology that enabled us to isolate ourselves.

In the past, people died of just everything. Kicked in the head by a horse. Typhus, epilepsy, consumption. Food poisoning, lead poisoning.

But they knew what their lives were about (the constant struggle to stay alive). Imagine if you only heard music once or twice a week, how sweet it would sound. Today, without the physical challenges, we struggle with mental and spiritual ones.

I believe there's no such thing as good or bad. Things happen, and they have consequences. We like some of the consequences, and not others – at least we think so, for a while, until we find out we had it backwards.

There's no such thing as "the good old days", just like there's no clean, easy, utopian future.

It's a tradeoff. It's all tradeoffs.

No pros or cons. Just uncertainty.

There's two parts to physics: the math, and the explanation. There are three explanations of the math behind quantum mechanics, but the physics community rejects one, not because of any evidence against it, but because they find it "absurd", "philosophically distasteful".

I'm not 100% convinced this forbidden explanation is correct, but it deserves more serious consideration. The idea alone has changed my life.

Speaking of life, my father was a PhDc in computational physics. When I was a kid, quality time started out tossing the ball around, but then Dad would get excited about a mathematical concept, and we'd end up at the kitchen table as he graphed the curve the ball took.

Kids understand classical physics instinctively. Without having to be told, they learn to throw the ball higher than its destination. To account for the drop while it flies.

When you graph the curve of the ball's path, it has a very literal explanation – the one represents the other. You can hold it up and see the same shape.

Like pixels on a screen, quantum mechanics studies the smallest pieces of reality. So small, every experiment involves billions and trillions and quadrillions of particles.

Quantum mechanics is built on top of statistical mechanics, which like the name implies, uses statistics to model those particles. Being statistical, it's built on probabilities. Extremely accurate, but still probabilities, and therefore containing uncertainty.

All the explanations try to figure out how the uncertainty maps back to our everyday reality.

The mainstream explanation, Copenhagen, says the uncertainty in the math literally matches physical reality, like the graph of the baseball. When a tiny little part of reality is not being "observed", it doesn't exist. This leads to all kinds of voodoo, the cat that's alive and dead at the same time. But it does have an appealing finality: all the difficult questions can get rejected out of hand. Only physical results matter, and the math delivers those in spades."Shut up and calculate," they like to say.

Explanation #2, "Many-worlds", says the uncertainty means that there's a separate universe for every possibility. We just never know which of these many worlds we're in. This also explains the math, but introduces a lot of problems, like where these other worlds came from.

The forbidden theory is called superdeterminism. It is the simplest of all three – "many worlds" without the "many". It suggests physical reality is what it looks like, there's only one world, and the uncertainty in the math simply represents our lack of knowledge about the future.

Simple, physical, doesn't require flights of metaphysical fancy. Of course, there's a catch.

If the uncertainty in the math represents our lack of knowledge about the future, then it does not represent uncertainty in the future. Superdeterminism suggests that the future may be predetermined.

This idea, predeterminism, mainstream physicists find objectionable. If they don't have total freedom to conduct any experiment they feel like choosing, what's the point?

But it's not pre-determinism, it's super-determinism. The difference is not about the future, it's about freedom.

What is freedom? Are we truly free to choose from any and all possibilities?

It feels like I am free to make choices. But feelings can be misleading. It also feels like the sun "comes up" in the morning.

More to come.

Life throws problems at you. Learning from those problems is debugging.

Debugging sounds like it only applies to programming, but problem solving consists of a set of habits. The habits involved have a lot of similarity across practices, especially music.

I saw some epic real-time musical debugging at One Longfellow Square, a venue here in Maine. The band had gotten halfway through a great set when something happened to the sound. It was feedback – not the squealing, ear piercing kind, but a sustained, unchanging note. And loud enough to make the band stop.

The engineer got to work for a little while, but the note didn't change. The band started to get a little irritated, but then we all heard the engineer's voice.

"I'm talking through the house P.A.," he said, "I've cut the power up here in the booth. The main amplifier is off… the sound is coming from the stage."

A twist! Suddenly the tension shifted. The band sprang into action, checking their gear. And then the noise stopped. One of the band members – mortified – offered a short apology, and the show went on.

The instrument that fed back was an electric violin. Hollow body instruments are prone to this kind of feedback, so the musician had most likely dealt with feedback many times before. I bet whatever caused this was something new. A new piece of gear, or maybe a new situation, unusual acoustics, some interference, who knows. But I bet it was new.

As a musician, you learn to debug your equipment. The only way you learn is through failures. Every time something goes wrong, you make a new habit around it.

Nothing is a failure as long as you learn from it.

Listen, simple ain't easy. Here's a simple truth that's hard as hell.

I believe it's possible to learn to change how you see any situation. And by changing how you see something, you can change how you feel about it.

One day I got sick of getting bullied, and I decided to do something about it. I decided that no matter what those kids did to me, I would never let them get to me. I replaced my fear with a steely resolve.

I don't believe you can control your feelings. In intense situations, you have to feel something. But with practice, you can choose what feeling is most useful.

A steely resolve is a feeling. Compassionate, but focused is a feeling. Absurd black comedy is a feeling. The dedication of a commited parent.

You can learn how to change how you see a situation.

My brother passed away. He had complications from chemotherapy and died from an infection inside his heart. It was a gruesome, horrific, slow death. I was by his side in the ICU the whole time.

I'm not glad he died. But I have learned to be grateful. His death taught me lessons I deeply needed to learn.

You can learn how to change.

You can change how you feel.