Summer Happenings

First off, allow me to introduce you to Chuck.



This region is aswarm with groundhogs (aka woodchucks). Groundhogs are a type of large rodent in the marmot family of ground squirrels. They happen to be rather large ground squirrels; Chuck here is a relatively small one, about the size of a large cat. Another one living in my back yard, Groundhogzilla, is about four times his size.

Groundhogs like to nibble on garden plants, and what with the large gardens around the house they can be a bit of a problem here. A live trap is used on occasion when one gets too destructive. Chuck had gotten bold and taken to sitting on the front porch eating the petunias. And so it was decided that Chuck needed to be evicted.

The trap was placed where Chuck was wont to roam, and in a few days I found him sitting in it looking most disgruntled.







Chuck in action!

And so Chuck was taken for a ride in a car to a nice area of woods and fields and streams about ten miles outside of town, where he was released upon the unsuspecting world. Now he's hopefully gallivanting about in happy groundhog style out there, eating things other than peoples' gardens.

So far, Groundhogzilla has been behaving himself. He wanders off to the meadow next door to munch on things, so there are no plans to trap him. It would be interesting to try, though. I think we'll need a bigger boat. . .errrr, I mean a bigger cage.

On a different note, Wolf Hills has started its annual Mountain Festival, the yearly event held to commemorate the desire of local merchants to get lots of money from tourists. Opening day kicked off with a parade down Main Street, featuring lots of Shriners and lots of clowns.

Here is the front of the parade, complete with big lumpy weird mascot thing.



There were also these odd miniature trucks charging down the road.



What would any parade with Shriners be, of course, without their miniature precision driving teams?

And what would any parade be without these guys?

So now the streets of the town are full of tourists and will probably remain so for the next few weeks. Various events and activities shall occur around town, and all will be happy and carefree and merry. Or something like that. So far I've seen the parade, an airplane and car show, several concerts, various demonstrations of Colonial-era and Civil War-era this and that, and other stuff. This upcoming weekend is to have an overall "Celtic" theme to it, so perhaps I'll be able to record lots more bagpipe music for all my Scottish friends to enjoy.

This afternoon, though, I went out of town and trekked southwards to seek out new life and new civilisations around a certain geographical feature I'd heard mentioned a few days earlier: Backbone Rock.



No relation to Brokeback Mountain, as far as I am aware.

Backbone rock is a ridge that juts out from Holston Mountain. I have no idea how it formed; information on it seems to be very, very limited. A small river called Beaverdam Creek flows along one side, around the end, and then back up the other side. The ridge is about a hundred feet tall on average, though it varies considerably. A tunnel was blasted through it in 1901 so as to allow a railroad track to pass through; the train has long since stopped running, though, and these days a road passes through the convenient tunnel instead.

















I decided to climb up to the top of it and see what was to be seen. The entire ridge is perhaps a mile or so long, but at the top is about ten feet wide. So it forms a sort of narrow rocky pier jutting out into the trees that you can walk along.









This is that same bridge, looking upwards from about halfway up the side.



If you look closely, you can see a team of climbers with their ropes and pulleys and pitons and climbing packs and hammers and picks and whatnot, all set up to climb the slope beneath the bridge. If you could look even closer you'd see that they looked rather annoyed, because I climbed up to the top, wandered around up there, and then meandered back down again before they even got halfway up. They were some of the slowest climbers I've ever seen.

Compared to climbing up, climbing back down is generally either extremely fast and easy and unhealthy or else extremely difficult and tiring. So I decided to just walk down the hiking trail that goes down off the ridge rather than climb back down.





The cliff face had lots and lots of nice hand-holds, but most of them were also full of spiders. Which made climbing a bit more interesting.



There were also lots of other fun Naturey things to admire. Such as this tree, which has been very thoroughly visited by woodpeckers.



There were plenty of flowers still blooming, too.



The place was rather damp and shady, so there were plenty of mushrooms. I restrained any urge I might have felt to nibble on them.







I even spotted some of Gustav's cousins lurking about. They were much smaller than he is, though, only about as long as a finger.



After climbing about, I decided to go splashing about. I visited Beaverdam Creek and (keeping an eye out for any bears) poked along it for an hour or so, hopping about on boulders and poking at river rocks.







I didn't see any bears, but I did find lots of our little salamander friends lurking beneath rocks and leaves.







Salamander!

