The Skeptical Lutheran

I wanted to write about the U.S. defense budget and how it compares to defense expenditures of other countries.  It seems I had heard once that our annual defense spending was not only the highest in the world, but exceeded that of the next 16 or so countries (ranked in order of real spending) combined.  I thought I would verify this for myself.  I was shocked to find that this is no longer the case.  In fact, our annual defense spending now exceeds that of every other country in the world combined.  The data are here if you don’t believe me.

This is breathtakingly inane.  There is absolutely no danger that China, Russia, France, England, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, India, and Saudi Arabia are going to team up in an effort to overthrow the United States government.  Even if they did they would be hopelessly outclassed, even if our military was cut in half.  It should be clear that our military’s main function is no longer one of “defense” and we should quit calling it that.

I am all for protecting ourselves from aggressive neighbors, but this is ri-gosh-darn-diculous.  When I play a game of Civilization IV and I get to the point where I outclass the rest of the world at ratios like this I stop playing out of sheer boredom.  What’s really sad is that I know from first-hand experience that a lot of that $600 billion is going to employ my colleagues in this country who are busily putting their talents to work trying to find clever ways of killing my colleagues in those other countries.  Imagine how much actual good could be done by diverting those engineers and scientists onto something useful like the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which was postponed indefinitely by an increasingly war-obsessed Bush administration in 2007.

My daughter has been fascinated with the latest version of Disney’s minor character Tinkerbell.  I have to admit to having some fascination with her myself.  Check out this rendering and tell me just how much of a perv that makes me.

Looks like Disney is trying hard to come up with things that Fathers and Daughters can both enjoy.

Some of you may have missed Sunday school last week because of Memorial Day.  Make up for it by watching this retelling of an old favorite.  Be sure to tell the author if you like it.

I have been peripherally aware of Green Day ever since “When I come around” was dominating the airwaves, but I was not what I would consider a fan until I bought “American Idiot” last October.  For reasons, most of which I will keep to myself, “American Idiot” really resonated with me.  I’m a big fan of albums that are better than the sum of the songs that comprise them.  Depeche Mode’s “Black Celebration” was the first CD I bought and probably holds the record for the most complete listens.

I figured the successor album would be just another rock album, a random collection of punk songs, some of which are good, most of which are not, and couldn’t possibly live up to “American Idiot”.  I was delighted to realize this prediction was way off.  “21st Century Breakdown” builds on the concepts introduced in the former, adding a full broadside attack on organized religion.

Unfortunately no one song can live up to the 9-minute masterpiece “Jesus of Suburbia”.  The title song, clearly divided into three themes, comes the closest but only clocks in at just over five minutes.  The best song on the album, though, may be “21 Guns”.  I’m not very good at inferring meaning from rock songs, but something about this song appeals to both my ex-military sentiments and my ever increasing disgust with the global war on terror.   In general, recovering Republicans, christian fundamentalists, and Bush-ophiles will find a lot to like in this album.  “American Eulogy” does just what the title suggests.  “Peacemaker” is a commentary on our over-willingness to kill each other over our imaginary friends.  “Know Your Enemy” warns against fighting the wrong war and inadvertently assisting one’s adversaries in the process.

I am far from the best person to comment on the album’s musical qualities, but that is not going to stop me.  This album has several songs using what I would call the classic Green Day sound: “Know Your Enemy”, “Horseshoes and Handgrenades”, and “The Static Age” come to mind first.  Many of the songs, though, take some other style and put a Green Day twist on it.  I don’t know what style of music “Peacemaker” is derived from, but I picture Green Day as a Mariachi band in a Texas cantina when I hear it.  “Viva la Gloria?” builds on that theme, giving it an even more potent punk punch.  I’ve been told that “Last Night on Earth” sounds like the Beetles, but I’m not familiar enough with the Beetles to say whether I agree.

All in all, I think “21st Century Breakdown” is a better concept album than “American Idiot”, but does not have as many memorable songs.  I may be proven wrong, but I don’t think this album has any big radio hits like “Wake Me Up When September Ends” or “Holiday”.  I guess time will tell.

So I bought a guitar and amp combo a few days ago and I’ve been trying to emulate that modern rock sound that all guitar amps have.  I’ve learned a few things over the past few days and I’m going to start a series of blogs trying to explain it.  In this post we discuss the basics of overdrive.

Suppose I were able to play a perfect middle C.  My guitar would send an electric signal to the amp that would, ideally, be a perfect sine wave with a frequency of 440 Hz.  That signal and the corresponding spectra are shown in the figure below in blue.  Ideally, an amplifier would convert that signal to a sinewave that looks exactly the same, although scaled in amplitude.  Amplifiers have limited power, though, so if the amplified signal exceeds a certain threshold, it is simply clipped.  This is illustrated using the red signal in the figure to the right, where our pure sinusoid has been scaled by a factor of 2 and clipped at 1.

The clipped signal, not being a pure sinusoid, sounds markedly different from our original tone.  (I had hoped to include both signals as .wav files, but apparently I have to pay money to wordpress to upload .wav files.  If anyone knows a way around this, please let me know.)  The difference in the sound is best illustrated in the frequency domain, where it is clear that additional tones have appeared at 1320 Hz, 2200 Hz, 3080 Hz, and 3960 Hz.  In fact there is sound at frequencies that are integer multiples of our original tone, 440 Hz.  Why this is so is an interesting matter, but a proper explanation requires complex numbers and taylor series.

If I were interested in accurately reproducing the sound from the guitar I would do my best to avoid this scenario.  However, in rock music this phenomenon can be used along with another technique to produce unique sounds that, to my knowledge, are not possible with other instruments.  More on that later….

So Republicans are for small government and Democrats aren’t, right?  Turn on right-wing talk radio these days and that’s what they’re saying.  I decided to see for myself how accurate this claim is.  Federal outlays for the last 35 years wasn’t hard to find online.  GDP over that same period of time was even easier to find.  I imported those data into Matlab, a software package for crunching numbers, which I use hourly in my day job.  It was an easy thing to plot these two data sets alongside each other.  This isn’t very informative, though.  To demonstrate that portion of the economy that is swallowed up by big brother I computed and plotted the ratio of annual federal outlays to the GDP.  This is also shown below.

Note that this fraction reached a 35-year peak of nearly 23% in 1982 – Reagan’s second year in office.  On the other hand, 1992, the year in which Clinton was elected, was the first in a steady downward trend that bottomed out in 2000 at it’s lowest point since 1975.  Ever since small-government Republicans gained control of both the legislative and executive branches of government this index has been steadily climbing, reaching a 13-year high in 2008.

I like the small government talk, but who walks the walk?