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I'm not a railway enthusiast at all, but back in the olden days (1960s) there was a British Rail research project to develop a train that could travel at high speed on Birtain's 19th Century railway lines. The project became the Advanced Passenger Train.

The APT employed a tilting mechanism to allow it to go around curves up to 40% faster than conventional trains. It could achieve speeds of 160mph, when not held up by slower traffic. There were even gas turbine-powered prototypes, however in 1981 three electrical trains were built.

Unfortunately, the journalists invited to experience the first Glasgow to London run were plied with drink and reported that the tilting mechanism made them feel sick. Mechanical problems followed, and the trains were withdrawn from service.

They were reintroduced in 1984 but were withdrawn in 1986 for good.

The technology was adopted by other companies in France and Italy, and now Virgin Trains uses the tilting Italian/French Pendolinos on the West Coast Main Line.

Lemmy died on 28th December at the age of 70. The Guardian has some of his best quotes (with swears etc.)

In your twenties, you think you are immortal. In your thirties, you hope you are immortal. In your forties, you just pray it doesn’t hurt too much, and by the time you reach my age, you become convinced that, well, it could be just around the corner. Do I think about death a lot? It’s difficult not to when you’re 65, son.

The BBC and the Guardian both recently reported that Pope Francis has officially recognised Mother Theresa' second miracle, and that her canonisation is expected to take place in Rome in September.

The BBC article states , "The miracle involved the healing of a Brazilian man with several brain tumours in 2008, the Vatican said."

The Guardian article, however, goes into more detail about the controversial nun and discussed the incident of another alleged miracle, as documented by Christopher Hitchens. "A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of Mother Teresa, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumour. Her physician, Dr Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumour in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine."

Mother Theresa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is said to have amassed vast wealth and enjoyed the best private health care money could buy, while the poor and sick in her missions in India endured illness without proper medication, pain relief and even had to use second-hand hypodermics, despite the huge sums of money donated to the "good cause."

All miracles are open to public scrutiny, so there should be no doubt!

Let us examine the evidence. Or not.

I've been experiencing depression, not a "Goodbye Cruel World" sort, more like feeling no ambition at all. I haven't been singing on the street as much as I could. There's a problem with being totally self-employed: if I don't show up to work I have no one to scold me.

I know very well that this is not like my normal self so I asked my psychiatrist for imipramine. It has worked well in the past. He prescribed 50 mg at bedtime for my first week, then 50 mg in the morning and at bedtime after that.

Tonight I will complete my first week of it. It's not having any effect yet.

If I sleep too much it makes me depressed if I'm depressed I sleep too much. Clearly I should sleep less but I just don't feel like getting out of bed.

"Get more exercise," commanded my psychiatrist back in the day.

"I don't feel like it."

"Do it anyway."

I had in mind to study up on kernel programming but instead it's all I can do to reload Facebook.

I'm getting more food stamps on the third. I'll buy some ice cream. Ice cream fixes everything.

Learning from the past: What yesterday's media can tell us about the times

If you want to get a real feel for what was happening during a certain period in history, how people really felt about the issues of the day, take a look at the media coverage.

For example, a recent study of how historically black newspapers covered the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia, found their coverage not that much different from their mainstream counterparts.

The team of researchers, including a journalism professor from Michigan State University, was surprised by the findings, as they hypothesized that black newspapers would be more sympathetic to the racially mixed couple who challenged the Virginia law.

Historically, said MSU’s Geri Alumit Zeldes, the African-American press is an advocate for civil rights.

“Just knowing how the ethnic press operates, we thought they were going to be very one-sided in favor of the Lovings,” she said. “But they followed the same pattern as the mainstream media such as the New York Times and others.”

Zeldes said one of the lessons learned from this, something that hasn’t changed since the first newspaper was printed, is that news is a cultural mirror of what is going on in society at that point in time.