I haven't figured out what type of salamanders they were, other than small and squirmy. I did catch a glimpse of something else; a very pale tail of something slipped quickly beneath a rock. What I saw of it was about the size of my thumb. It was probably either a large salamander of another species (or perhaps a newt or hellbender), a lizard, or a snake. I couldn't tell if what I'd seen was the entire tail or just the tip. Since it would have taken a good bit of up-close effort to lift that rock, I decided that I'd leave it be in case it turned out to be something less than entirely pleasant and friendly that I wouldn't want to be sticking my hands into the middle of.

And that was my investigation of Backbone Rock. From there I drove the long meandering road back to Wolf Hills, and was once more immersed in the seething swarms of Summer tourists.

Getting Physical!

It happens fairly often in science-fiction stories: a man gets into his spaceship and leaves his homeworld. He flies through space at super-high speeds, and when he comes back after a month he finds out that time passed slower for him. Everybody who he knew back on home has long since died of old age.

It seems impossible, really. Time is time, after all. It just flows along at a nice steady rate, all over the universe. How could time change, just because you went traveling?

First, let's talk about light. What is light?

A bit over a couple thousand years ago, people in many parts of the world were poking at their surroundings and trying to figure out how things worked. People in both the Greek regions and India came up with an interesting idea: the universe and everything was made up out of lots and lots and lots of really tiny little bits. The Greek philosophers who supported this idea called these little bits atomos. Some of these philosophers even decided that light itself was made up out of tiny little particles.

Most people considered this all to be totally impractical theorising, though, and ignored the ideas. But the notions never really faded out, and in the 17th Century AD the idea started to catch on in this new thing called "science". Gradually it was established that matter was indeed made up of smaller and smaller and smaller bits.

Then somebody thought to take a look at light. Various tests were conducted, and they were surprised to discover that it, too, acted like it was made out of little bits of something moving along in a stream!

Of course, somebody else had to go and complicate matters. Also in the 17th Century, some other scientists looked at light and decided that it was actually a wave. Various tests were conducted, and light displayed its wave-like qualities.

There was a problem with this wave theory, though.

There are two types of waves: longitudinal and transverse. An example of longitudinal waves are soundwaves. To imagine a longitudinal wave, picture a long, long line of billiard balls set out on a flat surface, each a couple of inches from its neighbours. If you then take your cue and hit the first ball, it strikes the second ball and stops. The second ball hits the third ball and stops. The third ball hits the fourth ball and stops. And so on, down the line. The motion is all in one direction. In the case of soundwaves, just substitute air molecules for billiard balls.

Transverse waves work differently. For these, you can imagine a rope tied at one end to a tree. If you take the free end of the rope and give it a strong shake, you can cause a wave to travel down the length of the rope in a big hump. Unlike longitudinal waves, transverse waves move in all sorts of directions at the same time.

If you have one of those Slinky toys, you can have fun making both kinds of wave!

You'll notice something that both types of waves have in common, though: they need something to travel through. In the case of the longitudinal wave, it was the line of billiard balls. In the case of the transverse wave, it was the rope. If you took away the rope, there would be nothing there to wave. So to have a wave, you need something there to be waved. You couldn't have a wave of nothingness.

But light travels through a vacuum. In fact, it travels best through one. And a vacuum is nothiness.

Yet scientists had solid evidence that light moves in a wave. What was going on? Well, obviously there was something that the scientists didn't know. And so they came up with the theory of luminiferous aether.

Luminiferous aether was an intangible, undetectable omnipresent "stuff" filling the universe. If the universe was a giant bowl, the luminiferous aether would be a gelatin dessert filling it and all the stars and planets and comets and walruses would be the little bits of fruit floating about within. And it was through the luminiferous aether that the light waves traveled.

Immediately, scientists realised that there were a large number of huge problems with this idea. For one thing, it would require the aether to have no mass yet behave like a solid. But it was the only idea they had that seemed even halfway plausible, so they tried messing around with it to see if there was any way to get it to work.

There had long been one insurmountable obstacle to some experiments with light: clocks. Light travels fast enough to circle the Earth seven and a half times in one second. How, then, could you accurately measure the speed of light if you worked in the 1600's? How could you tell how long it took light to travel from one side of a three-meter wide table to the other (0.00000001 seconds) when the average clock in the 1800's was off by sometimes as much as several seconds? The answer: you couldn't. . .by using a timer. There was a way to sort of get around that, though, and in the late 1800's a man named Albert Michelson figured it out.

They couldn't measure light's actual speed, but they could do the next best thing. You can measure how long it takes one beam of light to travel a known distance, and then compare that to how long it takes another beam of light to travel a similar distance. Then you can see if one beam moves faster than the other!

