links to all my websites...
Kaliedoscope animations... and...
Political cartoons, Rainbow Gathering, Science Fiction Story --->Alien Socket Wrench<--- This website has been online since 1997.
http://alohafreddy.com
a screenplay written by my friend...
http://360.yahoo.com/gregvan
Blogging for Peace, Justice and the American Way.
self portrait greg vanderlaan
greg vanderlaan self portrait
become one with the universe. actually, a pretty good idea. That quest for enlightenment seems to work better than doing evil as a way of life. We have seen BUSH CHENEY voluntarily selecting to murder 4,110 American Soldiers in Iraq... Not a real fine way to spend your time on Earth... GEE, I'd rather they select a different hobby... We who stand on the moral high ground have an advantage... we don't have to feel guilty.
http://groups.msn.com/gregvanARTeARThandheART
photos of San Francisco trip... redwood sculptures...
http://gregvan.bravehost.com
Bald Eagle game and conspiracy theories...
http://gregvan.oceansfree.com
Eureka Peace March, Jammers League Band, Slewfoot String band
http://www.angelfire.com/art2/gregvan
IdealChick Painting, Marching Lumberjacks Band, FutureWorld Sci-fi story
http://www.geocities.com/momsaachico
Mom's AA club website: Chico, California
http://www.freewebs.com/gregvan/index.htm
Tourist Photos of Eureka, Van Duzen river, Trinidad
http://gregvan.madpage.com
Kinetic Sculpture Race Arcata, California
My writing: answers to questions you forgot to ask.
My dad sent me an article about the new Google server farm...
He wanted to know what's a server and why The Dalles...
It's important to remember that when you look at anything that is stored on the "Internet" you are really looking at a file in a "server" computer owned by someone else... All CONTENT-pictures, words, stock charts, newspaper articles, email and movies are stored on computers called servers... your home computer is just looking at another computer somewhere else where someone has decided to store the CONTENT... Someone CREATES the content... like ME! I take pictures and store them on Yahoo's server... send you email with pictures "attached"... then you can ask yahoo to let you look at the pictures... that's what really happens with email and pictures... Someone creates (writes) the newspaper articles in the Mercury News and when you look at their online edition, your home computer is asking the Mercury News's server to let you look at the article... and in the case of the article about the Los Gatos fire, they also let you look at google's firemaps... SO, there are millions of server computers. Most owned by google, Microsoft and Yahoo... They each consume electricity and cheap reliable electricity is absolutely essential... The Dalles is famous for hydroelectric power... Grand Coolie Dam... All those dams on the Columbia river are really good... The other thing is: near the border of Oregon and Washington is the fibre optic cable that allows communication with the orient... It goes under the ocean to all of Asia... Since about half of the people that use the internet live in Asia, it's a good idea to build your server farm "near" them... "Near" is a relative term... at the speed of light, over a fibre optic cable, Oregon and Asia are very very close... Distance can best be measured in time... It takes 7 hours to drive to San Francisco... 4 hours to fly (two hours fiddling around with the Homoland Security nonsense, one hour in the Air, one hour at the baggage claim) As the previous example shows, the extra nonsense takes more time than the actual travel... On the Internet, a signal from Asia goes directly to Oregon... A signal from Eureka goes to a telephone switching center in Sacramento and then on to The Dalles Oregon... If our cable is working perfectly... if it's not working properly, or is too busy, the route may be extremely wierd... Like, the signal tries to use a path that is not overloaded with other people's messages... My signal could go to Sacramento, then San Jose and then Texas, New Jersey and back thru Idaho to contact Oregon... I'm not kidding... at the speed of light it might be quicker than waiting for the phone circuits to stop being used in the most direct route... The other factor is heat... a transistor converts electrical energy into heat energy... It just does and there is nothing you can do about it... Just like an automobiles brakes convert kinetic energy into heat on the brake shoes... Unless you have one of those new cars that capture the braking energy by transferring the rotary motion of the wheels into driving an electricity generator when you step on the brakes... With silicon, it fails to perform when it gets too hot. Therefore a lot of power is used for cooling fans and air conditioning units... some of the really big computers like CRAY have liquid nitrogen stored near absoulte zero for cooling... someone has to power all those giant fans... that's where the Grand Coolie Dam also is helpful. Do you know why it's windy in Candlestick Park? All those Giant Fans!
