Homemade recording studio

As you may or may not know, I play guitar for the funk/rock/pop band Kobayashi Porcelain (name taken from the film The usual suspects). We are currently working on a new album, but we do not have a lot of cash for it. So... yesterday 7:30am I picked up Sagi (the band leader, drums, vocals...) Guitar, amplifier, effects, cables, percussion instruments... we drove to Yanai (Sagi's brother, percussions, vocals, keyboards...) picked up the recording computer, hard drive, more cables, microphones, mixer, headphones ... drove to the holy city of Jerusalem to pick up some vintage keyboards, and finally drove to Ofer's (ex bass player for the band, now plays with Sagi on a seperate punk-pop project Action Attention!!!) paresnt's basement. Ofer set up a small rehersal room there. This is not an american standard basement, more like a small storage room. After finding the actual keys to the basement the fun began: setting up all the equipment in the room and running the cables to the mixer and computer outside the room. Bottom line, by the end of the day I didn't get to record a single note. So... Today im going back in... wish me luck...

*Top picture: Kobayashi Porcelain show at the Patiphone club

On the lighter side...

Well, yesterday I had a very good recording session . We are recording our version of Dani Ben Israel's 'Kapara', a classic 70's song. We might actually get Shlomo Mizrahi A.K.A. 'The Israeli Hendrix', who recorded the original song, to lay down a few track for us next week. Markey Funk is working with us and helped us A LOT during the last few days. Recording of this song constitutes a test run for the recording procedure of the whole upcoming album, and I think we are getting a lot out of it. The final mix should be ready in about a month... tell you all about it when it's done.

Back to the usual business, here are a few entertaining links regarding religion:

There is a big issue in the U.S.A. regarding teaching an 'alternative' to Darwin's evolution theory which is called 'intelligent design'. The intelligent design advocates use pseudoscientific arguments, and claim that life is so complex that an intelligent entity (GOD) must have designed it. An amusing retort is suggested in form of the new Church of the flying spaghetti monster which uses similar pseudoscience to prove that our creator is... well... a flying spaghetti monster (see picture at the top).

Here is another one: Scientology is a rising religion that believes in some ridiculous ideas. The founder of this religion is science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard. The TV show South Park has a whole episode about them and some of their devoted believers (Tom Cruise...), you can see a small outtake from it on Youtube, or watch the whole episode online at http://www.southparkstudios.com/ season 9 episode 12. The late Isaac Hayes played a regular character at South Park (Chef), but after the Scientology episode was broadcast he quit the show.

Do you understand quantum mechanics?

The late professor Richard Feinman once said: "if someone says he understands quantum mechanics, he doesn't understand quantum mechanics". Is quantum mechanics such a mysterious theory? I claim that it is not. Thats is not to say that I posess some secret knowledge that no one else does, or that I have answears to some fundamental difficulties with the theory. I simply think that one needs to consider the meaning of the word 'understand'. We say that we understand the answer to some question, when the answer puts our mind at ease.

The most relevant example is that of Newton's laws: To those of us that studied and practiced some problems of Newtonian mechanics, these laws of motion and graviational force seem simple enough, even intuitive. Most of my coleagues say they understand Newton's laws. But do we really understand them? On close inspection these laws are quite weird. Many scientists and philosophers objected to the theory at the time that it was suggestd (a few persisted in objecting for many years later). According to Newton:

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  Every two bodies attract each other, no matter how far they are. This was objected to on philosophical grounds, asking how could there be action at a distance between two bodies that don't touch each other?


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  The force acts instantaniously. Information is exchanged between any two bodies at an infinite velocity.

These objections to the theory are important, they were solved by Einstein's general theory of relativity (1915) which is an extension of Newton's laws. But that does not mean that we do not understand Newton's laws. On the same token, people that study quantum mechanics and practice some problems, get an intuition about the theory. I think we CAN say we understand quantum mechanics just as we say we understand Newton's laws. As for the open question of the 'quantum mechanical measurement problem', this should be studied and hopefully a solution will be found one day which extends the quantum mechanics theory just as general relativity extended Newton laws.

The picture at the top shows the late Prof. Richard Feinman with his family. In the background you can see Feinman's car with 'Feinman diagrams' drawn on it.

Welcome

Welcome, this is my first bolgging attempt. First a few words about the blog's name: ħ is Planck's constant, a fundamental constant in quantum mechanics. This already hints to my interest in science, and probably to some subjects that will be discussed in this blog (in a popular manner that I hope the general public could follow). Other than science, I will share some thoughts on music, religion, and maybe a bit of philosophy. I am by no means an expert on any of these subjects (don't tell my lab instructor), therefore, any comments you have about what I say here are welcome.

The topic I have been thinking a bit about lately is atheism. I highly recommend viewing the talk by Richard Dawkins at TED.com (many other interesting talks there as well). It occurred to me that the transition from polytheism to monotheism originated from the Middle East. It would be nice if the next step – transition from monotheism to atheism (Richard Dawkins calls it "going one god further") would emerge from Israel. I wondered how many atheists live in Israel, so I checked at Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics... The population by religion table does not say how many atheists live in Israel. I strongly suspect that many atheists of Jewish decadence were written of as Jewish believers. So I searched on and finally I found a document which states that in 2005 out of all the citizens above the age of 20, about 40% claim to be not religious. This is a very encouraging figure. This puts Israel in the top line of atheist countries (compare to other countries). We should be aware of our power and use it to prevent the society's decay to mystic believes in karmas, reikis, auras and all sorts of relics. I'll leave you at that for now... until next time, more interesting information can be found at http://www.hofesh.org.il/ (origin of the comic strip at the top).