"Like Water"

The other day I watched a documentary about MMA fighter Anderson "The Spider" Silva that was entitled Like Water. For a split second I thought, "Naaah, he couldn't have taken the title from the Bruce Lee quote I hold so dear." But I only thought that because I had forgotten what an icon Bruce Lee is in the martial arts world. The documentary opened with the Bruce Lee interview that I posted in my third blog:

The documentary was pretty good. I feel like it was made just to save some face after Silva's perplexing and disappointing performance in Abu Dhabi. Sidenote: Silva was dominant in that victory. But my main take away from the documentary was a fable that Diogenes Assihida, Silva's Muay Thai coach, told. It went something like this:

There once was a bird who was flying off to discover new land. When he found the new land it was freezing cold. The bird fell from the sky and froze into an ice cube. One day a cow came along and pooped on the bird. The heat melted the birds icy confines and the bird awoke. A distant cat heard the bird struggling and came over. The cat pulled the bird out of the poo and ate him.

The moral of the story: Not everyone who poops on you is your enemy and not everyone who pulls you out of the poop is your friend.

When you finish laughing, think about it.

Just Joe

No More New Music??

A couple of years ago I was having a conversation with my cousin, Chris, who happens to know a thing or two about music and I asked him, "Doesn't it seem like we'll run out of music eventually?" He wasn't sure at first so I asked him how many notes there are. I think he said eight but then added something about half notes or something that this music ignorant didn't quite get. So I don't remember the number he told me but let's just say it was 16. That means if you started songs with a different first note, by the time you got to the 17th song, you will have repeated a first note. Your second note would then be another (or the same) of the 16 notes, leaving 16 possibilities after EACH of the first 16 possibilities. So just in the first two notes you would have 16 X 16 possibilities. That is 256 possibilities with just the first two notes. So we realized right away that we would get quite a huge number of possibilities but that given a song of whatever length, there would indeed be a finite number of possibilities.

Then recently I came across a video on YouTube that explained our hypothesis in a slightly different and well expounded upon way (with the same conclusion).

In that video he mentions "Everything is a Remix." Here is Kirby Ferguson's TED Talk version of his remix series. Be warned Bob Dylan fans, Bob gets called out here:

And lastly, here is a fun website that was also mentioned in the first video: Soundsjustlike.com. Who knew that Nirvana sounds like Killing Joke or that Green Day sounds like... Petula Clark?!?!

ENJOY!

Just Joe