“If you take a look at the newspapers at the time they were published, they will give you hints as to what the times were like,” she said. “So if we look at the black press at that time period, you can get a sense of what the black community was thinking because those reporters were part of that community.”

Zeldes said that by reviewing the newspapers’ stances on the issue, it gives us a clue to the political and cultural mood of the time.

“It indicates,” she said, “that some segments of society in the late 1960s were ready to lessen social and cultural marriage restrictions, but that other groups in the United States were still undecided.”

News as a Cultural Mirror: Historically Black Newspapers Reflecting Public Views of Loving v. Virginia (1967) (DOI: 10.1111/josi.12144)

From Futurity.

At the time I wrote it I was very determined to go to music school to learn to compose symphonies. Some kuron advised me "So you want to compose, then compose". That is he felt I should not need a degree to write music.

This essay is very popular with composers, there have been three who offered to teach me but life was just a little too crazy to focus on it.

• I Have So Many Questions About Music

In other news, with the money my Aunt gave me for Christmas, I purchased a hardbound drawing book, two technical pencils, a technical pen, an eraser and a pencil case. I'm quite good at drawing when I'm in practice, but it has been a long time so I have some work to do.

3D XPoint: Not The Point

A fun article about Intel/Micron's 3D XPoint that I was too lazy to submit.

Computing capabilities aside, the $34 billion 2020 estimate from Intel for 3XP DIMMs partially reveals the Earth-shaking nature of this technology. What most people aren't yet realizing is that 3XP is "fast enough" to replace standalone DRAM in the vast majority of use cases. Research from 2011 outlines a hybrid PCM/eDRAM chip that increases performance and dramatically reduces power versus traditional homogeneous DRAM. This was done using assumptions from the old filamentary PCM technology: nano-PCM will improve the numbers even more dramatically.

From the patent applications, we know that the announced 128Gbit 3XP part is heavily sandbagged (i.e. - they don't want it to appear too disruptive). With the expected four planes (instead of two) and four bits per cell, that works out to exactly one terabit. This blows 3D NAND out of the water. This is the part that they were really going to announce - after the ECD bankruptcy had reached closure last summer.

But my article came along in the form of a giant monkey wrench, the ECD bankruptcy closing was further delayed and the Ovonyx CEO was deposed. Microsoft scrambled to put together a stop-gap Windows phone after it became apparent that they weren't going to be able to ship their PCM/3XP phone in the near future (this phone wasn't cancelled - just delayed until PCM is fully-secured).

Where the Sidewalk Ends

There's no incremental technology planned to succeed DDR4 DRAM. The industry is going to fragment at this next step (Micron's HMC, Samsung's WIO and AMD/nVidia/Hynix HBM). This transition is going to produce few winners and many losers. Who's going to win? The US Government has already weighed in on the matter (where "HMC" is Micron's "Hybrid Memory Cube")

Today I found a reasonably quiet place to make a very lo-fi recording of America the Beautiful with the built-in mic of my Acer Aspire E 15, with Audacity. I saved it as an Ogg. I don't know what quality number it is but really that doesn't matter.

Soylent Singing

It's easy to tell that my mic does not have flat frequency response, as certain notes resonate with the Acer's plastic case.

I'll make some far, far better recordings when I can rustle up the cash for a real mic. You can get good-quality mics with built-in USB for about $200, or I could get a better mic with an XLR connector then use a USB audio interface. Sadly my Acer has no way to attach firewire.

I once owned a Zoom H4 handheld audio recorder. It advertises itself as four-track however it is really two tracks, it just has the ability to record a second time, laying down the second pair of tracks along with the first pair. There is a somewhat improved model available now but I don't recall the price.

More important than finding a better mic is finding a quiet place to record.

I'm expecting to cash out a $7000 401k soon. I'd forgotten all about it until I was reminded of it by the Social Security Administration. I'm going to buy a van to live in, when I do I expect it would work to go way out in the woods to do the recordings.

