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That's a new trick for me! 

Diminished chords: Is there anything they can't do?

1. Yes.
2. Yes, although it would be redundant. 
3. Yes.  Weird jazz guys play that stuff all the time.   And also, gypsy swing players.

So, see if you can get your head around this (taught to me by a weird gypsy, no less.)

If you add the 7th and play dim7 chords, not only does it sound weirder, but each chord shape on the fret-board is a full inversion of every other note in the chord.  You effectively get four different chord voicing out of one fingering!

Check this out as an example.  Lets use the four notes that make up Edim7

Edim7:    E  G  Bb Db
Gdim7:   G Bb  Db E 
Bbdim7:  Bb Db E G
Dbdim7:  Db E G Bb

Woah.

Generally speaking, when it comes to legislation I'm of the "If no one is happy about the bill it is probably the right way to go" school.  With this one, there were way too many happy people for it to be right. 

I am an avid intellectual property rights advocate and am fully in favor of draconian enforcement against violators, but you have to hold the actual violators responsible.  This bill doesn't do that.

I'm far from an expert.  But there are certain things that are personal enough that I want to handle them before I make a buying decision.  SCUBA gear, guns, and guitars all fall into this category.  It isn't a question of the guitar being broken, it's a question of the guitar being "right."  And as Mr. Dude notes, two guitars of the same make and model, but different production runs may differ significantly.

Well, it's not the government that it provides censorship to, it's content owners.  I'm going to copy an email I sent to my mom when she asked about this.

The bill in question, SOPA (Stop On-line Piracy Act), will "change the internet as we know it" depending on who "we" is.  If you use the internet to surf web sites, email, and share pictures you took, then it isn't going to effect you at all. If you are a person that provides content, it may impact you.  If you are a person that provides a facility for people to provide content, then you are heavily impacted.  If you are a person that facilitates access for stealing other people's intelectual property, then you're going to hate it.

So, is this a bill you should support?  No. It is a crappy bill, but it addresses a real problem.  Like all legislation in the US, it is motivated by corporate concerns, and like all legislation motivated by corporate concerns, it over reaches in scope and intent.  This one was motivated by pharmaceutical companies worried about "fake" versions of their drugs being promoted by on-line websites.  Pfizer doesn't like it if you don't buy the officially sanctioned boner pills from them, after all, and the congressmen they own are there to help!

Right now the law grants to people who create stuff almost unlimited rights to distribute, re-create, or otherwise control the stuff they produce.  As a guy that writes software and writes songs (the two big areas impacted by law) I think that's pretty important.  There is a small army of degenerate thieves out there that believe they have a right to other people's stuff.  They upload movies and songs and software to websites so other people can download it,  which is a violation of the rights of the dude that actually created the work.  So right now the law holds the people that upload and download this content accountable for it.  You may have heard horror stories about the RIAA suing 12 year old kids for sharing songs, those evil bastards.  What you don't hear is that poor 12 year old was sharing the entire Sony catalog and costing them millions in sales. 

Now, when we say our little shit 12 year old was "uploading" we tend to overlook where he was uploading too.  There are companies out there that do nothing but host websites for other people.  Netflix, for example, is hosted almost entirely by Amazon.  So if I'm a hosting company and I have literally thousands of websites on my computers, am I responsible for the content that our little shitbird uploads?  Right now the law says "no" and provides some indemnity to me for his actions.  If I find out about it and do nothing, then I have liability.   If I don't actively protect against such things, then I have liability, but otherwise it's our turd-bird punk that is going to jail for it, not me.   That is all well and good and reasonable.

SOPA would change that, and hold the hosting provider liable regardless of their knowledge of such things.  That isn't right, which is why the bill is a bad one.

If you take a look at the list of companies that support SOPA, they are almost all companies that generate on-line content that is stolen and re-distributed without their consent.  They have a right to be pissed, and I support their efforts to crush the little bastards that steal their shit.   If you look at the list of companies opposed, they are almost universally companies that provide places on the internet for content to live.  They have a right to be concerned, as this law would expose them to massive liability and the result would be less content, or content provided only by organizations that can afford the lawyers.   Small hosting companies would assuredly be sued out of existence.  The problem the law addresses is real.  This isn't the right way to address it, though.  It would mean Amazon was responsible for what Netflix does, which is unfair to both Amazon and Netflix.

This isn't a 1st amendment issue.  There is no free speech when it comes to someone else's stuff.  This is an Article 1 Section 8 issue.   It involves balancing my right to control my material with liability for the people that inadvertently help facilitate its theft.

Short story:  You shouldn't support it, but don't freak out.

Love,

-J

This is one of my many ongoing projects...

1948 Magnatone with the matched amp.

The amp is a basket case, but the guitar sounds good.

Whitewater, I'm curious if you have any commentary on the Synoptic / Gnostic disparity in the gospels?  Your interpretation to my reading sounds like what the Gnostics would tell us (the Kingdom of God is already here) and I'm interested in your thoughts on the matter.

I'd also like to comment on c-j's comment.

"I find it extremely unbelievable that God in all his Omnipotence, is so powerful that he can speak the world into existence, yet does not have the ability to ensure man writes His word exactly the way He wants it."

