Monday, January 24, 2011

In which things are revealed

Right, it's about time I stopped putting it off.  This is what I have so far for one of the tracks on my upcoming EP.  I alternatingly love it and hate it each time I listen to it, so I'm going to put it online now before I change my mind.  Again.

I'm new to all this online music posting trickery, so let me know if it worked - and of course, what you think!

Hopefully in a few weeks there will be a bit more stuff to put up here, but in the meantime, here's Longest Night:



Also, just because I feel like being generous to my poor long-suffering readers, here are a couple of sketches for cover art provided by the talented Ariel Pascoe - these may change before I actually print the EP, but I'd appreciate some thoughts in the meantime on these too.  And I'd like you to tell me which one you like the best!


Who needs drugs?

Right, I'm almost entirely confident that was the strangest night sleep I've ever had.

Dream 1: Dreamt I was in a really bad screaming argument.  Realistic enough that I woke up in a cold sweat at 5am, took me over an hour to get back to sleep.

Dream 2: I'd moved house into a residential college, except my college "room" was an entire apartment, with a room in it that was completely full of randomly arranged beds of different sizes. I remember thinking "awesome, the friend who I offered to stay over at my place (which happened in real life) will have heaps of room now".

Dream 3: Had a dream within a dream (this is not the first or most complicated of these dreams I've had) in which I was very ill and throwing up in bed, then "waking up" from that dream to do pretty much the same thing.  Realistic enough that I dragged myself into consciousness, actually waking up (about 7:30am) to make sure I hadn't actually thrown up while dreaming of myself throwing up.  And to make sure I wasn't just dreaming of myself waking up to check.

Dream 4: I watched Powderfinger play cricket - the band members who weren't playing chatted with me about music. Except the pitch was maybe 2 metres long, and it basically just involved the bowler hurling the ball at the batsman.

Dream 5:  I was in a movie.  For some reason I wasn't actually aware of being in the movie - I thought it was real.  The fact that there were ad breaks in the dream involving discussions of said movie should probably have tipped me off.  The plot of the movie involved me thinking that I was in someone else's elaborate dream in the movie (and it was elaborate, I just can't remember all the details), but it turned out they were in mine.  And once I worked this out, and that I was in a movie, I woke up.

...

If I could go back to sleep, I suspect I'd dream up an awesome plot for Inception 2.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Cribbage (part 1)

Well, as requested on my previous maths post (I won't go so far as to say "by popular demand"), I'm going to do a brief analysis of the game of cribbage.

Cribbage, for the uninitiated, like some variants of poker, involves choosing which card or cards to throw out to maximise the number of points you're likely to get.  You can score points for your hand by having runs, combinations of cards that add up to 15 in value, pairs, three of a kind, four of a kind, flushes, and a strange one-point bonus named "one for his nob" <cough>

The variant of cribbage we'll work with here involves starting with 5 cards, and throwing one out. A single card, the "starter", is then chosen which acts as an extra card for your hand, replacing the one you discarded. Often you'll need to decide whether to take the risk and remove a card which might be useful in the hope that something better will come up as the starter.

Let's say you pick up this hand:

4♠ 4♣ 6♣ K♣ K

So, what do you do?  All you know about are the cards that you picked up, and nothing about what the other player(s) might have.  The starter could be any of the other 47 cards in the deck with equal probability.

If you discard a 4, you'll destroy one of the pairs, losing you 2 of the 4 points already in your hand.  But if the starter comes up 5, it'll score you 11 points.

If you discard a K, you'll again destroy a pair.  But again, if you pick up a 5, you'd score a tasty 14 points!

Finally, if you discard 6♣, you will have two pairs tucked away safely in your hand for 4 points.  However, the best you can do from that point is get an A, which will get you 12 points.

By running through all 47 possible starter cards, we can work out (using the magic of computers!) every possible outcome of each choice.


Discard Minimum Average Maximum
4♠ or 4♣23.6611
6♣45.5312
K♣ or K24.2614

So if you're trying to get as many points as possible, your best option is to discard 6♣ even though the best case scenario is only possible if you discard a K.  Even the option of discarding a 4 is almost as good as discarding a K, even though you can only score a measly 11 points.

A couple of histograms give a better idea of what is possible.  For 6♣:

Most likely we'll only get 4 points for our hand - but that's the worst we can do, and there is still a small chance of doing better. The red line shows us what'll happen on average, so a little over 5 points.

And for discarding a K:
In this case, we are most likely to get only 2 points, though getting 4 points is also a definite possibility.  Getting any more than that, though, is even more unlikely than if we discarded 6♣.  On average (red line) we won't even score 5 points!

So we see that in this case, the potential benefits are outweighed by the risk.

However, just like in Pass the Pigs, our aim isn't just to rack up as many points as possible - our aim is to win! If our opponent is very nearly at the finish line and we need 14 points to win, then our best option would then be to discard a K, because it's the only way to win the game.  In a situation like that, the utility of the amount of points changes, and near enough is no longer good enough!

Friday, January 14, 2011

Happenings in music

Hi all!

I have a gig on Sunday week at Irish Murphy's, my fourth solo gig, and I'm excited about it!  There will be:

  • New songs!
  • Unprecedented levels of audience participation! (hopefully - don't let me down, you bastards)
  • Tortured nautical metaphors!
  • Hats!

and much much more!

I hope people can make it - tell your friends, but especially tell your enemies.  If you bring your enemies to the gig, the awkward silences will mean people pay more attention to me, and after all, isn't attention-seeking what music is all about?

My band The Solution also has a gig coming up, also at Irish.  It's our long awaited comeback tour, otherwise known as our second gig.  We've had a long time without gigs or practice, and we're all gagging to get back into it.  Please come along to that too, and justify our existence :)

In other music news, the EP is coming along well - we've had more recording time, and I think we might be approaching the halfway mark.  Hopefully over the next couple of months we'll get enough time to knock most of it off.  I'll get to putting the first completed song on here sometime soon!

And while we're talking about music, I woke up with a song in my head this morning.  This is about the third time this has happened.  I'm hopeful, generally when this happens I end up with a song I really like!

Finally, if you want to avoid the actual human interaction in this blog and just see what's happening musically, you can use (or give your friends) this link: http://firstsignofmadness.blogspot.com/search/label/music