In case you need a refresher, check out the tune here. While some are a stretch, a few are really quite relevant.

1. Never let no one know how much dough you hold.

Keep your finances (good or bad) to yourself.

Don’t make the mistake of bragging about how well or mentioning how badly you’re doing unless you have a very good reason for it. What you think of as idle talk amongst friends can get around very quickly and can affect future deals or relationships. When it comes to finances, its just better to keep your mouth shut.

2. Never let ‘em know your next move.

Keep your core strategies/opportunities under wraps.

I know its tempting to talk about your plans or techniques, but just like #1, sometimes it’s just best to shut up. Biggie elaborates on this with “don’t you know Bad Boys move in silence or violence” which is just another way of letting you know that the big dogs don’t over-plan and discuss, and they act.

3. Never trust nobody.

Words are words. Get a contract.

Trust is a funny and terribly fragile thing. While your business partners or clients may not want to ruin you from the outset, who knows what the future will bring? You need to protect yourself. Hire a lawyer, get a contract. Live by this motto: “Everybody signs something.”

4. Never get high, on your own supply.

Discover the customers’ needs; don’t substitute your own.

While you may think you have it under control, your customer should come first. They are the ones controlling your paycheck. Don’t forget that. If you think you have all the answers, be prepared to fail. Badly.

5. Never sell no crack where you rest at.

Don’t mix business with personal life.

It’s easy to bring your personal life into business, and some people have no problems maintaining the difference. But when you become a friend to all, you may have trouble making necessary decisions in the face of emotion. Just know that if you do mix the two, you’ll may need to break the connection to make the right decision.

6. That God damn credit, dead it.

Get cash upfront unless you don’t care about being paid.

This goes back to #3, don’t trust anyone. Get a contract and get the cash upfront. While Biggie was dealing with unreliable crackheads, you’ll still run across unreliable or dishonest businessmen. When in doubt, get it in cash.

7. Keep your family and business completely separated.

Don’t work with family for family’s sake.

This is an elaboration on #5, but don’t hire friends or family just because they are who they are. Do they have a strong skill-set? Can they contribute to your bottom line? If you can’t be honest here, you won’t make it far.

8. Never keep no weight on you.

Learn to delegate effectively.

Biggie clarifies this with the line: “them cats that squeeze your guns can hold jumps too.” In Biggie’s case, he doesn’t want to get nailed with possession. In your case, hire someone to do your dirty work for you. Learn to delegate and get on with more important things.

9. If you ain’t gettin bags stay the fuck from police.

Watch who you are perceived as working with.

There are probably a lot of people who in hindsight would have taken a different route when dealing with unsavory people. Biggie had the right idea, your colleagues will form their own assumption, some of them negative.

10. A strong word called consignment; if you ain’t got the clientele say hell no.

Don’t take credit without a means to repay.

This is the flip-side of #6, don’t take obligations you can’t repay. This is one very quick way of run yourself into the ground. If you already have revenue and need to grow, then by all means.

What do you think? Did I interpret one wrong?

I never thought I’d cross into the dark side. Using AutoTune? On jazz?! What?!?

Oh, I know how wrong it is. The “Trane” would roll over in his grave. Wes would be shocked. Miles would not approve. But, I don’t think those guys would listen to our records anyways (even if they were still alive). Besides, I think I speak for everyone when I say I am tired of doing 800 takes. We aren’t professionals who spend their lives playing live and in the studio. This is for fun. So here is my two bits about Antares AutoTune on woodwind and brass instruments.

Holy shit, it worked!

That was my first reaction. I snagged a copy (v5), installed it, and was thinking I just wasted time and money. Like we need Cher or T-Payne style AutoTuning on our sax duets. Right…  All I did was throw it on the tracks, leave it on the “Auto” setting. 10 seconds later… Well, holy shit, it worked!

Alright, so you know it worked, but how did it sound? Here’s a little excerpt on a song by Adam Loftin, named “Out Of The West Wood”. It’s a very angular jazz tune, slow and ballad like. You can hear our two sax players (who are quite talented), stray off on this strangely angular melody.

• Broken.
• Fixed.

Now, that may not sound that different, but listen closely to the last note. The warble is gone. The harmonic dissonance is still there (this is jazz, remember). This is actually a pretty good example, hopefully you aren’t trying to fix horribly out of tune performances, just slightly out of tune.

Anyways, it was literally as easy as installing the software, attaching it to the track, and selecting the instrument setting. We could probably fix the slightly out of tune note pickups, but seriously, its so much better, we don’t even care.

