When one is fat, one may puff up one’s cheeks to prevent the teeth from biting them from the inside. It works quite well. A person skilled in the art could sleep and eat with cheeks puffed like a frog.

Watching the second season of Foundation series on Apple TV. This is some serious sci-fi so beautifully shot.

How do I describe how I feel about it?

Well, contemporaneously, Netflix produced several version of infamous Chinese literary classic the Pilgrimage to the West. The Monkey King cartoon is one of them. In this film the monkey king is born, he is rejected by his own kind. He the exercised himself into a strong person. He gains the support of an intelligent stick from under the ocean and proceeds to have adventure, win a lot of fights, and live a great life/

As someone who has read the original Foundation series (and prequel and sequels), and also the original Pilgrimage to the West, I feel the new renditions completely betrays original stories and just is just a new and fun story. But they’re just using minor plot devices to tell new stories.

Chinese cultures embodied in this stories include things like human are born strong and powerful—but through special, supernatural, guidance and training they, their own self, gain significantly more abilities. They then fight and win a lot of fights against evil(TM). Through this iterative improvement of theirselves, they themselves become more and more divine achieving certain ultimate attainment…. It is the evil(TM) that relies on extracorporeal objects …

Omg, the suona is not the royal horn of desperation. This is very insulting. Man… this is just an onslaught of insult followed by insult…

Well there you have it, that’s how I feel, FAMX.5 most episodes.

My news feed often tells me, via new articles, very specifically that people like myself who misspell words and have wild fantasies of deeply controlling society are either already insane or otherwise are well on their way to insanity.

My own brain is a bit smarter than that. It had come up with the idea that my subconscious mind has made up fantasies about a world where I am being artificially limited from doing work on state of the art technologies or making a lot of money. That my failings on many small things like spelling, simple algorithms, simple logical deduction are all the work of secret-state technology that can remotely disturb a person’s thoughts…

Logically, I absolute can imagine any person, and by any person I mean from beggar on the street to my family to billionaires, and to the 80-year-old Asian man or woman walking down the street in the middle of the day. I can imagine each and every one of you secretly scheming or be involved in a scheme to sabotage my plan to do any thing.

WHY? You ask? What motive would drive any and each of these person to conspire together to make one single measly life of yours miserable? There really ought not to be any amount of money or scarcity or value that can manufacture so many bad luck things in one person’s life. It can’t be real! There can’t be a conspiracy against me.

But one question does surface. Would human beings choose to control its population for idealogical reasons, or for safety under FUD. Would we choose for total control at the cost of … , we’ll, my proud mind would say here at cost of the possibility of advancement. He’d rather sit around and eat cake instead of flying to Mars on Huan’s cheap rocket that beat out spaceX. Because he owns space X stock, and in all honesty he thinks Huan is a total fuck up and won’t ever amount to anything, can’t even type a blog much less fly to Mars… and plus there’s a race thing here. Why risk an Asian born succeeding ?

Issues…

I have no doubt that people are capable of secretly implementing stupidly firm control systems. Even if we didn’t have the technology to accomplish it. I’d bet people would spend careers to design such systems so their next generation can stay in control. I’d bet large simulation was run on software systems optimizing for total control of society… I bet your daddy did it and now you’re working your hands to the bones trying to do the same with new tech….

Man… talk about issues…

Some days, one’s conclusion is that one has hopelessly lost, in all imaginable worlds, one embodies total and absolute uselessness.

I’ve been picking up my trumpet more and more now that my daughter has gotten serious about playing it. I watch a lot of videos on YouTube.

