Random Research: The Beatles

The other day I was linked by a friend to a video pun by the people at College Humor. After proceeding to watch the video, which was quite entertaining, I found the sudden and random urge to look through how many songs Ringo actually wrote. The iconic drummer only helped to write and co-write nine songs through their thirteen standard released albums, most notable his work on Don’t Pass Me By and Octopus’s Garden. Getting back on track, I jotting down information that led to this very post.

The basis of my research was a breakdown, by album, of how many songs each of the Beatles wrote. Equipped with my unreliable source, I worked out a method to how much credit was due for each Beatle. A single name in the writer column denoted a song fully written by one member. One written by two of them jointly (I.E. McCartney & Lennon) gave each of the writers half a song written while a song written by one member, with another (I.E McCartney, with Lennon) gave 3/4 credit to the primary composer and 1/4 credit to the latter. Few other discrepancies occurred which I worked around, such as 1/4 credit to each Beatle for a traditional arrangement.

With pen and paper at my side and my source on screen, I began tracking my findings. Typically, Paul and John wrote at least 80% of the music on each album, but George pitched in with some of his notable songs like Here Comes The Sun and While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Ringo, however, steadily maintained his 2% contribution, pitching in on less than half of the 13 studio albums. Following is a breakdown in delicious pie charts of the primary writers of each album, and please forgive me for linking to them. They look too utterly excel-generated to even be posted here. Color Chart is as follows:
Paul McCartney | John Lennon | George Harrison | Ringo Starr

Please, Please Me
With The Beatles
A Hard Days Night
Beatles For Sale
Help!
Rubber Soul
Revolver
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles (White Album)
Yellow Submarine
Abbey Road
Let It Be
Breakdown of all 13 albums

And finally, this graph shows in chronological order the growth of each Beatle’s composed repertoire through each album’s release.

Again, my apologies for the poor presentation, but my computer with Photoshop is currently down, so everything was done in Excel 2003.

Bad Vibes Bob

The moments happened too fast

It began all those years ago with the simplest of conversations. Our words were mere nothings, hollow and meaningless, yet your smile provoked within me a feeling I never knew before then. Our time together slowly waned, supplemented only by our ceaseless discussions. I cared not what we talked of as long as it would never end. My only hopes were of this sudden provocation to be equivalent.

Years pass, yet such strong feelings as these can never feign. No, they only inflate, making you some sort of legend in my mind shrouded with my feelings. Love, confusion, and infatuation surround you now like a Siren. With each year we see and hear from each other less and less, but I feel that you may finally realize only now what I have felt over the years, pursued by our lack of time. Each time I’m reminded of you I must endure the terrible mixture of nostalgia and regret, suppressing a lifetime’s worth of words I feel I must say to you. What holds me back from telling you this? An eminent curse could be lifted from my shoulders with the simple utterance of three words. I love you, I love you, I love you! How simple it seems when anonymity masks it.

Politech-savvy

I tried my hardest, but I couldn’t stay out of politics forever. Earlier today The SF Chronicle’s Datebook ran an amazing article by Mark Morford. Being primarily against old people, I was translucent with joy to see an attack on Senator McCain’s inability to use the internet. Ah yes the internet, the blogosphere, the interweb, regardless of how you term it, it is arguably the most influential median in spreading news and holding the ever embarrassing truths behind politicians.

Bare in mind as I dive into this article that I hold no allegiance to any candidates this time around, yet I love the ways in which the media, or at least the media that matters, has described Senator McCain. He plays the part of the elderly figure that has long since passed his days of sanity, and now only speaks his faulty opinions on the golden days and his Civil War accomplishments. Oh yes, I went there. Until this morning, being as ignorant to news if it is not found in my newspaper of choice’s Datebook as I am, I would have said these were repugnant attacks directed at a potential experienced candidate. Luckily sense came to me, and to whomever chooses where to place which article, as I learned McCain cannot use the simple yet versatile being that I process this blog with: computers.

In all his long years as a politician I am left aghast that he has never made the effort to learn the workings of computers. He would not even need to learn something complex, per say, iTunes. Yes, I went there yet again. In a world where simplicity comes in the form of Macs and the versatility and potential of PCs, he has not the knowledge enough to wade with our younger siblings: the ones who have the know how to play a video game console, which is safe to assume Atari 3200 was a tad too complex for McCain to figure out back when he was slightly less elderly.

Now comes the biased portion of this blog, the one where I praise Senator Obama, but not for typical reasons: how can we vote for a man lacking the simple know-how to use a computer when we can vote for a man that can hit a 3 pointer from beyond the arc? McCain, you better hit a half-court shot at least if you want to stay in this race.

