Well, a lot of my old vinyl sounds much better than the digital versions of the same tracks through the same system. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. I suspect it's due to the extreme compression that usually gets applied when the tracks are remastered.
To be fair, Dark Side of the Moon was released in 1973. Thats 3 years after the Beatles broke up. PF's earlier efforts were mixed at best and PF didn't peak until well into the 1970s - 10 years after the Beatles begun to peak
To be fair, Dark Side of the Moon was a major change of direction for PF, and is unlikely to be the sort of thing the AC was referring to. 1967s "Arnold Layne" is a fairer comparison. It was far more experimental than the singles off Sgt. Pepper, and as an album Piper at the Gates of Dawn was more experimental than Sgt. Pepper or Magical Mystery Tour. Of course, experimentation tends to be hit-and-miss. The Beatles let other people do the experimentation, then used the stuff that worked, which is why Sgt. Pepper and MMT are more highly regarded than Piper.
I won't disagree with you, but only because they are overrated in the same way that Tolkien is overrated. That is, if you look at him compared to contemporary sources, he appears unimaginative, derivative, and even predictable. And then you take a big step back and you suddenly realize that there was nothing before it to be a derivative of.
Lord Dunsany. And, of course, the Eddas and the Heimskringla.
The Beatles, for the most part, did too. Well, they did if you weed McCartney's influence out of it, and focus mostly on the stuff created after some wonderful guy gave Lennon LSD.
Nah. It's a popular meme (like the also erroneous "Ringo was a crap drummer" meme), and McCartney's clean cut "thumbs up" persona throughout the 1980s did a lot to cement it. But it doesn't stand up to close examination.
Agreed, and you can't write off McCartney's song writing, either. It has been said that without Lennon, the Beatles would have been just another disposable pop band, and without McCartney they would have been another obscure art-house band that nobody had heard of. It was the interaction of the two (with more than a little help from their friend George Martin) that made them stand out from the crowd.
that statement shocked me, and I like to attribute it to his lack of taste.
More likely lack of historical context, as you suggest later on. What was ground-breaking in the 1960s can nowadays just sound like another Oasis clone.
The product returned to me was garbage, and, if I handed it in, would have resulted in a c grade at best. Whoever wrote clearly didn't carefully read the article, and instead focused on a few key sentences which he/she thought were important. The writing was verbose and not in the proper style for a philosophy paper; very disappointing.
But just what most users of the service would want, because it doesn't raise their head above the parapet.
When I first started studying ethics I joked that I was doing it so that I could justify whatever I was going to do anyway. By the time I'd finished I'd decided it wasn't a joke. But there's no real irony. Few ethics courses have a practical exam.
I suspect it's thoroughly mediocre. Which is to say that it'll get you a "C" in the worst case, probably a "B" or even an "A" under the right circumstances. Any reasonably competent writer can churn out most undergraduate coursework for a humanities or soft science course without being all that expert. I graduated with a degree in History, but I took classes in Lit, Comparative Religions, Philosophy, and Sociology. I got "A" graded papers most of the time in most of those classes, I can't see any reason why I couldn't do so for someone else.
And yet most students of those subjects don't get "A" graded papers most of the time. When I went to my degree ceremony, it wasn't a very long line for the first-class honours in any subject. Which suggests (to your credit) that it takes more than reasonable competence to get those grades.
It's been my experience that in many mathematics/computer science classes there are no papers, or very few. I think in computer science only one or two senior level classes had papers in my school.
But did they have programming assignments? And did any students get others to write their programs for them? They did when I was at college.
we decided the authors of these ghastly things did it just to sound "academic" and "learned" when in fact the whole damned thing was completely devoid of actual content.
When I was doing humanities at university we looked at research on the extent to which people do that. It's not just academia that uses language in distinctive ways to distinguish insiders from outsiders and to beef up weak content. And within academia, it's not just the humanities and social sciences -- a lot of published science research does it too.
I did some research for my engineering degree, but most of it was "reading and recompiling". I also did some research for one of the English modules on my humanities degree (finding a statistical discriminator between two classes of text based on verb use -- the sort of thing used in forensic linguistics, which is pretty analytic nowadays).
On the night before his assignment was due in he came and asked me for some help. I proceeded to waffle on about the book based on the leading question he had been given regarding it. He sat there with his pad and took notes as I pointed out the sections of the book that were relevant to the question and gave some examples of the how the technological change (nanotechnology) in the book had changed the separate societies that are mentioned. It probably also helped that I was studying Physics so had some idea of nanotechnology.
