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Unintended Aural Consequences of MP3 Compression
zenst writes "A rather interesting read about possible damage to your hearing due to the way most audio compression techneques work. They mainly work by presenting a signal that the brain perceives to be the same as the original and it is this assumption that could effect our hearing and the way we hear."
I'm downloading 512kbps version songs of my entire library right now to avoid this!
I thought my hearing was going from turing my speakers all the way up.
Mess Stuff Up
There are many reasons for hearing loss and tinnitus that have nothing to do with what you listen to or what volume you listen to it at and everything to do with, for instance, degenerative diseases of the inner ear. The article doesn't provide much to persuade me that MP3s are going to make people go deaf.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Knowing them... they might try giving money to help the military research sonic based weapons and get something to fight those pesky pirates!
Then again I suppose it will also depend on the quality of the speakers, and what frequency range they can properly output (as well as the soundcard and encoded track).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
I listen to punk and hardcore music, so I don't think it matters what kinda compression is on my music, my hearing is gonna be lost either way!
Question everything that you've accepted without thinking.
'But a continuous consumption of datareduced audio could possibly lead to fatal consequences' How? Why? Nowhere else in the article is even the start of a reason for this statement. I at least expected to see something along the lines of not hearing that semi while crossing the street. Remember, MP3s, along with marijuana, can kill you.
Tv ruins your brain, mobiles give you cancer, junk food makes you fat, computer monitors ruin your eyes and now they say mp3s cause hearing loss.
Is there anything left that wont slowly kill or mame you over time? They wont be happy until I'm sitting in a darkened padded room eating a liquid only diet.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
The author presents only speculation, no evidence or mechanism. In fact there is a barely concealed paranoid rant about the mass media and DRM. By now MP3s are in sufficiently wide use that real hearing problems should be noticeable, yet I am aware of no studies or other complaints showing this to be the case. At worst, this is probably a "cell phones / power lines cause cancer" type nonissue.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
heh... does not...
Moderation total: (-1 Didn't use preview)
The author of the article seems to lack any relevant qualifications, any proof of his ideas, or indeed basic proofreading abilities.
He does say that CDs are overpriced though, so it must be worth posting on Slashdot.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
LAME produces more than decent mp3 files. Did I mention it's open source?
MP3 is what's used for sharing because it's what's used for sharing. If MP3 wasn't the predominant file sharing format, people wouldn't encode in it. MP3 is the predominant file sharing format because it's what people encode in.
As a healthcare provider and someone that works at Mayo clinic, this article does not even merit the cursory speed read.
can you hear me now?
Does this mean that the RIAA will be seeding P2P networks with MP3s that contain the subliminal message "buy this CD, buy this CD"?
And I believe that listening to boy-bands will give you tinitus even if you keep the volume way down and wear ear-plugs. That's the price you have to pay for having really bad taste.
" I have however some computer games with MP3 music, but I don't excessively play them. Despite I listen to music only quietly, I have repeatedly tinitus (and thus I also suspect the data reduction in radio and TV broadcasts as a cause)"
This guy seemed intelligent all the way up to the point where he wrote that particular line. If it only took that little of exposure to lossy sound caused him to have tinitus, then why aren't people by the millions complaining of hearing problems? I'm quite surprised he'd attribute his hearing problems to his hypothesis. I think it is far more likely there are other causes of his problems.
I also don't think, from what I've read here, that we're in any real danger of suffering noticable hearing damage from MP3s. The the main reason is that we don't listen to just MP3s 24 hours a day. Not even close! We'll be surrounded by compressed sound for years to come, but it'll never replace the natural every day sounds we hear all the time. Right now, as I write this, I can hear things happening all around me that definitely are not digital. As long as that noise is there, I can't imagine that our brain would focus in on the compressed sound itself.
It's an interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't hold up against real world data.
I must just note, as others have, that there is a reason that peer reviewed, scientific journals exist. When a doctor does study this, get it reviewed and published and the confirmed by other studies (or maybe after extensive meta-analysis) I might begin to believe it.
YESTERDAY: eggs make you live 20 extra years--eat a lot
TODAY: eggs will kill you
TOMORROW: eggs will make you live 30 extra years--eat a lot.
Ha. Medical science.
From the Article: "Unlike with compression and decompression of computer programs (e.g. ZIP), that is to say, during lossy data compression (data reduction) the original signal is not reconstructed 1:1, but to reduce the data amount, only control signals for a synthesizer programs (called CODEC) get recorded, those are optimized in a way that during rendition the CODEC can reconstruct from these an approximation of the original picture or sound signal that appears as similar as possible for the human conscious perception, but is not identical to the original signal."
Translated to English:
Lossy compression loses some of the data,
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
It just takes a while...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
This has gotta be more FUD from the record industry to try to reduce the threat of mp3's. Think about it. Telephones have been digitizing and sampling voice for over 40 years. You don't here people saying that will make you deaf. CD's are samples of the real analog signal, do they destroy your hearing? Hell, just about everything you hear coming out of a machine is fake, digitized, sampled, compressed in some form it is all lossy. So, should we all go back to live acoustic concerts to save our ears?
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
The article used jpeg compression on the pictures, I'll never be able to see properly again!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
As several other posters have pointed out, this guy is full of shit. He reminds me of the sort of people who call in to the Art Bell show.
If anything, my hearing has gotten better since I started listening to MP3s. I remember when I first started encoding my CDs, I couldn't tell the difference between 128kb CBR MP3s and the CD source. I can't even fathom how I was able to believe that; I encode everything with LAME's r3mix preset now.
It says, basically "Listening to music with lots of information removed may be bad for your brain's neural filtering hardware. But on the other hand, it also hurts the music industry, which is good since CDs are over-priced."
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I can see how, with *great* amounts of extrapolation, this might present a problem after prolonged periods of time in an isolated environment which *only* contained the offending constructions.
On the other hand, you could take your freakin' headphones off every so often, scrappy.
When listening to music, music isn't the only thing you hear. There's plenty of background noise going on. The fact that it gets filtered out so's you can listen to your tunes seems to indicate that the sensitive "circuitry" in your head is actually working just fine.