Google.org wants to change the paradigm of philanthropy by doing venture capital funding of businesses that can do good and earn enough of a profit to sustain themselves. Sort of like the old saying... "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime". They have selected Dr. Larry Brilliant to head this mission... Dr. Brilliant has had a life that is so amazing that it would not be believed if written as fiction... Founder of SEVA, Founder of "The Well" computer online community with Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog)... He came to public attention as the Doctor who provided maternaty services on Alcatraz Island when the Indian's ruled the Island in 1969. He became the doctor in residence for the entire occupation of Alcatraz.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Brilliant
my Buddha Buddy
dancing teenage alien
ghost of extra terrestrial
I recently got an email about an archaeological find of chariot wheels in the Red Sea and Moses parting the waters... (you remember the movie called The Ten Commandments?) That reminded me of my own collection of shark's teeth from a sandy mountain behind Santa Cruz. As a child our family went with friends to sift the sand and discover teeth. My dad still has the teeth. It makes me wonder, HOW DID THE TEETH GET ON THE MOUNTAIN? One explanation is that the earth moved and the land rose up to become a mountain. Land that was underwater traveled vertically and now is a mountain. Another explanation is that there was a great FLOOD and the mountain was underwater at some time. In the Bible there is a description of Noah's Arc and a great flood... Who knows?
A simple invention: put keychain LED flashlights on a rope and wear it around your neck for walking around at night while camping. Automatically lights up the trail right where you want to see... directly in front of your feet... Your hands are free... OR, hold the rope and spin lights around while dancing for a light show... just like those people that spin fire balls around but high tech and safe...
My response to a conservative email meme explaining why the war in Iraq was a brilliant idea...
Dear Dad:
Keep on sending these messages . I find them interesting. All college students are required to take a class called critical thinking, I remember that one of the things we learned was: Two wrongs don't make a right. Cas compares the murder rate of Washington DC with Iraq. Neither is good. They both should be stopped... AND he makes the classic statistics switcheroo of comparing one set of data to a different set... "TOTAL deaths in DC" do not accutately compare to "Deaths of PEOPLE LIKE US in Iraq". Total deaths in Iraq would have to include the 100,000 Iraqi people that have died... and the 770 American civilians that work for Halliburtan, KBR and Blackwater. By the way, no one has ever mentioned removing the 120,000 American civilians from Iraq. Will they ever leave ??? There is a new book about Blackwater Inc. They also have been hired to do police work in New Orleans... No, we don't have martial law, they are civilians... Does the second Amendment to the constitution protect MILITIA groups like Blackwater ? I don't know...
CATCH 22 SOLVED!
It has always been a puzzle of how to look up how to spell a word...
If you don't know how to spell it, how do you know where to look in the dictionary?
It's a classic puzzle... sort of a school joke... but now it's been solved... use the ONLINE dictionary, with spell check!
anyway, I before E except after C... A long time ago I misspelled Receiver on the front panel of some computer equipment I was designing and it cost thousands of dollars for the company to strip off all the paint and re-silkscreen the computer... Big hassle at work... I was working as a draftsman in the aerospace industry and I was responsible for the artwork used on the front of the equipment... very upsetting to make a mistake at work... but not as bad as the day Donald Rumsfeld was at the Pentagon when a jet airplane crashed into it. 9/11/2001. The day the military FAILED COMPLETELY!
written by Tom Robbins in the book "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas"
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In the eighth century there lived Joshu, a great patriarch of Zen. One day a monk asked the Master Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha-nature?" Joshu replied "Wu".In the Chineese language the word "Wu" is a negative response... like "No" in the English language. However, the word has many shades of meaning depending on the inflection and subtle nuances in pronounciation. Wu could mean 'absolutely not', 'probably not', 'possibly not' or 'I am inclined to doubt it'... So, for twelve hundred years, Zen scholars have debated EXACTLY what did Joshu mean when he said "Wu". For twelve hundred years they argued and argued. However, there has recently been discovered an ancient manuscript that show that there was a spelling error when the scribes copied the original text. When asked about the possibility of a dog having the Buddha-nature, the Master actually replied... "Wuf"... or as English dogs say, "Woof"... "Woof, woof, woof, woof, ooooooOOWWWwwwwwww" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I changed the words slightly to make it more understandable in email... His IDEA remains, unless I made a spelling error...
http://www.aclu.org/thespieshaveit/
Here is a fantastic movie about the US Government spying on You and me... Well, not me cause I don't phone anyone... Of course they DO READ ALL EMAIL... and look for "keywords" like known errorist organizations... greenpeace, ACLU, code pink, ELF, ALF, Earth First and raging grannies... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear NSA EMPLOYEES: Why not quit your job and go write software for google? DO NO EVIL is their slogan... sure beats spying on Americans...