Michelson eventually got together with another man named Edward Morley, and together they put together one of the most famous science experiments in history: the Michelson–Morley experiment! (I bet you never saw that coming!) The basic idea behind the experiment was to compare two beams of light that were moving at right angles to each other. The purpose of this had to do with the idea of the luminiferous aether. If the luminiferous aether was a great big omnipresent bunch of something that light travelled through, then the motion of the Earth would make light seem to be travelling at different speeds depending on what direction it came from.

You can imagine this as being sort of like you standing outside in a big field on a windy day. Suppose that the wind is blowing from the north at 10 kph. If you stand still, then you feel the wind blowing southwards at 10 kph. But if you were to run south at 5 kph, then the wind appears to change. It seems to be travelling south at only 5 kph now. And if you were to run south at 15 kph, the wind would then seem to have turned around and be blowing back the other way. The speed of the wind itself didn't actually change if you compare it to how it travels over the field, just your perspective of it. Thus in the frame of reference of the field, the wind is constantly blowing south at 10 kph, while in your own personal frame of reference it is moving at whatever speed.

The same would be true of light travelling in the luminiferous aether. The Michelson–Morley experiment used a series of mirrors to split a beam of light in half. The two halves of the beam were then sent off at right angles to each other. Both beams of light would have started off at the same speed, since they were originally just one beam from one source going one way. But now they would be travelling in different directions.

At the same time, the Earth would be flying through the luminiferous aether at about 30 kilometers per second around the sun, while the sun is flying through the luminiferous aether at an even greater speed as it circles the galactic core. So while the light is travelling through the aether's frame of reference at whatever speed light was travelling at, to the Earth's frame of reference the light would often be moving at some other speed. A light ray coming from directly ahead would appear to be moving faster, while one moving from behind would appear to be moving slower. One coming in from the side would seem to be going at about normal speed.

So the Michelson–Morley setup had the two halves of the one beam of light moving at right angles. They would turn the whole device around to point in various directions, and then they would see which of the two halves of the light beam was able to travel a certain distance the fastest. By repeating the process over and over with the device turned in different directions, they'd eventually be able to see in which direction the light travels fastest, in which it travels the slowest, and so on. This would demonstrate the Earth moving through the luminiferous aether.

And so they ran the test, over and over and over. And each time, the results came back the same: both halves of the light beam travelled the distance at just about the same speed. There should have been a noticeable difference, but there wasn't one.

Later experiments with even better equipment came up with the same result. Eventually, it was realised that light always travels at a certain speed (not counting if you stick something like a glass full of murky water in its path).

Physicists were pretty much unanimous in their agreement that this was really weird. It shouldn't work that way.

Pretend that you're in a car, driving down the road at 100 kph. You're holding a ball in your hand, hanging out the window. You let go of the ball.

From your frame of reference, the ball will seem to drop straight down at 9.8 m/s squared. Its forward speed will, in relation to you, be zero. This is because both you and the ball are moving in the same direction at the same speed, so there is no difference.

From the frame of reference of somebody standing by the side of the road, things would be different. The ball will drop in a curve, heading down at 9.8 m/s squared but also moving in the direction of the car at 100 kph.

You can see this sort of thing in action in all sorts of situations. An airplane flying at 1,000 kph fires a missile; to the pilot of the airplane it looks as though the missile moves forward at 2,000 kph, while to people on the ground it looks as though the missile travels at 3,000 kph. You're running in a baseball game at 30 kph and somebody directly ahead of you throws the ball straight at you at 100 kph; to you, it seems as though the ball is travelling at 130 kph. This is pretty much common sense, and perfectly logical, and seemingly obvious, and is totally unlike how light acts.

Instead of holding a ball while you're in the car, pretend that instead you were holding a flashlight. You point it straight ahead and turn it on. The light shines out and ahead of you. From your frame of reference, the light will be travelling ahead of you at 300,000,000 m/s.

According to all common sense and logic and theory, the view from the bystander's frame of reference should be different. To him, he should see the speed of the car travelling forward added to the speed of the light. To him, the light should appear to be moving down the road at 300,000,000 m/s plus the 100 kph of the car (so about 300,000,027.77777 m/s).

But it doesn't work that way. To the person watching from the side of the road, the light travels at 300,000,000 m/s. If you were to shine the light behind you instead, it would still seem to both you and him to be travelling at 300,000,000 m/s. If you were to somehow drive the car at the speed of light and shine the light in any direction, it would still appear to every person viewing it to be travelling at 300,000,000 m/s.

