Lots of small jobs done yesterday. I completed the last of the Secret Electric Sorcery scores, though the last tune, The Ones We Love was more complex than I expected. It uses the same melody twice, a gentle introspective melody which overlaps like a canon. This, being 'naturally' played was difficult to transcribe, but the result is passable. The words too needed transcribing as these were droned with odd timing.
Then I worked on a lottery predictor program, LotPred II. I'd written LotPred years ago in the early day of the UK National Lottery, a Visual Basic program, but that was fixed to 1 to 49 numbers. Now the draw uses 1 to 59, and there are many other types of game. The principle of operation is simple, that over an infinite term all random numbers are destined to be drawn equally, so that when analysing past results, the numbers that are least frequent are more likely to appear from now on. Part of this implies that randomness has an indirect memory.
Anyway, I programmed LotPred II. It can process two 'ranks' of numbers so can be used for games like the EuroMillions Draw where there are two ball sets, and any ball rank can span any range and contain any quantity of balls. It checks a database of past results and produces and frequency tables which are used to produce a 'prediction' which is still random, but skewed towards the least popular numbers.
Doing this made me think of John Whiteside Parsons, the 'mad' rocket scientist, who, being on a downward career slope, decided to invest his time in magic and strange rituals in a quest for success, riches, glory, love. Are all lottery players similarly tantalised? I wrote some words for a song, I'm Turning Into John Whiteside Parsons, inspired by this.
Today, a slow day. I feel tired, at the end of my scoring project, and tonight's live Open Mic event is distracting me. I've elected to play Cycles III, as this single will be out on the 1st of March, but don't know what else to perform. I had the original idea of a piece from Tree Of Keys, either Murmuration or The Dark Cliffs, but didn't really like either when I played something like them, then had the idea of another Cycles track... but again felt unsatisfied.
I've just carried 28Kg sheets of plywood into the garage for a shed-repair job that my mother has decided on, planned, and ordered the materials, and only now asks me to do the job! If I were planning this job, I'd do things differently - at very least have had the wood cut to size, as this is offered as a free service in some places. My hands hurt now, but I don't think it will damage my performance too much.
I've also made up a Snow Business CD for Bernard from LATH, and listed the next Fall in Green gig for March 16th. There are more jobs to do but I feel tired, and it's only 4 hours to go until the piano performance.