Fair enough.  I also find it extremely unbelievable that God, in all his Omnipotence, couldn't get it done until 1604, when the King James version was finally canonized.  My namesake, St. Jerome, translated the Vulgate in the fourth century, and things have been wonky ever since.  It is impossible to say "you have to go back to the greek" because that is simply another translation.  Jesus didn't' speak greek, he spoke Aramaic.  The greek is no more original than the latin or the english, and even it was subject to interpretation.  Its why there are four canonized gospels (and several other gospels not in the cannon, including gospels from Peter, Mary, Timothy, and Judas) that all take from one another.

So how could that be, then, that God couldn't direct his creatures to write it down correctly for over a thousand years?   Were the people prior to the coronation of James reading the "wrong" version?   Perhaps it is because we are *supposed* to filter it through our own experiences and pre-conceived notions.  I can't fathom a God that could breath life into us and claim a personal relationship with each of us, but was too busy to come up with an individual plan for each of us that would require an individual interpretation of his word.   I do not believe that God said all he had to say to a group of nomadic sheepherders during the Roman occupation and then disappeared forever.   

God's plan isn't a "one size fits all" plan.  It's a plan just for you.  Your readings should likewise be just for you.  That requires filtering through your experiences.

I'll follow on with that excellent summation.

I'd like to address the word "proof" and "prove" as they aren't really relevant to anything other than mathematics and vodka.  Science deals in "evidence" rather than "proof."  The confusion that whitewhater just went over often stems from a simple order of operations problem.  Scientists start with evidence, and then develop the theory.  The problem with AiG is that it does it the other way.  One of the halmarks of a good scientific theory is that it can be used to make accurate predictions about future events.  It is also one of the chief reasons that AiG isn't a scientific theory at all.  It makes no predictions and is predicated upon no evidence.

Using the Galileo example, what Galileo came up with wasn't proof that the planets orbit the sun, and not the earth, but a much better theory as to why the stars and planets behaved in the sky as they do. 

Going back even further in time, the retrograde motion (the appearance that inner planets move backwards in the sky) of planets had already been explained by another geocentric theory called Ptolmaic theory that mathematically accounted for the motion.  It was incredibly complex, though, involving multiple orbits for each of the retrograde planets but it had stood for almost 1500 years until Copernicus came along and explained it all rather simply with a heliocentric model.   His theory accounted for more of the observed data than the Ptolmaic system did, and could be used to more accurately predict the locations of the retrograde planets in the sky.  In other words, the theory was refined to fit the observable data.  They did not go out to seek data to fit the existing theory.

Then came Kepler, who looked at Copernicus's work and said "Hey, there are still some inaccuracies in your predictions," and offered refinements of his own.  Where Copernicus used circular orbits, Kepler looked at the evidence and found that elliptical orbits more accurately fit the evidence.   We know now that Kepler's theory on orbital motion is accurate and that planets do in fact have elliptical orbits.

The same can be said of the "theory" of gravity.   Newton first observed that objects in a vacuum fall at a constant rate regardless of mass, was able to model that accurately, but couldn't explain why.  Einstein came along and gave us General Relativity, based on the exact same data, and now we have a pretty good model to use when we go to the moon.

The point of all this is that science *starts with evidence,* and then seeks to move to a conclusion to explain it.  As a result, the theories *must* change.   If they didn't, then you're not really dealing with science.  Literalism starts with the conclusion (the Bible is literally correct) and then seeks to find evidence for it.

Heh.

Seriously, though, if you want to play with other people or along with the radio, or pretty much any other noise maker, you'll want that tuned to A 440.  In that frequency band, you will start to notice "out of tune" with a difference as small as 3Hz difference.  As our master mathematician Zurf notes, you're double that.

If all you are doing is playing alone, it won't make much difference so long as the strings are all in tune relative to each other.

Personally, I'd tune it to 440 regardless.  You will train your ear over time to discern tuning issues and if you're not at standard pitch, you'll train your ear to 433.

As a point of detail, it's just plain old Hz, not Mhz.  Megahertz is beyond the range of human hearing. 

There is a difference between add chords and sus chords.  They aren't identical.   Add chords, as noted, simply add the note to the triad.  Sus chords "suspend" (hence, sus) the 3rd before adding the new color tone.

So an Aadd9 would be A C# E B ("add"ing the B) while an Asus2 would be A B E ("sus"pending the C# and then adding the B.)  And while it's less critical in guitars because we take inversions for granted, the 2 and the 9 aren't the same B.  The 9 would be the note above the octive, while the 2 would be the B within the octave.  Keyboard players get this bit a little easier than fretboard players.

This is fundamentally it.  Belief is God is a natural outcome of a reasoning, evolving mind.  Early cave dwellers struggled to explain things like lightning, eclipses, and the changing of the seasons.  As our ability to reason evolved we were able to explain these things as natural phenomena.

It is also inaccurate to say that Dawkin's theory has been "refuted."   Blind Watchmaker was written in 1986, and evolutionary biology has had 30 years between then and now to refine itself, add new data, and come up with new theories to account for it.  Natural selection is still the dominant theory of what drives change in species.    That is what science is supposed to do.  The prolog in the '96 edition discusses this to a degree.

Oddly enough, yes they do.  It's an occupational hazard.