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Overdrive, Distortion and Fuzz

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Broadly, when we talk about “overdrive”, distortion” and “fuzz”, we are talking about wave clipping , which happens when the signal exceeds the headroom of the amp.  Soft clipping is normally called “overdrive” and mimics the gain on your amp being turned up. Hard clipping is more aggressive, cutting the peaks flat. This is called “distortion”. When the wave form is so clipped that it turns a sine wave into a fully square shape, this is called “fuzz”. Here’s a diagram: Overdrive can be likened to a boost: it drives your amp harder so that the amp (rather than the effects pedal or app) creates the distortion. Think of overdrive in the way you might think of the gain on your amp (or the “power knob” if you one, which affects how much the gain knob drives the amp). Obviously some “overdrive pedals” are just weaker distortion pedals (because they do more than drive the amp).  Likewise, some “distortion pedals” are really more like overdrives because they really don’t introduce a clip as mu
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Tenth Anniversary (Special) Second Edition of The Mirror Image of Sound!

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It's been 10 years since my debut novel The Mirror Image of Sound was first published by Pikkeljig Press. I'm proud to annouce that, as of today, the special anniversary Second Edition is now live on Amazon and available for purchase! Please note that it replaces the First Edition. You may wonder why a second edition was necessary...   Over the years I have had small errors (typos, etc.) pointed out to me and I have stored these up.  I also regretted the subtitle almost as soon as it was published. The new subtitle is “A novel about second chances”.  Finally, and most importantly, some minor extraneous minor scenes that bogged poor Dan’s story down in the first act have been excised, speeding up the pace without any loss to the story. Conversely, some small scenes cut from the original second act have been partially restored.  Basically I have had ten years to consider my second edition and create a “Director’s cut”! I invite you all to buy: your paperback copy  here ; and your
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Harvest Breed - new novel published today!

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My first novel since 2016 has finally been published today! Harvest Breed is a psychological thriller that also explores the human condition through the lens of 2 characters who are both survivors of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. It is part murder mystery, part espionage tale, part character study that has been 15 years in the making. The novel's blurb reads as follows: "A probationer monk apparently commits suicide. His sister seeks the truth but the only person who can help her is a troubled man hiding from his own past. The ghosts of the Cold War creep into the shadows of the present in this political and psychological thriller. Spanning five decades and three continents, the story reaches its finale on an isolated estuary island in Western Australia's deep southwest. There, two strangers with linked destinies must learn to trust each other if they are to untangle a complex web of lies - including the biggest lies of all: the ones you tell yourself." As with
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A Cycling Cliché

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Most people know the “angry cyclist” stereotype. I’m starting to wonder if it’s more than that. My family and I suffered a road rage incident today. My wife was taking me to a bus stop so I could get to the hospital for a day procedure - and she could get to work on time. My daughter works at the hospital so I was going with her.  We were driving through the morning crush - peak hour traffic in the busy café district of Leederville. As we were nearing the relevant bus stop, my wife stopped at a yield sign so my daughter and I could climb out (there was literally no where else to stop, never mind park).  We had passed a cyclist in a parallel bicycle lane about a minute before. Obviously he’d caught up as I fumbled the childproof lock. “Oh for fuck’s sake!” He shouted as I got out. It seemed he’d lost momentum coming in to the shared part of the road - indeed, horror of horrors, he’d actually had to stop (as if car drivers like me don’t regularly accept the necessity of slowing down to 2
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The uselessness of polls and unsupported tanks

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I had the dubious pleasure of reading this article by Nate Silver on Fivethirtyeight in which he tried to muster a lukewarm argument against critics of poll-based electoral predictions. Reading it, I got the feeling that it was an attempted response to recent arguments by various observers about the growing irrelevance of Silver, his poll algorithms (which have been more miss than hit since the 2016 election) and of the uselessness today of landline-based political polls.  Arguments like this: And this: Looking back, Fivethirtyeight’s response was as laughable as their  final prediction for the Senate in the US 2022 mid-terms  - and probably their  final prediction for the House .  Indeed, Fivethirtyeight’s 2022 predictions have been almost as useless as their  predictions for a Clinton win in 2016 . It makes me think of how the use of tanks in warfare has changed since WW2 - especially their use without infantry support  in an era of guided missiles (javelins, NLAWS, Panzerfausts etc
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Message in a bottle: is the Fermi Paradox just a matter of time?

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The Fermi Paradox is the conflict between the lack of clear, obvious evidence for extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for their existence. Numerous hypotheses have been offered to explain this paradox. I’m left wondering whether we aren’t just missing the obvious. What if we and other sentient, sufficiently advanced, life forms simply exist in time spans that never overlap? Consider: how long has humanity had the capacity to generate any significant radio signals? 100 years? And how long have we been capable of finding radio signals of a similar kind in the cosmos? Half of that? Our species has existed 1-3 million years and civilisation has only formed in the last 6-10 thousand. How long does a species last once it develops technology of the spacefaring kind?  Every indication suggests that our civilisation does not have all that much longer to run in relative terms. It could well end in the next 50-100 years - be it from nuclear war, uncontrollable pandemics or (more cert
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The need to dispel propaganda rather than dismiss it

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 Q+A host Stan Grant asked a young pro-Russian audience member to leave the studio after he made claims regarding the Azov Battalion. It’s a shame he did this without giving the young man and the rest of the audience a few myth-busting facts. Yes, the far-right “Azov Battalion” in Ukraine does exist. However it comprises only 900-2500 individuals - i.e. less than 1% of forces fighting the Russian invasion .  The Azov Battalion is a far-right paramilitary organisation. It has its parallel in various Russian and Belarusian fascist, anti-Semitic organisations (e.g. the “ Russian National Unity ” paramilitary movement). These far-right terrorist groups are all reprehensible - but hardly representative of any country in the so-called “ Russkiy Mir ” (the Azov movement’s political wing gained only   2.3% of the vote in the 2019 Ukrainian elections - not enough for a single seat).  So while Putin’s reference to “Nazis” has some basis in fact (in Eastern Ukraine, Russian separatists have f
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