7 Pints of Guinness and Other Diversions

Okay, so I mentioned before that I was heading to my favourite bar, which I did. Got some good reading done [naturally]---page 379/1321 of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications, completion of Animorphs Series: The Andalite Chronicles by Katherine Alice Applegate, and page 42/77 of Animorphs Series: The Invasion by the same.

Apparently I had drunk 7 pints of Guinness stout, or roughly a pint an hour for the whole 7 hours that I was there (from 1415hrs to about 2115hrs). I mean, I had some finger food and ``regular'' food to go with it for lunch/dinner, but apparently the 7 pints were enough to make the store manager a little bit concerned about my safety getting home.

I reassured her that it was fine. Frankly, I didn't even feel anything more than buzzed. She did mention that she didn't realise just how much I could drink, but I didn't dare to lionise what I have done by pointing out that before heading to my favourite bar, I had already downed two cans of Tiger beer at home.

It's good to feel a little buzzed every now and then. Takes the edge of reality in some ways.

On the way home, I was listening to an album from SDN48. The pieces they have were sung in Japanese, but had a really high-energy beat to it, which was just the right amount of energy that I wanted.

Which of course segues into a completely different topic. When I play the high pitched instruments (like the 梆笛 or the soprano saxophone), I mentally switch myself towards ``diva''; in other words, whenever I go high, I re-imagine myself as an accomplished female soprano singer, the first lady in the orchestra. It helps with setting the right attitude and all the subtle adjustments necessary to ensure that my entire breathing tract is in tune with the rigours of playing high notes.

And no, I don't have some kind of gender dysmorphia, in case there was any doubt. I'm still a cis-male, but I find that putting myself into the shoes of a prima donna is a great way to sound much more controlled and light when playing high. It's just another way of acting, though less intense than say method acting where one is a role as opposed to one takes on a role.

Since my natural voice and volition is no where near sounding like a prima donna, I suppose it is why I have a tendency to favour listening to music that is sung by female singers, with bonuse points if they go high but do not sound squeaky.

These days though, I'm starting to expand more on the lower end of the range. I mean, yes, having the right mental model to play high is essential for 笛子 playing, but with the alto flute, bass flute, and tenor saxophone, I really need to beef up my lows. As time goes by, it will be increasingly easy to go lower on my natural voice than to keep going higher---going high by voice is always doable through careful constriction of various parts of the breathing tract, but the lowest note that one can sing (and therefore shape properly on a woodwind instrument) is completely limited by the length of the breating tract and its diameter.

There's a reason why the lowest oktavists are generally tall and/or old men. No woman is ever going to reach the deepest of the bassi profundi no matter how much they try---it is literally impossible for them due to physiological limitations. To be fair, for male voices to go to the highest soprano range without resorting to falsetto isn't exactly the easiest of things either, but as I said before, ``squeezing'' out a high pitched note is always feasible, even if its timbre sounds like garbage.

On a completely unrelated note, I just want to point out that O(log (n!))~O(n log n) from Stirling's approximation.

I think that's really about all for today. Till the next update then.