Have you used it?

Just curious about your experiences with AutoTune and your stories. What genres did you use it on? What’s the strangest track you’ve run through AutoTune?

PS: If you care, the band’s name is Glass Cannon. The album is due out whenever it is done, which, at this rate, might be a while…

Well, I just put together a little mini web-app with AJAX jQuery goodiness called Was That Guy In…?. The basic is concept is this:

Sometimes I am watching a movie and I notice an actor or actress that I think was in some other movie I had previously seen. Unfortunately, I rarely know thier name and I don’t feel like searching IMDB for the character name to find out. I want to know if he/she was and who they played.

So, I made this app. You just put in the name of two movies and it will tell you who was in both of them. It does a pretty good job going deep in the cast, but isn’t perfect. Sometimes Car Driver #1 (uncredited) is that guy you thought you saw. In that way, it can be pretty powerful.

Also, it has been brought to my that IMDB has already done this common search thing before me. That’s fine. Mine’s prettier and has AJAX and is much more specialized in finding actors. Their’s kind of sucks, no offense.

To celebrate the spirit of the upcoming election, I thought I’d collect a few past stats that have turned out to be pretty good predictors of the US presidential elections. These are quite silly but you can’t argue with the results. First up is one you’ve probably already heard about somewhere…

Halloween mask sales.

This is according to BuyCostumes.com, the world’s largest online retailer of, well, costumes. According to them, the past two election years’ sales of each nominees’ masks have correlated perfectly to the actual winner. In 2000 and 2004, Buy Costumes had sold 57% and 53% George W. Bush masks, respectively. Obviously, Halloween masks have more power over our government than previously thought.

• Prediction: Obama with 55%.

The Redskins’ final home game.

Basically, if the Red Skins win their final home game, the incumbent party will remain in office. This one was dug up by ESPN in 2004, while it didn’t work out last election, where the Redskins lost to the Packers predicting that Kerry would take office, it has otherwise proven accurate since 1936.

• Prediction: Obama. Last night the Redskins lost 23-6.

Favorite cookie recipe.

Since 1992, each prospective first wife (or husband?) sent in their favorite cookie recipes to Family Circle for readers to vote on. Each year, the winner of that vote was the spouse of the winning on nominee on Nov. 4th. However, there was some talk of Cindy McCain cheating on her recipe, perhaps we should consider her disqualified…

• Prediction: (Cindy?) McCain with 54% but cheated.

The Scholastic kids vote.

Apparently, asking a bunch of kids who will win the election is incredibly accurate. It’s worked since they started the poll, except for one year in 1960 when JFK supposedly lost to Nixon. The likely reason for the stunning accuracy is that the kids simply mirror their parents political opinions. Actually, this probably leads to a more accurate sampling than most polls because kids don’t filter very well. Just ask the master of getting-kids-to-say-dumb-stuff Bill Cosby…

• Prediction: Obama with 57%.

So it looks like that’s three for Obama, and one for McCain (disputable). I think Obama is gonna take it too. We’ll see.

Just in case you didn’t know, Scientology is a religion started by science fiction writer Ron L. Hubbard and has experienced quite a bit of backlash in popular culture. Often, the subject of ridicule is the outrageous claim that extraterrestrial life detonated hydrogen bombs in volcanoes sealing millions of thetans on Earth. It manages to be even more outrageous than the religions that claim a zombie man ran across the Earth for a couple of days before rising into the sky, which is quite a feat. But I digress.

However, the real issue that most people have with Scientology is not their extraterrestrial claims, but the way the organization, however misguided, brainwashes and controls their members into paying outrageous sums for progressing membership while simultaneously claiming altruism.

In my brief inspection of the church, I suggest that there are two primary psychological effects (irony anyone?) that serve to condition the members for absolute subservience.

1. One tends to artificially value more when one pays a high price for something.

A unique thing happens when you pay a high price for something, you value it. In fact, you tend to value it a lot more than something someone simply gives you. It’s the exact psychology behind selling high priced designer jeans when jeans bought at the local Walmart are of comparable quality. While higher price items don’t always become a “status symbol” or similar, the price plus societies’ approval can categorize the said item as a status symbol.

Anyone with a working knowledge of Scientology is aware of the extremely high fees the church demands for the practice of auditing. Auditing is a type of interviewing along with an e-meter (a device that has been proven to measure nothing but random electrical impulses) that is required to advance to higher levels of the church. Many believe that Scientology is simply an “unscrupulous commercial enterprise” because these high prices simply prey on unwitting people who get caught up in the scam.