After an hour or so he took his 1 or 2 sides of A4 notes and went upstairs to churn out an essay based on my ideas. He gained a first for that paper, and permanently changed my opinion of humanities subjects: Most of them are so easy to pass they should not even be taught in the same college as the sciences of engineering subjects, they are certainly not the same academic level and do not require the same amount of study. All they require is the ability to structure your ideas (or someone else's) into a well formed English essay.
I have a humanities degree and an engineering degree. Neither was easier than the other to pass, they just required very different skills. I note that you "waffled" but he had to "structure" the ideas into a "well-formed English essay". Don't you wish more engineers had that ability? And why do you assume he only used your ideas? To get a first he would have had to have shown how it linked in to the rest of the course, something he would have had to do himself when he got back upstairs.
In my time at school some of our teachers gave us free hand - bring what you want and see if you succeed. The problem was that these were the most difficult exams of them all as they required:
understanding of the tested subject
ability to solve puzzles related to subject
And as such exams are time limited no dead tree or electronic material can really help you solve the task in time if you have no clue. These were exams I actually enjoyed as I could pass (albeit not w/o difficulties) and majority of my colleagues (the cheaters and those that learned by the letter) needed few more attempts usually.
They're also the most representative of what most people need to do in the real world. Solve problems in real-time with access to reference material if they need it.
As someone with an undergraduate degree in the humanities and a graduate degree in CS, I' think I'm probably one of the best qualified people on Slashdot to make this comment
Undergraduate degree in humanities, undergraduate degree in engineering and postgraduate degree in CS here. I beat you by one:-) Unfortunately I agree with what you're saying, so there's no point pulling rank.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually in the bible it specifies that as much as possible and as intact as possible of the body has to be buried.
[citation needed]
I think it represents the market for humanities degrees.
There's no reason to assume that the person writing the essay knew nothing about the course or the book, either.
Sorry it's not XKCD.
Why? Half the band is still alive. Who should be profiting from their work if not the members of the band and their families?
But who is profiting from this work? Not the band or their families, because they don't own the rights to it.
and third the most important Beatle wasn't even ALIVE
What, has something happened to George Martin?
Well, a lot of my old vinyl sounds much better than the digital versions of the same tracks through the same system. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. I suspect it's due to the extreme compression that usually gets applied when the tracks are remastered.
Sonny and Cher fits the bill. "These boots are made for walkin'"... UGH!
That was Nancy Sinatra, not Sonny and Cher. Unless you're thinking of the Megadeath version?
To be fair, Dark Side of the Moon was released in 1973. Thats 3 years after the Beatles broke up. PF's earlier efforts were mixed at best and PF didn't peak until well into the 1970s - 10 years after the Beatles begun to peak
To be fair, Dark Side of the Moon was a major change of direction for PF, and is unlikely to be the sort of thing the AC was referring to. 1967s "Arnold Layne" is a fairer comparison. It was far more experimental than the singles off Sgt. Pepper, and as an album Piper at the Gates of Dawn was more experimental than Sgt. Pepper or Magical Mystery Tour. Of course, experimentation tends to be hit-and-miss. The Beatles let other people do the experimentation, then used the stuff that worked, which is why Sgt. Pepper and MMT are more highly regarded than Piper.
I won't disagree with you, but only because they are overrated in the same way that Tolkien is overrated. That is, if you look at him compared to contemporary sources, he appears unimaginative, derivative, and even predictable. And then you take a big step back and you suddenly realize that there was nothing before it to be a derivative of.
Lord Dunsany. And, of course, the Eddas and the Heimskringla.
The Beatles, for the most part, did too. Well, they did if you weed McCartney's influence out of it, and focus mostly on the stuff created after some wonderful guy gave Lennon LSD.
Nah. It's a popular meme (like the also erroneous "Ringo was a crap drummer" meme), and McCartney's clean cut "thumbs up" persona throughout the 1980s did a lot to cement it. But it doesn't stand up to close examination.
Agreed, and you can't write off McCartney's song writing, either. It has been said that without Lennon, the Beatles would have been just another disposable pop band, and without McCartney they would have been another obscure art-house band that nobody had heard of. It was the interaction of the two (with more than a little help from their friend George Martin) that made them stand out from the crowd.
that statement shocked me, and I like to attribute it to his lack of taste.
More likely lack of historical context, as you suggest later on. What was ground-breaking in the 1960s can nowadays just sound like another Oasis clone.