This article seems to be an idealized application of a half-baked problem.
But then, I'm no high-falootin' science guy.
GMFTatsujin
Pr0n makes you go blinde...
...
MP3 makes you go deaf...
We're running out of things to do online.
Seriously, though. In the article it mentions how the sound waves have been changed and lack certain intereference frequencies that our ears normally 'filter out' and how that process doesn't happen with MP3 since the sound is already gone. What I'm wondering is if ALL artificial sound (MIDI, Electronic sythesis [think SID music, MODs, etc]) doesn't also lack these frequencies? Sound samples would have the full range, but simple wave-forms generated electronically wouldn't. After all, those sounds aren't full range and they would also inherently lack the natural "interferences" discussed in the article.
My point is -- if they say MP3s are bad for your hearing, the should also say that electronica music, some video games, some electronic devices, and just about anything that produces sound now days could be potentially harmful to our ears.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
is this.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Even a Janitor there would be like an expert on what is or is not quackery.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I believe when MPEG decoders process an MPEG stream they recreate approximations of the sound (rather than leave them out, which is what the author seems to believe). Therefore, listening to MPEG-encoded audio is like listening to a CD with bad speakers. So by this reasoning, Dell and Gateway are slowing killing us all with those horrible speakers they ship with their PCs ;]
As you read through it the paper seems to go downhill in regards to both believability & grammar. To be honest, this has the feel of a college essay with a little too much BS (which I've written a few of myself); the diagrams are neither referenced within the paper, nor especially informative.
...) as it sounds at first. ... or if the continuous consumption of neuroacoustically datareduced sounds can lead to long lasting or even permanent damage.
Eventually, the paper does acknowledge that this is something to look into, not a reason to ban MP3s (& DVDs, & digital TV, &
Actually it is still unclear whether the consequences of such maladjustments are only temporary
The second to last paragraph is devoted to basically saying that the author is not against MP3s, which is a good idea for reducing the flamebait of this essay. But then the essay ends with the alarming (& rather unbelievable) statement:
But here definitely exists acute research need, therefore I request hereby all politicians and neuroacoustics scientists to be concerned with the danger potential of neuroacoustic data reduction...
Now, I'll agree that MP3s aren't perfect; I'll get "sick" of them every so often (when they sound to feel tinny & empty) & have to listen to some CDs or other media... But I'd have to imagine that the scratches most tapes & records have are more damaging than the acuoustic gaps an MP3 has. I can't comment on OOG because I don't use it; my portable MP3 player can't play them, so it would be inefficient to use them.
However, it is an interesting idea to try filling the gaps via interpolating the surrounding frequencies. I'd be curious if this has been done before, and how it sounds.
SuperCalendar.com - Web calendar with RSS, AIM/SMS notific
Furthermore, television, movies, and computer monitors are based on persistence of vision-- the idea that the eye and brain can be fooled into perceiving motion if the pictures are switched fast enough (in the case of NTSC TV, 30 frames per second). This is a significant "compression" of the data, far larger than the amount of data being thrown out by psychoacoustic compression. NASA uses cameras that record 10,000 fps to examine explosions and things of that nature that occur far too fast for us to perceive.
Reality occurs at a rate that technology currently finds impossible to record in full. That doesn't mean it's damaging us.
Well with all those pictures us geeks are sterotyped as always looking at, we're heading for blindness anyway (along with hairy palms) ;-)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
... (which seems quite unlikely), it would be possible to introduce random masked sounds during playback to counter the effect.
I hate to be negative, but I don't think this really belongs in the Science section. Do we have a Postulate Wildly section?
The mini-rant against the RIAA almost sounds like it was just added to ensure publication on Slashdot, since it has nothing to do with audio compression effects.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
However, your willingness to dismess out of hand the, shall we call it, intuition, of someone who is clearly at least educated both in the anatomy of hearing and the signals-processing fundamentals, is just as baseless.
Of course, given a critical evaluation of the text itself, dismissal is a good guess. There are a lot of red flags there, especially at the end. Certainly, it's not clear to me what calibratory function the signals otherwise masked by psychoacoustic (or neuroacoustic, as the author says) compression might serve - this is the most important part of the theory, and there's no real attempt by the author to treat it in detail. But (self-consciously) little sketches like this, many of which by students with even less coherence or credibiliy, are often a prelude to important discoveries, good and bad.
If I were a betting man, I would confidently bet you were right. But just the same, I hope a few members of the medical community (I think this would take a background in neurolobiology/cog. sci/audiology) see this, and at least consider it. You could probably devise a relatively inexpensive animal study or two that could safely close off this kind of speculation.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
"continuous consumption of datareduced audio could possibly lead to fatal consequences"
I always knew the Britney Spears, boy band crap stuffed into every p2p and newsgroup would be the end of me. I guess Metallica wins in the end with "Kill 'em All."
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
...there could be another reason why he has tinnitus.
I find it amusing that he says: 'I am interested in "zoner" games, i.e. certain monotonous high speed skill games those are capable to create alterated states of mind.' - but remember, don't listen to mp3s cos they'll make you go deaf :)
Tim
PS. No, I'm not saying video games affect your hearing - just that it's about as likely as lossy audio codecs being the problem.
Scroll to the bottom and you'll find that this is written by "CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler, (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!)."
This looks like one of many crackpot "religions" based on a few scientific terms and some mystical psychobabble. These are people that believe microwave radiation or EMF from power lines slowly poisons your soul, the world is coming to an end becuase of evil american weather control machines, the aliens have visited us from dimension Z, the ancient Mayan calendar is the key to all knowledge, astrology is a real and important force in our lives, and so forth.
Mix varying amounts of scientific-sounding nonsense, mysticism with references to eastern religions, profound realizations about the nature of space and time, and maybe a few terms like "asymptotically" to really fill the minds of morons with awe and fear, and you have yourself a religion, or more appropriately, a cult.
Nix absolutably seriousness.
