I’m trying to learn the guitar in a way that’s compatible with reading standard sheet music. But the notes on the guitar fingerboard seem at first fairly random– because of the different number of steps between successive notes and between strings, it’s tough to predict.

Here’s a standard fingerboard diagram, from wikipedia:

But there’s another way of looking at it, and every note makes sense:


Edits: corrected score octave, added mysteriously-disappearing notes.

Every note is either on a staff line or a staff-middle. This diagram is for a guitar in standard tuning (E-A-D-G-B-E), against a staff in C major. Changes in the tuning move a guitar string up or down; sharps and flats in the staff move its lines up and down.

The guitar strings aren’t evenly spaced, because there are only four half steps between the G and B strings. The staff lines aren’t evenly spaced, because there are different numbers of half steps between them. The one thing that is evenly spaced here is the one thing that’s not on a guitar: the frets. That’s because what’s non-linear in space is linear in what we hear. All music is on a log scale, but so are our ears (like all our senses), so it cancels out.

I’ve called out the C’s in purple for convenience. Also, I show the notes on the frets, instead of between them where you hold the string.

Note: this, along with all my posted material, is Creative Commons.

I still need to write a post about life, which has been full of reflection recently. Suffice it for now that I’m working a lot; I’m inspired that my moon sign is Taurus and my ascendant sign is Leo; I love LiveMocha; I miss my friends; I’m considering going back to school in Geopolitics; and I’m the captivated owner of a beautiful new all-wire-strung black acoustic guitar.

Some nights, loud (street-cleaning?) trucks move past my window, with an airy whine that sounds exactly like snow trucks in Boston, on a quite night after a deep snow. Saudade. I hear Boston got its first snow! How’s winter?

Here are a few pieces in pictures of my life in Porto Alegre.

Last weekend was the 12a Parada Gay Livre Porto Alegre. I’m sorry these are so far away; you can only see the aggregate energy and festivity (but click on the thumbnails for more!). I partied in the parade before this point, but there was no room for pictures.

The Leading Edge

Marchers

Down the Avenue

More Parada Gay Livre Porto Alegre

Brazil has avacados like a guacamole-maker’s wet dream, but they don’t know what a tortilla chips is. How can a country not have tortilla chips? I’m going to have to serve my guacamole on fried dough! What kind of messed-up third world country have I gotten myself into?

That said, I’m really enjoying Porto Alegre. This is a city where same-sex making-out on the dance floor outnumbers hetero even the straight clubs.

There’s a bar I’ve gone to a couple times that absolutely oozes alternativity. People relax on home-made chairs over hot discussions of art and politics. In the back are three cluttered artists lofts, and against one wall is a table of books for sale by one of those artists. If I can place two closely related aspects in opposition, the people there are funky instead of beautiful. People that comfortable with unconventionality talk and move and carry themselves differently. Not since Cambridge have I been in a place so casually different.

Edit: Turns out today is also the Porto Alegre Parade Gay! After Belém, Rio, and a near-miss in another city, I really think Brazilian cities have a gay pride parade every two weeks. I love them, and it’s good to be counted… but this city needs another gay-pride supporter like Obama needs electoral votes. I think I’ll wait until it passes in front of my apartment, in a couple hours.

Is moon as beautiful there as it is here?

I’m planning to go to the World Social Forum in Belém, in January. It’s an incredible opportunity to gather a group of similarly motivated people to help me help the world.

If you could do anything to make the world a better place for 6 months, what would you do?

Say you have at least four other people working with you, containing any skills you might want, and that you don’t need to earn money– in fact, you can work 20 hours a week from anywhere and have $2000 a month to support something more expensive. What would you do?

At the Forum, I’ll carry around a colorful cardboard sign, to attract people to my projects. On one side, I’ll advertise for people to join me in buying a sustainable bus, like BioTour, to travel around South America in. But the other side? Who knows. Maybe I’ll make the bus a mobile medical center. Maybe I’ll start a new web 2.0 project to make it natural to live green. Maybe I’ll start a learning/teaching/community and craft center. I need more ideas!

The project doesn’t need to fit in with my sustainable bus plan, but it’d be nice. It also doesn’t need to involve me leaving Brazil for the 6 months before I can get another visa, and then return here– but that’d be ideal.

Since I’m doing this raffle for the Travelers Network, I decided to start using Google Analytics to see how many and what kinds of users I was getting. But you get so much more information– where they’re coming from, where they go on the site, what they had for breakfast. I started watching the numbers change every day, and playing around with the little graphs and widgets.

But I have too few users, too little data! So, I looked into running a google ad. Look: I can specify to just spend $1.00 a day (since I make no money from the site), and my ad will go to thousands of users. So I set up my keywords and countries, built an ad, and set it free.