This discovery was not the result of theory and mathematics. This discovery was made by the actual observation of light doing just that. And so theory had to scramble to catch up to the observations.

So, light always travels at a the same speed. Always. This speed is given the symbol c. What does this constancy mean, then, in application?

Not much, most of the time. In our day-to-day lives, we don't really care. However, there are situations (mainly theoretical at the moment) where the weird properties of light might have a very weird effect on people.

Suppose that there are two ring-shaped space stations floating somewhere in space, Station A and Station B. Floating an equal distance from both stations is a giant mirror, so that all three objects form a triangle.



Station A flashes a beam of light at the mirror. The light flies through space at speed c , bounces off the mirror and reaches Station B.



At the exact same instant that the light leaves Station A, a rocket that is flying along passes through the ring of Station A. It flies in a straight line and passes through Station B's ring at the exact same instant that the flash of light reaches Station B.



So, if we look at the whole event from one of the space stations, we see the light travelling in a sort of inverted V-shape.

What does it look like from the point of view of the people in the rocket, though? The flash of light kept pace with them along the length of their journey, always being at right angles to them.



But it also got further away from them as they went along, then at the halfway point started getting closer again. So to the people in the rocket, the flash of light would have appeared to move out in a straight line from them and then come straight back again. The total distance would have appeared to be the height of the station-mirror-station triangle and then back again.



To the station observer, the light travelled a distance equal to the two sides of the triangle. To the rocket's crew, the light travelled a distance equal to the height of the triangle and back. Basic geometry shows that the former distance is going to be greater than the latter distance. So to the crew of the rocket, the light appeared to travel a shorter distance than it did to the station's observer.

But remember, light always travels at the same speed (c) for everybody. And the distance that the rocket travelled didn't change to anybody.

To calculate the time (t) taken for a journey, you take the distance (d) travelled and divide it by the speed (v, short for "velocity") of travel.

t = d/v

For example, if you travelled 100 miles at 50 mph, then the time the trip took was 100/50 hours, or 2 hours.

In our little rocket scenario, the speed at which the light travelled is always the same. So v = c in all cases. On the other hand, the distance that the light travelled is different depending on which frame of reference you look at it from. It was shorter to the people in the rocket than it was to the people floating around in space. Just to make the math easier to see, we'll arbitrarily give the distance as seen by the people in the rocket as 10, and that as seen by the other people as 20. We'll also make c = 2.

Given that t = d/v, we then get two results.

For the people in the rocket: t = 10/2
For the people in the stations: t = 20/2

This means that to the people in the rocket, it took the light 5 seconds to go from Station A to Station B. It also means that for the people in the stations, the light took 10 seconds to travel that distance. Two different times for the exact same event. So to the people on the rocket, time went twice as fast for the people on the space stations as it did for the people on the rocket. And to the people on the stations, time went at half speed for the people on the rocket.

By the way, the physicists finally did manage to resolve the particle/wave dispute over light. In its usual weird and contrary manner, light turned out to be both. It travels as a stream of particles (photons) and as a wave at the same time. It's even a transverse wave, that moves in a sort of helix motion.

Stuff!

1) Smerk!

Smerk is still a sweetie. And a hottie, even if it is Winter where she is.

2) Postdiluviousness

It was wet here. Town Creek runs through the back yard; ordinarily the creek is very properly behaved and mild-mannered. There's a small dam that has been here since the place was a tannery in the 18th Century; they used the pool created to rinse the hides in before and after the tanning process. I'd been working earlier this month on shoring up the banks of the stream with sacks of concrete, so as to keep the back yard from eventually eroding away. It's a good thing I did that, too.

Last night and this morning we had a rather impressive downpour. Thunder, lightning, wind, and lots and lots and lots and lots of rain. Abby (being the sensible cat that she is) hid under my bed all night. Marshmallow (being the silly kitten that she is) ran around outside in a panic until she remembered that she could come in through the pet door, whereupon she curled up under a chair as a little soggy lump and remained there for the duration.

This house is not all that far from the wellspring of the stream, so it's not as though there's all that much watershed upstream of here for gazillions of gallons of water to run into the stream. Even so, within a short time the water was all the way up to the old wooden shed that has been--at various times in its history--a tannery shed, a prison for an insane syphilitic, and now a workshop.

The waters eventually receded (as Genesis 9:11 foretold!), leaving behind lots of dampness, lots of mud, two disgruntled kitties, a very well-scoured streambed, and various odds and ends uncovered by the waters.