The article is an interesting read, but there seems to be one major flaw. If loud noises cause resonance, then there will still be something for our ears to filter out while listening to MP3 music.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Hey, wanna turn off your sig before more people bitch about the spoilers??
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
It would be nice if he supplied some experimental evidence in support of his claims. (Be sure to check out the rest of his web site, so you can learn about the dangers of pink light, too.)
I do wonder, though, what he means by "white" science...
Is this yet another ploy by the RIAA to eliminate mp3?
"Don't steal music. Or you'll go deaf. Then die."
wonder how much RIAA paid them to publish this ridiculous garbage.
how about if the original signal was just totally poor quality (think cassette tapes). would this damage hearing also?
lame lame lame excuse for quality publishing.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I bet they recieved money from the RIAA to 'study' this concept. Hmmmmm I can see it now "An RIAA supported study has shown that mp3's make your ears fall off"
Right, whatever.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Since he basically said that he feels bad hearing is a reasonable price to pay for toppling the recording industry. And that any problems could be averted by some simple hacks without increasing filesize.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This isn't bad for a highschooler. Once he learns scientific method he might contribute to real knowledge. In the meantime this sort of theorizing keeps kids' neurons limber.
Wow, the editors of Slashdot accepted this bullshit but rejected 20 or so of my submissions? At least I wasn't full of shit.
This is just ridiculous bull crap. So is the brief mention of "subliminal messages". Normally, I would elaborate further and explain, but on this I think not. Anyone stupid enough to not immediately realize that this is bullshit is beyond reason anyways.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I think, unfortunately, that you have touched on something here that nobody else seems to have yet. With the recent (and not-so-recent, in hindsight) onslaught of stupid and pointless lawsuits over every little thing ("omgz mcd0naldz maed me teh fat izt there fault"), one wonders if perhaps some damned fool reading this guy's page might sue FhG, et al., for "making him deaf". That would truly be a sad thing... but i wouldn't put it past anybody, not for a second.
From the author's web page:
Warning: Pink can be dangerous for health! about the stress generating, sick making and learn- hindering effect of long exposure to pink in the viewfield
I sure am glad someone is finally focusing on these severe health risks! Where are the Surgeon General's warnings about the risks inherent in MP3s and the color Pink? Why isn't CNN covering this?
I mean, it's obvious that pink must be bad for you -- just look at the grammar in the abstract. The author is obviously a severe sufferer of pinkitis, poor man.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
While I don't buy all of his ideas, it sounds plausible that the "simplified" music may desensitize our hearing. Of course audiophiles and the like will never accept compressed music, but it will be harder to introduce your typical person to classical music and its fine nuances, if their idea of music is dumbed-down thrash. Then again, the pop industry is probably more to blame than audio codecs.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Since he used pretty little graphics in the article.
Really!!
:)
I SWEAR
I'm NOT just pulling this out of my butt. I PROMISE!!!!
...then before electronic sound systems were invented, everyone was deaf. Therefore Beethoven wasn't the only deaf composer, the history books just say he is to make him look good!
...then everybody only heard mono before stereo was invented.
...then there was no math before the Babbage machine. Thus, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Newton are frauds.
...then video game players couldn't hear human voices before the mid 1990s because games didn't have much speech before CD-ROM.
...there is no such thing as depth perception because TV is still 2D. Thus no one is qualified to drive a car, or at least the people who watch TV aren't. Nor are Slashdot readers, I'm afraid.
Calvin and Hobbes has evidence that the same thing happened to color vision:
Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn't they have color film back then?
Dad: They sure did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It's just the world was black and white then.
Calvin: Really?
Dad: Yap. The world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while there, too.
Calvin: That's really weird.
Dad: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
Calvin: But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?
Dad: Not necessarily, a lot of great artists were insane.
Calvin: But... but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn't their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Dad: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the '30s.
Calvin: So why didn't old black and white photos turn color too?
Dad: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?
[Calvin leaves, meets Hobbes]
Calvin: The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.
Hobbes: Whenever it seems that way, I like to nap in a tree and wait for dinner.
That's the masturbation making you go blind, not the jpegs themselves.
Tinitus is a mystery to us. Docotrs have theories and evidence but they honestly don't know why some people get it in certain instances while others do not.
Here is an example. My mothers family when she was young went to a war memorial where a cannon was fired several times. From that day on due to the extreme noise my mother has had tinitus. It comes and goes and is rather mild most of the time.
I however am a musician and have been for 14 years. I play Bass and do so at extremely loud decibals at times yet have no problem with tinitus.
Tinitus has been tied to thing such as white noise, like a ceiling fan or running water. It has also been tied to ruptured ear drums as well as exposure to short but intense exposure to load noise. It has further been tied to deep sea divers such as Navy SEALs where they literally hear nothing but the pressure itself causes it.
Tinitus is a bit like cancer in this way. We know the symptoms, we have treatments and we can name multiple causes.
It's not impossible this guy is correct, it's unlikely as you stated but not impossible. As a musician his theory doesn't make much sense to me but that doesn't mean I'll rule it out.
This effect seems magnified if subjects have been sitting in front of CRT all day reading headline websites and not generally excercising their physical body in any way.
(BTW-Tongue firmly in cheek, no offense meant to these researchers in any way.)
Yes, there's something strange about this article.. it starts off with some interesting stuff, and then some reasonable speculation, and then degrades into some pseudo-religious political rant about DRM and the music industry.
As I read this I couldn't help but thing about RGB displays. The visual world is populated by a wide spectrum of photons of different frequencies, but due to our anatomy, our sensitivity peaks at three wavelengths, approximately red, green and blue. The entire color TV and video industry exploits this fact and achieves huge amounts of compression by transmitting three signals at these peak wavelengths. While I recognize that there are some certain mechanical elements in hearing, it seems to me that if this guy's arguments are sound, then we would have observed similar effects from watching TV-- that the absence of unperceived wavelengths would cause damage. Of course we all recognize that TV's bad for your health, but I don't think it causes the kind of damage he's alluding to.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
I stopped reading after he started going on about dictators slipping propaganda into the inaudible cracks in your media.
And it started off with such promising analysis! I bet the slashdot moderators didn't read to the bottom of the article before approving it.
