Here's To A Weird July

This is the last day in a month you will never see again in your lifetime.

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The month of July this year had 5 Sundays, 5 Mondays and 5 Tuesdays.

This happens once every 823 years !!!

My New Solar Oven

I usually don't like cooking in the Summer. Heats up my kitchen. Since I don't have A/C I want to avoid this. Here is a solution. It's kinda fun to play around with different food stuffs to cook. So far mostly it's been veggies and chicken.





It's just a glass tube, vacuum sealed with a dark coating, a simple reflector and a tray that slides inside the tube.

I'm also experimenting with cooking times and placement of the oven in my yard.

What Is Music?

We know that sound results from the vibrations of air molecules moving through the air to our eardrums, that the speed of those vibrations is referred to as frequency, measured in Hertz, and that pitch is the relative highness or lowness of a sound. But what is music?

I love this quote by T Bone Burnett, who I admire in spades. It’s a beautiful and elemental way to think about music.


“I view all instruments as drums and all music-making as tribal. A violin is just a drum with some strings attached, but it’s still a resonating chamber you attack with a bow or your fingers. A flute is a drum with holes in it that you blow through to make different pitches with that resonating chamber you attack with your breath. A band is, ‘Okay, we’re a tribe now. We’re going to be in this village right now and we’re going to tell people in the next village what’s happening over here.’ That’s all it is, really.”

Search for:

Found at C.A.N.

This seems tragic to me.

Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted. 

• Fruits and vegetables, plus roots and tubers have the highest wastage rates of any food. 
• Global quantitative food losses and waste per year are roughly 30% for cereals, 40-50% for root crops, fruits and vegetables, 20% for oil seeds, meat and dairy plus 35% for fish. 
• Every year, consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes). 
• The amount of food lost or wasted every year is equivalent to more than half of the world's annual cereals crop (2.3 billion tonnes in 2009/2010). 
• Per capita waste by consumers is between 95-115 kg a year in Europe and North America, while consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, south and south-eastern Asia, each throw away only 6-11 kg a year.

Here's the source.

Church Modes (DPL - MAL)

Learning the names of the modes (why are they sometimes called the church modes?).

So weird.

Making a smart flashcard deck. DPLMAL is a mnemonic.

Found at C.A.N.

Industrialized and developing countries dissipate roughly the same quantities of food — respectively 670 and 630 million tonnes. 

Project #8 (Part One): Scales on guitar

Again, weird that I haven't learned this by now. So, here we go. First I want to learn the Pentatonic Scales all over the neck.

7/14/18
Another long term project! Rather than pentatonic, I'm thinking of learning the major scale first, reasoning that all other scales can be derived from it. So many different approaches CAGED, 3 notes per string, etc.

Project #7: Thoughts after one week.

I started learning the notes on the guitar fretboard. Harder than I thought! I have the basics down but I have to keep drilling. I looked around for ideas on how best to learn -- there are many ideas on how to do this. I tried making smart cards, which I think may be beneficial, but I 'm not certain I know which method is ultimately the best.

The ironic thing is that I've been playing consistently now for about 15 years, but the very first lesson -- learning the notes on the fretboard -- turns out to be the hardest thing. Learning the notes on the keyboard turns out to be so easy in comparison

.

I will need to keep drilling on this.

NOTE: I'm renaming these from weekly projects to simply projects.

Found at C.A.N.

I occasionally work for a local food bank called Community Action Network. It's a great service to a community that has people in need. They distribute food for free to folks that need it. I like to help out and I get some free food. I'm amazed how much overproduction of food there is floating around. The are a lot of canned goods, but loads of fresh foods too. Much of it is approaching expiration. If you go look you can find surprises there.

Food losses and waste amounts to roughly US$ 680 billion in industrialized countries and US$ 310 billion in developing countries.

Project #7: Learn all the notes on the guitar fretboard.

I've been playing guitar more or less continuously for about 15 years. Amazingly and ashamedly, I haven't bothered to learn the notes on the guitar fretboard. The whole fretboard. That ends this week.

Not sure at this point which methodology I'm going to use. I'll experiment a bit, but I'm thinking I'll start by choosing a single note, then finding all of those notes on the fretboard. All the "E's", "A's", etc.

7/14/18
This is a long term project. Duh! Wow is this hard.  I've made a series of flashcards to help with this. I'm try to do this from multiple angles: all notes on each string, all notes at the 3rd fret, etc.  There is not clear winner for me ... yet.  Speaking to a friend, I heard him say this takes years. Oy. No. Don't have years.  Giving myself to the end of the year.