You know who needs to read this book? About half the managers I've ever had to work under (Bungler and the Ho, etc.).

Alright, so Ken Wilber's Integral University has just gone live in its beta version.

Sort of.

It's just a dummy home page so far, and another "lorem ipsum" one linked to it:

I was trying to download mp3's and streaming audio from their affiliated Integral Naked site the other day, and kept getting show-stopping errors all over the bloody place. (I have no particular interest in those dialogs, particularly given the $10 per month fee, but it's research for a future book: The Blind Eye of Spirit: A Skeptical Vision for a World Gone Slightly Integral.)

Which leads me to wonder: Are they doing development work and QA on their live sites, rather than in separate server environments?? Granted, we've all done that occasionally when management wasn't watching and we (programmers) needed to fix something quick-and-dirty without going through the normal stages. But still.

Either way, they're putting up stuff in their public-face environment where they don't even have the content written yet. I find that astounding.

The Integral University community (20+ linked websites) was actually at one time supposed to be ready by the autumn of 2003, but I'm not gonna laugh at them for that delay, especially considering that my own Stripping the Gurus was supposed to be finished by the end of January ... in 2004. Just another week or so, now....

You know what would be a good Simpsons episode? If Homer got caught lip-synching at a talent show in Springfield, and it turned out that guest-star Ashlee Simpson was his long-lost cousin.

He gets booed off stage, she covers for him and nails a song ... then all of the characters in the show have their voices go out of synch with the picture, and they all stalk off in separate directions.

If you listen to music on your computer via Windows Media Player (or Winamp, or QCD), please do yourself a favor and download the Ozone for Media Players plug-in right now.

It's a "dumbed down" version of their Ozone mastering suite, applied to your favorite CDs.

The nag screens for the 7-day trial version are annoying as hell, but if you're anything like me (and who isn't?), you'll spring for the $29 U.S. registered version within 10 minutes of using the application, simply because it brings so much life and presence to any music you apply it to.

A/B it on any song, you'll be amazed.

I'm not certain enough about this to include it in the chapter in Stripping the Gurus on the grossly overrated pandit Ken Wilber, but this looks suspiciously to me like another example of that "spiritual genius" mangling high-school-level ideas:

In his book The Marriage of Sense and Soul, Wilber quoted from the mathematician G. Spencer Brown regarding the mental science of mathematics:

[I]t is not out of order for mathematicians, each having obeyed a set of injunctions [e.g., imagine two parallel lines meeting at infinity; picture the cross-section of a trapezoid; take the square of the hypotenuse], to describe to each other, and to discuss among themselves, what they have seen.

The material within the square brackets is Wilber's addition.

From Random House Webster's Electronic Dictionary and Thesaurus, College Edition, Version 1.0, Copyright 1992: "Cross-section: 1. A section made by a plane cutting something transversely, esp. at right angles to the longest axis."

From the same dictionary, a trapezoid is "a quadrilateral plane figure having two parallel and two nonparallel sides." Like a parallelogram that's gone bad.

The only cross-section a (two-dimensional) trapezoid has, then—derived from cutting through the figure, and looking at the edge you've just cut along—is a rather uninteresting short, straight line. (The trapezoid is also a mammalian wrist bone, which would have a more noteworthy cross-section, and could dovetail with kw's early-'70s background in biochemistry. But unless Wilber was playing "One of these things is not like the others," it is highly unlikely that he would have sandwiched that in between two geometrical figures, in an explicitly mathematical context.)

One is, of course, free to picture any number of such short, straight lines, in one's mathematical reveries and otherwise. And Godspeed to you in that.

Still, one cannot help but wonder whether perhaps he might have meant to say, "Picture the diagonal...." Mathematicians (and high school students) might well have need to do that in concocting proofs of one or another theorem, via splitting the trapezoid into two triangles, etc.

Personally, though, when I think of the cross-sections of odd geometric shapes, all I can flash back to is pieces of plywood in my dad's old workshop, and the smell of unpainted wood after a rainstorm.

Got up late yesterday morning, after working well into the wee hours on Stripping the Gurus the previous night, and ambled over to my computer, as is my wont.

Checked my email, etc.—as is my font—and then heard something over the music that sounded like water drops, but figured it must be the kitchen sink or shower dripping, so I didn't even look over at it.

You know about when Elton John left the bathtub water running while he went to make a phone call, and it flooded the apartment below him? Something like that must have happened with the elephantine idiot tenant above me, because there was already a puddle on the floor, from water dripping down from the ceiling in the hallway between my kitchen and bathroom.

"My Darling Elephantine."

So I went down to the management office, they sent the super up, he went up to #412, and the "rain" stopped soon afterwards.

It was raining outside on Thursday, too. Amid a foggy +18 record high, which induced me to spend at least five minutes out on my balcony, unchained from my computer's melody, getting some fresh Toronto air. (Cough, cough.) Back down to -7 today, though.

Bought some new music software recently, i.e., most of the products from www.pspaudioware.com (at half price) and all of the ones from www.izotope.com. (You gotta have good compression and mastering tools.)

Idea for a song:

Clinical Depression Blues.

"Oh, baby...."