However, your willingness to dismess out of hand the, shall we call it, intuition, of someone who is clearly at least educated both in the anatomy of hearing and the signals-processing fundamentals, is just as baseless.
Please tell me this is sarcasm.
This guy did little more than quote a college biology book, and scan the pictures to create a web site. On first reading the article I thought to myself, "funny, it doesn't feel like April first."
Also, even if we give this guy the benefit of doubt for a moment, there is still nothing to worry about. When was the last time you listened to MP3's and/or video games in a completely soundless environment for an extended period of time? Last few times I did it, I was at home with the refidgerator humming away, a few computer fans whirring, my chair creaking occasionally, simply put, I had lots of background noise for my ears to filter out, without my speakers adding to it. Sure, I would love to put a sensory depravation tank around my computer when playing Thief, it can really blow yuor concentration when your roomate bursts out in laughter 3 feet away from you while reading his email. But, I don't have one, and so am bombarded with small, often inaudiable sounds.
If I were a betting man, I would confidently bet you were right. But just the same, I hope a few members of the medical community (I think this would take a background in neurolobiology/cog. sci/audiology) see this, and at least consider it. You could probably devise a relatively inexpensive animal study or two that could safely close off this kind of speculation.
There are far better things for that money to be spent researching. Don't waste it on junk like this.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
From the webpage cited in the parent post:
When the man artificially gets exposed to a pink viewfield,the same waking archprogram gets executed and sets free stress hormons.If the exposure lasts for a too long time,lots of stress hormons are setted free,causing a similar effect as consuming too much coffee,cigarettes or any other wakening drugs;the man doesn't get waker anymore but feels exhausted and even more weak and ti- red,because this maladjustment of his body cybernetics hinders his brain from cleaning up itself.An exposure to a red viewfield starts a similar,but weaker program,because red appears in the daylight sequence at morning and evening too,but for a longer time.
Just think of the money you'll save! I am still trying to perfect the process of "artificial exposure" to the color pink. Maybe if I change the backgroung color of my code editor from white to pink that will be "artificial exposure". I am not sure what the effects of natural exposure to pink are. Since they are still unknown I suggest that you all avoid any natural pink for now.
Lasers Controlled Games!
This article is obviously written by someone working for the RIAA trying to get people to start listening to CDs and stop listening to MP3s any more.
In fact, the newer formats, such as DSM (SACD), have so many more frequenceis, that listening to these formats will, in fact, improve your hearing. So, everyone, listen to SACDs instead of normal CDs. beecause even CDs may cause brain damage.
Never mind the fact that SACDs are copy-protected 15 different ways, and that our methods for copy-protecting normal CDs have been shown to be ineffective. We want people to listen to SACDs for, well, their hearing.
Again: Do not listen to MP3s! they only damage your hearing (and promote bands which are not approved by us).
- the RIAA
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
By this logic jpegs damage your eyes.. You'll go BLIND... BLIND...BLIND I sez..
Maybe only because what your doing while veiwing those jpegs..
While reading this story, ironically enough, I played an MP3 I had downloaded from Gnucleus (a Gnutella client) using a multi-host download. One of the hosts seems to have been one of the RIAA servers that sends out static; for a few seconds in the middle of the song, there's this horrible (loud) clicking and popping. I have no desire to be the one to try it, but how cool would it be if I sued them for damage to my ears (when listening to the MP3 I downloaded from them) and won. It's actually not as ridiculous as it might sound -- if I steal a candy bar, and it turns out to have cyanide and razor blades in it, I'm almost positive that I could still sue / file criminal charges -- you can't 'booby trap' things if they cause injury.
As I said, it's a stretch, but I'd love to see the RIAA ordered to pay a tremendous fine for causing hearing loss / damage to speakers.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
So it must be the author's contention that glaring irony doesn't compress well and so intensive consumption of his infotrash is juuuuust fine.
I don't think consequences will be quite that serious. Still, it warrants looking into: there is probably some adaptation to compressed audio, and that adaptation may distort the perception of regular sounds.
Scientists have discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
Research has proven that exposure to laboratories is a leading cause of cancer among rodents...
Sapere aude!
Overtones shape the harmonic spectra and create a specific waveform. Why do a piano playing a=440Hz and a xylophone playing a=440Hz sound like a piano and a xylophone? Because the overtones (which occur at 1, 2, 3,... times the base frequency) have different strenghts at diffierent frequencies. Strings tend to have good octave, fifth, and seventh harmonics, bars on a xylophone don't.
MP3 stripping is more subtle - when there are two instruments which have a harmonic line on the same pitch, one line gets stripped out, as it will make no difference to what you hear. That kind of thing
And BTW, tuning forks don't produce a sine wave, they produce a very strong set of harmonic octaves, which is what makes them unpleasant. A nice low sine tone is actually quite unoffensive, if used appropriately.
[FUCK BETA]
A possible advantage of the data reduction characteristic to remove all sound portions classified as "inaudible" could however even be that one could clean with it supposingly contaminated audio material (as for instance propaganda from dictatorships) from so-called subliminals (i.e. hidden hypnotic suggestion messages those are intended to get into the brain without getting into conscious awareness) before listening.
Anybody think anything else this man has to say merits attention?
Rob
Also indicative of crap: the author's warning about the damaging properties of the color pink!
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
> And I thought that was an oxymoron.
However, Bose, certainly has the market cornered for customers perceiving it to have quality. They do it all with advertising.
As an analogy for you geeks, it's like Intel's dominance over AMD, despite AMD having a cheaper faster CPU. Intel does it with advertising. Actually there is a difference. Intel makes quality processors. Bose might be passable, but you won't find anyone who knows what they're talking about saying Bose is quality with a straight face. There are nice things you can say about them. Maybe convenient to set up for the average user or something, but not quality speakers.
In short you are correct.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
He has spammed several usenet groups with this speculation before and he hardly knows what he is talking about. We have decades of experience on audio compression and as one usenet poster put it, "almost every tv or radio uses some kind of compression for audio (e.g. many radios use mp3). The telephone itself cuts a lot of frequencies (nothing above 8kHz). So, everyone should have a serious damage to the ear, isn't it?"