Barack autographs with troops after big shot

Justification of Regret

I’m a great fan of movies, but rarely do I feel the need to dub one as a favorite. One in particular that nestled in as one of my favorites was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. For no definitive reason did this movie make it onto my list of favorites, but a few lines in particular strike me as blissful truths that I long for in life:

Clementine: I wish you’d stayed.
Joel: I wish I’d stayed, too. NOW I wish I’d stayed. I wish I’d done a lot of things. I wish I’d… I wish I’d stayed… I do.
——————
Joel: I could die right now, Clem. I’m just… happy. I’ve never felt that before. I’m just exactly where I want to be.

The first reminds me of the longing feeling within every person of regret. No matter how far away we push ourselves from this feeling, it always lingers in the back of our minds. We struggle to escape it but each time to no avail the feeling overcomes us, claiming us as its emphatic victim. As if we play the part of the protagonist, eager to forget the woes of the past we are pulled back by our antagonistic regrets. I could have, I should have, I would have all are the limits of ourselves. The purest of solutions appears to us as living with no regrets. This is possible to some extents, but eventually the past will catch up to us. Each regret we find in the once perfect memories feels worse than the plunge of a blade yet, they are all too necessary to oppress. Life may be too short to bear in mind the regrets, but they are often the thing most needed to move onward.

The latter quote is quite self explanatory in the sense that we all long for a perfection, yet some may only be able to find it after it has occurred in their pasts. The moments when nothing seems to be wrong are too few in life, but the sensory passion that emits from us when they do happen is too blissful to pass up. Everyone deserves at least one moment of true perfection: their true passion, true love, quintessential tranquility.

When you find that memory, long fleeted from regret, you’ll be exactly where you want to be.

A Requiem To The Night

The night is a weird thing when the remnants of light clash together to cast faint shadows upon the ground. Silhouettes appear as if a puppeteer controlled the hour. Rustling leaves and the dim chirp as the crickets tune themselves for a rigorous piece form the corner stones of a natural song in my ears. A requiem written to the night is what it is. As if the writer knew all too well what my ears so longed for, this natural song reverberates like a soft chord perfectly stroked on a violin. What is this my ears catch next? The horns arise in the night to match the tempo of its fellow orchestrals as an owl passes by sightlessly. Though I see not where it come or goes, his faded hoot permits me to reconstruct his figure in my mind. Ah yes such a sweet, sweet sound as if each hoot was sugar coated in an all too perfect icing. The horns fade out in this requiem, and all concept of sound and song escape me as I begin to look upwards. Past the dancing silhouettes and beyond their strings lies the true mystique of the night. Ah the moon, the cunning puppeteer himself. He shines before me, flaunting his beauty as his puppets continue to dance in and out of view. This sight to behold surpasses all the fire in all the stars. Ah yes, the night is my true love.

Folds In Reality

The Möbius function is one of my favorite mathematical functions. It proposes a way for a plane to fold unto itself, only to be expelled back out as a mirror image to begin a mirror of the same plane. The function grew in fame due to its popular paper diagram form. The small strip of connected paper prompted me to apply the function to a wider spectrum: what if every sequence of events is in itself a Möbius? The idea started when looking at the way the Möbius works. At any given time, you are able to touch two sides of the strip of paper, yet how it is connected gives it the property of having only one plane, or side. My idea is that each contingent existence is paired with a perfect counterpart. Whether more than one of these contingencies exists such that the string theory would suggest matters not. These two mirror realities are in essence identical in the sense that everything through the looking glass was antonymous to Alice’s reality. At the end of a subsequent series of events, reality folds unto itself, laying down the stepping stones to continue on the path of reasoned existence. The fabric of time assures we are never able to reach our paired reality by any ordinary means, but at the end of each stated series of events the counterpart sides of the mirror are traded, forcing our known reality into a confusion only defined as ‘difference’ to our reality.

Whether these flips in our knowing are as frequent as the second of a minute or as long as an eon I know not. Nor do I know of the vastness of these counterpart events, but maybe, just maybe this can help us explain the tendencies of our questionable actions. Maybe the length of the Möbius pattern isn’t constant in the sense of time, but constant only in the sense of moments. When someone performs an action differing from what they normally would do, we define this as usually a mistake on their part. Maybe these really aren’t mistakes, but predestined flips in our subconsciouses. At the end of each loop as the Möbius flips, our tendency flips, even for just a moment, and we do something we usually wouldn’t. Before we even realize why we did this, reality has already flipped back to its respective state as we know it, leaving us questioning our actions.