The product returned to me was garbage, and, if I handed it in, would have resulted in a c grade at best. Whoever wrote clearly didn't carefully read the article, and instead focused on a few key sentences which he/she thought were important. The writing was verbose and not in the proper style for a philosophy paper; very disappointing.
But just what most users of the service would want, because it doesn't raise their head above the parapet.
When I first started studying ethics I joked that I was doing it so that I could justify whatever I was going to do anyway. By the time I'd finished I'd decided it wasn't a joke. But there's no real irony. Few ethics courses have a practical exam.
I suspect it's thoroughly mediocre. Which is to say that it'll get you a "C" in the worst case, probably a "B" or even an "A" under the right circumstances. Any reasonably competent writer can churn out most undergraduate coursework for a humanities or soft science course without being all that expert. I graduated with a degree in History, but I took classes in Lit, Comparative Religions, Philosophy, and Sociology. I got "A" graded papers most of the time in most of those classes, I can't see any reason why I couldn't do so for someone else.
And yet most students of those subjects don't get "A" graded papers most of the time. When I went to my degree ceremony, it wasn't a very long line for the first-class honours in any subject. Which suggests (to your credit) that it takes more than reasonable competence to get those grades.
It's been my experience that in many mathematics/computer science classes there are no papers, or very few. I think in computer science only one or two senior level classes had papers in my school.
But did they have programming assignments? And did any students get others to write their programs for them? They did when I was at college.
When you graduate in humanities, you very well might never have taken any sort of engineering, calculus, chemistry, physics, etc.
You'll probably have done some statistics, though.
we decided the authors of these ghastly things did it just to sound "academic" and "learned" when in fact the whole damned thing was completely devoid of actual content.
When I was doing humanities at university we looked at research on the extent to which people do that. It's not just academia that uses language in distinctive ways to distinguish insiders from outsiders and to beef up weak content. And within academia, it's not just the humanities and social sciences -- a lot of published science research does it too.
I did some research for my engineering degree, but most of it was "reading and recompiling". I also did some research for one of the English modules on my humanities degree (finding a statistical discriminator between two classes of text based on verb use -- the sort of thing used in forensic linguistics, which is pretty analytic nowadays).
I'd love to see a slashdot user write a paper in "philosophy, ethics, architecture, etc" as well.
I've done all of those, and looking back in this thread there's at least one other /. user who almost certainly has.
On the night before his assignment was due in he came and asked me for some help. I proceeded to waffle on about the book based on the leading question he had been given regarding it. He sat there with his pad and took notes as I pointed out the sections of the book that were relevant to the question and gave some examples of the how the technological change (nanotechnology) in the book had changed the separate societies that are mentioned. It probably also helped that I was studying Physics so had some idea of nanotechnology.
After an hour or so he took his 1 or 2 sides of A4 notes and went upstairs to churn out an essay based on my ideas. He gained a first for that paper, and permanently changed my opinion of humanities subjects: Most of them are so easy to pass they should not even be taught in the same college as the sciences of engineering subjects, they are certainly not the same academic level and do not require the same amount of study. All they require is the ability to structure your ideas (or someone else's) into a well formed English essay.
I have a humanities degree and an engineering degree. Neither was easier than the other to pass, they just required very different skills. I note that you "waffled" but he had to "structure" the ideas into a "well-formed English essay". Don't you wish more engineers had that ability? And why do you assume he only used your ideas? To get a first he would have had to have shown how it linked in to the rest of the course, something he would have had to do himself when he got back upstairs.
If the dimensions weren't specified he could have twisted it into a moebus strip.
In my time at school some of our teachers gave us free hand - bring what you want and see if you succeed. The problem was that these were the most difficult exams of them all as they required:
And as such exams are time limited no dead tree or electronic material can really help you solve the task in time if you have no clue. These were exams I actually enjoyed as I could pass (albeit not w/o difficulties) and majority of my colleagues (the cheaters and those that learned by the letter) needed few more attempts usually.
They're also the most representative of what most people need to do in the real world. Solve problems in real-time with access to reference material if they need it.
So who did write them for you?
As someone with an undergraduate degree in the humanities and a graduate degree in CS, I' think I'm probably one of the best qualified people on Slashdot to make this comment
Undergraduate degree in humanities, undergraduate degree in engineering and postgraduate degree in CS here. I beat you by one :-) Unfortunately I agree with what you're saying, so there's no point pulling rank.