Blogservations by Drew Vics

This is an older piece I wrote while pondering wisdom. It’s had a little popularity around the internet so I thought I would share it again up front on the blog…

Wisdom eludes me. The more I learn, the less I think I know. Maybe it’s because when I learn something new I realize how much more there is to know. And by that I mean, how much we can know, not how much we must know. It’s perpetual. I strive to learn more, but sometimes I feel I
don’t know enough.

Wait a minute, wisdom isn’t just knowledge! It isn’t how many books you’ve read or how many degrees you have. Wisdom can’t be learned just by reading, it must be gained as well. Wisdom collects, and is gained from experience and consideration. No matter how much you try,
you won’t become wise just learning stuff.

Wisdom is found in the application of knowledge, the awareness that comes from the analysis of our world and life, through learning and experiencing.

Think deeper. When you toss a stone into a pond you’re immediately aware of the ripples and the splash, but it doesn’t stop there. Even though your mind forgets the stone because it’s gone from sight, the stone continues its journey to the bottom of the pond. We can think
about the stuff we can’t see.

When we’re seeking knowledge we shouldn’t skim the surface and ignore the lessons within the lessons. The deeper considerations are where wisdom hides. Things we learn on one subject may intersect with points of another subject, we need to examine those connections. Even
if the connections are not obvious at first, once made, the proverbial light bulb goes on and we’re one step closer.

Gain: Increasing the level by increasing the amplitude.

Depth. More than a little. Wisdom is gained. It’s about what lies beyond the zero point in a wavelength. It’s looking toward the outside, while looking in.

Sadly, only one month after resigning as President of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs has passed away. He was 56.

I’m 44 years old now, and I still remember my first computer, an Apple ][+. My father bought me that computer when I was about 14 years old. We subscribed to a little magazine called CALL -A.P.P.L.E. which was loaded with BASIC program code, and I would write programs on that computer day and night, when I wasn't in school, or playing my guitar.

When Apple introduced the Macintosh, a little app called HyperCard became popular, and I began building "stacks" as they were called, making my own little mini applications and games. I also spent a lot of time using MacPaint.

I didn't get it at the time, but later would come to respect and admire the man behind Apple, and I would start to make connections between what I do now, and what I spent so much time doing as a teen. I still work and play on my computer, a MacBook Pro, as a graphic artist, web site developer, and musician.

Steve said, "...you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

When I look back I see that is true. Thanks to HyperCard the web site concept was easy for me to grasp. MacPaint of course led to PhotoShop, one of my other design tools, and Apple's Logic Studio allows me to use my Apple computer to record my music, my guitar, and design with sound. I have literally grown up with Apple, and can connect those dots.

Steve Jobs was a mysterious figure to me. In those early days my father would speak of him with a sort of reverence and awe, as if Steve were some amazing, forward-thinking visionary. As a teen I didn't so much wonder what it was all about as much as I just got the vibe, and understood what was known: Here is a man with some amazing ideas that will change everything.

Steve did change everything. Apple changed everything. Steve Jobs and Apple rearranged the playing field and continuously took us to new places with technology. They have enabled us with intuitively designed machines that have made, and make, our lives easier. Steve also inspired, and provided creative people around the world with tools that seem to directly connect to the artist within. They have opened doors for creative people worldwide.

I found this quote of his very inspiring. And it brings tears to my eyes.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” Jobs said. “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

His computers allow me to express myself as an artist. And his words inspire me to continue following my heart and intuition. I'm an artist and a musician. I need to keep doing these things and let the dots connect ahead of me.

Thank you Steve, for everything you've done. You will be missed.

A short note: After emailing my father a link to this post he replied with an interesting story, one I never knew...

"Don't know if I ever told you but I met Jobs and Wozniak at the Philadelphia Computer Show in 1977. They had a small table in a corner showing off the Apple I. [a couple of my friends] and I chatted with them for a while. They introduced the Apple I in Atlantic City in 1976.”

We don’t like to conform, but we’re going to get hitched anyway. And in true nonconformist form, my girlfriend, Cindy, told me she didn’t want a diamond ring for our engagement. I had to think of something else. But what? I found just the right thing, it wasn’t a ring, and it had been staring me in the face the whole time. Ribbit.

I thought it was a novel idea. (novel: “of a new kind; different from anything seen or known before”) so I went with it. It certainly wasn’t the traditional approach (tradition: “a long-established or inherited way of thinking or acting.”) But then, aside from Christmas and Halloween, I’ve never been much for tradition anyway. I’ll get to the novel idea in a minute…

What’s this about a frog? It goes like this:

One day, my girlfriend, Cindy, and I were unpacking some things during our move into a new house. Each of our lives had been upturned for a time, and starting a new life together was refreshing, although challenging.

