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The mathematics of awesomeness

Sometimes, things don’t work out after all. A thunderstorm has been passing through today, making my already poorly-laid plans for a jam session go awry. Luckily, though, I had some musical fun by myself. When nobody was home, I cranked my amp to an obscenely high level. Usually when I put the gain on 10, the volume has to be extremely low, and a hair’s width makes a huge difference. Today I cranked the volume up to about three quarters of the way between 0 and 1. It sounded amazing. (I can’t even imagine what 10 would sound like. Or 11, for that matter.) So I guess there is hope for my guitar playing sounding good. I’ve come to think that there’s a simple formula for how awesome your music sounds:

…where A is awesomeness, s is skill, q is quality of equipment, and g is the coolness of the genre. The variables s, q, and g can be placed on a scale of 1 to 10; therefore, awesomeness is rated on a scale of 1 to 100. Take a world-class banjo player, for example. He can really pluck away at those strings like you wouldn’t believe, so let’s say s = 10. He’s got a great banjo, but it is just a banjo, so q = 7. And he does bluegrass, which is okay because it sort of inspired rock and roll? Let’s let g = 4. So his awesomeness factor is 1/2*4*(10+7), or 2*17, which equals 34. He’s fairly awesome, but I wouldn’t stay after a show to get his autograph. Hmm… do I smell a collaborative awesomeness index site, complete with live voting?

Anyway, with not much to do and a thunderstorm a-brewing, I sat at home and read. As usual, we have to read a book over the summer, but this year we got to choose one of several books. I chose “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien because my freshman English teacher had recommended it when I was in his class. I had put the book down for a while after finally discovering (by reading the cover, title page, etc.) that it was a work of fiction. I was a bit disgusted, actually, because it all seemed so real, and the author acted like it was real. But in the parts that I read today, he said that all of it was made up. I wondered what the point of reading it would be after finding out that it’s all bull, but at the same time I was captivated by the author’s prose and by the fact that I’d committed myself to reading it. So I plowed through the remaining half of the book and now I’m done.

It wasn’t just the storm that’s put a damper on my day. Just yesterday I was marvelling at how great my web host is, and how I never even have to worry about them. Today: massive, apocalyptic downtime. Hours upon hours upon hours. Well, it was a few hours, at least. Time seems to slow down when no one can access your site. But actually, this is where my host’s business model really pays off. See, they charge me according to how much bandwidth and storage I use. When their servers are down, there’s no bandwidth sent and so their revenue is at stake. You can bet they’ll fix the problem as fast as they can. Needless to say, the downtime is over, as you are now at my web site reading this.

Love late night TV? Check out The Late Night TV Page, which lists upcoming guests on all the big late-night shows and some daytime shows. If an upcoming show is a rerun, it will mention when it originally aired, which can be handy. Best of all, there are RSS feeds for each show, so you can always be on top of things.

Here’s a good sanity test. If all of the statements on the list sound normal to you, you need help.

One year ago: “What’s the opposite of mischief? Just ‘chief’?”