One thread out of many
This reminds me of the dotcom boom when even the worst business plan could get venture capital. Similarly, this story, no matter how idiotic, is getting attention. It made me feel nostalgic at first, except that the dotcom boom was pro-tech and this one is anti-tech and paranoid to boot.
All of those things simply downsample, while psychoacoustic compresses things that are not audible due to the minds built-in filtering.
What this guy is saying is that that filtering out all the stuff that our brains would filter out will result in a degredation of those filters.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There should make a study linking the use of pr0n with inability to engage in relationships in the real world.
OK, before someone else says it, yes hearing aids are exactly like that, so they must be safe... Well, have you ever been next to someone who's wearing headphones and playing some kind of personal hifi (mp3, cassette, cd, radio) loud enough for it to be heard 3 feet away? That's way, way louder than a hearing aid...
My father couldn't hear low frequency sounds, mainly due to the noise inside the tank he was driving around Europe in 1944, and being parked under the gun-line when there was a constant barrage going on.
Uh, has anyone explored the *rest* of his site?
n dex.html
o logie/picts1.html
o logie/Logologi.faq
This is interesting:
"CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!)"
And
"I am a cyberage-child - born in the year of Pong"
As a matter of fact, his main page is dedicated to Logologie:
http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/e_i
Hmmmm:
http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/Log
This is the real nail in the coffin, however: http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/Log
the nerves in your ear and all the low-level neural processing of sound will fire in response to the gaps, watermarks or subliminal signals in the music stream. It is only the brain that filters these out. But is the brain unaware of the signals?
it's long been known that humans perceive sounds they dont actually hear in the sense that their brain registers it. Ancient church organs have sub sonic and ultra-sonic pipes in them for the purpose of stimulating emotional responses in the audience. It's well known from many pyschological studies that slight , consciously imperceptible, delays introduced into telephone conversation response times causes people to think the person they are talking to is angry.As a kid I could always hear the flyback transformers in TVs and video screen. I could not tell you what the sound sounded like--it was not a high pitch. it was no pitch at all. But I could tell it was present.
The thesis that spectral drop-outs could somehow disrupt neural feedback circuits is an interesting one. Certainly most human made electronic circuits dont handle delta-function responses well: that is the phase lag in any feasible feedback circuit puts an upper limit on the fidelity of the response. Thus the idea that the neural feedback that nulls the unwanted off-pitch sympathetic vibrations in the ear following a loud signal could be disrupted if the waveform was not continous after the loud noise is a valid one. Would this lead to false retraining of the neural net and thus tinitiitus? doubtful. But interesting as an example of an unintended consequence no one thought of before.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/
Just go to the above... The guy is a proponent of "logologie" "religion from the cybertime" (sic). The other article are nice too, like the one about natrium glutamate in cantine food ("nervengift"...). There is nothing to see there, just an Informatik Student in hamburg having fun (heck he isn't even a neurologue !) : Quote : Ich bin ein Kind des Cyberzeitalter, geboren im Jahre des Pong, und ich studiere Softwaretechnik an der Fachhochschule Hamburg (was leider den Großteil meiner Zeit kostet).
I am a child of the Cybertimes, born the same year than Pong, and I study Programming (software technic?) in the Highschool (not university something else) Hamburg (which cost me the biggest aprt of my time).
Move along, ntohing to see here.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
To generalize, the human ear registers the frequencies between 20 and 20,000hz. No matter what theroetically an MP3 could contain as far as "inaudible damage," speakers themselves aren't engeineered to often reproduce sounds that exceeds these thresholds. To do so would be a waste of R&D because the average human would not even hear it. The concept of this (false) argument would work, if the delivery device for an MP3 wasn't a speaker; however, because the delivery device is engineered to reproduce the audible range (ideally) for humans, how then is it somehow malformed into projecting killer sound waves through inaudible means?
Another thing to note: take an equalizer and cut out all treble and all bass; you are then left with just the mids. Does this process leave you deaf? Yes, I'm aware the signal isn't compressed, but the speakers are doing the same thing. Some frequencies are cut out, others aren't. Listen to an MP3 in 96kbs and then in 192kbs, and you will hear the difference. The difference is simply part of the wave is removed, just like in a crossover or equalizer.
- Throbbing Gristle was rumoured to have played around with their harmonics in such a way during one or two shows that their audiences experienced uncontrollable vomiting and presumably a loss of control of other bodily functions (heh).
- A more general overview of "aural warfare" projects that were rumoured to have taken place is available here.
However, I doubt any of this could be achieved with MP3-encoded sound, what with its low fidelity and whatnot...--sdem
This is increadibly irresponsible of /. to leave this crap on the front page. Some guy puts some drawings of the human ear on a page with a few big words and all of a sudden it's freakin' scientific? No references, no data, nothing but trying to create FUD and crud!
Please add an update questioning the validity of this article.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Well, OK, I'll admit, it was an interesting read for me (an ex biologist / scientist). But for the masses, you can either RTFA, or the following summary:
MP3's and other lossy compression (loss of quality through compression) methods change the distribution of frequencies along the sound spectrum, and maybe, just maybe, because nobody has proven otherwise, it might be the case that this can possibly have permanent effects on one's hearing. Maybe. Possibly. We dont really know. Neither do you. Or so we might think. Maybe. Oh yeah - here are a bunch of pictures from a biology textbook that look really cool, but are only connected to our speculation in a weak tangential unscientific way. Maybe.
. I haven't heard so many maybe's and 'might be the case' equivalents since the last 'In Search Of' marathon. And the article didn't even have Spock. .
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Try an extreem example for yourself some time. Walk around with headphones on playing only a single tone and see what it does to your hearing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
No but he suffers from pinkeye.
I wonder if it is mis-information, to discredit MP3s in general.
Nah. The author wants to discredit not only mp3s, but the sound from video games, digital radio and TV, minidisk players, DVDs, the irritating voice that says "Please take the ticket", everything that involves lossy compression.