That day she found a rubber tree frog in a box of stuff she had forgotten about. A blueish colored frog, cute. It was a gift from a friend of hers, given during a time when Cindy was starting to believe that she would be alone for the rest of her life. The note attached to the frog read something to the effect of “don’t worry, you’ll find your prince.”

Cindy laughed when she found it, and told me the whole story with a huge smile on her face. I liked the sentiment, and the frog. It was a reminder to Cindy that something will happen, and things will be okay. And at that moment the frog took on a meaning for me as well. It became something that represented a bond between us. It became special.

I took the frog and informed her that we’d be keeping it because it had meaning for us. I don’t consider myself a prince by any stretch of the imagination, but neither of us were alone anymore, and the frog was a symbol of that. It was staying.

The frog became a little game, and began appearing in the most unexpected places. One morning I opened the medicine cabinet to grab my toothbrush and there it sat staring at me. So I cleverly stowed it someplace where I knew Cindy would stumble upon it. Later that week it would be waiting for me again somewhere else, and the game went on, and continues to this day.

So, what’s this novel idea I had?

After about three years of dating Cindy and I began to discuss plans for marriage. We were apprehensive, especially since we’d both been burned by previous relationships. We also don’t feel that marriage is a necessity, it’s just something people are expected to do. It seems that long term, committed relationships are not taken seriously unless the couple is wed.

In any case, we decided that we would like to get married — in the legal sense, not the religious sense — as a way to officially establish our bond of love. There is also this ridiculous feeling that getting married might somehow cheapen or jinx the true love we do feel for each other. Sort of like, “we’re happy now, why get married and ruin it?” It’s a good thing we’re not superstitious.

Now for the details, and the novel idea. If we we’re to get married, we need to be engaged first. That means we need a ring or something. Well, Cindy didn’t want a ring so I had to think of something else to serve as a symbol of our union. Here comes my novel idea.

I decided to get her a necklace, but, what kind of necklace? Of course… A FROG necklace!

I shopped around for a sterling silver frog pendant and found the perfect one. A little tree frog that looked very similar to our rubber frog mascot. I kept it hidden so Cindy wouldn’t find it, and waited for the right moment to pop the question.

It was actually kind of fun. We had plans to visit my family in North Carolina, so I decided I would ask her during that trip. Initially I was going to ask her on the beach, but decided to wait until the moment was just right.

So one beautiful day in North Carolina, on the dock of a little place called The Provision Company, located in South Port, on the Intracoastal Waterway near the mouth of the Cape Fear River, I asked Cindy to marry me. I opened the box and showed her the necklace. She loved it, and beamed with happiness as I placed the little silver frog around her neck. It was nice, and special, just as I had hoped. And you know something? It felt right. It felt real.

I know that many people will think it’s odd that I bought her a necklace instead of a diamond ring, but I don’t really care. All that matters to me is our happiness together. Isn’t it nice to do things your own way once in awhile, and thwart tradition?

While mastering the tracks on my latest CD release (shameless plug: It’s All Timing), I was doing some research on average loudness, in order to determine what I should be shooting for with the final tracks. I stumbled upon something called “the loudness war.” Basically the battle between audio aesthetics, and the benefits of compression and limiting.

Just because we have the technology to master music louder doesn’t mean we need to blow the windows out of the house. A lot of commercially available music has been ruined, in my opinion, by the ability of mastering engineers to push the audio signal level as high as possible. Balls to the wall is an understatement.

I love loud music as much as the next metal head, but when it’s so over-compressed that the dynamics are completely lost we’re missing something. The subtle nuances of an acoustic guitar part do not need to be the same amplitude as a drum solo, but that’s exactly what we get when these mastering tools are overused.

Why are things over-compressed? It’s mostly a result of having the technology to do it. Today’s digital audio technology allows us to push the signal level higher and higher. Basically, we can make quiet parts really loud while holding the louder parts where they are. That’s compression. To prevent clipping of the signal we can apply a limiter, which keeps signal peaks below a specified threshold.

It’s good to have this kind of control over the sound, it allows music to be appreciated at lower volumes, on various systems. A tool called an adaptive limiter can squeeze even more out of the song, and it’s used a lot in modern mastering to get the apparent loudness of the music even louder.