I propose the next philosopher-to-be follow suit and discover the gray areas of my ideas. I may be too simple-minded to think outside my frame, but I beg the next Socrates to permit my mind closure to these inane and quite possibly insane ideologies.

Existence Is Subjective

Scientific postulates are best known for the solid truth and factual evidence behind their theorems, yet some leave me more quizzical of their ways. Schrödinger left no exception to this when formulating his hypothesis behind the Cat. The experiment that sparked it, titled Schrödinger’s Experiment very fittingly, discusses how after a random release of poison, initiated by indeterminable radioactive decay, the state in which the cat is left after the poison in an inescapable container is both alive and dead. As the article dragged on I lost interest in anything other than the direct experiment and the Copenhagen interpretation, but instead took interest in reformulating the experiment’s hypothesis on my own.

The first question at hand as I delved into the theorem was the effectiveness of said poison, and the rate at which radioactive decay must occur for the cat to be dead at X time. The prior was simple, as the dosage of poison would have to be of a constant lethal amount, meaning that no matter how much was absorbed the cat would die. As for the question of time, I figured later on it must be irrelevant, as the cat had no where to go, and the poison could not lose its lethal strength over time from within a closed container. Next at hand was to determine in what sense the cat was two equally perplexing manners, of which this could be determined in a real sense such that the string theory proposes, or that the cat could be both alive and dead according to a subjective sense. With the article as my spoiler I knew right away that the cat could be both alive and dead according to randomness, or Quantum indeterminacy. With the formula resolved all that remained was to question an expanded sense of the problem.

In a subjective state of mind, the cat at any moment is both alive and dead. With the unpredictable rate of decay controlling the release of poison, the cat could virtually have died near immediately, or the process could have taken a much longer time. Without actually physically using a sense to determine the outcome of the situation, our minds have no way of determining what the outcome was. Thus our minds are left assuming all possibilities much like a natural computer would to determine the outcome.

Though unintended by its creator, Schrödinger’s experiment left with it deep rooted question surrounding existence and transcendentalism. With the indeterminableness of the cat’s state, the only assumable state of the cat is a lie much like the cake. It is simply a trick of the mind, and its existence is merely subjective.

Whether this has been random babbling or an actual revelation the matter of the fact stands: I have a truly disoriented train of though, and can over-think any hypothesis.

A Diamond In The Rough

The mind is a flurry of thoughts during the late hours. I feel sporadic enough to follow up a former relic of this page with a sequel if you will. The Cheshire Cat started it all the first time. His backwards tongue and dialect may have confused Alice, but much more went through my own mind as he weaved his words into a verbal tangle. How ever could I follow up nonsense that analyzed nonsense? Oh, but I found the way.

Upon my normal stumbling of the internet as it should fittingly be coined, I was attempting to aid someone in their search for daily webcomics that could entertain them. Being the expert of the web I am, I asked Google for some popular web comics. The usuals were all at the top. 8-bit theater, Cyanide & Happiness, Penny Arcade all held their domain over the aspiring mini-comics. What startled me was one I had yet to hear of, but seemed to have achieved a popularity all comics dream to achieve. Xkcd contains in it the sort of intelligent humor, one that I barely under stand myself, that can entertain me for hours upon hours on end. Its intelligent yet farce humor based upon a composure of computer terminology, vague gaming references, and mathematical computations act as a strict deterrent for those with no background to rally upon. Despite its fairly limited audience, the webcomic caters to a surprisingly large crowd for its genre.

Despite my love for many webcomics, it is great to see a finer base of knowledge applied to a field that generally is much more prone to low-brow slapstick humor. I honestly am lost for words about what more to say about such a finely tuned webcomic, so my closing words will be theirs.

And to think I loved her. Such a fine immortal line to end with that I just had to subsequently end with it myself.

Dry Wisdom

For anyone brave enough to have followed my random writings, sorry for dropping off the face of the earth all too suddenly. For lack of better terms, I have hit a wall, and writer’s block knocked me square on my arse.

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The streets have lost their wisdom. I have walked them too long, too frequent to learn anymore from them. I need a new place, a new escape. One still rich of the fruitful wisdom I yearn for is preferred. My life has drifted away from aimlessly walking the sidewalks I know too well. As I take each step down the familiar paths my mind no longer connects to them, leaving my feet to face the journeys alone. I’m left in a nothingness as if once the wisdom was lost, they lost their meanings as well. Something needs to change. No benefit can come of my remaining existence here. I now realize I have the capacity to fill my need elsewhere. A place with more streets, bigger streets, wiser streets. One thats streets, like a fresh book, can teach me far more than the pages of one I know by heart.

Until then I must settle for used wisdom.