First was the bottom of an old ceramic jug, pitcher or bottle. Just the very bottom was left, so it was like a little ceramic disk. It was stamped with a maker's mark and the date 1793. I took it up onto the porch and left it on the table there; when I went back a few hours later it had vanished. The swarm of kids who had been running around the yard disavowed all knowledge of it, of course. . .

There were several interesting rocks, too. A smallish one had a rather nice dendrite on it. It looks sort of like a fossilised fern, but it is really a branching crystal of something like manganese or iron that has formed almost like a snowflake between layers in a stone. A bigger rock, one with lots of nice sedimentation layers, has what just might possibly be fossilised impressions of raindrops on it. I don't really know enough about those to be sure; it could possibly just be little blobs of other stuff that somehow got into the layer of sediment.

Also washed up was a Dutch 1 euro coin from 2002. Obviously the Dutch are spying on me, scheming folks that they are. There's probably a tracking device in the middle of the coin.

I haven't found any relics of the Lost Tribes of Israel or marooned sea-serpent larvae or anything like that. Yet. Who knows what I'll uncover next, though?

3) Battle of the Quacks.

No, this wasn't two "miracle weight-loss pill" merchants beating each other up in the middle of the street. Rather, it involved our fine feathered friends, the common mallard.

There are a number of ducks and duck families living around Town Creek. They like to lurk in the underbrush across the creek from the back yard here, and to come up into this yard to peck in the grass at the seeds dropped from the birdfeeders by clumsy finches and jays. So it's not uncommon to look out the kitchen window and see some ducks poking about.

Currently, there are two main family groups. One is a mother duck with her four young ducklings. We'll call her Aloysia. Then there is another mother duck with her own four ducklings, though those four are almost grown. We'll call her Zahar.

I had settled myself down on the porch around the gazebo, next to the stream, and was lounging about reading a book. I heard one of the duck mothers coming along the stream, quacking away to her brood the way that they do.

It turned out, though, that this wasn't just a family of ducks. It was both families, one coming from upstream and one from downstream. And just to add to the sheer duckiness of it all, a pair of adult ducks came waddling out of the underbrush and hopped into the stream. All three groups were converging on the low grassy patch of lawn in one corner of the yard where one of the birdfeeders hangs. All three groups came staggering out of the water into this grassy area more or less simultaneously.

At first they all just stood as the vertices of an almost equilateral triangle, eyeing each other. Then--completely without warning--Aloysia and Zahar launched themselves at the adult pair. There was much quacking and squawking and thrashing and probably very bad language in Duckese, and in the end the adult couple got chased off to the edge of the lawn.

Then the two mother ducks squared off, while their ducklings milled around in confusion. Aloysia ducked down her head (appropriate maneouvre, that), charged Zahar, and sent her into a backflip. Zahar decided that being goosed so was unducklike and retreated back to her young; together, they quickly waddled off a little ways and left the area around the feeder to Aloysia and her young. Aloysia stood watch while her four little ducklings ate their fill of spilled seeds, and then they waddled off to check out around some other birdfeeders across the yard.

Seeing the prime foraging spot vacated, the adult pair rushed into the lawn. . .and came beak to beak with Zahar. Once more the feathers flew, and once again the adult pair had to give way. This time they lost heart (and many feathers) altogether, gave up, and hopped back into the creek and swam downstream. Zahar stood watch while her nearly-grown ducklings pecked around in the grass.

Enter Abby, all innocent and unsuspecting. She knows very well not to get close to a momma duck when the ducklings are around, so she wasn't going anywhere near them. She just wanted to come see what I was up to on the porch.

Even so, the ducks decided to vacate the yard and return to the safety of the stream. Zahar and her young flopped down into the creek on the far upstream end of the yard, while Aloysia and her brood dashed in comic waddling fashion to throw themselves into the water a bit further down the stream.

Unfortunately, this meant that they came into the water on either side of the adult pair who were still paddling around in the water, nursing their battle wounds. Cue once again gratuitous amounts of quacking, squawking, thrashing, flopping, and feather-plucking.

The adult pair tried to retreat from Zahar who was upstream of them, only to run into Aloysia. So they bounced up and downstream between the two mother ducks, like avian pinballs in an overly violent pinball machine. Each time they neared one of the mothers, the mother duck got even more frantic and violent.

One of Aloysia's little ducklings got scared and confused, and bolted upstream. This ended up putting the adult pair between himself and his mother. Aloysia did not approve of this arrangement. She went completely berserk and turned into a birdie buzzsaw of destruction. She flung herself onto the adult pair, while her other three ducklings charged back and forth across the creek peeping in dismay and confusion. Eventually their momentum sort of carried them over the heaving mass of feathers that was their mother and the adult pair, and they were reunited with their lost sibling. Aloysia dashed over to check on them, and the adult couple took advantage of her distraction to flee downstream at full speed.