Not having read the link, I am an idiot.
Why isn't this true for CD-quality sound, which is a distorted, some would say degraded, attempt to mimic analog sound. Or why isn't this true for recorded music generally, which generally sounds substantially different from the same thing performed live? The biggest problem I have with his thesis is the assumption that there is an "original" or "natural" sound that we should be calibrating our ears to in the first place. What is the "right" or "natural" way to really listen to "Smells Like Teen Spirit"??
So let me get this straight. It is wrong, evil, BAAAAD, to make copies.
The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. The problem is that I want to make copies. CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V CTRL+V
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
After 20+ years of standing in front of the main stacks, I cant't understand what the author is talking about. ;->
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Last night. I use big over-the-ear headphones in a quiet room.
I was going to say the same thing. Glad someone beat me to it.
Also, Q: wouldn't there necessarily be a dynamic "smearing" in the D/A, AMP, and driver stages? Especially with cheap gear? Wouldn't the kind of cover over dynamic "holes" in the signal?
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
It's like this: the ear is able to pull a lot of information out of natural, acoustic sound. There's regular features to such sounds that are distinctly different from plain random noise. The ear can dig into the random noise very deeply to get information out.
What these guys are saying is this: with certain types of distortion, the noise becomes opaque, the information just ain't there when the ear tries to dig for it. Soon it stops trying- or just gets out of practice. It atrophies.
There are a few points that are established (some recently) to support this, though the whole chain of evidence isn't there, and in fact it's a bit alarmist.
(1) Ears do adjust. If your hearing isn't symmetrical, your brain WILL construct a coherent picture from the sound field, despite the ear inputs not matching.
(2) Digital noise floors are NOT the same as natural white noise.
That last helps to support these wilder theories, but nobody that I know of had tested it until recently. I got in an argument on Usenet where I had to establish this. The argument was that dithering and truncation produced a noise floor different from the same signal with exactly equivalent white noise overlaid onto it. Basically, that quantization can be heard as a distinct character to the noise floor.
I had people very huffy about me even arguing this, because their digital audio theory demanded that dithered digital was perfect in every respect, and specifically that it behaved the same as analog noise w.r.t. detail retrieval beneath the noise floor.
I was given matching files- one being signal plus random-amplitude noise, and one being the same thing but quantized to the level of the noise, resulting in a normal TPDF noise floor, entirely uncorrelated. There was a 2 bit and a 4 bit example for me to try, because I was arguing that this difference was obvious at coarse levels, not that I could consistently hear it at 16 bits or something.
I did a computer ABX double-blind test, using both the examples, and got 40 out of 40 trials correct, establishing beyond reasonable doubt that these types of noise DO sound different. It's not even subject to debate anymore- that's what ABX is for- not asserting a negative but proving a positive beyond serious doubt. Dithered noise floors measure a lot like broad-band noise, and they may be uncorrelated, but they are absolutely not the same as simple random-amplitude noise (like you use for the dither signal prior to quantization).
I'm not aware of anyone doing this test before, but now it's been done and the point proved.
I am inclined to agree with the lunatic fringe here that it's the results of these very 'unnatural' processes which cause problems- they damage musical enjoyment, and they're part of why modern music is so commodified and worthless. The only serious mass media formats are prone to these problems. As a result, mass media itself seems less important- a self-destroying process. The sound alone contributes to a lessening of interest.
That said- anyone who had their hearing actually damaged by this effect would have to either live in an anechoic chamber or wear Walkman headphones every waking moment. The world is FULL of acoustic sounds- hell, traffic alone is an acoustic sound quite capable of 'recalibrating' the ear, and any face-to-face human contact often involves sound, which also 'recalibrates' the ear. So the alarmism is entirely foolish. Maybe Mark Levinson lives in an environment entirely free of any outside sound, I don't know :)
...due to the fact that most people work inside in office environments, humans are sure to soon lose their ability to percieve depth at a distance. Also at risk is the human ability to tolerate absolute silence or darkness (both mostly eliminated in our modern workplace and dwellings). The ability of humans to withstand pain is vanishing, and allergies are being introduced, due to cleaner environments in our youth. Oh, and electronic calculators are eliminating the human ability to do mathematics.
In conclusion, the world is going to end in five...four...three...two...one...damn. Well, maybe tomorrow...
May we never see th
"You forgot to mention s*x! "
...
How the hell do sox kill you? And don't try and say by their smell
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Use crappy headphones or speakers and you're guaranteed to get lots of that precious extra noice...
The author suspects that since neural thresholds are continously calibrated they could be affected by prolonged exposure to sounds with significant energy just below the masking threshold. This is a valid theory that definitely merits further research.
The author's claim that his tinnitus condition results from this is as flawed as the claims of most pseudoscientific texts that rely on anecdotal evidence instead of statistical research. Mentioning "subliminal messages" and "overpriced CDs" further reduces the credibility of this article.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Sounds like he has a hypothisis, now if he applies the scientific model, constructs some proper, double blind experiments to prove it, while removing interfering factors, it might grow up to be a theroy.
Till then I'll continue listening to MP3s.
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Check out his "biography."
He's a "cyberyogi," a teacher of "logology." Uh.. yeah. From his site:
Logologie is a religion of reason; it is free of devilization and has many things common with Buddhism, but unlike this it includes a much more detailed understanding of the physical interaction between consciousness and the nervous system. Main goal of Logologie is the preservation and development of the human race by enabling it to sovereignous- holistical thinking and the overcoming of causing sufferance, because due to the network of cosmic consciousness everything is connected with everything and sufferance therefore never exists separately.
I am a cyberage-child - born in the year of Pong, and I study software- techniques at the German technical college Fachhochschule Hamburg (which unfortunately consumes the major amount of my time).
I am researcher of neuronomy and consciousness physics. (Neuronomy is the science of the improvement of the usage of brain and nervous system.) I collect historical videogames and homecomputers, I enjoy to build and repair electronic things and I am interested in electronic musics, synthesizer technology and everything that makes unusual (mostly electronic) sounds. I also compose own musics (e.g. like tekkno- trance, meditational musics etc.) and like to write poems and short stories etc. (e.g. SF), paint computer graphics and I am generally very interested in art and philosophy.