However, it is simply a device that serves several purposes. First, it raises capital that can be used by the church however it sees fits, whether fighting people who stand up and speak out against the church or purchasing impressive buildings to expand. Second, it conditions the members to value their membership because of the inherent sacrifices involved in pursuing higher membership. Finally, it helps lock members in a fanatical obsession. An interesting feature (or bug?) of the brain is how it tends to rationalize its decisions regardless of the circumstances. This loyalty, inflated by sacrifice, results in the famous fanaticism so hallmark of Scientology.

2. Adjusting behavior in order to instill radical beliefs or values.

By extension, it’s called brainwashing via behavior modification. This is a common component in almost all cases of brainwashing. Take, for example, turning a spy. When a foreign spy is found out, rather than removing him or her, they often convince the spy to do something trivial but in opposition to their alignment. Because they can often leverage the knowledge of his real nature, it can be rather successful. As soon as trivial act becomes normal, they escalate the act demanded of him or her. This repeats gradually until the spy is effectively turned. The unique part is the spy can become completely indoctrinated into the opposite agenda and subsequently does such work willingly. In effect, the adjusted behavior seeded the new belief or value.

This replacement in behaviors breaks down the person’s previous identity and ultimately removes it completely. At this point, the new behaviors shape the new identity. Ultimately, you believe what you do, and you do what you believe.

Replace the spy with an average Joe and the hostile country with Scientology and you have a basic understanding of how Scientology conditions otherwise rational people to their new and strange tenants. It is gradual and methodical. However, their use of brainwashing serves the unique purpose of fully indoctrinating its members into a culture so perverse that its barriers against logical opposition are already built in. Put simply: once you’re in, you rarely leave simply because you don’t want to.

A powerful combination.

By understanding the methods by which members’ fanaticism and beliefs are conditioned, one can begin to feel sympathy for the lower level members and repugnance for the leaders of the church. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the organization is designed solely to reap profits by controlling their members. Even more disturbing is the fact that Scientology fully intends on infiltrating and controlling governments.

Such cults of conditioning and control are a blight on society and need to be controlled as well.

The interesting concept of intuition was brought up the other day in one of my classes. In order to highlight the fallibility of trusting your intuition over cold hard logic, they proposed to us a slew of questions (although only three were really important). We were simply told to answer each question the best we could. Without further ado, here are the three questions of interest (try to answer each rather quickly):

1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
   How much does the ball cost?
2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take
   100 machines to make 100 widgets?
3. In a lake, there is a patch of  lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size.
   If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it
   take for the patch to cover half of  the lake?

A little background: These three questions were first proposed by Shane Frederick of MIT and are commonly referred to as the “Cognitive Reflection Test” or the CRT. The questions basically test your reliance on logic vs. intuition and are supposedly correlated with one’s IQ and their willingness to wait for good things (according the original study).

Each question presents an easy “intuitive” answer which is actually incorrect. However, it is assumed that those with a higher IQ will notice that the intuitive answer contains inconsistencies that deserve a further (and more time consuming) examination. You might take it with a grain of salt, but it is interesting.

Solutions below.

||

||

||

||

||

||

||

\ | | /

\/

The Solutions.

For question #1, one might intuitively say, “$1.00 plus $0.10 is $1.10, therefore a ball costs $0.10“. While this is quite intuitive, it is also incorrect. A person who is more thorough might respond that the ball actually costs $0.05 (.05+(1+.05)=1.1). The correct answer is the ball costs $0.05.

For question #2, an intuitive response would be that “5=5=5 so 100=100=100“. However, if it takes a single machine 5 minutes to make a single widget, even a million machines can make a million widgets in 5 minutes. The correct answer is therefore 5 minutes.

For question #3, the common intuitive response would be, “half the pond would be covered in half the time, so 48/2=24 days“. However, this ignores the exponential growth of the lily pads. Try working it backwards, if the pond is covered after 48 days, and they double in size every day, then day 47 would be half covered. The correct answer is 47 days.

How do you compare?

How many did you get right? Compare your score to the below averages for various colleges.

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 2.18
• Princeton University: 1.63
• Harvard University: 1.43
• Web-based studies: 1.10
• Michigan State University: 0.79

Please note that even if you missed them all, don’t fret, it’s obviously not a full IQ test. I would imagine that getting each question is a bit like adding a few more points to an average IQ score. Besides, how much credence can you give some odd paper?

Regardless, I am pretty sure I cheated and saw these all before the test. But I feel like I can be pretty impatient at times. Isn’t knowing half the batttle?