It would seem that much of the video focus on adding pressure to the lip to reduce the size of the hole between two lips through which air flows into the mouthpiece. The curious fact here seems to be that according to the Bernoulli Principal and Venturi Effect, because the same fluid air volume is flowing from the large-cross-sectioned mouth, into a very very small-cross-sectioned lip opening, and then back out into a large-cross-sectioned leadpipe, all sizes being relative, the speed and pressure of air at the lip is higher and lower, respectively, as compared to the same in the mouth and leadpipe. Air, being compressible, exceeds the physics I learned in AP physics. But the general gist without math would still be that the pressure at the lip is lowest. This has some immediate consequences. It explains why the force to vibrate metal can flow through such a soft tissue and not rip it apart. It suggests why experts on YouTube insists that sound production should be in the leadpipe and beyond(where they suggest visualizing the blow is fast and through the mouthpiece and into the leadpipe.) It also explains why most expert insist that pressure for high notes should only be a concern for preventing air from leaking from the lip—because as you reduce the opening in the lip, the pressure reduce. If more pressure is applied, the lip actually stops vibrating more quickly at higher notes than at lower notes (due to reduction in the Venturi.) beyond Venturi is the mouthpiece cup where pressure shoots up and vibrates the outside of the lip and walls of the cup. Heavy mouthpieces use mass to prevent vibration of the walls of the cup thereby putting more vibration on the lip structure itself. And again, here is the part where sound and quality is not coming at the little hole between the lips but beyond.

Another YouTube video shows a guy playing Yamaha Mariachi trumpet in a Mexican store. The Mexican store clerk comments that synthetic valve oil needs to be warmed up before it starts sliding. This explains why a lot of trumpet players play with the valves without blowing just before playing fast passages. The sliding action causes heat producing friction that heats up the valve oils.

After playing a beadless trumpet, I suddenly started feeling the effect of the bead on my beaded trumpets. I can almost feel it anchoring the bell rim from moving. The sound is very well contained from vibration of the bell but not beyond the bead. On the beadless trumpet, the sound is not that much worse or different. But clearly the rim of the bell is vibrating much more.

The brass instrument’s internal surface is important. Obviously, if you have a bean stuck inside leadpipe, it won’t make sound well. But some online discussions seem to indicate that if one is to smooth out the inside of leadpipe by adding lubricant, the trumpet plays better (higher/louder/slots better/etc.) trombone slide spray was one suggestion. My thoughts here are that the lubricant coats inside of the leadpipe to fill and rusting depressions and to smooth out bumps so that air is flowing through a more smooth surface. Of course the oil is also vibrating with the surface of the brass and evaporating into air. The oil in air conducts sound better. All these factors may explain the improvement.

Lastly, more notes on the strenuous effort trumpet players put into playing high notes. I have a hypothesis that when Maynard sets up his stance for that one last note, that a lot of that energy goes towards: 1.) steadying the mouthpiece, head, neck and jaw to ensure the vibration does not shift the setting; and 2.) the pressure between two hands towards each other squeezes the trumpet in a way that adds the body’s mass to the trumpet. This has the effect of keeping the vibratory energy inside the horn for pitch and volume production. I have never play above a concert D6, so all these are conjectures at this point. But this conjecture is consistent with the YouTube videos insisting that the apparent effort is never to push trumpet into the lip to create pressure.

Added to that, the isometric muscle strain might also change the resonance property of the human airway. The one realization disseminated by people on YouTube, such as Hickman, is that actually, the whole human airway is the resonance chamber for the brass instrument. There isn’t anything solid in between the trumpet and the bottom of your lungs. It’s all just one single airspace and sound bounces everywhere. So then anything you do to your body changes the sound. I swear, one time, I had a lot of pee in the bladder, and when I played high, the pee vibrated. Seriously, I kid you not, this may sound like Easter mystic jumbo jumbo about one’s body being one with the universe… But it’s not, it’s about your whole body being one with your instrument. DOH, that’s not much better is it? Anyways, IMMHO and YMMV.

As parents, we’re often supportive of our children. But the fact of the matter is that the trumpet player has a unique experience of listening to the sound from behind the bell. Now the fact that trumpet is vibrating onto the player’s hands teeth means that player hears the most unique sound. The parent of the player, however, may consider sitting next to the player, facing the same way. The auditory experience is different from this side. It may help you to share in this very fun and beautiful experience with the player. When they get good, you can sit on the other side and help the improve their projected sound. But at the beginning, there sound that the player hears is the most important.

That’s it for now. These are draft notes, so comment to help me clean it up.