Uh.. yeah. Sounds credible to me.
Moderation totals that amuse me for one of my posts: Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Underrated=1
Low level tinnitus? i thought that was just my PC fans...
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
God damn local death metal bands.
Whenever I've been to one of those concerts I have tinnitus for two days afterwards, their guitar amps and drum kits must have embedded lossy compression software.
Six sick
Oxygen it a horrendously poisonous gas in high concentrations.
You'd better be thankful for the ~80% Nitrogen in the air, or
you'd be dead.
Back "on topic" I want to know if the removal of corriander from my curries
will cause fatal tongue damage?
No, really back "on topic", sorry. The article's author briefly visited
comp.compression a week or so back. I seem to remember dismissing him and
his article quite quickly due to his poor definition of terms, and just
plain incorrect use of terms.
FP.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
This reads like a rather clever troll to me. Especially given the "color pink" bit he also did.
That is quite possibly the longest single sentence I have ever read.
The whole challenge of decoding sensory input is not so much in trying to sense every little variation in the environment, but more in finding meaningful patterns in the input. The way the brain processes information is inherently lossy anyway. For example, the brain does not store the direct input from your retina. There is no bitmap of RGB values of every image that you've ever laid eyes on. What remains in the brain are only the connections to other processing centers, such as the limbic system which controls emotion or the parietal lobes which guide spatial perception, which get reinforced every time a similar input presents itself. And it seems that all the senses work this way.
If anything, the way codecs emphasize a pattern (e.g., a song) helps reinforce the particular tracts in the neural wiring that recognize this pattern. In fact, in the article, it is even pointed out that the whole reason the feedback tracts (i.e., the efferent fibers that run back to the cochlea) exist is precisely to dampen out unwanted input, so that the desired sensory pattern can be better recognized. (Hence, e.g., the ability to hear a conversation 10 feet away despite being in a roaring crowd at a stadium)
And in any case, hearing did not evolve for us to be able to enjoy music. Compared to other species, our auditory acuity generally sucks, and these limitations are hardwired into our genetics. Instead, in a sense, music evolved precisely because of the way we hear. Our brains are good at finding patterns in seemingly random streams of information and listening to music, which is definitely less random than ambient environmental noise even out in the wilderness of precivilization, may very well continually reinforce this ability. In other words, input that is simpler than what naturally occurs in reality reinforce tracts in our brain that help us pick out the same inputs in challenging, distracting environments.
I sincerely hope you're right about this being satire... but I doubt it.
I think the author does believe what he's saying.
But you're right, it is funny regardless.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Phexro spankith:
/enjoy/. Changing to 192 encoding may sound fine for now, but your brain is a persistent beast and will figure it out sooner or later.
> I remember when I first started encoding my CDs, I couldn't tell the difference between 128kb CBR MP3s and the CD source.
Actually Phexro, this does not mean your hearing has gotten better, but that it has gotten WORSE.
Your hearing use to be so well tuned that it could compensate for irregularities in 128 encoding, preventing your brain from ever perceiving them. However, now that you've grown accustomed to listening to MP3 audio, your brain's hearing has lost the ability to fill in the gaps as well, because it doesn't remember how.
Rather, your brain is doing its job by noticing the gaps in the signal, and figures this is for a purpose, and turns those gaps into noise for you to
AgV
I'd say this might, might, might be a problem is all you listened to on a daily basis were MP3s and their lossy compression. But it's not. Most people I know of take their headphones off one in a while and are forced to listen to the real world full of it's real with it's complete lack of audio compression. In fact, I'd be willing to bet the human ear recieves more than enough of this on a daily basis to negate any imagined long term effects listening to MP3s might create.
Frankly, this sounds like some study the RIAA might fund.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
It appears that the author of this presentation has read a bit on cochlear function, but the premise of his argument is purely speculative, offering nothing of scientific value.
Immediately, my skepticism made me think, your eye and brain make similar tuning adjustments, so why has nobody made this argument against the CRT? The fact that is missing here, is that the ear and eye and all sensory systems of the human nervous system make tuning adjustments continuously, in real-time, and have proven themselves time and time again to be remarkably plastic and resiliant.
Perhaps if you grew a person inside a box where only audio that suffered lossy compression was avaiable, you'd get a person who can't process the generally unnoticeable differences (note: unnoticeable != impercievable).
This is analogous to persons who attempt to learn foriegn languages beyond early childhood for which there is limited overlap in sounds relative to the native language of the speaker. The end result is, certain sounds are simply not processed correctly.
The problem I see with the author's premise is that proliferation of lossy compression schemes will result in this type of immersion, only it fails to indicate that *any* sound a person hears that is not compressed is still processed by the ear and brain. I doubt that a child who has listened only to MP3 music wouldn't be able to tell the difference when first introduced to live music.
Of course, I offer no scientific proof to refute this article that offers no scientific proof.
My last hearing test showed that the hearing in my right ear had not deteriorated at an unusual rate and had not deteriorated faster than my left ear.
So, although this is only one case, I suspect that this paper is nto going to lead very far.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
We don't take a straight signal in and record it like a video camera. We run it through a biological convolution function that generates a holographic signal. That is what allows our eyes to subtract out the blood vessels on top of our retina. That is also what allows our ears to subtract out background noise from a room to hear a conversation.
Next they will be telling us that movie makers not painting the back of sets will cause macular degeneration!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Paradigm Reference Studio/20. One of the best near-field monitors ever designed at any price is available for about $700 Canadian. That's a bit above $200 (but not much :). You'll pay a premium if you buy them from an American retailer. However, no matter what you pay, you end up with a speaker that would be a bargain at twice the price. Run, don't walk, to your nearest Paradigm dealer and take a listen.
P.S. I'm saving up for a pair of the full-size Studio/100's right now.
P.P.S. I'm not affiliated with Paradigm in any way. I just really love these speakers!