Two hours later, I checked: the ad had been shown to 2,209 people, and two had clicked on it, using up my $1.00 and disabling the ad for the rest of the day. I thought– Wow! My ad just showed up in 2000 people’s bedrooms and hostels and offices. And I started playing with all the little toys Google AdWords gives you: I set up multiple ads and goal actions to test their effectiveness and tripled my daily ad budget.

And now I’m can’t stop thinking of all the things I could do with a little money. I could produce dizzying collections of targeted ad campaigns, finance-equalized conversion metrics, and user-response reports. I could do experiments in eye-catching techniques and study the demographics of search term usage and online behaviors. I could make millions of screens the unwitting acolytes to all my projects, funneling people around the globe onto my once-lonely pages. The world opens itself up to be my oven, if I’ll just lean over to feed it a little more dough.

Hamlet: Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
    wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing
    either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
    it is a prison.
Rosencrantz: Why then, your ambition makes it one; ’tis too
    narrow for your mind.
 — Wiliam Shakespeare

Today I want to discuss how to choose gods: amongst the endless possible gods, how to discriminate the best and most righteous for a situation. In polyscriptivism, this is the question of how to make moral decisions.

The universe has layers. At the base is nature, or reality, as it really is. We have no words to describe nature, and only an indirect experience of it. However, it is what both we and the gods are made of.

There is neither good nor evil in nature, right or wrong, justice or love. Nature is Being being being. Good and evil are created by the gods, and because all of our experience of nature is mediated through the gods, the world appears to be permeated with these values. In a very real sense, our world is filled with good and evil, even if nature is not. Although good and evil only exist in our experience, they are no less real than anything we’ve experienced, and in no way dispensable.

Of course, different gods define different goods and evils. If the god of capitalism defines good as sanctity of contract, and the god of Christianity includes usury amongst his evils, neither of them is any more “right”, according to the laws of nature.

We choose our morality by the gods we associate with. Not only do we decide whether to do “right” or “wrong”, but we decide what write and wrong mean to us. Further, these two decision are deeply connected. Our morality produces our actions– we try to do what is good and avoid what is bad.

These efforts are not under our control the way they appear. They result from the interplay of the gods that define our lives. The realm of choice for us is in which gods we evoke.

But if there’s no morality outside of the gods, by what criteria are we to choose them? The doctrine of polyscriptivism says, choose those gods that make you happy. But we can say more.

There are many different kinds of happiness. Each– and our desire for it– is important, from those that appear most instinctual or irrational to those that seem most cultivated or perceptive.

Human beings are beings in motion. Our grossest nature consists in a drive to be or act– that is, in want. The gods mediate our experience of this drive, but they cannot define it.

Sometimes gods present our drive as a shadow– as a thing to be denied and buried. It is then that we feel trapped, because we are trying to divorce our most fundamental nature and motive force. When we feel trapped, it’s because we’ve chosen the wrong gods.

But the pure pursuit of happiness is difficult, because the nature and direction of our drives is easily mistaken. Drives also change quickly and unexpectedly. Fortunately, some gods are almost as flexible and help us to perceives our drives more clearly.

Once, two men sought to build houses of great quality. They both sought the finest materials and the most skilled of craftsmen. The first man built his house of stone, with doors of steel, and proudly said that it could stand a thousand years. The second made his house of cloth. Every room was pitched and arranged according to changing mood of its occupants. The houses were completed, and the men moved in.

One summer day, the house of stone got so hot that the man there didn’t dare touch the doors, and he was trapped. On the same day, the man of the cloth house held a large party. The occupants moved between rooms in every direction, raising up the walls, until the whole structure collapsed, and the man was left without a house.

The second man heard the cries of the first, and broke through a stone wall to set him free. The two men decided to build a new house to live in together, this one with some walls of stone and some of cloth.

When we try to live our lives by following a single god, we find ourselves confined. When we try to live by trying to appease all gods equally, we find ourselves with without direction. The life of quality necessarily has both some strong gods and a changing cast.

In nature, there is no good or evil. Whether you live your life confined and ashamed, or righteous and celibate, or perverted and smelly, the universe welcomes you no less or more. You can live your whole life consumed by restrictions, and it will end the same way. The most horrible, self-mutilating experience of our lives, in the eyes of the universe, is nothing but an experience.

And so, in reality, we have no obligations to bear on our choice of gods. The polyscriptivist mandate to live well and help others to do the same comes from its adherents, because it is what we want for ourselves and the world.

I’m so happy, I could shout. The whole world– well, at least Brazil– was praying for this and watching with as much anticipation as we did. I’ll always worry about democracy and the future, but last night the US showed that it was a far better courier of those two abstracts than I hitherto barely hoped.