I remember the special note on the self-titled debut CD by Rush back in 1974. It said “For best results play at maximum volume.” The limitations of the medium (vinyl record albums), and the technology at that time preserved much of the dynamics of the original recording. Listen loud and it sounded fuller because you could hear all of those nuances and dynamics that you might miss at lower levels.

Compression and limiting became popular for radio stations because they could ensure a louder, more even signal output, regardless of the varying levels of records that they played. These technologies increase the average loudness of the signal, and allow radio broadcasts to be heard better on smaller radio sets and car speakers. The compression technology essentially sacrifices dynamics for loudness, but to what extent is entirely up to the mastering engineer, the band, and radio stations.

The advent of audio tape allowed for greater maximization of the signal. You remember Max Headroom? What the term headroom originally referred to is the saturation limit of the audio tape medium. Compact disc and digital technology provided greater headroom to expand into. Saturation distortion isn’t a problem on CDs, but over-compression can still lead to clipped signals, and clips create distortion.

Unfortunately radio stations of today completely over compress the sound and all dynamics are pretty well scrapped. The music can even seem unnatural, with pulsing effects, depending on the levels of compression and limiting used. That’s why mastering engineers tend to master the music with high compression and push it with limiting. The louder they make it, the less likely it is to be altered with when played over the radio.

But how loud is loud enough? Why push so far? I’ve looked at pro recordings in my audio editor and have seen incredible amounts of signal clipping. Clipping is distortion. Why would a commercially available recording be distorted? That seems to go against the “pro” in professional audio production.

So, on goes the loudness war. Some bands are choosing dynamics over loudness, and having their music mastered at a lower average volume. Still, others just like it loud for loudness’ sake. The problem is that the consumers end up having to turn their volume up and down depending on what CD they’re playing. But I guess even that won’t be a problem for much longer, since apps like iTunes can automatically adjust track volumes for a more consistent listening experience. Leave it to technology to smooth out the wrinkles created by technology. If that makes any sense.

I guess the purist in me argues to make it louder but keep the dynamics as much as possible. Push it a little, but don’t push it too far. But hey, what do I know? I’m no pro.

The background noise of our personal, inevitable doom, is the undercurrent in our lives, always tugging at our subconscious, reminding us that we can’t escape it. We can’t live forever. Unless of course you expect that Ray Kurzweil is correct and at some point in the next 40 to 50 years surviving humans will be able to live on inevitably, aided by assorted pills designed for specific tasks, genetically remodeling ourselves to slow or even reverse aging, and fending off disease and disorder in our bodies.

It is dubbed “The Singularity.”¹ A proposed time, in the not so distant future, when, it is said, artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence. The Singularity is based on, and compounds, an exponentially increasing growth of technology and medicine, expanding the arena of Moore’s Law², which refers to the exponential increase in computer technology. And if you think about it, it doesn’t seem too hard to comprehend.

By then, or maybe because of then, nanotechnology will have developed to the point that armies of microscopic robots will be sweeping our arteries clean, and patrolling our inner workings for viral and bacterial evildoers. Our personal soldiers will take no prisoners, and spare no mercy. I welcome it. My own reserve arsenal to assist my natural immune system? Bring it on!

Our immune system, incredible as it is, and naturally evolved, identifies and reacts to a threat, then it remembers that threat for future reference. But the process is a crash course. The immune system has no real “heads up,” except for vaccinations, a wonderful scientific advancement that has proven immensely beneficial to humanity yet, sadly, are now sometimes avoided by ignorant parents who listen to the likes of Jenny McCarthy.

Ignorance, on some level, may endanger us all, but just imagine what could be possible with scientific advancements like nanotechnology. Our immune systems could have a backup militia to help in the fight against disease. We could be healthier. But that’s not all, we’d have new medicines at our disposal to stop aging, or reverse it. Scientists at Harvard Medical School have successfully reversed aging in laboratory mice.³ Our physical health could be managed, and in that future world, many of us could thwart death inevitably, maybe live forever. Of course, getting hit by a car is another story.

But for now here we are, “each of us,” to quote Neil Peart of Rush, “a cell of awareness, imperfect, and incomplete,” living our lives with the awareness that one day, in our future, we will stop living. That’s a tough thing to consider, and many of us do a great job of not considering it at all. But I think we rob ourselves by not pondering our own death.

Singularity aside, we’re all looking down the barrel of the same gun. And, not that it has equal potential of The Singularity, let’s put any notion of an afterlife aside as well. This world is the only one we will ever know, and our individual life is the only one we’ll ever experience. Doesn’t knowing that life is not forever make it that much more valuable? All we see and hear, all of the people we love, are ever more precious because our experience with them is limited. For now…