At this point, I think they were all exhausted. The last I saw of them, the adult pair was headed in the general direction of the park that is a hundred yards or so downstream, Zahar and her kids had settled down onto a mudbank a bit upstream of this yard under some trees, and Aloysia and her youngsters had found a nice sheltered place to nap on the grass under the trumpet vine on the creek's bank.

Abby had watched the whole second part of the ordeal from the porch, looking totally horrified and awestruck, then quietly slunk away and hid herself in the garden.

4) Bluegrass and white flour.

A few days ago was a bluegrass concert at the mill, to help raise money for its further restoration. I decided to go check it out and see how the food and the music and the food and the atmosphere and the food was. The music was a bit of a disappointment; a number of performers played on the stage (actually it was a flatbed trailer, but close enough to a stage), but only the first group--a duo with guitar and fiddle--actually played any bluegrass. They played it well, too, and without the really nasal quality that bluegrass often seems to involve.

The rest of the acts, though, were all people either playing Gordon Lightfoot or Bob Dylan songs, mixed in with their own attempts at Ligthfootesque and Dylanesque songs. And none of them were all that good.

So after the first guys, nobody paid much mind to the music and wandered around instead, and by the time the third act came on stage (a Dutch guy) about half the people had gone away.

The mill was open to the public for the event, and I took advantage of the opportunity to poke around in it to see what was to be seen.











Wheels and things!



Fireplace.



A family of ducks seems to have moved in.



The main gears.













The place was made of some rather good-sized beams and boards.



This series of belts and wheels connects to the main gears and goes up. . .



. . .to this grinding bin.



And this is a sort of crane for picking up millstones (which can weigh up to 3,000 pounds at this mill).



And a few views of the waterwheel from inside.





The mill was built in 1790, though it has been upgraded repeatedly since then. It is one of the oldest gristmills in the country, and especially one of the oldest ones still standing. The big waterwheel was an overshot wheel; the water came down from higher up the mountain and was channeled through a trough (that's not there anymore) to the top of the wheel, rather than running underneath the wheel to turn it as undershot wheels do. Overshot wheels are more effect than are undershot wheels; whereas the undershot wheel is powered only by the force of the water current moving under it, overshot wheels use both the force of the current and also gravity pulling the water down. Overshot wheels are harder to build, though, especially in flat lands.

During the American Civil War, the same raid that burned the salt mines in Saltville also passed by the mill. The wheel was torn off the building and the mill set on fire, but just then an especially strong rainstorm came along and kept the fire from doing much damage. The wheel was soon replaced, and the mill went back into operation.

Today the mill obviously doesn't run the big wheel anymore. It still does produce some small amount of flour for the tourist trade, though this is all from small electric or hand-turned grinders. The mill is owned by an organisation that hopes to raise money and get it back completely into working order. As you can see from the pictures, this will take a lot of work.

5) Music makes the world go noisily.

Every now and then I get asked, "What sort of music do you listen to?" or, "Do you listen to [insert band or musician name here]?" or some other query of that nature. So, in order to pre-emptively answer such questions I provide the following more-or-less comprehensive list. Note that this list only includes musicians whom I have an entire album of; if somebody appears only a few times on some sampler disc, then I didn't list him.