I think it’s likely that Obama will become the best president I’ve been alive for. The president in the show the West Wing was said to modeled after Clinton– but to me Jed Bartlet’s unflappable energy, intelligence, ability to inspire, and liberal courage seems to be a reflection of Barack Obama.

Even so, there was a voice of racism in me. I wondered, as I saw him walk out for his speech, “A black man? Is he going to be able to handle this? He isn’t going to do anything crazy, is he?” And I could answer myself, yes, a very fine black man at that; yes, he’ll handle it with grace and style; and no, he’s going to set a lot of crazy things right. But I’m ashamed that I asked the questions in that light.

I have half a mind to move to Washington and start working the man. It an incredible thing to have the country in the hands of someone you respect.

Congratulations, Mr. President-Elect. You make us proud.

NYT has a fantastic human interest story of a few large organizations who found themselves entangled in the economic net: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/business/02global.html

“This is going to have a tremendous financial impact,” said Robert F. Kitchen, a member of the West Allis-West Milwaukee school board. Officials say some districts may have to cut courses like art and drama, curtail gym and classroom maintenance, or forgo replacing teachers who retire.

The election tension is so think you need a sawzall. Obama’s got in clinched, right? Electoral-Vote seems to think so. The possibilities of having a mixed-race– and 13th Gen– president who actively supports building a new economy build on green-innovation are almost too wonderful to believe. I really liked Tim O’Reilly’s endorsement, but I imagine my f-list is already fully-decided.

With a friend, I’m starting through Your Money or Your Life, an enlightened approach to personal finance. The first step is to calculate (a) the total amount of money you’ve earned in your life, and (b) the total value of everything you own. Want to join us?

I’ve also started taxing myself. Politicians are taking too long to implement a carbon tax, and we can’t wait. Americans need to be more-than carbon-neutral (and it’s not that expensive; we can do it) to offset countries that aren’t ready.

I did some calculations. An MIT paper said that the per-capital carbon footprint of the world, per year, is 4 metric tons, but at the rate carbon is increasing, I calculate it at 17 tons, or 1.2e11 metric tons total per year. If just the populations of the US and EU pay carbon offsets for the rest of the world, that’s only $1200 per person per year (at the costs from Carbonfund.org). Not only can we do that– we have to if we want the Earth to survive.

I’m also doing a fair-trade tax. Basically, if I pay less than fair-fair-trade prices, it’s supporting a exploitive economic, political, and social systems I hate. So, I’ll put the difference into a fund, and split the money between charities that do short-term amelioration and long-term fixes.

My last tax is a self-tax, to be used for non-critical medical, educational, and devotional services, levied whenever I mistreat my mind, body, or soul. So far, I’m very pleased with the added awareness I’m getting from all three.

Anyone want to join me organizing our self-imposed taxes? We can make it easier doing it together.

I went up to São Paulo, Sunday, to get my “moving bag”. This is the bag that had everything I didn’t need, but I wanted anyway. The distance from Porto Alegre to São Paulo is about the distance between Boston and Jacksonville, Florida, but in Brazil terms, they’re both in the southernmost quarter of the country.

I just got back and unpacked my bag, and got to see all the funky stuff I brought. A third of the bag was my beloved books (of course) and my card system, a third was a sleeping bag and a few more clothes, and the last third included electronic parts, a sauce pan, colored pencils, accidentally smuggled drugs, checkbooks, and a mosquito net. It’s nice knowing I can live without them, but it’s even nicer having them too.

I took a plane up, but I felt guilty about the carbon so I took a bus back down. But as a reward, I figured out how to lucid dream! The trick was releasing that I’d already done it before.

Does this happen to you?

So you’re sitting in a car, reading and listening to the radio and people talking. And it gets darker and you keep reading and the time passes, and at some point you realize that you’re reading with your eyes closed. But you can still see the page and you’ve been reading like this for half a chapter already, and you can look around and see everything in the car too. And you can hear the other people talking, occasionally mentioning you sitting there sleeping. But you aren’t sleeping, and you’re just about to tell them this when the car pulls to a stop at its destination.

Or you’re dreaming, and you decide you want to do/remember some things in the morning. So you start making a list. When it’s done, you realize a dream-list won’t do any good. You have to wake up. So you dream you wake up, and start the list again. But soon you realize you’re still dreaming, so you stop and open your eyes for real. But then to make the list, you reach for the dream-pen, closing your eyes again, and start writing on the dream-paper again. You realize the mistake and that you need to actually *get up*. So you open your eyes again, and then close them, and stand your dream-body up, get a new dream-pen and dream-paper, and start making your list again. Finally, you realize you have to the “getting up” in real-life too, so you do, get the real-pen and real-paper and start your list again. And you can only remember the first item.

They happen to me often enough that I never realized that they were the special kind of dream I’ve been trying to have for years.