My Synthesizer Music Experiences:
The Korg Polysix was my favorite. It had an amazingly beefy sound and could do all those spaceship taking off effects. (resonance set to 10)
There was a cv and gate connector on the back that allowed me to connect it to my Radio Shack 100 in One Experimenters Kit. I built an elaborate oscillator circuit on the kit and created some truly unique sounds. The cv connector also let me connect a special black box that converted audio volume to control voltage. VOCODER... I enjoyed your website... Thanks... I wrote a long story about my band Solarwind at
http://www.geocities.com/gregvan/synth_stories.html
Another beautiful synth: I bought it used at a yard sale for 75 dollars. It was a minikorg and had been thru severe abuse on the road. This marvel is most famous as the lead voice on Kitaro records... the breathy flute sound that he uses to play melody parts... The theme to Silk Road, etc... This was a monophonic synth that had ring modulator effects and white noise... this also had a switch for setting the pitch to an extremely low tone... as if you were playing notes on a piano that were way off the end of the left hand... this machine allowed me to create what I called the "Dawn of Time" sound... A growling bass note that needed about 10 seconds to play... A ring modulator lets each key have its own vibrato rate... for example" "C" might have a wow wow wow sound that shanged every half a second while "C#" would have a wow wow wow that changed 42 times a second... "D would be 6 times a second etc... this tonal quality creates many of the more avant garde (or teeth grittingly irritating) sounds of extremely early recordings...
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I also became facinated by the possibilities of echo and computer controlled music. Lucky for me, instruments started being built with a MIDI interface... this caused older instruments to go on sale at extremely cheap prices... The Roland microcomposer was 8 1/2 by 11 inches and had a microcomputer in it. I stored sequences of pitches and durations of notes using the tiny keyboard... really, really tiny... It was designed to drive two SH101 Roland synths and could play two notes simultaniously... what a breakthru... from ONE NOTE at a time to two... By typing in a series of bass notes each with a duration of 1/8 of a bar... and then running it thru an echo box that had a time set to 3/16th of a bar... and setting the voltage controlled filter so that some notes were silent, some notes were muted and some notes were loud... I was able to trick the system into composing by itself a never repeating bassline that was fun to improvise over... the computer selected which notes to play and when... cosmic... This worked well for music that is called MODAL... In that style, there are no chord changes at all... the performers select a handfull of notes as the scale and just go to it... the most famous modal piece is "The Old Washer Woman" performed by Edith Bunker on the television show "All in the Family"... The theme music is played entirely on the BLACK NOTES of the piano... I think they called it "Those Were The Days"... "Didn't need no welfare state, everybody pulled his weight, gee those old La Salles ran great... THOSE were the DAAAAAYYYYSSSS.... It is an extremely simple song. So simple that I was able to teach a computer to play in that style... Of course, my compositions were not at all like that whiny song... more robotoc and like German Technopop...
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Music nonstop, technopop... Bleep, blonk... tchatchink...