Aaron Copland
AC/DC
Acoustic Alchemy
Adolphe Adam
Aerosmith
Afro Celt Sound System
Alacranes Musical
Alexandros Xenofontos
Alfredo Ramirez Corral
Ali Farka Toure
Alice Cooper
Altan
Amr Diab
Amy Grant
Andreas Vollenweider
Andrés Segovia
Andrews Sisters
Andy Williams
Angele Dubeau
Angelique Kidjo
The Animals
Anja Lechner
Anne-Sophie Mutter
Anonymous 4
Anton Bruckner
Antonin Dvorak
Antonio Rosetti
Antonio Vivaldi
Apocalyptica
Aram Khachaturian
Arcangelo Corelli
Aretha Franklin
Artie Shaw
Asha Bhosle
Atreyu
B. B. King
Babatunde Olatunji
Baltimore Consort
Banda Guasavena
Barenaked Ladies
The Beach Boys
Beastie Boys
The Beatles
Bedrich Smetana
Bela Bartok
Ben E. King
The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos
Benny Goodman
Bette Davis
Bianca Ryan
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Big Blow and the Bushwhackers
Billie Holiday
Billy Branch
Billy Idol
Billy Joel
Bing Crosby
Bjork
Black Sabbath
Blue Oyster Cult
Bo Diddley
Bob Dylan
Bob Kindler
Bob Marley & the Wailers
Bobby Darin
Bobby McFerrin
Bon Jovi
The Brian Setzer Orchestra
Buckwheat Zydeco
Buddy Holly
Buena Vista Social Club
Buffalo Springfield
Buju Banton
The Byrds
Calicanto
The Calling
The Cambridge Singers
Camille Saint-Saens
Capercaillie
Carey Bell
Carl Nielson
Carl Orff
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
Carlos Montoya
Carole King
The Carpenters
Cat Stevens
Cesar Franck
Charles Gounod
The Charlie Daniels Band
Charlie Mingus
Charlie Parker
Charlie Rodriguez
Charlotte Church
Cheb Mami
Cheikh Lo
Cherish the Ladies
Cherry Poppin' Daddies
Chet Atkins
Chick Corea
The Chieftains
Christopher Parkening
Chuck Berry
Cibelle
Clannad
Claude Chalhoub
Claude Debussy
Coldplay
Cole Porter
Congotronics
The Corries
The Corrs
Count Basie
Counting Crows
Cranberries
Creed
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Crowded House
Csaba Nagy
Csokolom
Dan "Daddy Squeeze" Newton
Dastan Ensemble
Dave Brubeck
Dave Holland
David Bowie
De Dannan
Deep Blue Something
Def Leppard
Default
Devo
Dhol Foundation
Diana Reyes
Diana Ross
Dick Haymes
Dido
Dire Straits
DJ Cheb i Sabbah
Dmitri Shostakovich
Dobet Gnahore
Domenico Scarlatti
Don McLean
The Doors
The Drifters
Duke Ellington
Duo Nova
Eagles
The Early Music Consort of London
Eddie Cochran
Edvard Grieg
Edward Elgar
Edwin Starr
Ehab Tawfik
The Elftones
Ella Fitzgerald
Elvis Presley
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Emmanuel Chabrier
Ennio Morricone
Ensemble Galilei
Enya
Eric Clapton
Erik Satie
Erno Dohnanyi
Escalay
Etta James
Eva Cassidy
Evanescence
Eve 6
Everlast
Faramarz Payvar
Fats Domino
Fats Waller
Fazil Say
Federico Mompou
Felix Mendelssohn
Finger Eleven
Finntroll
Fire in the Kitchen
The First Detached Model Orchestra of the Defense Ministry of the USSR
Fiona Apple
Fleetwood Mac
Foo Fighters
Francis Poulenc
Frank Sinatra
Frank Yankovic
Franz Liszt
Franz Schubert
Fred Waring
Frederic Chopin
Fredo & the Flybaits
Gabriel Faure
Gabriel Yared
Gene Autry
Georg Telemann
George Gershwin
George Handel
George Winston
Georges Bizet
Ghazal
Giacomo Puccini
Ginny Gibson
Gioacchino Rossini
Giovanni Kapsberger
Gipsy Kings
Giuseppe Verdi
Glenn Miller
Goldspiel/Provost Classical Guitar Duo
The Goo Goo Dolls
Gordon Lightfoot
The Gotan Project
Green Day
Grupo Naidy
Guns N Roses
Gustav Holst
Gustav Mahler
Gyuto Monks
Hakim
Hamza el Din
Harry Belafonte
Hector Berlioz
Heitor Villa-Lobos
Henry Purcell
Henryk Gorecki
Herb Alpert
Hesperus Early Traditional Ensemble
The Highwaymen
Hobart Smith
Hootie and the Blowfish
Howlin' Wolf
Ibrahim Ferrer
Igor Stravinsky
Il Divo
India
Intocable
Iron Butterfly
Iron Maiden
Isaac Hayes
Itzhak Perlman
Ivan Khandoshkin
Iz
James Brown
James Cotton
Jamiroquai
Jan & Dean
Janette Fishell
Jean Sibelius
Jeff Beck
Jim Brickman
Jim Chappel
Jim Croce
Joan Jett
Joanie Madden
Jacobus Vaet