BRENT ROCKWOOD, EST'd 1975
he claims to be the "Teachmaster" of Logologie - the first cyberage- religion.
His other article on "health information" is titled: Warning: Pink can be dangerous for health!.
Well then, I think we can safely say that this individual is not exactly a "conventional" thinker. In my limited experience with such matters I would say he seems to have the hallmarks of schizophrenic thinking. But one way or the other, this is pretty damn far from scientific research. I wish articles like this would actually get read before they're posted.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
The sounds you hear do not add together in quite so simple a way as the physical sounds. For example, if you add two pure tones of similar frequencies together, you hear beats in addition to the two separate tones. It's not at all clear that the noise itself is what you are missing.
So what if mp3's and HDTV signals are missing some "natural" frequencies from the real world. What percentage of our lives do we spend listening to these signals? I would take this article seriously if people wore soundproof boxes around there heads 100% of the time, and these artificial signals were pumped into their ears constantly. This is not the case, so I have a hard time taking research like this seriously.
Someone should check this guy's funding - I would bet it's from the RIAA!
if the guy was being paid by the RIAA to make such a claim.
I'd believe it then.
Just like I believe that Marijuana makes you go insane.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Sometimes, especially in spring, when I walk around in the woods and watch brown and yellow leafs, sometimes some colors feel strange, like an itching inside my brain. Once I stared for several minutes into some square meters of ground covered with yellow leafs reflecting the direct light of the sun. I was happy and excited just by looking at this color, which in fact was not like any yellow I have seen before in my life. It seemed to be yellow, orange, brown and green at the same time. The sensation felt great, and I after a while looking at it I was sure this color could never be reproduced on an RGB display. Sometimes I also feel slightly disoriented when bathed in red or blue light from flourescent lamps, which are placed by artists in some public places here, and I like this sensation of brain-tickling so I often to walk through there just to get this strange feeling.
Regarding MP3, when I started to listen to 128kbit MP3, I was hardly able to recognize a difference. Later I became very sensitive to the artfacts of MP3-compression and almost stopped to listen to 128kBit MP3 for some types of music, especially Madonna and The Beatles sound really bad to me when compressed at 128kbit. I could not hear artifacts with 128 kBit OggVorbis Compression, but I am curious whether I will after a while. Also this effect of feeling bad while listening to an MP3 Versions seems to happen with music I heard very often ucompressed before.
The article does not give any answers, but it raises some really important questions. However, I am afraid they will never be answered, because after more than fifty years of television the consequences are still not understood very well.
p.
yellow-brown-orange
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
I do work in sound compression and I find that with music I know and love, I can ALWAYS find some bit of it where the compressed version is missing something. Even Ogg at it's lowest possible compress "-m500" doesn't sound quite as good as the original.
That's the reason to listen to the original. Because you will enjoy it more.
Rocky J. Squirrel
THE RIAA and MPAA?
On tap for 2003 the RIAA and MPAA convince the Surgeon General that all MP3 files and mpg files must have the following warning:
The Surgeon General has determined that listening to MP3 Files or watching MPG files is hazardous to your health.
I'm not going to flame here because it sounds like the author means well, OTOH, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. This one frankly belongs on the same list as UFO coverups and Flouride Conspiracies. He doesn't indicate any in-depth knowledge of what he's writing about, just the kind of layman-level understanding psychosomatics get when they scare themselves silly reading anatomy texts.
:-) Volume can certainly damage.
Perhaps our author really is state-of-the-art, but I see nothing in his article to indicate that. Everything cited can be found in beginner's texts on the subject. Nor is anything cited particularly relevant to his conclusions.
Let's not forget that the CD itself is a 'data reduced' sampling of a real world signal, at best an approximation of the original. And so was vinyl. I don't see many claims that the harsh approximations of the 33 1/3 LP are damaging ears by the very nature of their artifical reproduction... Unless, of course, you play them too loud
Living in a modern city, it's nearly impossible to not end up with some level of permanent tinnitus, and it worsens with age. However, there's an interesting paradox here: Background noise is required for the auditory system to function properly. Perfect dead silence, for prolonged periods, will also damage the auditory system-- through atrophy due to lack of stimulus (an unexpected discovery from a few fascinating experiments)
Monty
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
"Put down that uninformed pontificating before you poke out an eye"
But my point (which btw is well expressed by "The Matrix") is that anything before brain processing is irrelevant. As someone pointed out in another thread, you can train your brain to see upside things right side up and then train it back to normal, with no damage. So any miscalibration can always be corrected by succeeding inputs. But the thing is, it is the brain that decides what is important and what is extraneous, and what I'm trying to say is that most brains don't care about whatever lossy compression cuts out anyway.
I don't know. Generally training that is *harder* than reality is a better skill builder than easier/simpler. Worf did not battle bunny rabbits on the holedek.
This is not really true. Notice you mention the holodeck, which by definition is easier than reality. You don't have to deal with actually being killed. The way most people practice skills, whether it is playing the violin, doing an appendectomy, or learning how to fight with a Klingon Bat'leth, is to start easy, and to build upon that. Once simple skills become automatic, it is easier to learn more complicated skills. This does not work very well in reverse. Just because you learn a complicated skill from the start does not mean you can perform, much less understand, the simple skills that it is built upon.
You don't get what I was saying - like water or vitamins, you *can* overdose on THC. So it is pretty much possible. You are obviously challenging me to produce a case where somebody has smoked too many joints and died. Way to strawman me. I said that it is possible to OD on marijuana (although I really meant THC) not that anyone had died smoking joints. (This is not evidence, but I recall the LD50 for THC is 40,000 so it's a hell of a lot safer than alcohol where the LD is as low as 4 for some sensitive types)
You can OD on caffeine too, but not from just drinking coffee. You'd have to take handfuls of pure caffeine pills.
My point was that too much of anything can be fatal, people shouldn't speak in absolutes (say "Smoking a few grams of marijuana per day is not dangerous" rather than "thc can't kill you, that's impossible." And I was just making a stupid joke.
You right-to-tokers are just so damn sensitive
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
--sex
Sex - Find It
--sex
Sex - Find It