I was fortunate to have read an article in the Washington Post about the upcoming Kraftwerk concert so I went out and bought the recommended album Autobahn and liked it... The basic style of music sounded interesting and so, I went to the beautiful Warner Theatre to see them. This was an elegant performance space that started out as an ART DECO theatre and then became a dance hall for rock music... oh how lucky we were... This was my first exposure to the technopop music and many of the people in the audience were Germans... I had no idea that such music was even possible. The tour was to promote their albums Computerworld and Man Machine... They had two fellows that beat with "knitting needles" on touch sensitive rectangular bases while the other two played keyboard synthesizers... The drummers were wild because every time a knitting needle contacted the base, a loud percussive sound happened... not drum sounds but more like boink or ping or even pffffbtt... When they performed their song "pocket calculator" they walked to the front of the stage and had members of the audience play the notes... The lyrics state " by pushing down a special key it plays a little melody" blink bonk.... katrronk.... Quite an effective piece of showmanship and audience participation... Then at the end of the show , all the people left the stage and let the computers play the song... for about ten minutes... wild dancing to actual robot performers... I was amazed... Their website has a toy on it that lets you play a drum machine... boing, boom, tchack, peng, zonk... http://www.kraftwerk.com/
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Much of the time when I played with my friends in the basement in Manassas, Virginia we had a home made laser lightshow going... My friend built this using an extremely slowly rotating mirror that had a little "house" built on it out of transparent "walls" and clear glue... The "house" was about 3/4 of an inch tall and caused interference patterns to be displayed on the ceiling... these took the appearance of galaxies or clouds that slowly changed. The speed was about One RPM. He had guests come over and bring their instruments... A trumpet player from the Redskins Football Team band was a memorable evening. In general, we played music that you would hear as a soundtrack for a motion picture... Incidental music or abstract jazz or "outer space whoosh whoosh".....
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We made a demo recording and had an agent in New York try to sell it to people making corporate videos... No sale, but it was fun trying... When we recorded the demo, I loaned a huge pile of my equipment to Leon and he set up a special studio in the basement of his grandpas home. His grandpa was a Retired General in the Army and had a mansion in McLean and another in Arizona. I never met the grandpa because were were not allowed to visit when he was in town nor were we allowed in many parts of the mansion due to breakable oriental antiques. These people live in a truly different world than us peasants.
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I really got into samplers when I got a midi controlled 4 second monophonic machine. It could be controlled by the drum machine. My favorite sound was a pan pipe. I set up the sound so that the sampler could play it back very slowly giving a low pitch. It sounded as if a giant was blowing on a pan pipe 20 feet tall... I made a tape and gave it to my friend "Major" Tom (a Bowie fan). He was very happy with it because when it was played on the car stereo, it put his children to sleep... Unfortunetly, also on that tape were some doppler effect noises and he panicked because he thought it was a police car siren. A moment of fear but it was quickly resolved by erasing that song from the tape...
A spying program called "ECHELON" has been working for at least 25 years. There was an agreement that the UK would spy on Americans and then the USA would spy on the British and then share results...
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One interesting finding was that on Sept 8TH, 2001 there was a large stock market "put option" placed for United Airlines. Someone thought that the price of UAL would go down... It would appear that someone knew IN ADVANCE that there was going to be a problem at UAL... This was thouroughly investigated by the 911 comission and they said that there was "no insider trading" going on... sometimes, co-incidences just happen... see articles...
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What I find interesting is that there is a list of exactly what words they were looking for... The ECHELON DICTIONARY... I won't include the words here in this email because it might cause "big brother" to investigate you...The NSA publishes some classified information that is 25 years old because it is so outdated that no-one could possibly care...
I see that the TEMPEST project that I worked on now is available online to anyone... Gee, they were so serious about security when it was state of the art... Anyway, I now see the big picture... I was involved in a small part of the overall scheme and it didn't make much sense to me at the time... That is the way it is supposed to be... compartmentalized knowledge... The bottom line is that we had developed a way to use a RADIO RECEIVER to capture data from a nearby computer... we assumed that the USSR had a similar device and my job was to prevent radio interception...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
ECHELON is a highly secretive world-wide signals intelligence and analysis network run by the UKUSA Community. [1] ECHELON can capture radio and satellite communications, telephone calls, faxes and e-mails nearly anywhere in the world and includes computer automated analysis and sorting of intercepts. [2] ECHELON is estimated to intercept up to 3 billion communications every day.
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Carpenter, Dave. "Option Exchange Probing Reports of Unusual Trading Before Attacks." The Associated Press. 18 September 2001.
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Schoolman, Judith. "Probe of Wild Market Swings in Terror-Tied Stocks."
[New York] Daily News. 20 September 2001 (p. 6).
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Toedtman, James and Charles Zehren. "Profiting from Terror?"
Newsday. 19 September 2001 (p. W39).
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Psychedelic ART on T-Shirt, coffee cup... wow, it's COSMIC.
Magic Mushroom