Jimi Hendrix
Joaquin Rodrigo
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Strauss, Jr.
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Ockegem
John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band
John Coltrane
John Denver
John Frizzel
John Horner
John Mellencamp
John Phillip Sousa
John Rutter
John Turner
John Williams
Johnny Cash
Johnny Horton
Johnny Mathis
Jonathan Biss
Jose Alfredo Jimenez
Jose Suarez
Joseph Haydn
Jubilation Sykes
Jules Massenet
Julia Fischer
Junior Wells
Kal
Ken Kolodner
Kenny G
Khaled
The Kingston Trio
The Kinks
Kiran Ahluwalia
Kitaro
Kodo
Kraftwerk
The Kronos Quartet
Kylie Minogue
Lacuna Coil
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Leadbelly
Led Zeppelin
Lenny Kravitz
Leo Delibes
Leon Redbone
Lesiem
Lila Downs
Little Richard
Loreena McKennitt
Los Angeles Guitar Quartet
Los Tucanes de Tijuana
Louis Armstrong
Ludwig von Beethoven
Luigi Boccherini
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Maggie Sansone
The Mammas and the Pappas
The Manhattan Transfer
Manitas de Plata
Manuel de Falla
Marc Anthony
Marlene Dietrich
Mary Fraley
Mason Williams
Mastodon
Matchbox 20
Matisyahu
Maurice Jarre
Maurice Ravel
Mazizo Musical
Meat Loaf
Megadeth
Melissa Etheridge
Metallica
Metqâl Qenâwi Metqâl
Michael Lee Thomas
Mikhail Glinka
Miles Davis
Miller-Rown Consort
The Mills Brothers
Miriam Makeba
Moby
Modest Mussorgsky
Mohamed Abdel Wahab
Monster Magnet
The Moody Blues
Mormon Tabernacle Choir
Morten Lauridsen
Motley Crue
Motorhead
Muddy Waters
Munir Bashir
Muzik Tarian Malaysia
Mychael Danna
Na Palapalai
Nat King Cole
Natalie Imbruglia
Nirvana
Nickelback
Nicolo Paganini
Nikoli Rimsky-Korsakov
Nino Rota
No Doubt
Northern Arizona University Wind Symphony
The Norton Sisters
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Orla
Otis Redding
Osamu Kitajima
Ozzy Osbourne
Pablo Casals
Pat Metheny
Patrick O'Hearn
Paul Dinletir
Paul Whiteman Orchestra
Paul Winter
Pearl Jam
Peggy Lee
Pete Seeger
Peter Fletcher
Peter, Paul & Mary
Peter Tchaikovsky
Phil Manzanera
Philip Glass
Pietro Mascagni
Pink Floyd
Placido Domingo
The Platters
The Pogues
The Police
Professor Longhair
Queen
Queen Latifah
Quincy Jones
Ralph Carmichael Orchestra
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Rammstein
Randy Edelman
Rare Air
The Rascals
Ravi Shankar
Ray Charles
The Red Army Choir
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Regina Carter
Richard Hill
Richard Rogers
Richard Strauss
Richard Wagner
Ricky Martin
The Righteous Brothers
Ritchie Valens
Robert Johnson
Robert Schumann
Roger Miller
Roger Whittaker
The Rolling Stones
The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards
Ruggero Leoncavallo
Runrig
Salif Keita
Sam Moore
Samuel Barber
Santana
Saor Patrol
Sarband
Scorpions
Scott Joplin
The Scottish Fiddle Orchestra
Seal
The Seatbelts
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Seven Mary Three
Shakira
Shania Twain
Shaun Davey
Shauna Rolston
The Silk Road Ensemble
Siti Nurhaliza
The Sixteen
Ska Cubano
Smashing Pumpkins
Smokey Robinson
Soundgarden
Spyro Gyra
Squirrel Nut Zippers
Steeleye Span
Steppenwolf
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Stevie Wonder
Sting
Stone Temple Pilots
The String Dusters
Taj Mahal
The Tannahill Weavers
Teatro Lirico
Temple University
Tex Ritter
Thelma & Erika Peterson
Thelonius Monk
Third Eye Blind
Thomas Tallis
Three Dog Night
Three Doors Down
Tina Turner
Tingstad & Rumbel
TLC
The Tokens
Tomaso Albinoni
Trans Siberian Orchestra
Trevor Jones
U2
Valeri Kikta
Van Halen
Van Morrison
Vangelis
Vertical Horizon
The Verve
The Verve Pipe
The Village People
Vusi Mahlasela
The Wallflowers
Warda
The Weavers
Weird Al Yankovic
Whitesnake
Will Millar
Willie Nelson
Wolfgang Mozart
Wolfstone
Woody Guthrie
Woody Herman
Wynton Marsalis
Yanni
Yo-Yo Ma
Yungchen Lhamo
Zumi-Kai