I'm afraid I've been slacking at the guitar, however I've been picking up the piano again as there is an upright that I can play at a day center for the mentally ill in vancouver. All the shops are closing early tonight, so I'm expecting to spend some time on my guitar before I turn in.

For Christmas day, the Potluck in the Park people are holding a dinner from noon to 3:00 at the Portland Art Museum. I expect I'll go to that.

http://www.vice.com/read/a-brief-history-of-bizarre-christmas-crimes

Journalists are getting beheaded in Syria, it's near-impossible to get an abortion in Texas, and almost half the world lives on less than $2 a day. Even so, a bunch of assholes dress up like Santa every year, run drunkenly through the streets, and dry-hump each other through sweaty, plush suits. The only good that can come from such a grotesque public display of whimsy is a good old-fashioned bank robbery. Last year, some fucking genius dressed up like Santa during SantaCon, the seasonal Santa-themed pub crawl for people with strong opinions about football and other useless bullshit, and robbed a bank in San Francisco.

The cops never found him.

• Salmon Creek Consulting Engineers: We Unscramble Spaghetti

The very minimal design is actually a marketing gimmick; the websites for all the truly expert coders look just like that. Even Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web, has a website that looks like that.

I'm going to make a new site for my music, art and photography but not my writing, my writing I'll leave where it presently is:

http://mike.soggywizards.com/

This second site is not configured yet, I'll do that tonight at Starbucks.

Someone is selling roast chestnuts in Pioneer Square today. Oh how I love roast chestnuts! - but it is quite rare to see them sold on the street, I only recall that from Italy.

"How much are they?"

"Three dollars."

"I sing on the street for tips. I'll be back after I sing three dollars worth."

They seemed skeptical but I came back with three dollars. "Sometimes I can almost make minimum wage".

I often sing on nasty days too but get few tips. Even so if I can earn just enough for one single coffee at starbucks then I have a warm place to spend my evening, a power socket, a table, internet and a restroom.

The problem with good days is that all the other buskers are out as well so it's hard to find a good streetcorner. Days like today I find new places, just now I sang at one corner of a block of food carts, where I had not performed before.

A woman listened to me the whole time she was eating her lunch then gave me two dollars. She thanked me for serenading her meal.

That was nice. Real nice.

I wasn't so confident I'd get anything else to eat other than the chestnuts but I was very determined despite getting a sore back because of the way the sidewalk was tilted.

For $5.50 I could have gotten an Al Pastor burrito but then I would have used up my last dollar bill. While not strictly necessary its helpful to put at least a dollar in my "tip jar" - really my hat - because most people don't really understand why my hat is on the ground in front of me.

But for $5.00 I could get the vegetarian burrito and have that dollar bill left over.

It was good. Real good.

I was planning to sing some more after taking a break but it looks like the rain will indeed come. I'm going to take the MAX light rail and C-Tran bus to CVAB in Vancouver. It's a day center for the mentally ill, there is a piano there that I can play anytime I care to make the journey.

I'm making the journey more often as of late because there is a lady there that I'm sweet on. She likes me too but she is very hesitant. If she's not into it I won't press it. I haven't had a whole lot of luck with women, just a couple days ago I asked a friend for her phone number, she told me she was married. I had no idea. She'd kissed me when we met see but then she is very flirtatious.

There is another that I don't know well at all but she's friendly and enjoys talking to me. I'm going to ask her for coffee the next time I see her.

She's a stripper. I'm not completely clear how one asks a stripper for a date but I know two different dancers who each have four children, so there must be some procedure for asking them out with appearing too lecherous.

Yesterday I added Gene Kelly's "Singing in the Rain" and John Denver's "Country Roads, Take Me Home" to my set. I didn't sound good at all when I sang them yesterday, but today Country Roads worked real well, some guy who was sweeping the sidewalk sang with me.

Singing in the Rain sounds lifeless without the orchestral accompaniment but I'll give it a few more days. My best song is Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

Melodically,

Mike

(Reposted from a mail to my friends and family, with the addition of the note about the stripper.)