Today, I did almost nothing except record. I woke up at about 10:30, fed my neighbor’s (who is out of town) cats and then walked to the guitar store. I bought a new XLR cable for the new microphone I got for Christmas from my grandparents and a new guitar cable. I got home, restrung my guitar and from 12-8 did nothing but record.

I redid a few songs, and added some minor adjustments and little changes to others. I really enjoyed myself and Lauren’s going to get the Christmas present that she asked for tomorrow morning. I used the Line 6 preamp, and I’m really learning how to use it properly, and find what it’s good for and what it’s bad for. Some of the aspects of the songs that I did, I don’t like as much as the old ones, and some I really was impressed with the machine.

The preamp has some great vocal models and effects. I play around with them quite a bit… one you’ll hear that’s more extreme is in my remake of “Zombie” by the Cranberries. My dad didn’t much like what I did with it because it sounds rusty and like I’m in a box, but I thought it was neat. Of course, no one else has really listened to it. I did some cool stuff… It starts out with my voice very distorted and during the prechorus, it fades into a clean voice with some flange and reverb. I really liked how it turned out. The others were all very fun. Tell me what you think of them… there are mistakes. One day I’ll go back and redo everything and make it all sound a lot better. The production was great, but the performance is okay. The beginning of the new Linus & Lucy is a little odd… I actually tried to get it to sound normal for quite a while, but didn’t have much time to mess around.

The songs that are not different or redone or new are…

Hey Ya- redo
Spilt Milk- redo
Zombie- new
Dance of the Sugar Plums- minor adjustment
Linus & Lucy- redo
Give it to Me- minor adjustments

And to my mother! I did use the bongos today, but they do not appear in any of these songs… when I recorded them, they sounded awesome, but I’m really off¬†beat so I really need to work on learning how to play the more accurately. I’ll get there.

My dad is constantly bugging me to put all of my conversation that I have for him on my blog. It is because in person, he hates to talk about the things that I’m learning in all of the scientific writings that I read. I don’t care who gets this stuff or who doesn’t… I am going to rant and scream to the world how incredible this stuff is.

First of all, the book I am currently reading is a collection of physics lectures written by Richard Feynman. He was a big physicist in the 50s and 60s and I’m pretty sure he went to all teaching until he died in 1988.¬†His writing is magnificent. The only thing that you really need to know before you read this book is some basic calculus and some Euclidean geometry.

It starts out talking about a lot of mathematics involved in classical¬†mechanics. Classical mechanics is just Newtonian physics… the boring stuff… force, kinetic energy, momentum, acceleration, all of that classic stuff dealing with bodies in motion through space. If there are any of you out there that think those types of things are what physics I’m going to be studying in college are, you are mistaken. Although these are the basic mechanics to what I’ll be doing, and an important part in the learning process, it is only the beginning.

In Einstein’s time and just before, physics was entering a revolution, where electricity and magnetism were starting to be known as a large part of modern physics. All kinds of men made incredible contributions to science in those days… and they were all brilliant. Luckily for Einstein, he was coming up at just the right time when all of the equtions he needed to answer the things he’d been dreaming up were being born. Things such as the Lorentz Transformation and so on. A famous experiment called the Michelson and Morley Experiment had just been conducted.

It’s as if God was pushing Einstein right up to the top of modern science. He had been dreaming about principles of relativity since he was 16. He failed his last final in college, which would have led him into electrical engineering. Instead he was stuck in a patent office all day in Switzerland doing nothing, but dreaming up the ideas that would change the world of science and technology as we knew it. The basic principles of relativity were starting to form, but nobody really saw it coming until he came in and BAM! Like magic, he put all of it together.

I was excited last night and earlier this evening about the things I’d been reading. I knew Einstein’s theories of relativity about how it changed our views on space… and then I also knew about his famous equation which states that mass is proportional to energy. Tonight Feynman finally pulled it all together for me, and I understand how the two connect now. I also learned a bit of vector analysis which was a really cool form of math which was composed of a little basic calculus, basic algebra, and some Euclidean geometry, but when they were put together, it will make your head spin at first. It was really exciting as I grasped it all.

I felt like putting up a list of really good quotes that I found last night. Most of them will have a theme of conscience, sin, or justice.

“The roots of violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principles.‚Äù
-Ghandi

“There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.‚Äù
-Ghandi

“Never do anything against the conscience, even if the state demands it.”
-Albert Einstein

“Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… the power to choose, to respond, to change.‚Äù
-Stephen R. Covey

“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.‚Äù
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.‚Äù
-Thomas Jefferson

“If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and congress and assemblies, judges and governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.‚Äù
-Thomas Jefferson

“The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.‚Äù
-Thomas Jefferson

“Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, until you know there is no hook beneath it.‚Äù
-Thomas Jefferson

“The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.‚Äù
-George Bernard Shaw

“Other men’s sins are before our eyes; our own are behind our backs.‚Äù
-Seneca

“Pleasure is the bait of sin.‚Äù
-Plato

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.”
-Buddha

“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.‚Äù
-Buddha

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.‚Äù
-Buddha

“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.‚Äù
-Buddha

“There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it.‚Äù
-Buddha

“Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security.‚Äù
-Benjamin Franklin

“The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.‚Äù
-Benjamin Franklin

“Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.‚Äù
-Benjamin Franklin

“Never confuse motion with action.‚Äù
-Benjamin Franklin